PART VI
The largest turning point on the road to disunion is too often considered off that road. The Texas Annexation Controversy came before the so-called Era of Sectional Controversy. Nationalistic ideologies and interests helped make Texas attractive. National diplomacy was centrally involved. The annexation story thus easily slides into nonsectional sagas.
But the Texas epic emerges most clearly in the context of the coming of the Civil War. The same southern impulses making slavery politics sporadically distracting earlier brought the Texas Annexation Controversy front and center on the national agenda. Many slaveholders’ prayers that bondage and blacks would diffuse away, Southerners’ apprehension about vulnerable hinterlands, their fear that world-wide opinion would imprison them with multiplying blacks—all of this helped focus southern eyes on Texas. Calhounites’ search for “mere” words to reorganize politics along ideological lines, Southern Democrats’ and Whigs’ forays in loyalty politics, southern states’ rights politicians’ leverage over the Democratic Party and frustration with National Whiggery—all this thrust slaveholders’ concerns about Texas into national and especially National Democratic Party politics. Northern resentment that southern protections of slavery would destroy white republicanism, already omnipresent in Missouri and Gag Rule controversies, ballooned when Southerners demanded gigantic Texas. The resulting crisis mocked Jacksonian “Democracy,” de-Whigged the most States’ Rights Whigs, and scarred democratic Union. An episode so entwined with the slavery controversy, too much of it unknown, too little of it now connected with sectional contention, all of it replete with zany characters and weird happenings, demands a section of its own.
CHAPTER 20
Political consequences of annexation were manifestly destined to swell to the size of Texas itself. In territorial mass, the annexed enslaved state would rival the six previous Lower South States combined. The annexation agreement of 1845 would allow the Lone Star State to turn itself into five states. Specters of a doubled Slavepower would loom before Northerners already angry about a southern power bloated by counting slaves as three-fifths additional votes.
Worse, annexation would lead to huger territorial acquisitions and nastier sectional resentments. Admission of Texas into the Union in 1845 would make war with Mexico in 1846 difficult to avert. The rout of Mexico would make American hunger for Mexican land hard to curb. The new empire thus acquired would make a mid-century crisis over slavery’s expansion impossible to avoid. Before Texas, tendencies towards secession were merely foreshadowed. After annexation, events would come in a rush.
The reasons why the Lone Star State was admitted to the Union, unlike the consequences, may seem to have little to do with slavery politics. Texans who originally migrated from the United States, as the historical legend has it, delightedly reannexed their destiny to the United States. United States citizens espousing a Manifest Destiny to spread American democracy over the hemisphere, as the story continues, happily invited Texas republicans to share democratic Union. Why elaborately explain so natural a marriage?1
Because this natural attraction formula ignores natural forces splitting the two republics apart. Immediately before annexation, both major American parties remained frozen in their decade-long position that Texas was not worth foreign war or sectional combat. In 1843, the American establishment’s opposition to annexation drove Texas leaders towards an alternate Manifest Destiny: an English-protected independent republic.
This manifest drift away from annexation initially alarmed only one tiny southern faction, composed of a few stymied States’ Rights Whigs and fewer disgruntled Democrats. Members of the annexation clique fed each other rumors that English leaders would trade protection of Texas’s independence for emancipation of the Lone Star Republic’s slaves. These southern alarmists controlled the presidency. They dominated nothing else. An accident of death had pulled President John Tyler of Virginia into the White House. Tyler’s accents of extremism had pushed away popular support. His Accidency’s latest extremism, his conception of English interference with Texas slavery, seemed at first to most Americans a wild idea, a demagogue’s nonsense. Yet this isolated resident of the White House with his far-out nightmare about England precipitated a stream of events which reversed Texas’s and the United States’ movement away from each other. The resulting national disasters, fully as destructive as national political idols had predicted, illuminate why the American political establishment had desperately sought to block a despised President’s notion of Manifest Destiny. Still, Tyler prevailed.
Faced with this bizarre phenomenon, fine historical intelligences have echoed contemporary charges that John Tyler’s supporters cynically used irresponsible propaganda to spread an absurdity.2 This thesis, with its emphasis on a minority’s manipulation of majority opinion, at least rejects the notion that some euphoria about Manifest Destiny transfixed the American majority. But the argument that propaganda yielded otherwise needless disaster also represents a last stand of the Revisionist theory that unscrupulous politicans created an unnatural civil war.
