Panama Canal Did President Roosevelt 'Steal' the Canal or Obtain It Fairly? Library of Congress The issue

Roosevelt and his supporters claimed that the government had no prior intent to engineer or aid a rebellion in Panama, and that no government official had played a role in it. As proof, Roosevelt pointed to a letter he had written to Albert Shaw, editor of The Review of Reviews, on October 10, well before the revolt occurred. In the letter, Roosevelt insisted that he had no intention of intervening in Panama. He wrote:

However, supporters said, once the Panamanians chose to rebel, the U.S. followed the correct course in sending warships to Panama, to protect both Panama's interests and those of the U.S. The Panamanians deserved their independence from their Colombian oppressors, Roosevelt's supporters contended, and it would have been immoral to help Columbia crush the rebellion or allow bloodshed to occur.

Furthermore, since the canal was to be built on Panamanian land, it should have been up to Panama all along—not up to Colombia—to negotiate the treaty, supporters insisted. Therefore, they said, the U.S. did not "steal" anything from Colombia but simply purchased the rights to the land from its rightful owners. In an address on February 22, 1904, former Secretary of War Elihu Root declared:

The people of Panama were the real owners of the canal route; it was because their fathers dwelt in the land, because they won their independence from Spain, because they organized a civil society there, that it was not to be treated as one of the waste places of the earth. They owned that part of the earth's surface just as much as the State of New York owns the Erie Canal.... The question for the United States was: Shall we take this treaty from the true owner or shall we take it from the faithless trustee, and for that purpose a third time put back the yoke of foreign domination upon the neck of Panama, by the request of that Government which has tried to play toward us the part of the highwayman?

However, not only Panama's interests were at stake; U.S. interests were too, supporters said. They insisted that the situation merited sending warships to the area to make sure that any conflict did not shut down transit across Panama. "We had to decide on the instant whether we would take possession of the ends of the railroad and keep the traffic clear, or whether we would stand back and let those gentlemen cut each other's throats for an indefinite time, and destroy whatever remnant of our property and interests we had there," Hay explained in a letter to historian James Ford Rhodes on December 8, 1903. He continued, "I had no hesitation as to the proper course to take, and have had no doubt of the propriety of it since."

On September 26, 1913, the steamboat Gatun successfully tests the locks located at Gatun, on the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal.

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