Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder of the Seas

by Charles Lee Lewis

Though Maury emerged with victory perched upon his banners from his bitter conflict with the “Retiring Board”, yet he was not to enjoy again the peaceful pursuit of scientific and philosophical researches. His mind was to be distracted by the consideration of a question which was before long to rend the country in twain and incidentally cause the wreck of his scientific ambitions.

Maury had always been distinctively a sympathizer in all the hopes and ambitions of the South, but he had early recognized the dangerous political potentialities in the slavery problem. As far back as 1850 he had set forth the free navigation of the Amazon River as a novel remedy for the preservation of the Union. According to his plan, Brazil was to become a country for the disposal of the surplus slaves of the South, and he hoped that in time by act of law slavery and involuntary servitude might be completely removed from the South. “The Southern states”, he wrote, “may emancipate just as New York, Massachusetts, etc. emancipated their slaves—large numbers of them were not set free; they, after the acts of prospective emancipation became laws, were sold at the South; and so the South may sell to the Amazon and so get clear of them. In no other way can I see a chance for it,—the slaves of the South are worth about fifteen hundred million. Their value is increasing at the rate of thirty or forty million a year. It is the industrial capital of the South. Did ever a people consent to sink so much industrial capital by emancipation or any other voluntary act?”

Courtesy of Dr. K. O. Bertling of the America-Institut of Berlin.

Statue of Maury over the Main Entrance of the Deutsche Seewarte (Meteorological Station of the German Admiralty) in Hamburg.

With characteristic energy Maury pressed the question upon the notice of the public. Lieutenant Lewis Herndon’s report of his exploration of the Amazon Valley was submitted to Congress on January 26, 1853, and soon afterwards there appeared in the National Intelligencer and the Union of Washington at irregular intervals seven articles signed “Inca”, in which the commercial, mineral, and agricultural potentialities of the Amazon region were painted in glowing colors. The free navigation of the Amazon River was demanded of Brazil by Maury in these “Inca” articles; and at the meeting of the Memphis Convention in June of the same year resolutions were adopted urging the same proposition. These resolutions were then reported to the House of Representatives in the form of a “Memorial of Lieutenant Maury in behalf of the Memphis Convention in favor of the free navigation of the Amazon River”.

This propaganda made at first a very unfavorable impression on the Brazilians, and caused them to suspect that a scheme of annexation by the United States was the real reason for the insistence on the opening of their great river to free navigation. One Brazilian newspaper asserted that “this nation of pirates, like those of their race, wish to displace all the people of America who are not Anglo-Saxon”. So strong was the feeling thus aroused that the House Committee on Foreign Affairs reported on February 23, 1855 that further action on the Maury memorial was for the present inexpedient. However, at last, on December 7, 1866, an agreement was signed providing that after September 7 of the following year the Amazon should be free to the merchant ships of all nations, as far as the frontier of Brazil.

Later even the Brazilians themselves conceded the beneficial influence of Maury in bringing this about. “After the publication in the Correio Mercantil of his (Maury’s) memorial”, wrote the Brazilian historian, Joaquim Nabuco,[10] “and his description of the Amazon region, locked up from the world by a policy more exclusive than Japan’s or Dr. Francia’s, the cause of the freedom of navigation was triumphant. Tavares Bastos himself received from the book by Maury the patriotic impulse which converted him into a champion of this great cause”. Events moved too swiftly, however, in the United States for the development of the Amazon Valley to play any part in the settling of the slavery question.

Although Maury was, to a certain degree, pro-slavery and a strong States’ rights man, yet he was by no means dis-unionist. In fact, during those critical months just preceding the outbreak of the War between the States he used all the power and influence at his command to keep the country united. As early as 1845 he referred in one of his letters to the “tendencies toward disunion in the nation”, and as the years went by there was a constantly increasing number of references in his correspondence to the drifting of the ship of state toward the breakers. In his opinions regarding the great question at issue, he occupied a position in the middle ground and refused to permit himself to be carried away by either the extremists at the North or those of the South. He condemned with equal vigor the effort to precipitate the acquisition of Cuba, and John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry. He believed that the people as a whole, both of the North and of the South, were not in sympathy with such schemes, but that such raids and filibustering expeditions were fostered by the unwisely partisan press, pulpit, and politicians.

He, therefore, suggested the calling of a council of men out of politics, ex-governors and old judges, from different states of the South to formulate some kind of a proposition to lay before the people of the North. “It will never do”, he wrote, “to suffer this Union to drift into dissolution”. With this end in view, he wrote to the governors of the border states, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware, to act as mediators.