# Panama, past and present/Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI
HOW PANAMA BECAME A REPUBLIC
"BUT I should wonder," said Goethe, as the great German poet was discussing with his friends, in 1827, the possibility of a Panama Canal, "if the United States were to let an opportunity escape of getting such a work into their own hands. It may be foreseen that this young state, with its decided predilection to the West, will, in thirty or forty years, have occupied and peopled the large tract of land beyond the Rocky Mountains. It may, furthermore, be foreseen that along the whole coast of the Pacific Ocean, where nature has already formed the most capacious and secure harbors, important commercial towns will gradually arise, for the furtherance of a great intercourse between China and the East Indies and the United States. In such a case it would be not only desirable but almost necessary that a more rapid communication should be maintained between the eastern and western shores of North America, both by merchant vessels and men-of-war, than has hitherto been possible with the tedious, disagreeable and expensive voyage round Cape Horn. I, therefore, repeat that it is absolutely indispensable for the United States to effect a passage from the Mexican Gulf to the Pacific Ocean, and I am certain that they will do it."
CHRISTENING THE FLAG OF THE REPUBLIC OF PANAMA AFTER THE REVOLUTION OF 1903.
​States, by the treaty of 1846, obtained from New Granada the perpetual right of transit for its citizens across the Isthmus of Panama, promising in return both to maintain the neutrality of any trade-routes that might be built there, and to guard the local government against attack by any foreign power. And ever since the making of this treaty and the building of the Panama Railroad, the Isthmus has been kept alive by American business and kept more or less peaceful by American ships and guns.
Left to itself, the Isthmus would have been anything but peaceful. In the fifty-seven years between the treaty of 1846 and the final revolution in 1903, there were at least fifty-three disturbances and outbreaks, beginning with a riot in which two Americans were killed, and ending with a civil war nearly three years long. Six times our warships had to clear for action and land sailors and marines to protect life and property, and at four other times the government at Bogotắ begged that United States troops be sent to Panama. This may surprise many people who believe that nothing of the kind ever happened in that country before 1903, but there were revolutions in Panama not only before then, and before 1846, but even before Nathaniel Bacon, our own first "revolutionist," rose against the royal governor of Virginia, and burned Jamestown in 1676. To understand this properly we must go back to the time of Balboa.
Balboa, Pizarro, Cortez, and all the other conquistadores, were men of the Middle Ages, living by the sword and despising honest labor. They were robber-barons, forcing the conquered Indians to pay them tribute in ​food and gold, and when there were no native warriors left to fight, they turned their swords against one another. And when, in 1543, the Emperor Charles V, urged by the good bishop Las Casas, decreed in his "New Laws for the Indies" that no more Indians must be enslaved or cruelly treated, Spain nearly lost America at that time, instead of two centuries and a half later. A fleet from Peru captured and plundered Old Panama, and, when reinforced and joined by the Panamanians, the Peruvians seized the whole Isthmus and held it in the name of Pizarro. Instead of an army, Charles V sent Pedro de la Gasca, a clever, smooth-tongued priest, who won back the leaders at Panama to allegiance to the emperor, and with their aid put down the rebellion in Peru. As Pedro de la Gasca was about to take ship for Spain at Nombre de Dios, after his triumphal return from Peru, the Contreras brothers, turbulent grandsons of old Pedrarias, came down the Pacific coast after raising a successful rebellion in Nicaragua, suddenly captured Old Panama and started to march across the Isthmus. But the citizens rose behind them, and the Contreras "revolution" came to a sudden and bloody end.
COLOMBIAN BARRACKS AND GARRISON IN PANAMA CITY
Shortly before the revolution of 1903.
​— and when his power was ended, they all started up again. The Spanish Americans had nothing like the training in self-government and respect for law and order that our ancestors received both in England and here, for centuries before they won independence. The Spanish Americans have had to work it all out for themselves in the last hundred years or so, and a wonderfully good job they have made of it in that time; particularly in the big, stable republics of the south temperate zone. But in too many of the little countries along the shore of the Caribbean,—the region which a great American statesman has called "the land of the fantastic and the unexpected," men still prefer to vote as their forefathers did, with swords and cannon. Of all these backward countries, the one that has changed least since the days of the conquistadores is Colombia.
