CHAPTER 21
The first plotter Ashbel Smith inflamed Abel P. Upshur by naming was no famous London schemer. The offender was an obscure lawyer lately driven from Galveston, Texas. The ousted Texan’s accomplice was an equally obscure English diplomat lately ostracized from London. Yet these two zanies at their respective culture’s fringes momentarily made mainstream antislavery forays seem imminent to the Tyler administration. That saga is worthy of a hallowed place in Texas’s outsized legends.
1
The unlikely protagonist of this tale bore the unlikely name Pearl. Stephen Pearl Andrews was a scarce type in the customarily highly enslaved Deep South—except in not-so-enslaved pre-annexation Texas. Pearl Andrews was a New England “fanatic” agitating on a Lower South frontier.
The first prominent example of the species was Founding Father of Texas. Stephen Austin, native of Connecticut, sporadically opposed slavery during colonial Texas’s early years.1 One question, however, made Austin’s effort ever more sporadic. If Texas barred slaveholders, who would come? Migrants from the neighboring Southwest, not voyagers from faraway New England, were most likely to move to the Lone Star Republic. Southwesterners in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama characteristically considered slaves indispensable to develop an empty tropical kingdom. If Texas turned down these pioneers’ solution to the labor shortage, the area might have no laborers. Stephen Austin bowed to that argument.
Pearl Andrews, a migrant from Massachusetts via Louisiana a generation later, came with an answer to the question which had stumped Austin. Austin was most powerful in the 1820s, when Southwesterners, the only Westerners likely to move in, were not given to antislavery. Andrews thrived in the 1840s, when millions of western free laborers were choosing between various El Dorados. In these new circumstances, believed Andrews, Texas, by emancipating slaves, could entice enterprising whites.2
This speculation about harnessing enterprise to emancipation came naturally to a seeker torn between Christ and capitalism. Andrews’s father, a Massachusetts Baptist revivalist, had sought but failed to treat his son to ecstatic conversion. A soul too resistant of the Lord was allied with a body too sickly for extended education. Failing eyesight forced Pearl Andrews to quit Amherst College before graduation.
An older brother out in the Southwest, Thomas Andrews, rescued the troubled teenager. Thomas summoned Pearl to Louisiana. There the elder brother assigned the eastern tenderfoot to help a sister and sister-in-law teach amenities in the Andrews family’s female academy.
Before Pearl Andrews was twenty, an infuriated mob forced less tender pursuits. The crowd, excited for obscure reasons, smashed Thomas Andrews’s arm. The disfigured brother needed immediate help with his law practice. Young Pearl, still on the shy and effete side, mastered the law, became his brother’s partner, and practiced before the Louisiana Supreme Court when still not 21. By the age of 25, now moved to New Orleans, Pearl Andrews was a star of the legal establishment.
The newly-rich lawyer could not forget his father’s warnings about Mammon. The Panic of 1837 reinforced the preacher’s words. Both Andrews brothers lost fortunes. Thomas Andrews reacted by moving north towards freedom, freeing his wife’s slaves and enjoying an emancipator’s bliss.
Pearl Andrews instead moved west to Texas, dreaming of the double bliss of an emancipator who would turn materialistic gamble into holy triumph. Andrews’s dream of a capitalistic/moral jackpot focused on that greatest western fling, land speculation. In sprawling Texas, even more than in most frontier spots, gamblers could buy uninhabited acres for little on the speculation that inhabitants would come and pay much for the land.3
Andrews believed only slavery repelled settlers from Texas. Few slaveholders would risk property in so chancy an area, and not many nonslaveholders would migrate to an even slightly enslaved region. But if slavery was abolished, immigrants would swarm to this lush prairie. Then rising land values would richly compensate slaveholders for lost slaves.
Andrews’s economic argument against slavery was pervasively American and more relevant to a laborless frontier than were European theories such as Marxism. Marxists, assuming the typical European condition of too many laborers on too little land, urged that free labor would always outproduce slave labor. That “always,” while relevant to entrepreneurs in a Baltimore crowded with many species of laborers, was irrelevant to a Texas without sufficient laborers. The first critical frontier decision involved deciding to come, whether the choice was the laborer’s or his owner’s.
Andrews honed in on whites’ choices. Back in Thomas Jefferson’s day, Illinois land speculators, also worried about those choices, had urged repeal of the Northwest Ordinance’s bar on slavery. Then slaveholders, supposedly the most likely emigrants, would come and make land speculators rich. Edward Coles and his crowd had countered that free laborers would move faster than slaveholders to an area so far north. In the Maryland Slavery Debate of 1832, Henry Brawner had made Coles’s position relevant a step further south. Brawner had argued that if South Maryland sent its too few slaves to Africa, whites would pour in to end the Chesapeake Bay region’s population stagnation.
