At the very time of the Venezuela difficulty, such a crisis was taking shape in the Caribbean. Cuba had always been an object of immediate concern to the United States. The statesmen of the Jeffersonian period all looked to its eventually becoming part of American territory. Three quarters of a century before, when the revolt of the Spanish colonies had halted on the shores of the mainland, leaving the rich island of Cuba untouched, John Quincy Adams, on April 28, 1823, in a lengthy and long-considered dispatch to Mr. Nelson, the American Minister to Spain, asserted that the United States could not consent to the passing of Cuba from the flag of Spain to that of any other European power, that under existing conditions Cuba was considered safer in the hands of Spain than in those of the revolutionaries, and that the United States stood for the maintenance of the status quo, with the expectation that Cuba would ultimately become American territory. By the late forties and the fifties, however, the times had changed, and American policy had changed with them. It was becoming more and more evident that, although no real revolution had as yet broken out, the "Pearl of the Antilles" was bound to Spain by compulsion rather than by love. In the United States there was a general feeling that the time had at last come to realize the vision of Jefferson and Adams and to annex Cuba. But the complications of the slavery question prevented immediate annexation. As a slave colony which might become a slave state, the South wanted Cuba, but the majority in the North did not. After the Civil War in the United States was over, revolution at length flared forth in 1868, from end to end of the island. Sympathy with the Cubans was widespread in the United States. The hand of the Government, however, was stayed by recent history. Americans felt keenly the right of governments to exert their full strength to put down rebellion, for they themselves were prosecuting against Great Britain a case based on what they contended was her too lax enforcement of her obligations to the American Government and on the assistance which she had given to the South. The great issue determined the lesser, and for ten years the United States watched the Cuban revolution without taking part in it, but not, however, without protest and remonstrance. Claiming special rights as a close and necessarily interested neighbor, the United States constantly made suggestions as to the manner of the contest and its settlement. Some of these Spain grudgingly allowed, and it was in part by American insistence that slavery was finally abolished in the island. Further internal reform, however, was not the wish and was perhaps beyond the power of Spain. Although the revolution was seemingly brought to a close in 1878, its embers continued to smolder for nearly a score of years until in 1895 they again burst into flame.