No aspect of Revisionism more demands revising. Nothing was unnatural about President Tyler’s and his southern advisors’ far-from-cynical beliefs about Englishmen’s far-from-fictional speculations about securing the far-from-preposterous object of an independent, emancipated Texas Republic. Rather, this apprehension represented a recurrent nightmare among southern extremists, who ever worried that the southern mainstream would neither notice nor combat Anglo-American silent drift towards antislavery. Nor was anything unnatural about these slaveholding extremists’ successful pressure on Southern Democrats, and thus on the National Democratic Party, to pass a law shoring up the Peculiar Institution at its exposed fringes. That was outcome as usual in slavery politics, whether the incident involved gag rules or Texas or fugitives or Kansas. The annexation of Texas was indeed one of the most understandable pre-Civil War events, so long as one understands that unpopular initiators were not paranoids or demagogues or provokers of weird happenings. Rather the President and his main diplomatic lieutenants were coherent ideologues who used established patterns of slavery politics to secure the latest dubiously democratic consolidation of the Slavepower.3
1
Few chief executives anywhere in the hemisphere anytime in the nineteenth century were more frustrated than were Presidents John Tyler of the United States and Sam Houston of Texas in the year 1843. The two Presidents’ respective attempts to break free from paralysis ultimately fractured the logjam over Texas Annexation. Let us examine each chieftain’s predicament on the eve of breakthrough, starting with Tyler’s.4
John Tyler’s frustration as the first and last States’ Rights Whig President was the climactic frustration of a man’s and a faction’s doomed attempt to make Whig Nationalism a states’ rights crusade. The impossible dream, it will be recalled, had begun back in nullification times. Then Senator Tyler had been a States’ Rights Democrat who believed that Andrew Jackson’s proposed coercion of South Carolina Nullifiers was unsafe for states’ rights and for slavery. Three years later, Tyler switched to the Opposition Party. He would make the anti-Jackson coalition uncompromisingly for states’ rights.
Only unusually principled politicians characteristically switch parties. John Tyler was long on states’ rights principles. But for an abstractionist who played unconventionally loose with party connection, Tyler was also a conventional two-party politician, as his states’ rights intimates despairingly knew. Among Tyler’s doubting Virginia friends, the most important was Judge Abel P. Upshur, the zealot ultimately most responsible for pushing President Tyler and the nation towards annexation.
Upshur, leading foe of King Numbers in the Virginia Convention of 1829, invidiously compared Tyler to the great seceder from the Jackson coalition, John C. Calhoun. The South Carolinian, Upshur’s idol, broke cleanly from the Jackson Party in 1831. Calhoun then warned followers away from compromised national parties. They should create a new, uncompromising states’ rights coalition. Some Calhoun admirers, including Judge Upshur, hoped to triumph more swiftly within the already existing Opposition Party. But Calhoun’s most loyal partisans tended to be only nominally Oppositionists. Unlike more centrist politicians such as John Tyler, they doubted that the nationalistic Opposition Party could be transformed into a states’ rights vehicle.
Calhounites such as Judge Upshur especially suspected John Tyler because the Virginian crept rather than leapt for his principles. The Virginia senator waited, waited, waited, for almost three years after nullification he waited, until departure from the Jackson coalition could no longer be delayed. When the Jacksonian majority in the Virginia legislature instructed Tyler to resign his seat, the senator stalled, stalled, stalled, for several months he stalled, until resignation could no longer be avoided. Having delayed like a politician so long, he then raced, like a politician, straight to the center of the other party’s maneuverings.
The Tyler who switched looked the part of the slaveholder distressed about how southern purity and national partisanship could be combined. John Tyler’s face was long, his cheeks hollow, his complexion sallow. His nervous eyes darted erratically, as if searching for some way to be ideologue and politico too. This cadaverous partisan with the thin beak nose and the thin bony hands was in manner all severe gentleman of the Virginia-style Old School. But the question his thin frame exuded whenever he pressed the flesh was whether he would only exhaust himself by trying to be John C. Calhoun and Martin Van Buren mixed up in one package—and an Oppositionist/Whig parcel no less.
Tyler’s largest problem was that most Oppositionists lived in the North and championed Daniel Webster’s brand of high nationalism. Furthermore, most Southern Oppositionists lived in more northern sections of the South and cheered Henry Clay’s version of economic nationalism. The more extreme States’ Rights Oppositionists who lived in more southern sections of the South seemed imprisoned in the wrong fortress even in their homeland.
John Tyler escaped from prison in 1836 because the torn Opposition Party made no effort to unite. Southern Oppositionists ran their own states’ rights ticket in the Middle and Lower South, featuring Hugh Lawson White for President and Tyler for Vice President. After the multiple-candidate campaign of 1836 lost out to Van Buren, John Tyler and all Oppositionists/Whigs realized that the party would have to run one ticket in 1840. A Whig national party convention would have to be called. The John Tylers would have to attend. Virginians would have to wrench Whig Nationalists towards the states’ rights path to power.
Only the exile from both parties seemed capable of producing that miracle. John C. Calhoun might have the charisma, if on a national ticket, to induce a Whig gamble on states’ rights. But Calhoun saw no ground for compromise with Clay, that adherent of “consolidation and emancipation.” Calhoun could see less ground for accepting second place on a William Henry Harrison ticket. Harrison, lamented Calhoun, “has expressed an opinion in favor of appropriating money to emancipate our slaves” through colonization. Of the two old parties, Calhoun preferred the Democratic coalition. He believed more states’ righters were there encamped.5
As the presidential election of 1840 approached, Calhoun returned temporarily to the Democratic Party. Martin Van Buren, explained the South Carolinian, had fought the good states’ rights fight against the United States Bank. Many of Calhoun’s followers, having left the Jackson Party with their man and joined the Opposition Party without him, streamed back with him at least temporarily into the Democratic Party. Other states’ rights purists, Abel P. Upshur among them, still thought Van Buren worse than Whiggery. But Upshur was more than ever at the Whig fringes after Calhoun went back for a season to the Democracy.
