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22 Worldly Affairs [3] At Pensacola, Nelson became acting lieutenant of the supply ship Relief while he waited for reassignment. There was a great deal of excitement over the discovery of gold in California, and that brought up talk of building a railroad across the Isthmus of Panama. Because Cuba served as a gateway to the isthmus, some feared that Spain would obstruct commerce in the region. That concern led President Polk and his cabinet to broach the subject of a “fair purchase” of that island in May 1848, and Spain summarily rejected the offer. At the end of July, Nelson’s duty in the Gulf ended and he joined the Michigan, an iron-hulled vessel that carried two 18-pound guns while she plied Lake Erie, assisted ships in distress, and protected against any possible British encroachment of American soil.1 During the spring of 1849, Nelson learned that a devastating cholera epidemic had taken the life of his fifteen-year-old sister, Elizabeth, his fortythree -year-old father, Dr. Thomas W. Nelson, and step-grandmother, Elizabeth Cleneay Nelson. At this same time, the intervention of the Hapsburg and Russian governments in the Hungarian Revolution led the embryonic administration of Whig president Zachary Taylor to engage the U.S. Navy in the largest show of force in the Mediterranean basin since the conclusion of the Barbary Wars in 1815. On July 26, 1849, Nelson was on the Independence when she headed out of Norfolk for the base at Spezia, Italy.2 This action was regarded as the embodiment of a “Young America” at war with absolute monarchists, and it had support from many in the United States. This ambiguous cause in turn attracted a secondary group who encouraged Cuban ex-patriot Narciso López to assemble a 1,300-man filibustering (freebooting ) expedition off the coast of Mississippi. General López had come to the United States in 1848, and he led a faction intent on ending Spanish rule of the island. A long-standing statute prohibited carrying out “any military 23 Worldly Affairs expedition” against any foreign state at peace with the United States, and in September 1849 President Taylor ordered a naval blockade of Round Island and had the freebooters arrested.3 The situation in Europe posed an entirely different problem for the Taylor administration. Turkey had arrested Hungarian revolutionary Louis (Lajos) Kossuth, and the Russian and Austrian governments were demanding his extradition. In December 1849, George P. Marsh, the U.S. minister at Constantinople , approached Turkish officials and asked for the release of the “Magyar” (Hungarian). The following month, Congress approved having a U.S. Navy ship take the deposed leader to America. Commodore Charles W. Morgan received orders to cruise the Bosporus in anticipation of carrying out the mission. Morgan transferred Nelson to the Cumberland as acting master, disregarded that assignment, and headed for Lisbon to settle an indemnity claim against Portugal.4 At Cincinnati and Covington, John T. Pickett, an old Maysville acquaintance of Nelson’s, was busy recruiting a second filibustering expedition for General López. Pickett had served under Gen. John Pragay during the Hungarian Revolution, and in April 1850, his two-hundred-forty-man Kentucky regiment departed for New Orleans to link up with three hundred men from Louisiana and Mississippi. The freebooters achieved victory at Cardenas, Cuba, on May 19–20, but López could not convince the people to overthrow the Spanish government, and he had to withdraw.5 In Washington, a complex series of five bills (later known as the Compromise of 1850) was under debate when President Zachary Taylor suddenly died on July 9. The need to overcome the stalemate between the fifteen free and fifteen slave states was acute when Vice President Millard Fillmore took the oath of office the next day. He appointed Daniel Webster secretary of state and asked outgoing Kentucky governor John J. Crittenden to join his administration as attorney general. Fillmore trusted that Crittenden and other slave state appointees would alleviate Southern fears while Webster did his best to engineer the difficult passage of the bills and deal with representatives from Santo Domingo who wanted the United States, Great Britain, and France to protect them from Haitian efforts to seize control of their country.6 Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, a newly elected senator from Illinois, worked with Webster and Henry Clay to push through the bill that made California a free state. Another law established territorial governments in New Mexico and Utah...

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