biography
| name: |
Cazneau, Jane Maria Eliza Storms
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née McManus, pseudonym Cora Montgomery
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1807–78)
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| biography:
| Adventurer, journalist, and publicist, born near Troy, New York, USA. The daughter of a lawyer (and US representative, 1825–7), she assisted her father in a failed scheme to establish a colony of German settlers in Texas (1833–5). (Later, Aaron Burr's second wife accused him of committing adultery with her. Jane had meanwhile ended her brief marriage (1825–31) to Allen B (or William F) Storms.) Settling in New York City, she became a journalist, writing mainly for the New York Sun (1846). She spoke Spanish, and accompanied the newspaper's editor, Moses Beach, on a secret peace mission to Mexico during the war, and is said to have provided crucial information to General Winfield Scott. She went on to Washington, DC and New York City, where she lobbied for annexing all of Mexico, advocated the expansionist views summed up by ‘manifest destiny’, and promoted the liberation of Cuba from Spain. By 1850 she was married to William L Cazneau, a Texas politician and fellow adventurer, and they would devote much of the next 20 years trying to get the USA to annex the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo; they also encouraged William Walker's filibustering in Nicaragua. Apparently as indefatigable as she was irrepressible, she wrote several books under her pseudonym promoting her views about US expansion in the Caribbean, including The Queen of Islands and the King of Rivers (1870) and Our Winter Eden; Pen Pictures of the Tropics (1878). When their plan to annex Santo Domingo was finally rejected by the US Senate (1870), she and her husband retired to Jamaica. She was lost at sea off Cape Hatteras on a return trip to Jamaica. |
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