Meanwhile, states’ righters such as John Tyler, deeper inside the Whig establishment, were more awkwardly positioned than ever after Calhoun’s move. Then, at this moment of feeling hopelessly trapped in a nationalistic institution, the most nationalistic Southern Whig offered States’ Rights Whigs another escape. Henry Clay, of all people, made noises the John Tylers were desperate to hear.
Clay’s series of speeches and letters in the late 1830s, culminating in his senatorial address of February 7, 1839, hardly renounced nationalistic Whiggery. Rather, Henry Clay promised to delay agitating for his American System. He still wanted national roads built. But states were building them. He still desired a national tariff. But his Compromise Tariff of 1833 had settled the issue for a decade. He still preferred a national bank. But the people preferred Democrats’ banking solutions. His states’ rights friends ought to stop punishing him for nationalistic ideas he had stopped pushing.
The worst threat facing the nation, Clay now emphasized, was the abolitionist onslaught. The Border South’s hero still called slavery a temporary evil. He again hazily envisioned slaves and blacks diffusing from America. He again hinted that bondage would drift out of his Border South.
But this time Henry Clay’s soft prayers for black diffusion came embedded in hard attacks on Yankee meddlers. Where an earlier Henry Clay had hoped states would use distributed funds to finance state colonization-abolition and had prayed that in some distant future the federal government might free the District’s slaves, the Kentuckian now stressed that slaveholders must decide slavery’s fate. Clay urged secession if Yankees imposed emancipation. Abolitionists, he charged, inspired a southern rage endangering the white man’s republic. If Congress and Northerners would keep hands off slaves, the white republic would endure. Then the South would solve its own problem.6
Henry Clay hoped that these new emphases might forge a middle position for the divided anti-Jackson party. By coupling a call on fellow nationalists to delay commercial aspirations with a call on fellow Southerners to damn outside meddlers, Clay sought to become a Whig for all regions. By lambasting abolitionist agitation and muting agitation about banks, Clay also arguably demonstrated sounder southern priorities than the Calhoun won over by Van Buren’s banking policy. John Tyler, advocate of that position, became leader of States’-Rights-Whigs-for-Clay in the late 1830s.
Calhoun’s admirers on the Whig fringes, however, found the new Clay scarcely more admirable than the old. Abel P. Uphsur remained faintly hopeful that States’ Rights Whigs, by issuing ultimatums on slavery, could force Northern and Border South nationalists in the party around. Those were not Clay’s tactics. The Kentuckian, prizing permanent Union more than temporary slavery, opposed all agitation, for or against slavery. A neutral who would prefer to terminate the Peculiar Institution, declared Abel P. Upshur, “has no merit in my eye, except in being able to turn V. Buren out.”7
Henry Clay’s new stance had less merit in Northern Whigs’ eyes. Yankee nationalists had suspected the Border South hero ever since Clay compromised the principle of permanent tariff protection by co-authoring the Compromise Tariff of 1833. No matter that the Kentuckian opposed both sections’ ferocities. Northern Whigs still preferred a fresh face and a less sectionally sullied symbol of nationalism. The Northern Whig majority at the first National Whig Convention thus dashed Henry Clay’s hopes by selecting as its presidential nominee that war hero almost as beloved as Andrew Jackson, General William Henry Harrison of Indiana.
Northern Whigs’ rejection of Henry Clay showed how intractable was Southern Whigs’ predicament. A Whig national convention could understandably have declared Virginia’s Henry Wise, that advocate of total gags and utter condemnation of John Quincy Adams, too anti-Yankee to head a national ticket. But Henry Clay too southern? Or to ask the question pressing on Clay delegates, how could so northern a party mount a viable southern campaign?8
2
William Henry Harrison’s partisans of the 1840 convention had one easy answer: make a southern Clay supporter the vice presidential nominee. The ultimate selection, John Tyler, had a superb resume for the part. The eastern Virginian was a prestigious ex-United States senator and vice presidential candidate on Hugh White’s 1836 Oppositionist ticket. Tyler was also a strong but apparently nonfanatical states’ righter who had stalled on switching parties for states’ rights principles and then had leapt to lead Henry Clay’s presidential campaign. No American convention ever selected a more viable reconciliation candidate.
Still, the non-accidental nomination of the man imminently to be known as His Accidency had a tantalizing touch of the haphazard about it. Several names were bandied about the Whig Convention before Tyler swept up delegates. A promising boomlet arose for ex-Senator John Clayton of Delaware. We cannot know whether that popular Border South ultra-nationalist could have appeased enough Middle and Lower South states’ rights delegates to become the unity-restoring vice presidential candidate. We do know that the nationalistic Clayton, had he become President, would never have helped extreme states’ righters provoke the Texas Annexation Crisis. American history just might have been altered when John Clayton, furious that Henry Clay would not be heading the Whig ticket, refused to allow the convention to consider writing his name under William Henry Harrison’s.
