Cuba, one of Spain’s earliest and one of its last possessions in the New World, continued to be an object of American desire. In the early 1850s a crisis arose over expeditions launched against Cuba from American soil. Spanish authorities retaliated against those provocations by harassing American ships. In 1854 the Cuban crisis expired in one final outburst of braggadocio, the Ostend Manifesto. That year the Pierce administration instructed Pierre Soulé, the American minister in Madrid, to offer $130 million for Cuba, which Spain peremptorily spurned. Soulé then joined the American ministers to France and Britain in drafting the Ostend Manifesto. It declared that if Spain, “actuated by stubborn pride and a false sense of honor refused to sell,” then the United States must ask itself, “does Cuba, in the possession of Spain, seriously endanger our internal peace and existence of our cherished Union?” If so, “then, by every law, human, and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain…” Publication of the supposedly confidential dispatch left the administration no choice but to disavow what northern opinion widely regarded as a “slaveholder’ plot”.