Sherry Chandler » Mary E. W. Betts
Mary E. W. Betts
Although I can’t find Mary E. W. Betts’s famous poem, “A Kentuckian Bows to No One But God,” I do want to talk about her a little bit because she fits into my story about O’Hara, López, and the filibuster into Cuba. It is also, in a way, a continuation of the story of Gilbert Imlay and James Wilkinson. It’s all about Manifest Destiny and American expansionism.
Narcisco López’s first attempt at this adventure, in 1849, was stopped when Zachary Taylor seized his ships. He immediately began to plan a new filibuster, and as I said in the comment below, he appealed to prominent southerners to join him as a way of expanding slavery. Jefferson Davis turned him down and so did Robert E. Lee. But other prominent southerners decided to join him. In May 1850, he landed in Cuba with a force of 600, including Theodore O’Hara.
In events that might have predicted the Bay of Pigs, the local population failed to rise up and join the filibusters. The force retreated to Key West where they quickly disbanded to avoid prosecution under the U.S. Neutrality Law of 1818. Indictments were nevertheless brought against several members of the expedition but none were convicted.
In 1851, López tried a third time. Once again the local uprising failed to materialize but this time the troop was captured and most of them were executed or sent to mining labor camps. Among the executed was Colonel William Crittenden, nephew of Kentucky’s John J. Crittenden. William Logan Crittenden was born in Shelbyville. He graduated West Point and served with distinction in the Mexican War.
To quote Wikipedia:
The execution of López and his soldiers caused outrage in both the northern and southern United States. Many who did not support the expedition found the Spanish treatment of military prisoners brutal. The strongest reaction occurred in New Orleans, where a mob attacked the Spanish consulate. Despite its failure, López’s expedition inspired other filibusters to attack Latin American countries throughout the 1850s, most notably William Walker’s invasions of Central America in 1855-1860. Had he been successful, López could have profoundly altered politics in the Americas, giving a strong Caribbean foothold to the United States and spurring its further expansion. Instead, the failure of López and other filibusters discouraged Americans, especially in the South, from adopting expansionist strategies. Faced with the inability of slavery to move southward, many Southerners turned away from expansion and talked instead of secession.
The present Cuban flag is adopted from his banner.
One such expression of outrage was Mary Betts’s poem. According to William Ward, when Crittenden was facing the firing squad, he refused to kneel, saying “A Kentuckian kneels to no one but God, and he always dies facing the enemy.” This statement inspired Betts. She was a native of Maysville and the poem was originally published in the Maysville Flag.
In lieu of Ms. Betts’s poem, I’ll give you a snippet I found in chapter 1 of Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2002) to give you some idea what it may have been like:
Around the Moro’s grim façade
The soul of Lopez wanders
And Crittenden—a glorious shade!
Beside him walks and ponders.
O, God of Peace! that such as these,
Like dogs, should be garotted—
Choked out of life by Spanish beasts,
Fierce, bloody and besotted.
—Democratic Review, December 1854
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