Pearl Andrews, like Edward Coles and Henry Brawner, urged that his under-enslaved area would never fill its empty spaces with Mississippi-like numbers of slaves. Texans did not have Illinoians’ and Marylanders’ bar to a flood of incoming slaveholding migrants: a relatively nontropical climate. But pre-annexation Texas possessed an equivalent deterrent to slaveholder migration: a relatively precarious political and military environment. Andrews, like Brawner, believed that only nonslaveholders would extensively people an area relatively unattractive to slaveholders. Slavery, however, had to be eased out before nonslaveholders would rush in.
Elsewhere in the South, arguments such as Andrews’s sometimes rallied nonslaveholders against slaveholders. Andrews supposed the two classes possessed the same class interest. Scratch a Texan, believed Andrews, and you will touch a land speculator. Anyone owning raw land, meaning all rich men and many poor men too, prayed that settlers would come and develop the turf.
Further north, in Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri, frontier land speculators, when seeking to entice whites by deporting blacks, sometimes recklessly gambled their necks and enterprises to agitate. Recklessness was neither Pearl Andrews’s style nor his conception of how to free an area located much further south. “No country,” regretted the new Texan, was “more destitute of moral principle.” The “undercurrent of feeling… against slavery” was wholly “based upon interest.” A successful reformer had to renounce morality, eschew agitation, and hint at “the weakness of Texas, particularly as respects money” and “population.” Then Texas wheeler-dealers might consider getting rid of a few slaves to bring in much capital and many whites.4
During the late 1830s and early 1840s, Andrews became a wealthy Houston lawyer, bought uninhabited land for little, and carefully suggested to slaveholding land speculators that slavery cut land values by repelling settlers. This secretive mode of persuasion eventually yielded, over four years, a dozen or so wealthy supporters. Then one day, suspicious queries blazed through Houston’s streets. Is an abolitionist in our midst? The question provoked demands that Andrews confess any softness on slavery.
Andrews addressed a packed meeting at the Houston Court House on March 13,1843. In going public, as in private hintings, Andrews remained master of temperate persuasion. He never breathed the code words, “slavery,” “emancipation.” He instead emphasized the bonanza for land speculators if almost-empty Texas was packed with people.
Andrews’s listeners, at first “moody and silent,” greeted his peroration with “an intense and continuous peal of applause.” He had sold his drift so cautiously that the crowd seemed surprised when the next speaker, a Kentucky slaveholder, told them that they had purchased antislavery. But Andrews’s opponent could not blot out the vision of whites pouring into a Texas which few blacks were entering. When this meeting broke up, the establishment in the capital city of a Deep South slaveholding republic was speculating that maybe, just maybe, slavery might be causing the population shortage.5
Andrews still feared the consequences of going even carefully public. His cautious recruits, caucusing secretly in his rooms, decided that indirection was no longer prudent. You must publicize your plan, urged Andrews’s friends, before others can distort it. You must ride the next steamboat down the Brazos River and up the Gulf to Galveston. There you must quietly indoctrinate before mobs violently intimidate you.
While bowing before the apparent necessity for imprudent pushing, Andrews still chose the prudent Thomas League as his traveling companion. League possessed one sterling credential. He was no “crazy philanthropist.” A wealthy slaveholder and lawyer, Thomas League was known to be a “money-getting adventurer,” incapable “of any overstrained moral purpose.” With this coarse materialist in tow, Andrews would come to Galveston as representative of one money-grubbing establishment come to sell a money-making proposition to another.
The steamboat trip was an incredible Deep South journey. Day and night, excited debate over Andrews’s scheme took place on the crowded little vessel. Despite cries of “treason,” “disloyalty,” “incendiarism,” the prevailing notion on board remained that Andrews was no fanatic courting a lynching. Rather, Pearl was a Texas-sized businessman with a Texas-sized idea who just might bring a stampede of settlers to settler-starved Texas.
The riverboat classroom arrived in Galveston Bay, opposite General Moseley Baker’s plantation. The ultra-respectable planter pounded at the theme that planters had not brought the population which a slaveless destiny might beckon to Texas. After Baker finished, Andrews counted only some dozen of 300 travelers still opposed. So “malignant and determined” a minority, Andrews still trembled, might accomplish mischief.6
Early the next morning, the ship crossed the Bay and arrived in Galveston, there to initiate what Andrews correctly called an “unparalleled” Deep South scene. As Andrews described it, “a whole boat load of excited abolition fanatics,” and “a handful of bitter and hostile opponents, were let loose from their detention on board.” The “two diverging parties” burst upon a quiet southern town, which had hitherto rested “serene in the belief that no avowed and active abolitionist could live in the republic.”
It was all, Andrews exclaimed, like a “burning brand thrust into a cold fluid.” Citizens gathered “upon every corner, discussing with agitated and excited voices” this “strange phenomenon” of Deep South “abolitionism.” While slaveholders denounced and threatened, the alleged fanatic quietly “engaged in visiting and in actually converting, with the same rapidity” as in Houston City. A day went by. Two. On the third, Andrews planned a meeting of 20 or 30 wealthy converts.