John Tyler, ever ideologue and partisan too, was eager to be considered. John Tyler’s eagerness, when contrasted with several other Clay partisans’ reluctance, led the convention to select the Virginian without apparent reluctance. No Whig delegate was recorded as wondering whether the ex-Jacksonian might become President and then, not at all accidentally, urge states’ rights on his nationalistic party.9
3
From this first Whig National Convention emerged the first Whig presidential campaign staged like a Martin Van Buren electoral circus. In this Tippecanoe and Tyler Too effort, bands and barbecues, parades and haranguers whipped up the multitude for the Whigs’ heroic general born in a log cabin. Whig seizure of Van Buren’s own demagogical concoctions, so the historical myth runs, thus turned the electioneering magician out of the White House.
Nothing that simple occurred. Southern Whigs used the same electioneering hoopla in 1844 and were trounced. The new mastery of media meant little unless the message was right. Southern Whigs’ Tippecanoe and Tyler Too campaigners of 1840 emphasized the perfect message to rout the Democracy.
That campaign theme helps explain what most demands explaining: why the National Democracy, the only party capable of enacting national proslavery legislation, often lost black-belt neighborhoods. Whiggery was particularly strong among merchants, lawyers, and journalists in town centers dedicated to serving slaveholders’ marketing needs. The cause also swept up many planters and poorer neighbors dedicated to selling staples in state, national, and international markets. States’ Rights Whigs had a slightly strained slavery message for such black-belt folk: while Democrats secured only compromised victories for slavery, Whigs would be uncompromising. Nationalistic Whigs had a more natural appeal in a period before slavery dominated everything else: Southern Whigs, as dedicated to saving slavery as any Democrat, would secure better markets for slaveholders’ products. All Whigs of whatever persuasion also had the ideal follow-up to the Jackson-as-corrupt-Caesar line of 1836: Whig patriarchs, although just as adept at courting voters, exuded a more high-toned, more disinterested version of civic virtue. That faintly haughty Whiggish tone particularly attracted patricians who found Andrew Jackson’s mobocratic crudities slightly embarrassing, maybe even a little dangerous.
No way would gentlemen put electing their patriarchs and selling their crops ahead of keeping their slaves. William Henry Harrison’s campaigners, like all Whig partisans in preceding and succeeding presidential campaigns, thus had to show their man was as safe or safer on slavery before other messages could work. But in 1840 Southern Whigs did not yet struggle under the crushing burden which would imminently make the loyalty problem unmanageable. Northern Whigs had not yet turned Southerners down on a critical slavery issue. Gag rule debates were full of portents that Northern Whigs would be less accommodating to Slavepower demands than were Northern Democrats. Gag rules, however, remained a background distraction in 1840 as in 1836. When slavery politics dominated the foreground, the debate still largely involved not impersonal issues but that personality question: Which national ticket contained the true-blue Southerners?
Here the 1840 Tippecanoe and Tyler Too campaign was almost as patriotically southern as the 1836 Hugh Lawson White-John Tyler ticket. While William Henry Harrison lived northwards and had supported national colonization, he was a native Virginian. Harrison, after moving to Indiana at the beginning of the century, had urged Congress to lift the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery. Congressman Harrison had voted the South’s way during the Missouri Controversy and had arguably lost his seat for it. His running mate, John Tyler, another Virginian, had also fought the good congressional fight in Missouri times. This all-southern team, Southern Whigs declared, would be safer for the South than Martin Van Buren, that compromising New Yorker, who had wished James Tallmadge’s post-nati emancipation amendment plastered on Missouri. Moreover, Van Buren’s Vice President, Richard Johnson of Kentucky, openly flouted the color line with his mulatto lover.
Having made their candidates seem as sound or sounder on slavery, Harrison’s southern campaigners moved on to emphasize the theme which Clay had temporarily muted in 1839 but which he and most Southern Whigs usually considered their party’s essence: nonpartisan governmental boosting of commerce and community. Whigs derided Van Buren for presiding over a sour national economy since the Panic of 1837 and for allegedly making banking panic and currency shortage worse. The President had routed national bank recharter, swept federal cash out of all banks, and planted the government’s funds in the Treasury Department’s vaults.
Some cure for currency contraction, cursed Whigs: Take federal currency out of circulation! Some successor to Jackson, that Caesar who had used patronage to delude voters: a scheming Little Magician who kept the people’s funds in his Treasury appointees’ vaults. The better way, urged William Henry Harrison’s campaigners, was to elect a chaste general who would keep demagogues’ hands off the nation’s cash. With a nonpartisan anti-Caesar as President, a non-political national bank would be chartered. Then disinterested financiers would pump the nation’s stabilized currency back into the national market. Depression-ravaged southern agriculturalists needed better than the credit crunch Van Buren had foisted upon them. Harrison, as sound on slavery, was soundly non-political and sounder on banking.
Harrison’s talk of a national bank was not his vice presidential candidate’s favorite Whiggish rhetoric. John Tyler, states’ righter in harness with nationalists, performed his usual prevarications. He wrote long state papers opposed to national banks—and stuffed them in his drawer. He referred friends and foes to his former speeches on the unconstitutionality of national banks—and quoted with approval Harrison’s recent evasive statement that the Constitution granted no power to create banks, “save in the event the power granted to Congress could not be carried into effect without resorting to such an institution.”10 Tyler’s waffling recalled Calhoun’s prediction: states’ righters will be compromised in the National Whig Party.
