Security· Late 19th Century Foreign Interventions
Colombia/Panama protective deployments 1873
A series of protective landings on the Panama isthmus, then a province of Colombia, to guard the vital transit.
Through much of 1873 the isthmus was unsettled by civil disturbance, and on several occasions Marines were landed to protect the American consulate and the Panama Railroad, the crucial link carrying traffic between the oceans across the narrow neck of land. The duty was protective and precautionary, the landing parties standing guard over American interests and the railroad until the trouble subsided, and no casualties resulted. These deployments were part of the long pattern of American intervention on the isthmus, where the transit route made Panama a recurring object of concern; they were precursors to the larger Aspinwall expedition of 1885 and to the still greater interventions of the early twentieth century that would attend the building of the canal. The transit, once again, drew the Marines ashore.
Record no. 471