The minority of despots living within a majoritarian republic instead deployed their classic answer to democratic pressure. Before Andrews could agitate in front of his audience of respectables, some 20 armed men led by, who else, a South Carolinian, visited Andrews. They delivered him onto a ship bound back to Houston.7
Andrews returned to a town having second thoughts about its conversion. Nightly, groups gathered on Houston’s street corners, debating whether to emulate Galveston by pitching the “incendiary” out. Andrews’s first week back home was one of “really terrible suspense.”
Suspense swiftly gave way to terror. In “the dead of the night,” a “wild yell” awakened Andrews and his wife. “At the same instant,” a “glare of bright flame penetrated the darkness through the window, and revealed … an excited crowd of persons outside.” Believing that “a desperate mob … had commenced by firing the house,” the Andrewses hurriedly dressed. The mob demanded they unbolt the door. They tremulously obeyed. They were swarmed upon by “their neighbors and friends, who had assembled to awaken us, and to assist in extinguishing the flames.” Probably a careless servant had started a fire!8
This nonmobbing mob and the tragic comedy they staged would hardly have stopped a reckless fanatic. Had a pack of friends “mobbed” William Lloyd Garrison, he would have seen the irony as a sign to keep agitating. But Garrison’s signs were in the heavens. His zeal for abstract justice was steel against practical consequence.
Pearl Andrews was a different soul. His career as a southwestern businessman had begun when lynchers mutilated his brother’s arm. He had no intention of donating two more Andrews arms to mob fury. He decided to pursue Christian entrepreneurship elsewhere, where not “so many obstacles” would be “thrown in the way of my future career.” His compatriot in the failed Galveston venture, the slaveholding materialist Thomas League, was still fuller of prudence. League told Galveston vigilantes that his antislavery consisted of plans “to get $1000 apiece for his own slaves from the British Government.” He would “then pass them across the Sabine to the States,” to “sell them again.” With League’s un-Christian grossness, Andrews’s Christian capitalism came to a denouement the holy capitalist did not find appropriate.9
2
Pearl Andrews’s ephemeral Texas campaign gains more lasting importance in the longer perspective of southern dissent. Andrews’s attempt to end slavery bore no relationship to the most famous southern slavery debate, the Virginia affair of 1832, with its origins in nonslaveholders’ political resentments and slaveholders’ domestic unease. Rather, Andrews, like Edward Coles in Illinois and Henry Brawner in Maryland before him, and like Cassius Clay in Kentucky and Frank Blair in Missouri afterwards, urged that in largely white areas, a few slaves repelled many potential white migrants and thus kept underpopulated land underdeveloped. Pearl Andrews had never heard of those population-boosters in other states, nor had they heard of him. All simply responded to the same hunger for attracting migration to their area, the economic drive North and South in development-obsessed nineteenth-century America.
But a persuasive answer to a pervasive problem, usually the first necessity for reformers, was in the Slave South the second necessity. Reformers first had to win the right to be heard. Pearl Andrews fleetingly intrigued an audience unthinkable elsewhere in the Deep South. Even the planter class briefly listened, briefly wondered. But mere wonderers would not force a handful of proslavery vigilantes to drop firearms. Continuation of Andrews’s attempt came down to who was most committed, the few agitators or the few lynchers.
Andrews blinked first, as had James Birney in Kentucky. Verbal abuse about loyalty and chances of a more physical abuse, while creating no more sealed-shut an atmosphere than in a gagged Congress, demanded uncommon courage and zeal from agitators. Few American politicians were that uncommon. Most, like Birney and Andrews, were entrepreneurs seeking the main chance. They were more likely to depart or move undercover than to stand and defy. Slaveholder republicanism was not very republican when it came to debating slavery.
A quasi-despotic version of democracy, however, could stir up democratic resentment without possessing sanctions to crush what it had provoked. That had happened in the Virginia Convention of 1829 and in the gag rule congresses. The relatively few extraordinary souls who defied lynchers could also point to lynch mobs as yet more reason to rid republics of slavery. That would happen with Cassius Clay in Kentucky.
Still, Cassius Clay would find that even when stressing dangers to white republicanism, even in areas where relatively little slavery existed, the bravest leaders could not rally constant heresy. Too many followers fell silent for fear mobs would maraud or cries of disloyalty would taint. In whiter portions of the Slave South of the nineteenth century, as in the segregated and disenfranchised South of the twentieth century, a “better” South existed, but tremulously under cover.
The best hope of bringing a timid internal challenge out into the open, in both centuries, remained that the external world might intervene, to offer southern dissenters boons and protections. Then campaigns for a reformed South might seem more prudent, more profitable, more patriotic. The creation of unintimidated southern discussion would be Abraham Lincoln’s fondest hope and disunionists’ gravest fear when the Republican President offered national patronage jobs to latter-day versions of Pearl Andrews.