Southern Democrats, with no need to prevaricate, tore into Southern Whigs’ more nationalistic pronouncements. Van Buren campaigners urged that allowing a national bank to use the government’s hard cash to spew forth paper currency was no cure for banking panic. Democrats argued that a bank president responsible only to United States Bank shareholders would have unwarranted power over the people’s monies. They insisted that national banks violated states’ rights and that states’ rights protected slavery and that Northern Whigs were enemies of every law protective of slaveholders.
These campaign themes were powerful. The election was close. But William Henry Harrison, that chaste nonpolitician to the manor born who had a program for ending a disastrous depression and unseating Caesar’s henchman, had the most powerful southern message—and a powerless southern vice presidential candidate too.
The 1840 victory of Tyler and Tippecanoe, of safety on slavery and reversal of political immorality and economic chaos, represented the first Whig sweep of the entire South. Harrison and Tyler piled up 54% of southern popular votes and 68% of the electoral count. They added new majorities in Deep and Middle Souths to the old majority in the Border South. Harrison won the Border South states he had secured in 1836: Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. In the Middle South, where the more states’ rights White-Tyler ticket had won only Tennessee in 1836, the more nationalistic Harrison-Tyler duo added North Carolina in 1840. In the Deep South, where White and Tyler had won only Georgia, Harrison and Tyler added Mississippi and Louisiana. Harrison had won a southern mandate—not least to ignore the States’ Rights Whiggery of his running mate.11
4
John Tyler immediately became irrelevant inside the new administration. Daniel Webster, Secretary of State, directed a foreign policy not likely to serve slaveholders. Henry Clay, senatorial titan, directed a domestic policy not likely to please states’ righters. Harrison’s mandate could secure Clay’s program, since the President, in another chaste putdown of King Andrew the politico, renounced a second term in his inaugural address, the senator might give the next inaugural address. After a dozen years of thrashings, Clay might yet transform the Age of Jackson into the Age of Clay.
Vice President Tyler did not long have to suffer his most impossible situation yet. Before a month of the Harrison administration had passed, Harrison died, after catching a cold on Inauguration Day. The previously irrelevant Vice President became a potentially highly relevant commander-in-chief. Tyler, the states’ righter nominated because he had helped rally the South for Clay, might now destroy the Kentuckian’s opportunity to rally the nation for nationalism.
Henry Clay vowed to do the destroying. A tiny Whig faction, Clay stormed, must not overwhelm a whopping American majority. A campaign manager elevated by an accident of death, Clay urged, must not negate his own candidate, a statesman enshrined by a lifetime of elections. Dubbing Tyler “His Accidency,” the Kentucky senator dismissed the Virginia President as a caretaker. Clay drove a United States Bank through Congress. He defied His Accidency to veto it.
Tyler faced a no-win decision. The President could concede he was His Accidency and become again Clay’s cheerleader. The states’ righter would then welcome into the statute book a highly nationalistic measure—the very measure Clay, when courting states’ righters, had declared irrelevant in 1839. Alternatively, Clay’s ex-campaign manager could veto the National Bank and become again the states’ righter more loyal to principle than party. Tyler would then exemplify what he had denounced Calhoun for representing—a politician outside both national party institutions.
The harried Tyler repeated his stall of 1832–5. Once again, he was desperate to retain partisan allegiances. Once again, he was anxious to reassert ancient axioms. His confidantes offered colliding advice. Calhounites at the Whig fringes, of whom Virginia’s Abel P. Upshur remained the most zealous, insisted that States’ Rights Whiggery’s first national President must not surrender to nationalism. Meanwhile, pragmatic Southern Whig politicians, of whom North Carolina Senator Willie P. Mangum was the most insistent, urged that the states’ rights fragment must not declare war on Whiggery’s first national mandate.
This was the time of testing for John Tyler, half-theorist, half-politico, in temperament somewhere between Upshur and Mangum. Upshur thought the politico would triumph. But Mangum became the politician disappointed. Tyler vetoed Clay’s banking bill.
Clay secured passage of a less nationalistic banking bill. Again the President wavered. Again Tyler ultimately vetoed. This time, the Whigs’ congressional caucus almost unanimously excommunicated the President from the party. John Tyler, politician of the two-party establishment, now reigned outside both parties.12
The debacle fulfilled Southern Democrats’ longtime prediction. Some chance, Whigs’ Deep South opponents had always scoffed, that a States’ Rights Whig who threw down the gauntlet would force Whig Nationalists to surrender. Well, Tyler had thrown down the gauntlet, however reluctantly, and States’ Rights Whigs had been routed. So how could the Whig Party reorganize American politics along ideological lines safe for the South?
Tyler had only one place to turn for soul mates to help answer that question. Excommunicated by the Whig middle, the President could select only Southerners on the fringes. When all Harrison’s cabinet members except Secretary of State Daniel Webster resigned in the fall of 1841, Tyler recruited extreme States’ Rights Whigs. Abel P. Upshur, the Calhoun purist pleasantly surprised that Tyler had stood firm, was chosen Secretary of the Navy. After Webster resigned in mid-1843 and an interim Secretary of State died a month later, Tyler promoted Upshur to direct American foreign policy. John Tyler, unable to fathom how Calhounite abstraction could reorganize practical parties, now leaned on the most devoted Calhounite visionary in Virginia.
