RESEARCH General History

HISTORY LITERATURE
Long-lost antebellum novel of botched Cuba raid found

Andrea Lynn, Humanities & Social Sciences Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

3/1/03

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — One of America’s most disastrous – and unauthorized – military campaigns was chronicled, oddly enough, in a historical novel written by a femme fatale/Southern Belle.

Lost for nearly 150 years, the novel – "The Free Flag of Cuba; or, The Martyrdom of Lopez: A Tale of the Liberating Expedition of 1851" – recently was found by Carol Penka, a University of Illinois librarian, on behalf of Orville Vernon Burton and Georganne Burton. The Burtons – he is a history professor at Illinois, she is an independent scholar – have just edited and republished "Free Flag," the highly romanticized account of the botched private invasion to free Cubans from Spanish rule written by Lucy Petway Holcombe (1832-1899) under the pseudonym H.M. Hardimann.
The Burtons’ book, "The Free Flag of Cuba: The Lost Novel of Lucy Holcombe Pickens" (Louisiana State University Press), pulls no punches in its long introduction and heavy annotations. It is being hailed as a rich contribution to the history and culture of the antebellum South.

When she published her book in 1854, Holcombe was a 22-year-old aristocratic Texan. Four years later, she would marry Francis Pickens, a wealthy South Carolina secessionist governor twice her age. Holcombe was regarded as one of the South’s most beautiful, flamboyant, charming and intelligent women. She also was the only woman ever pictured on Confederate currency and the purported inventor of iced tea. But more sensationally, she was rumored to have had a child by Czar Alexander II. Not everyone fell under the jezebel’s spell. Critics saw her as "one of the most cunning and shallow of women," the Burtons wrote. The diarist, Mary Chestnut, called Holcombe "Lucy Long-tongue."

Either way, Holcombe is credited with writing the first "filibustering" novel about Cuba. Her aim was to change the U.S. policy of neutrality toward Spain’s dominion over Cuba "to one of active engagement in pursuit of freedom for the island." She also wanted the U.S. government to aid the men who were captured in the invasion. The expedition was financed by rich New York Democrats. Mercenaries, many of them high-ranking U.S. soldiers, were recruited from the South and the Midwest.

Holcombe’s other goals were to vindicate Narciso Lopez, the charismatic Cuban general who led the armed invasion, and to "broadcast to the world that the expedition was a noble cause and that the men who were executed in Cuba were martyred heroes." She had more than an ideological interest in the expedition: her fiancé and the love of her life, Col. William L. Crittenden, was killed in the campaign, along with 50 other soldiers who were captured and executed within weeks of their arrival in Cuba; Lopez followed soon thereafter. Another 135 men would be imprisoned for a year in Africa.

While Holcombe championed Cuban independence, "she advocated freedom only for the 418,000 white people of Cuba, whom she perceived as slaves to Spanish tyranny," not for the 436,000 enslaved Cubans. "Like other white southerners of her time, she did not see the irony of her position, that the tyranny of the Spanish over Cubans was less oppressive than that of southern whites over slaves."