As Lincoln’s strategy for building a Republican Party in the South would assume, outsiders’ intervention could be particularly helpful when sustaining insiders’ ideology and interests. Pearl Andrews, although easily shoved aside in a purely internal campaign, remained of concern because, under the right conditions, outsiders might fan the undercurrent of uncertainty he had revealed. Suppose those London rumors Ashbel Smith had lately pounced on proved prophetic. Suppose mighty England cajoled feeble Mexico into a tripartite international treaty, protecting vulnerable Texas. Suppose Texas could exchange its relatively few slaves for recognition from Mexico, cash for slaveholders, boatloads of English settlers come to create a land speculators’ dream. Suppose further that a United States nation long shunning Texas never offered annexation. Then the moneygrubbers who had briefly quizzed Pearl Andrews—and even the few who had swiftly silenced the land speculator—might wish to hear their Manifest Destiny reconsidered. But how could outside pressures and incentives open up a Texas which a departing Pearl Andrews was calling too closed for democratic decisions?
3
An answer arrived on Andrews’s doorstep before the disillusioned reformer could quit Houston City. Captain Charles Elliot of the English Royal Navy, Her Majesty’s Chargé d’Affaires to Texas, traveled from Galveston to Houston City to see Pearl Andrews. The Englishman came with a plan to procure English aid for a Texas antislavery movement.10
Elliot was a minor bureaucrat who made a historic career of sticking his mitts in places a flunky’s hands in no way belonged. Elliot had moved from being an unimportant officer in the Royal Navy to becoming an insignificant bureaucrat in imperial offices. Exciting events were happening in the British Empire during Elliot’s years of service. The Captain resided where the historic was transpiring. He had been Protector of Slaves in British Guiana when the British Parliament struck down bondage in the empire. He had then been Senior Superintendent of Trade at Canton when the Opium War commenced. Now he was Chargé d’Affaires to Texas, at the time Sam Houston was testing various Manifest Destinies.
Always Elliot’s orders were to observe in the provinces, report back to London, and follow headquarters’ orders. Always he was tempted to direct historic events. His tendency to seize initiatives from superiors ran him into the worst trouble in China. There his unauthorized actions helped precipitate the Opium War. He then secured an unauthorized treaty which London swiftly repudiated. After the debacle, Elliot’s superiors sought a pasture where the bull in the china shop might be safer from self-inflicted harm. The Texas empty ranges seemed just the spot.11
Elliot had not been out at pasture for three months before he was urging London to replicate emancipation in British Guiana. I know you do not want to intervene in another republic’s internal affairs, Elliot correctly wrote H. U. Addington, Her Majesty’s Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, on November 15, 1842. Elliot promised to “abstain from offering” to any Texan his opinion that slavery rotted “the heart of society.” He knew that Texans would respond by talking “violently of holding on to their property.” But he had learned in British Guiana that a “needy people” will respond “reasonably for a monied consideration.”
Elliot proposed English monies to compensate slaveholders for responding reasonably. Texans should be bribed to liberate free blacks as well as slaves. Abolish “disability upon free people of Colour” and you “would at once bring into this Republic tens of thousands of most abused and intelligent people from the United States.” Where Pearl Andrews would solve the labor shortage with free whites, the English chargé would go for free blacks.12
Having solved Texans’ labor problem and North Americans’ race problem, England’s statesman had to wait for metropolitan authorities to hail his provincial statecraft. He waited. No answer from headquarters. He urged his plan again. Still no answer. The bureaucrat on the spot, who knew he had figured out how to spread English abolitionism in North America, found the wave of history bottled up in the bureaucracy.
Then, just as Elliot was despairing of anyone ever pushing Texas emancipation, Pearl Andrews sailed into Galveston and was shoved back to Houston. Andrews, Elliot learned, would soon depart the republic. The chargé had promised Undersecretary Addington never to press abolition opinions on Texans. But Addington, who would not even answer Elliot’s letters, did not understand England’s opportunity. A conscience-bound Englishman must go see this Andrews.
He was “exceedingly unwilling,” Elliot told Andrews upon being admitted to Pearl’s house, that Andrews’s “still feasible” project “should be abandoned.” In Galveston, Elliot saw symptoms of a vital reaction in Andrews’s “favor.” Had Andrews guaranteed slaveholders compensation for slaves, he “would have succeeded” and “would still succeed.”
Elliot informed Andrews how compensation could be guaranteed. English abolitionists would buy Texas lands, or loan money with Texas lands as collateral, if cash would free slaves. Andrews thus should visit England and propose “pecuniary aids” to placate slaveholders and diplomatic aid against Mexico to please Sam Houston. Elliot would support Andrews with “the strongest letters of introduction and recommendation,” even though that intervention would surpass “appropriate duties of the British Chargé d’Affaires.” Andrews must promote Elliot’s enterprise and hide Elliot’s involvement with “necessary … prudence.”13
Before the discussion of prudent strategy was over, the two freedom-fighters struck a deal for their mutual emancipation. Andrews, enslaved by mobs in Texas, would control Texas’s destiny from England. Elliot, enslaved by bureaucrats in London, would command England’s conscience from Texas. If Andrews received the response Elliot expected, the marriage of the crass and the holy which Andrews had long sought and which Elliot had seen prevail in British Guiana would be consummated. English investors, morally attracted to emancipation and financially attracted to cheap Texas acres, would trade cash for land. English cash would bribe Texas slaveholders to permit emancipation. Abolition would attract English free laborers. Immigrants would seek virgin land. Escalating land values would enrich English philanthropists. When the sacred circle was completed, lofty preachers and mighty capitalists would join hands with an ignored bureaucrat and a skittish agitator in celebrating an earthly victory which Pearl Andrews’s father would have called heavenly.