Panama was too small a state to stand alone, after it became independent of Spain, and accepted an invitation from Bogotá to put itself under the government there, but quickly found that it had exchanged King Log for King Stork. Almost immediately there were attempted revolts, and twice, in 1830 and again ten years later, the Isthmus won complete independence, and only returned to New Granada on promises of better treatment, solemnly made, but never realized. It was furthermore recognized, and set forth in the Constitution of that country, that Panama was a sovereign state, and that it or any one of the others had as much right to withdraw and set up an independent government as Virginia or New York or Massachusetts had under the old Articles of Confederation. ​But constitutions and written laws have never been worth much in those parts, except for musket-wadding. The local idea of government was to put yourself in power and then squeeze all the taxes you could out of everybody else. Nobody ever became president of New Granada or Colombia except by violence, and no president was strong enough to keep peace in Panama.
Revolutions, like every other industry, were revived on the Isthmus by the coming of the forty-niners and the building of the railroad. The Spaniards there have always been predatory by choice, and as they had lived off the Indians in the old days, they now lived off the Americans and other travelers. It is the old story of the robber-barons of a trade-route, fighting each other and their equally greedy overlord for the privilege of extorting toll from the traders passing through their territory. Panama in the nineteenth century was still in the Middle Ages. The landward walls of the city were torn down less than fifty years ago, and underground passages still connect the fortress-like, town houses of the haciendados, the rich landowners who used to make revolutions and fight them with armies of peons from their great estates, led by bands of foreign mercenaries or soldiers of fortune. These were the barons, and the overlord was the federal government at Bogotá, which exercised absentee tyranny of the worst kind.
As the Panamanians were not strong enough to win independence, nor the Bogotá government to keep good order, every revolution either degenerated into brigandage, or was stopped by American intervention. For the burden of this disorder fell not so heavily on the ​habitants of a region where there are no industries, and a poor man can gather a week's food in half an hour's walk through the jungle, as on the foreign merchants and traders, particularly the American-owned Panama Railroad. This company organized a police force of its own, called the Isthmus Guard, in 1855, and these fifty or so men, led by Ran Runnels, a Texas ranger, cleared the country of outlaws so thoroughly that in a few months they had abolished their own jobs. But only two years later, a dispute over the price of a slice of watermelon started a riot in which several American travelers were killed and hundreds of others, including many women, terrorized and plundered by the mob, the police and troops making no effort to stop the looting, but, instead, preventing the Americans from defending themselves.
Again and again our intervention was called for, and not always to defend our own people. Ferdinand de Lesseps brought fresh millions for the hungry, and his company was robbed by the local authorities almost as enthusiastically as by its own employees. During the scramble, revolutionists seized and burned Colon, with a great quantity of French canal stores. American marines were landed, restored order, and set the Colombian Humpty Dumpty up on his wall again. This was in 1885, and the successful general who made himself president that year proclaimed a new constitution which deprived Panama of all its rights as a sovereign state, and made it a mere province under the direct control of the federal government at Bogotá. Naturally there was great indignation on the Isthmus, and from ​then until the end there was an almost constant series of attempts to gain freedom.
The enforced dash of the battle-ship Oregon around South America in the Spanish-American War woke up the United States to its need of a quicker naval route between the two coasts. Congress authorized the purchase of the rights and property of the New French Canal Company for $40,000,000an offer which that company was only too glad to accept, for, in 1903, its ten-year concession had nearly expired, and in another twelve months it might have no rights left to sell. We then offered the government of Colombia $10,000,000 for its permission to the Canal Company to make the sale, and for a new concession to the United States, allowing us to build and maintain the Canal.
The government of the so-called Republic of Colombia consisted, at this time, of one man, who had been elected vice-president but had kidnapped the president with a troop of cavalry and shut him up in an unsanitary dungeon, where he soon died. This interesting brigand had ruled ever since as president, without bothering about a congress, until he called one for the sole purpose of considering this offer of the United States. Hoping to get a higher price, and making no secret of their intention to wait until the French concession should run out and then demand some or all of the forty millions for themselves, the Colombian congress rejected our offer. They forgot what it meant to Panama.
CONCRETE BRIDGE ON ZONE HIGHWAY.
​it would build one across Nicaragua, where an American company already had a concession. If that were done, not only would Panama lose all its hoped-for prosperity, but even the railroad would cease to be operated, and the Isthmus would have as little trade or importance as in the eighteenth century. Naturally the Panamanians watched the Colombian congress anxiously, and, as soon as they saw the American treaty was doomed, began to prepare for a revolution.