Abel P. Upshur had special influence because even paralyzed Presidents retain diplomatic authority. John Tyler would have to listen if his Secretary of State could suggest a foreign policy fit to reassert executive authority and build a presidential party. As for Secretary of State Upshur, he cared less about saving Tyler than about proving that a states’ rights leader with the right slavery-strengthening issue could remake the Whig Party or remold some third party along Calhoun’s ideological lines. But what foreign policy could galvanize Southerners into revolutionizing the two-party system?
5
The answer came from the other chief executive stymied in mid-1843. President Sam Houston and most Texas compatriots resented being scorned by their homeland. Home, for most Texans, was not on the range but inside the American nation. These chauvinistic Americans had trickled into Texas territories over the previous fifteen years. They had come bearing American-style institutions to seize on American-style opportunity. The Mexican government, having taken empty Texas prairies from Spain as part of the Revolution of 1821, considered southwestern entrepreneurs the most likely migrants. Mexican officials accordingly invited Americans to bring along their despotic alternative to Mexican economic peonage, black slavery, and their democratic alternative to Mexican political despotism, white democracy. Mexican central officials allowed these weird dictatorial democrats to govern themselves at the local level. Salutary Neglect, an earlier version of this policy had been called, when Britain ruled America. Americans indeed found salutary Mexico’s neglect.13
To Mexican authorities by late 1829, as to English authorities by 1765, neglect seemed no longer salutary. Neglected sovereign power was creating a vacuum inside the area of Mexico least Mexican. A Mexican law of September 15, 1829, accordingly emancipated slaves throughout Mexico. Another law of April 6, 1830, forbade immigration of further Americans.14
Americans still kept crossing the border and bringing a few slaves. Texans repeatedly petitioned for redress of grievances. In 1835, Mexican authorities responded in a move reminiscent of England’s Intolerable Acts of 1774. Most local autonomy was closed down. Most local democratic proceedings were pinched off. In January 1836, Texans answered with the continent’s newest Declaration of Independence.15
The Texas War of Independence was shorter than the American. The Mexican commander, Santa Anna, moved troops into Texas and sacked the Alamo. Then on April 21, 1836, Texas General Sam Houston ambushed Santa Anna at San Jacinto, an area within what was to become the city of Houston. The Mexican chieftain, trying to sneak away camouflaged as a private, was captured when his privates cheered him. Fearing death, the hero, done in by his admirers, signed a treaty granting Texas its independence.
Mexican authorities repudiated Santa Anna’s treaty. An agreement signed under the gun, went the Mexican argument, could not legitimatize an illegal rebellion. The Mexican government, insisting on sovereign rights in Texas, warned that aiding or annexing the “stolen” republic meant war. Occasional border skirmishes made war not empty talk but likely prospect. The world’s newest republic faced a second war of independence as surely as had Americans approaching the War of 1812.
Imminent war hung heavily over the Texas Republic’s prospects. Few Texans feared that Mexico might win such a war. Texas was so vast and Mexico’s army so limited that a conquering brigade could always be drawn from its source of supplies and then ambushed, as Houston had done to Santa Anna at San Jacinto. But an invading army could again brutalize everything in its path. Texans did not have to be told to Remember the Alamo. Nor did prospective American settlers have to be told that life and property were safer within the United States than in Texas. Southwestern capitalists, still the most likely migrants to Texas, considered slave property particularly unsafe across the border. Worse, if slaves proved badly placed, they could not be legally returned to a United States which had barred slave imports.
The Texas Republic thus had an advanced case of the New World disease: too much land, not enough laborers. The Lone Star Republic possessed insufficient quantities of the Deep South cure: force slaves to develop the tropics. In 1840, something like 15,000 slaves and 60,000 whites dotted Texas’s vast plains. A larger population inhabited tiny Delaware. More slaves had lived in slightly enslaved colonial New York. Texas’s percentage of slaves, in the area of 20%, matched numbers in the Border South, where slavery was slowly diffusing out. Texas, in its colonial and independent republic phases, was the exception to the rule about North American slavery’s geographical locations. This relatively slaveless regime existed not north but south in the South.16
Texas, in its colonial and independent republic phases, also lacked the relatively slaveless Border South’s alternative solution to the labor problem. No large numbers of white nonslaveholding laborers remotely filled up sprawling Texas. The ratio of land developed to land uninhabited in Texas in the mid-1840s was in the area of one to 40. In comparison, the ratio in the Border South, where free white labor was more plentiful, was around one to two. The ratio in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana, where the drain of slaves from older enslaved areas helped solve labor shortages, was around one to three.17
Texas’s population shortage victimized more than the economy. Slim population made for low tax revenue, a large national debt, and an undermanned army. Such weakness invited another Mexican attack. Potential warfare deterred potential settlers, making war more likely, making vast immigration more unlikely, and thereby spinning Texas leaders dizzy with difficulties.
The American republic, by annexing Texas, could end this vicious circle. The American solution seemed natural to Texans, for Texas seemed to them a little America. American frontiersmen here governed under an American-like constitution after an American-like revolution with the help of American slaveholders. If these two American slaveholding republics were fused, Mexico might be frightened off, and American slaveholders might race west.