4
Once the English chargé in Texas had secured his own messenger to England, he sought to prepare his superiors to welcome his errand boy. Stephen Pearl Andrews’s recent expulsion from Galveston, Charles Elliot wrote Undersecretary Addington on March 26, 1843, showed that emancipation sentiment was not “general.” But “sound opinions” were “gaining strength.” As he had seen in British Guiana, “first comes violence, and then comes reflection and sympathy.” This fellow Andrews could yet become important.14
On June 8, 1843, less than a week after Andrews sailed for England, Elliot sent Undersecretary Addington’s superior the blockbuster information that the highest Texas official shared Andrews’s viewpoint. The last time I conversed with Sam Houston, Elliot wrote Lord Aberdeen, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the Texas president called slavery’s existence a “subject of deep regret.” I answered, Charles Elliot reassured Foreign Secretary Aberdeen, by telling President Houston that Her Majesty’s government never even “mentioned” slavery in their “despatches.” But since Sam Houston opened the subject, I felt free to express my country’s “deep regret” about slavery. President Houston answered, Chargé Elliot reported, that “unless the propitious Moment of Settlement of the difficulties with Mexico should be taken for devising some mode of getting rid of the Mischief, he foresaw that Texas would sooner or later become the ‘impound’ of the Black and Coloured population of the United States,” to the republic’s “incalculable injury.”15
Sam Houston here both expressed sincere morality and deployed his usual amoral tactics. Houston never had much use for slavery. The Texas president rather hoped the curse might slowly disappear. But Houston, like Southerners in the United States who hoped for proper conditions to terminate slavery, cared more about white men’s republicanism. So while Houston leveled with Elliot about far-off hopes for freeing blacks, he hid from the English diplomat his immediate strategy for saving his republic.
The Texas president had carefully built a relationship with Elliot. Houston knew what the chargé most wanted to hear and was most likely to pass on to London. English officials, once informed that Sam Houston might consider emancipation, might help Texas gain permanent recognition from Mexico. English intervention might inflame proslavery Americans, which might reinvigorate antislavery Englishmen, which might infuriate proslavery Americans. Out of all this escalating trans-Atlantic interest in Texas, some solution to Texas’s problems might come.
Houston probably did not expect the solution to be an emancipated republic. But a slaveless nation full of capital, immigrants, and power would not have displeased this a-southern Westerner, especially if the slaveholding United States was so unconcerned as to let it happen. On the other hand, if Charles Elliot unwittingly helped produce American annexation and perpetual slavery, Sam Houston would not be in tears. He meant to preserve his white men’s republic however he could.
Elliot, unaware he might be furthering the wrong Manifest Destiny, sent Houston’s vision of antislavery racing after Pearl Andrews across the Atlantic. Elliot thus completed his unauthorized attempt to breathe new life into an expiring Texas antislavery movement. He had clandestinely dispatched Andrews, now a reborn reformer, to England. He had secretly manipulated English authorities towards thinking that their apparently far-out visitor might unknowingly represent the position of the highest Texas authority. Now if only puppetmasters on the metropolitan stage would be true to the antislavery tradition they shared with their provincial non-puppet. Then the former Protector of Slaves in British Guiana would have set the stage for the spread of English abolitionism to the borders of the United States.
5
If Texas Minister Ashbel Smith in London had discovered the full dimensions of Charles Elliot’s anti-Slavepower Conspiracy, what a juicy tidbit could have been sent to Texas Minister Isaac Van Zandt in Washington. But Elliot covered his tracks well enough and Pearl Andrews kept his pledge of secrecy so completely that the extent of the Elliot-Andrews connection was not then—and has usually not been since—fully appreciated.16 Still, just before Andrews arrived in London, unconnected bits of information about Elliot and Andrews reached a delighted Ashbel Smith. The chief informer was a Texan named Andrew Yates.
Yates had been Pearl Andrews’s host in Galveston. Like Andrews, Yates hailed from New England and prospered as a Texas town lawyer. This Galveston insider considered himself “No abolitionist.… But I do believe that free labor is ten fold more productive of prosperity.” I do hope “to see the introduction to this country of free white industrious families of the laboring Classes, well satisfied that they will eventually supercede the Slave.”17
News about that hope, Andrew Yates believed, would encourage a Texas friend who was in England, trying to recruit English white migrants. On March 19, 1843, one of the three days Andrews was using Yates’s house as Galveston headquarters, Yates wrote the London recruiter that “a few individuals” have been “very cautiously” preparing Texans for emancipation. The emancipationist leader, Stephen Pearl Andrews, had lately gone public in Houston, had triumphed, and had found river-bound planters “willing for the measure” on his way down the Brazos and across the Gulf to Galveston. The emancipator would now “proceed with rapid movement through the whole country.”
