In 1903 Colombia's Senate rejected a treaty that would have let the United States dig a canal across Panama; nine months later a warship anchored offshore ensured Colombia's own soldiers never reached the revolt that followed.

By October 1903, Panama's independence movement had a manifesto and a provisional government already picked out. What it did not have was a country to run: the isthmus was still a Colombian province, and Colombia had an army.

Why didn't the French finish the canal first?

The idea of cutting a canal across the isthmus was two decades old by then. Ferdinand de Lesseps, fresh off building the Suez Canal, had convinced French investors that a sea-level canal through Panama would be no harder than the flat desert he had already crossed in Egypt. It was much harder. Malaria and yellow fever killed workers by the thousands (the U.S. State Department later put the toll at roughly 20,000 lives), and de Lesseps's company collapsed into bankruptcy in 1889. The failure triggered a financial and political scandal in Paris over mismanaged funds and bribed officials. The canal sat unfinished, and the company's remaining rights and rusting equipment were for sale to whoever wanted to try again.

What did the United States actually offer Colombia?

The United States wanted the canal, and it wanted the French company's leftover concession. Secretary of State John Hay negotiated a treaty with Colombia's chargé d'affaires, Tomás Herrán: a hundred-year, renewable lease on a six-mile-wide strip across Panama, for $10 million up front and $250,000 a year after that. Bogotá's legislature balked. Colombian senators noted that the United States was separately paying the French company $40 million for equipment already rusting in the jungle, so $10 million for the land itself looked thin, and a hundred-year foreign lease read as a permanent loss of sovereignty. In August 1903 the Colombian Senate voted unanimously to reject the Hay–Herrán Treaty. Roosevelt, who wanted the canal under construction on his own watch, was furious.

A revolution assembled in a hotel room

Philippe Bunau-Varilla had reason to want a deal with somebody. A French engineer who had worked on the original canal attempt and still held stock in what was left of it, he met Manuel Amador Guerrero, a Panamanian doctor and railway company physician, in New York that September. In a room at the Waldorf-Astoria, Bunau-Varilla drafted a declaration of independence for the Panamanians to sign, wired money for the effort, and worked his contacts to make sure Washington would recognize a new republic quickly if one appeared. He also went to Macy's for colored silk, so his wife could sew a proposed flag; Amador's allies rejected the design as too close to the Stars and Stripes, and the flag actually raised in Panama City was sewn instead by Amador's wife, María de la Ossa de Amador. None of this required a battle. It required a Colombian army that would not fight.

What happened when the Colombian army showed up?

On November 3, a Colombian battalion under General Juan Tobar landed at Colón, on the Caribbean side of the isthmus. The American-run Panama Railroad kept its rolling stock on the Panama City side, so only Tobar and his staff crossed the isthmus by rail; his soldiers stayed behind at the coast. There, the U.S. warship Nashville had anchored the day before, and its presence discouraged the Colombian troops from forcing their way across. In Panama City, Tobar walked into the hands of General Esteban Huertas, the Colombian officer commanding the local garrison, who had already been won over by the revolutionaries. Huertas arrested his own superior. That night a Colombian gunboat, the Bogotá, fired a few shells into the city; the single casualty was a shopkeeper, Wong Kong Yee, killed inside his own store. Panama's declaration of independence was read from the balcony of the municipal building, and the United States recognized the new republic within days.

Independence, or intervention by other means?

Panamanians had tried and failed at breaking from Bogotá several times over the preceding half-century, so the grievance was real. But the timing, the financing, and the naval cover in November 1903 were not organic to Panama alone. Roosevelt himself muddied the question in 1911, telling a Berkeley audience that he had "took the Isthmus, started the canal, and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me." Colombian newspapers reprinted the line as a confession, and a pamphlet distributed soon after (titled, simply, I Took the Isthmus) used Roosevelt's own words as evidence for an argument Bogotá had been making all along. Colombian historians have generally read November 3 as territory lost to a foreign power's design; American accounts more often describe an independence movement Washington chose not to obstruct. Both readings survive on the same set of facts, and nothing in the record settles which one was operating in any single mind that week.

The treaty nobody from Panama signed

Fifteen days after independence, Bunau-Varilla, whom the new Panamanian government had just appointed as its minister to Washington, put his name to the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty without a single Panamanian negotiator in the room. It gave the United States a canal zone roughly ten miles wide, described in the text as a grant "in perpetuity," for the same $10 million Colombia had turned down eight months earlier. The Panamanian junta objected to several of its terms once they read them, and signed anyway: refusing it meant negotiating from nothing, with the new republic barely two weeks old and no other patron in sight.

Manuel Amador Guerrero became Panama's first president. The canal finally opened in 1914, a decade behind de Lesseps's original schedule, and the United States ran it as sovereign territory for the rest of the century. That arrangement lasted until December 31, 1999, when, under treaties that Jimmy Carter and Panama's Omar Torrijos had signed in 1977, the United States handed the canal to the one government that had never gotten a vote on how it was built in the first place.

Sources

• "Secession of Panama from Colombia," Wikipedia, for the chronology of events between November 2 and 6, 1903.
• U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, "Panama" country page and Foreign Relations of the United States, 1903 documents on the Panamanian revolution.
• Britannica, "Hay–Herrán Treaty."
• HISTORY, "Panama Declares Independence from Colombia," This Day in History.
• HISTORY, "Why Building the Panama Canal Was So Difficult — and Deadly."