So reasoned both Jacksonians who presided over the two republics in 18356, when the Texas nation was born. President Sam Houston, an ex-junior officer of Andrew Jackson’s in the southwestern army, believed that his old commander would go for the Southwest’s Manifest Destiny. President Jackson was indeed a partisan of annexation. But Jackson delayed destiny a bit in 1836, hopeful that he might thus dull Mexico’s interest in revenge. On the last day of his administration, Jackson ran out of time. He recognized the independence of Texas. He sipped wine with its agents. He later claimed that his greatest presidential mistake was in failing to celebrate annexation as well as recognition.18
Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren, believed that Old Hickory had already celebrated too much connection with Texas. Van Buren was a far more cautious politician than his former boss. The Little Magician was also far less into western adventurism and not fond of appeasing slaveholders. He considered Texas potentially poisonous to American Union and to his own re-election prospects. John Quincy Adams and fellow Whigs, already making Van Buren squirm over the gag rule, could generate mammoth political capital out of any war with Mexico which was fought to gain a huge slaveholding republic and perhaps still more land for the Slavepower.
Until his first presidential summer, Van Buren would not even allow the Texas representative to present an annexation proposal. The poor fellow, when finally allowed inside the White House, was swiftly turned down. The United States officially informed Texas that peace with Mexico must precede annexation.19
After Van Buren’s defeat in 1840 and Harrison’s death in 1841, Sam Houston dealt with a friendlier administration. John Tyler found Texas intriguing. A thrust for annexation might allow a paralyzed States’ Rights Whig President to prove that an uncompromising proslavery issue could make Whiggery or a Tyler-led third party the pro-southern movement. In October 1841, the Virginian wrote his Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, of the “possibility of acquiring Texas by treaty. … Could the North be reconciled to it, would anything throw so bright a lustre around us?”20Webster let it be known that Yankee Whigs, already enraged with the southern President, would hardly be reconciled to more land for the Slavepower. Tyler responded by lapsing into Tylerism. He stalled.
Sam Houston was not privy to Tyler’s exchange of views with Webster. But the Texas president suspected what the American President might enjoy. Houston hit upon a shrewd way of forcing the enjoyable upon an interested but chary politician. He would nourish a southern President’s natural worries that England, in hopes of emancipation, might ally with Texas.
In 1842, Houston dispatched two formidable plotters. Ashbel Smith was appointed Minister to England. Isaac Van Zandt was appointed Minister to America. Smith in London soon picked up rumors useful to Van Zandt in Washington. Some Englishmen, Ashbel Smith wrote Isaac Van Zandt on January 25, 1843, had for “some months” speculated about emancipation in Texas. Such souls believed that a republic with few slaves and many problems might trade scarce slaves for large boons. England might entice Texas to emancipate, so Smith claimed to hear in London, by sending many white settlers. Or England might offer cash to bolster Texas’s sagging finances. Or Great Britain might intervene in Mexico City, where her diplomats might convince or bribe Mexicans to recognize Texas’s independence. Such “equivalents,” concluded Smith’s report on London rumors, might seem to English abolitionists a fair price for spreading New World abolition beyond the British West Indies. Texans, in turn, might consider emancipating their relatively few slaves a low price for becoming a powerful white man’s republic.
Ashbel Smith wrote as if he knew neither what Londonites were speculating nor how much power alleged speculators possessed. His claim to be “certain” that England at least “intended to make an effort” had the ring of a propagandist only “certain” that Washington ears would find London whisperings provocative. Smith seemed to be more straightforward in his assessment of danger. A strong, confident Texas nation, he thought, would shun abolition. But might not a Texas with few slaves, “exhausted,… listen in a moment of folly to such overtures?” The diplomat in London urged his Washington counterpart to share that question with Calhoun, Isaac Holmes of South Carolina, Robert Walker of Mississippi, Dixon Lewis of Alabama, and perhaps President Tyler.21
The schemer, unable to name a name in London, knew the right annexationist names in America. Isaac Van Zandt flashed Ashbel Smith’s letter around as instructed, including at the White House. “I have privately and confidentially presented the situation of our affairs to the President and one of the prominent members of his cabinet” (probably then-Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur), Van Zandt informed Texas authorities on March 13, 1843. Van Zandt had pointed to England’s long-standing antislavery preferences. He had also emphasized the “assertions of those connected with her government” that Texans would be rewarded for renouncing slavery. Texas, as Van Zandt presented the scenario, might trade its few slaves for much cash, many white settlers, and permanent independence, especially if the vulnerable nation was “reduced to the last extremity” against Mexico. The slaveholding President, Van Zandt reported, “listened with much attention.”22
With attention the cautious Tyler indeed listened. But only one hint of administration action surfaced. In January 1843, The Madisonian, the Tyler administration’s official newspaper, printed a long pro-annexation letter. A Tyler confidant, ex-Governor Thomas Gilmer of Virginia, wrote the piece. Gilmer called annexation in the North’s commercial interest. That notion hung in the air only a moment before John Quincy Adams was booming about the latest plot of the Slavepower.23 I wish “to annex you,” Tyler whined to Van Zandt in April of 1843, “but you see how I am situated.” Van Zandt passed Tyler’s wimper on to President Houston.24
An exasperated Houston read the wail as proof that the desperately situated American President lacked nerve to gamble on annexation. Houston understood why annexation would be a gamble. An American presidential election loomed. Henry Clay apparently had a lock on the Whig nomination. Martin Van Buren seemingly had the Democratic Party’s nomination secured. Both of these notorious anti-Texas men were determined to keep annexation out of the canvass. With Tyler drifting as usual, America’s Manifest Destiny hardly seemed defined by its isolated President’s timid gesture towards Texas.