Andrew Yates also reported that from “several conversations with the British minister here” he had “learned that” abolition “would secure for us the warmest support of the British Government in our present struggle” with Mexico. The minister had also hinted that England might provide “means of paying for our slaves.” If “you can get access to the Despatches of Captain Elliot by this packet,” Yates concluded, “you will find my statements fully confirmed.”
Yates’s correspondent passed the letter on to Ashbel Smith. Never was a man happier to see someone else’s mail. The Yates letter was the first slightly smoking pistol, perhaps confirming those rumors of the previous December. Maybe England would offer Texas “equivalents” for emancipation. Ashbel Smith sent Andrew Yates’s letter back across the Atlantic, to Isaac Van Zandt in Washington. Someone—perhaps Smith, perhaps Van Zandt, perhaps their American accomplice, Duff Green, whom we will soon meet—leaked the letter to the Boston Post. The Postpublished the letter on June 21, 1843. Two days later, Abel P. Upshur assumed direction of American foreign policy.18
On June 19, 1843, Ashbel Smith wrote Upshur’s favorite Southerner, John C. Calhoun. The Texas minister in London could not say “what active measures the British Government have taken.” But an “unquestionable authority” had told him of Charles Elliot’s “official communication,” looking towards “distinct propositions.” England’s “ultimate purpose,” so Ashbel Smith claimed “sincerely” to believe, was to make Texas a “refuge for runaway slaves from the United States, and eventually a negro nation, a sort of Hayti” under British protection. Southerners must act, Smith warned, before the newest St. Domingue loomed on their southwestern flank.19
Posterity cannot tell whether this last sensational charge was Ashbel Smith’s sincere opinion. The Texan just may have figured out the largest reality behind swirling London rumors. Charles Elliot, the only British official unconditionally seeking to abolish slavery in Texas, did want Texas to become a refuge for free blacks. But Ashbel Smith did not have posterity’s access to Elliot’s secret despatches. Nor does Smith’s expression have the tone of the man who knows he is right. The letter to Calhoun reads like the speculations of an alarmist groping in the dark, guessing about what might be there and trying to upset others with the most scary guess available.
The trouble with this latest scare letter, as Ashbel Smith implicitly conceded, was that new facts about old rumors all involved bit players on the historical stage. Pearl Andrews was hardly Texas. Lynchers had stopped his Galveston campaign. Nor was Charles Elliot necessarily England. Nothing linked the underling’s Texas maneuvers with his superiors or with Pearl Andrews. Ashbel Smith needed more worrisome names and a more specific plot to help Isaac Van Zandt inflame Abel P. Upshur, that highly inflammable new American Secretary of State.
6
Pearl Andrews’s visit to London, which was destined to supply Ashbel Smith with wonderfully explosive news, began with a quiet voyage to New York City. Upon arrival in the capital of American enterprise, Andrews benefited from another of those dashes of luck which punctuate the annexation story. A delighted Pearl Andrews discovered in New York that he had unknowingly scheduled his visit to London for a time when a World Antislavery Convention would celebrate the tenth anniversary of abolitionists’ first Anglo-American victory: emancipation in the British West Indies in 1833. Andrews’s New York hosts, leading American abolitionists, might accompany him across the seas, to rally an historic convention for a fresh trans-Atlantic foray.
The northern antislavery leader most enthralled with Andrews’s strategy also sought union of the crass and holy. Lewis Tappan, dry goods entrepreneur, used part of his profits to finance the American Antislavery Society. Tappan’s brother meanwhile had helped finance James Birney’s Kentucky agitations. Most Yankees considered such financing impractical. Pragmatic Northerners saw no way to compensate slaveholders for a billion dollars’ worth of slaves, or to cope with post-emancipation race problems involving millions of free blacks, or to persuade slaveholders to surrender peacefully.
Well, thought Tappan, the $15,000,000 perhaps necessary to persuade Texans to surrender some 15,000 slaves was hardly unmanageable. English entrepreneurs might exchange those liberating dollars for a stake in a promising land speculation. Texas slaveholders might turn over their relatively few slaves for cash, with further hopes that whites would pour in to pay more cash for land. As for 15,000 free blacks, they would create an inconsequential race problem amidst hundreds of thousands of white immigrants. This practical idea to harness philanthropy and capitalism might emancipate a vast Deep South area no less.