Everything was in their favor. The garrison had been left unpaid so long and had so many friends and sweethearts among the citizens that it was easily won over. Companies of men were organized, ostensibly as a fire-department, and rifles for them were smuggled in from New York. (There is as much romance and wickedness in the secret gun-trade of that city to-day as there ever was in bucaneering). Soon every prominent man on the Isthmus was in the plot, except the governor, who shut his eyes to it. Instead of the usual carpet-bagger from Bogotá, the newly appointed governor was Señor José Domingo de Obaldia, a man whose family have lived on the Isthmus for centuries, and he frankly told the Colombians that if the treaty were rejected, Panama would revolt, and he would do nothing to prevent it.
The treaty was rejected, and a date was at once set for the uprising. But the day before, a Colombian gunboat steamed into the harbor of Colon, with four hundred and seventy-four conscripts and a few generals, who landed and demanded a train to take them to Panama City. The Bogotá government had at last become aware of the unsettled state of affairs on the Isthmus, which the ​American newspapers had been discussing openly for a month, and had sent this force to put an end to it—which it did, but not in the way they expected.
    PANAMA
    NATIONAL
    FLAG.
Colonel Torres, who had been left in command of the Colombian troops at Colon, angrily declared that if the generals were not released and the new flags hauled down within an hour, he would kill every American in Colon. The women and children at once took refuge on two steamers, and the men gathered in the stone freight-house of the Panama Railroad, which had been strongly built for just such emergencies. But there was a small American gunboat, the Nashville, at Colon, and her captain landed forty-two sailors and marines. Torres then declared his great love for Americans, and a few days later he and his conscripts were bought up by the Panamanians for about twenty dollars apiece, and shipped back to where they came from.
QUARANTINE STATION ON CULEBRA ISLAND IN THE BAY OF PANAMA.
​The Isthmus was now entirely in the hands of its own people, as it had been three times before; and three lines of action were open to the United States. The first was to intervene and force the Panamanians back under the rule of Bogotá, the second was to let the two sides fight it out to a finish. But we had tried both of these remedies again and again for over fifty years, and neither had availed to stop the endless bloodshed and destruction of property. The third course was to recognize the independence of the Republic of Panama, and forbid Colombia, now a foreign power, to land troops on the Isthmus. That was what President Roosevelt did, and the judgment of the American people was summed up in a remark made by a western congressman: "When that jack-rabbit jumped, I'm glad we did n't have a bow-legged man for President."
To any one acquainted with the history of the Isthmus, the Revolution of 1903, though almost equally sudden,
COAT OF ARMS OF THE REPUBLIC OF PANAMA.
appears no less natural than the jump of a startled jackrabbit; and indeed there was fifty times as much reason for it as for any of the fifty or more revolts that preceded it. Much as we wanted Panama, the Panamanians wanted us more, and if there was one thing experience had taught them it was how to organize a revolution. The charge that our government had "conspired" to bring it about was brought by persons utterly ignorant of ​the facts, flatly denied by President Roosevelt and his Secretary of State, Johy Hay; and the most rigid investigations by Congress have failed to reveal the slightest evidence either of the existence of such a conspiracy, or of the need of any external incentive for the Isthmus to revolt.
The same orders were given the commanders of our war-ships as in several previous revolutions: to allow neither belligerent to land men or arms within fifty miles of either Panama or Colon. Colombia talked much of marching an army overland to the Isthmus, but that trail runs through the land of the San Blas Indians, and it would take a very strong army of white men to fight their way through that region, either then or to-day. Certain San Blas chiefs who had been made colonels in the Colombian army refused to fight the Panamanians; and the country of these Indians, though nominally in one or the other of the two republics, has been really an independent buffer state between them ever since 1903.
The Republic of Panama was quickly organized, with a constitution modeled on that of the United States, and a treaty was made between the two countries, by which the United States received the perpetual right to build and maintain a canal across the Isthmus, in return for the payment of $10,000,000. It also acquired possession of the Canal Zone, a strip of land five miles wide on either side of the Canal, and this bit of Central America is now as much United States territory as the parade ground at West Point. The two cities of Panama and Colon, however, were scalloped out of either end of the Zone and left part of the republic; but their ports, Balboa ​and Cristobal, became American, and the United States Government obtained the right to keep Panama and Colon clean, and to interfere whenever it thinks the native authorities cannot keep good order. For Uncle Sam was determined to make an end of filth and fever and petty warfare on the Isthmus, and get to work.
* ↑ Gonzalo Pizarro, brother and successor of the conquerer of Peru
* ↑ See Appendix, valuation of this purchase.