6
The time had come, Sam Houston believed, to test alternative Manifest Destinies. In mid-1843, the Texas president apparently swerved from seeking apparently unattainable annexation to seeking the apparent next best thing. He would negotiate independence from Mexico. England, Houston hoped, might aid such negotiations. Then independent Texas could attract the migrants to fuel economic take-off.
Houston always considered this alternative vision just that—an alternative. While pursuing English aid for a permanently independent Texas, he always kept in mind possible effects on American willingness to annex. If he could rouse specters of British re-entry into the Western Hemisphere, British-hating Americans might rouse John Tyler from his timidity. A more decisive Tyler effort to annex Texas might alarm Englishmen into protection of an independent Texas. The expanded English push might yield a more committed American pull, then a greater English shove, and so on. Now that circle was not vicious at all for a Texas patriot trying to counter America’s failure to act.
The western hero who would play those stronger against each other possessed all necessary duplicity. Sam Houston had studied survival tactics with experts. In his youth, after a mysteriously awful brief marriage on the western frontier, a shattered Houston had mysteriously disappeared from white men’s society. He resurfaced three years later, his old self-confidence restored, his new understanding of how to get along set for life. He had saved himself by savouring the forbidden. This white leader had lived with an Indian princess.
He had especially learned how the undermanned survive. Houston’s red-skinned hosts endured by ambushing superior white armies, by manipulating powerful white nations, by allowing no white-skin to know what an Indian thought. Sam Houston, the white man who became culturally red and then returned to white civilization, retained the best of Indian tactics.
His appearance signaled the way he operated and the persona he cherished. President Sam Houston marched around Houston City dressed like an Indian chief. Houston’s costume was as much his trademark as was the frontier hero Daniel Boone’s coon-skin cap. The white chieftain’s red man’s garb proclaimed that here strides a strategist not predictably of either color, not predictably anything at all. Houston was impossible to pin down, save to the position that a Texas at cutthroats’ mercy must trick them all.25
The occasion Houston seized in 1843 to play England against America epitomized his duplicitous diplomacy. He accepted a Mexican overture he must have considered unacceptable (but did he?) to talk about a Texas destiny he must have considered disastrous (or did he?). The mystery developed in early 1843, when Santa Anna, once victim of Houston’s Indian-like ambush at San Jacinto, now once again Mexico’s ruler, indirectly sent Sam Houston a peace proposal. Texans had only to pretend to end their revolution. They should ostensibly reenter the empire and accept Mexican sovereignty. Then the Mexican government would neglect its duties, allowing Texans to govern themselves.
England endorsed Santa Anna’s proposal. English leaders cherished the prospect of Texas stabilized outside the American republic. Santa Anna seemed to be pleading for a face-saving way to achieve that happy result. By offering Santa Anna merely theoretical command, Texans could in practice command their own fate. England offered to ease both sides towards this Manifest Destiny.
Everything about Houston’s previous ten years of statecraft shouted No way. Santa Anna’s proposal amounted to a return to the Salutary Neglect which had led to Mexican repression, Texas revolution, the Alamo, and San Jacinto. So how did Sam Houston respond when offered negotiations on the unacceptable?
He agreed to talk. To indicate he was serious about discussions, Houston suspended war with Mexico in June of 1843. In July, he ordered his Washington agents to abort annexation overtures. Shortly thereafter, he sent commissioners down to Mexico City to negotiate with the Santa Anna regime.26
Abel P. Upshur became Secretary of State on June 23, 1843, at the time Houston apparently switched strategies. Isaac Van Zandt cheered Upshur as “one of the best for us.” Although John Tyler was “fearful to make an important movement,” Upshur “has the nerve” to seize “responsibility” and to “act with decision.” Upshur had consumed those London rumors Ashbel Smith had fed Van Zandt. Upshur especially remembered Smith’s point that Texas, if desperate, might accept otherwise unacceptable conditions.27
Now an apparently desperate Houston apparently regarded return to the Mexican empire as negotiable. If Houston would even discuss that massive surrender, he surely would chat about the trifling surrender of a few thousand slaves. English help in ending Mexico’s threats and an English promise that English settlers would swarm to the stabilized El Dorado would make comparatively few black freedmen of scant importance, racial or economic. Now if Ashbel Smith could pin down names, dates, places, to confirm London rumors that England would give Texas everything essential if Texas would give up its slaves. Then the zealous Upshur might shove the shaky Tyler towards pursuing the inscrutable Sam Houston, who was making a great show (a sincere show?) of pursuing a Manifest Destiny fit to make American slaveholders shudder.