Lewis Tappan dropped everything, all business appointments and his every philanthropic meeting, to accompany Andrews. The two travelers journeyed first to Braintree, Massachusetts, home of John Quincy Adams. Adams told the pilgrims that “I believe the freedom of this country and of all mankind depends upon the direct, formal, open, and avowed interference of Great Britain to accomplish the abolition of slavery in Texas.”20
In England, delegates to the World Antislavery Convention shared Adams’s hopes upon hearing Andrews’s plan. The convention appointed a committee, including Andrews and Tappan, to interview Foreign Secretary Aberdeen. That crusty old cautious Scottish peer received the Tappan-Andrews Committee on June 19, 1843.21
Andrews suggested to Lord Aberdeen that English capitalists might raise a fund, say one million pounds sterling, to pay Texas capitalists for slaves. English saints, aside from properly celebrating the tenth anniversary of British West Indies emancipation, could recover philanthropic donations by purchasing heavily discounted Texas land. Emancipation would bring white settlers, who would drive up the price of emancipators’ land. Alternatively, English capitalists might grant a large emancipationist loan to the Texas government, with Texas lands serving as collateral. The English government, Andrews suggested to Aberdeen, might help float the loan by guaranteeing the interest.
Lord Aberdeen listened with ultra-cautious interest.22 The director of British foreign policy, in common with his countrymen, relished the vision of England safely encouraging world-wide emancipation. Aberdeen also savored the concept of a strong Texas republic allied with England and unannexed to the United States. But Aberdeen cared far more about preventing any new exhaustion of English resources in that bottomless pit, a resisting New World. Overextension of England’s military power, inspired by vain overconfidence that the Old World could dictate to the New, had horribly weakened England during the wars of the American Revolution and of 1812. Aberdeen and his nation might offer aid to Texas emancipation IF—if the aid was nonmilitary, within England’s financial resources, desired by Texas, and not opposed to the point of war by Mexico or the United States.
Lord Aberdeen’s potential impact on slavery politics was thus intriguingly like that of the first American who had insisted on proper conditions for terminating the institution, Thomas Jefferson. Like Jefferson, Aberdeen would use a great nation’s wealth to destroy slavery, so long as wrecking slavery did not ruin the nation. That insistence on national safety gave slaveholders bent on deterrence total power to deny the reformer his conditions. But proslavery warriors did have to be wide awake enough to deter. And the very reactionary intransigence necessary to render tentative reform impractical had the most practical effects on the future of the Union. Nothing would illuminate this process better than southern hard hearts’ insistence on annexation, lest ultra-cautious Aberdeens become a little bolder.
Aberdeen’s caution had been omnipresent in the British Foreign Office’s careful instructions to that incautious chargé, Charles Elliot, not to intervene in Texas’s internal affairs. The same safety-first impulses dictated that Aberdeen answer Pearl Andrews with questions in the interview of June 19, 1843. Could a British agent select the Texas land to be put up as collateral? Might an English pledge to pay interest temporarily, should interest payments be momentarily delayed, suffice? Once questions about “legitimate means” were satisfactorily answered, Aberdeen said, Her Majesty’s government might help “attain so great and desirable an object.”
Lord Aberdeen concluded by asking Lewis Tappan to bring in southwestern newspapers. The British foreign secretary wanted to investigate whether Texas wished English help and how the United States would react to the aid. Aberdeen especially had to find out if this odd duck Andrews represented Texas or only himself. Aberdeen had no clue, for Charles Elliot’s report on Sam Houston’s views was still crossing the ocean.
Still, Aberdeen’s words in the Andrews interview signaled that England might help, assuming Texas signaled that aid was wanted and assuming the United States signaled that help would be permitted. The chief spokesman of English diplomacy called Texas emancipation “desirable,” worth “all legitimate means” to achieve a “great consummation.” Those words gave Andrews reason to be slightly hopeful about future success.
Andrews instead came away with soaring conviction that success had already been accomplished. The leap is understandable. The seeker needed success not only for the sake of the slave, not only to make his antislavery activities worthwhile, but also to fulfill that drive to achieve purity which his evangelist father had made the burden of earthly life.
To this need to believe was added a Southwesterner’s conception of how agents negotiated. Pearl Andrews, provincial lawyer, was used to arranging settlements out of court on the uncomplicated Texas frontier, where New World tycoons signaled how they would plead in order to arrange plea bargains. The Texan had no experience in subtle Old World diplomacy, where slight signals were only signs that more slight signals should be exchanged.
Out of a frontier operator’s misreading of a metropolitan sophisticate and out of a seeker’s misplaced hopes of heaven achieved came Andrews’s conviction that Aberdeen’s government would stand behind antislavery loans. Why else would his Lordship ask those specific questions and climax with that encouraging peroration? A banker, after all, does not haggle over collateral unless he intends to grant the loan. Lord Aberdeen made observations which warranted the claim, Andrews was soon gushing all over London, that the English government would guarantee the interest on an antislavery loan!
7
Andrews’s news appalled Ashbel Smith, Texas’s man in London. Smith informed his government of Andrews’s apparent incredible breakthrough.23 Ashbel Smith also informed the American most capable of inflaming John C. Calhoun and Abel P. Upshur. It was another piece of luck, once again sending Texas annexation careening forward, that Duff Green happened to be in London to hear Ashbel Smith tell about Pearl Andrews.
No antebellum American asked “Who’s he?” about Duff Green.24 In an age when the editor of a national political newspaper was almost as notorious as the candidate, Duff Green’s support of John C. Calhoun was a legend. Green’s United States Telegraphspread Calhoun’s views during the mid-1830s, when Mr. Nullifier declared war on Mr. Jackson. Marriage alliance strengthened ties between the two ex-Jacksonians. Green’s son married Calhoun’s daughter.
Duff Green remained John C. Calhoun with a difference. Where Calhoun’s inflexible view of the world was sustained in the South Carolina he never thought of leaving, Duff Green fought for Calhounite principle with flexible tactics in many Souths. Duff Green, American pitchman, relished running factories, selling newspapers, speculating in western lands. The native-born Marylander invested some cash in Missouri acres, more in Texas bonds, more in Washington newspapers.
Politics remained his main enterprise. Calhoun’s viewpoint was his main commodity. He would sell where action was thickest; and in American politics, spoils went to two-party politicians. Once Calhoun lost the good fight within the Jackson Party, Green begged his man to make the Oppositionist/Whig Party a states’ rights vehicle. After Calhoun went the other way in 1840, temporarily back to Van Buren and the Democracy, Green offered his services to the Tyler administration while remaining Calhoun’s confidant.
President Tyler made use of Duff Green as an agent, sometimes a paid agent, to negotiate free trade with England. From London, Green reported back his opinion that England’s abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in 1833 had poisoned free trade. England’s colonial capitalists, Green alleged, found freed blacks would not labor effectively. American slaveholders, still able to coerce a naturally slothful race to work, outproduced ex-masters without slaves. Englishmen supposedly believed they needed trade barriers against slave-grown American staples to bail out colonies supposedly victimized by lazy free blacks.
English statesmen reinforced Green’s theory. The talk in and out of Sir Robert Peel’s governmental circles in the early 1840s was that tropical colonies were less productive than formerly. English leaders sometimes speculated, in and out of Parliament, that emancipation might be the cause and trade barriers the cure. Where Englishmen toyed with such notions, Green translated the intellectual game into dogma believed.
Green’s transformation of an English speculation into an American conviction was ironically like that of the other American loose in London. Just as Pearl Andrews, because of his world view, turned Lord Aberdeen’s cautious hints about possible aid into certitude emancipating loans were coming, so Duff Green, because of his world view, converted Sir Robert’s play with ideas into conviction that English leaders believed West Indies emancipation had proved disastrous. Everything about a slaveholder’s viewpoint drove Green towards his mistaken notion. That lazy blacks needed a master, that emancipation would destroy effective black labor, that emancipators would realize too late that their fanaticism had created a monster—all this was Deep South racist thought at the source. Green had been predicting the English disaster in his United States Telegraph ever since angrily reporting parliament’s emancipation act of 1833.25 Now he soared as the prophet vindicated.
When Ashbel Smith told Duff Green that Pearl Andrews had secured emancipation promises from Lord Aberdeen, Andrews’s miscalculation meshed perfectly with Green’s miscalculation. Why of course England would pay to abolish slavery in Texas. Then Great Britain would wreck at least one more efficient slave-based economy. With free Texas a semi-English colony on the United States’ border, the English could strike at the largest superior slave-based labor system. Once blacks were nowhere enslaved, England’s free black colonies could compete again.
Duff Green swiftly reported Ashbel Smith’s news to Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur.26 He had “learned from a source entitled to the fullest credit,” Green wrote, that “a Mr. Andrews, deputed by the abolitionists of Texas to negotiate with the British Government… has seen Aberdeen.” Andrews proposed, Green reported his source as reporting, that an English company pay for abolition and receive Texas lands in compensation. “The Texas Minister has authorized me to inform you,” Green concluded, “that Lord Aberdeen has agreed that the British Government will guarantee the payment of the interest on the loan, upon condition that the Texas Government will abolish slavery.”
Duff Green also passed on to Upshur, and the American Secretary of State permanently internalized, the world view making this incredible news creditable: England’s calamity with free blacks demanded that rival producers suffer the same disaster. The entire “value” of England’s colonial possessions, claimed Green, required emancipating other nation’s slaves. Such fanaticism would never stop in Texas. The English protectorate must “become a depot for smugglers and runaway slaves.” The Southwest would be in the same mortal danger long afflicting the Border South.
Duff Green, political pitchman, saw partisan advantages no less than southern imperatives in seeking Texas. Both his most recent patron, the hapless Tyler administration, and his long-term patron, the isolated John C. Calhoun, had long searched for the issue to reorganize national parties. Here it was, the concern sure to make Southerners storm out of both parties. Northern politicans would soon swarm into the remade, ultra-southern party, all to stop a threat to slavery Green honestly saw as dire.
“Come boldly forward and control events,” emphasized Duff Green to a Tyler administration despairing of controlling anything. “Meet the crisis; make a treaty” of annexation; save slavery; “advance your own fame. … When we look at what the abolitionists have done and ask ourselves what will fanaticism sustained by British gold accomplish, we must face the necessity of meeting the issue at once.” With those words crossing the ocean, Pearl Andrews’s pilgrimage to London began to make history in North America.