CHAPTER 22
Would Abel P. Upshur rise to Duff Green’s call to arms? No one who knew the Secretary of State could wonder. Just as Duff Green’s racist mentality compelled instant belief in Ashbel Smith’s news about Pearl Andrews, so Upshur’s oligarchic viewpoint produced instant concern about Green’s information. Contemporaries then and historians since have charged that Upshur cynically exploited Green’s and Andrews’s “absurdity.” The notion is absurd. Abel P. Upshur reacted just like the soul he was—a reactionary intellectual unbelievably (not least to himself) in a position to shove the mainstream backward upon hearing of a future fright.1
1
The key to Upshur, Duff Green’s latest patron, was the Virginian’s intellectual affair with John C. Calhoun, Green’s long-term patron. Calhoun’s importance, in the forging of a slaveholder world view, was to drive upper-class social attitudes to one natural political extreme. Calhoun believed that unequal social power demanded unequal political power, that a slaveholding ruling class must defy King Numbers on all sides of all color lines. Upshur agreed. The Virginia intellectual would drive one-white-man, one-vote egalitarianism out of nineteenth-century slaveholders’ befuddled skulls.2
Both Calhoun and Upshur came naturally by their eighteenth-century synthesis of social advantage and political inequality. Each was raised in an Old South planter family living near the New South. Calhoun’s upcountry South Carolina, located on the fringes of Carolina’s semi-mountains and slightly enslaved areas, was only a little less in contact with the imminently egalitarian (for whites) South than was Upshur’s Accomac County, that least enslaved Virginia Tidewater area and the one most controlled by nonslaveholding fishermen. Not many miles from the Calhoun plantation, James L. Orr would soon urge Carolina titans to join the national mobocratic chase. Not many miles from the Upshur plantation, Henry Wise would soon seek to bolster slaveholders by playing court-the-poor demagogue.
Both Calhoun and Upshur attended High Federalist schools, where they learned to loathe such mixing of social hierarchy and egalitarian politics. Calhoun was educated at Yale, that center of High Federalist despair about Jeffersonian Jacobinism. He went on to have elitism confirmed in the legal training of Litchfield, Connecticut’s arch Tapping Reeve. Upshur matriculated at Yale and Princeton. He proceeded to imbibe crusty haughtiness in William Wirt’s Richmond, Virginia, law office.
After the War of 1812, Calhoun had a brief fling with nationalistic economic measures before becoming theorist of minority veto in the late 1820s. Upshur, almost a decade younger, started out as nay-sayer to King Numbers. While Calhoun was secretly writing essays on the illegitimacy of numerical majorities, Upshur was openly defending Virginia reactionaires against reforming nonslaveholders. In the state legislature of 1827, Upshur denounced western Virginia’s attempt to call a state constitutional convention. Upshur condemned “with pity and dismay” the “wild and demoralizing” notion that “he who possesses no property” should “dictate laws for regulating the property of others.”3 When Upshur failed to block the 1829 convention, he entered the conclave, there to become, along with Randolph of Roanoke and Benjamin Watkins Leigh, the most notorious proponent of extra power for the Slavepower.4
As the tide of King Numbers and King Andrew rolled over American politics in the 1830s, the Carolinian and the Virginian occupied opposite vantage points. Calhoun, at the center of national affairs, was a famous United States senator. Upshur, at the fringes of state affairs, was an almost unknown planter, judge, and writer. Only in his bit of outmoded Virginia were his contemptuous bon mots considered wildly witty.
Upshur’s heavy-handed scorn for democratic pols emanated from a heavyweight of a body. His huge square head topped a huge round frame. Only side fringes of hair framed his head. The baldness atop made the reactionary ideologue seem all the more pure skull. It was as if nature had marked him as a man of mind fit to tower above the multitude.
Upshur conceived that the reign of the masses was both symptom and cause of mobocracy’s imminent slaying of slavery. In the good old Jeffersonian days, which Upshur aimed to resurrect, a world affirming natural aristocracy had called the Virginia Dynasty to dispense civic virtue from on high. In the bad new Jacksonian times, which Upshur sought to destroy, a nation declaring a poor dependent equal to an independent gentleman invited populistic demagogues to spread civic vice. The gullible rabble, putty in the hands of designing spoilsmen, especially shrieked approval when told that every rude, crude Tom, Dick, and Harry was equal to enlightened squires. Soon, Yankee hypocrites would crusade for office by demanding that all inequality, especially slavery, must be sliced out of the egalitarian body politic. By then, despaired Upshur, the South’s spoilsmen would have left their region too demoralized to resist.
Abel Upshur feared that Old Virginia might be already “irredeemably” demoralized. The state had “suffered materially” from “the withdrawal of so many of her people of property and intelligence, who have gone further South.” The Convention of 1829, by widening the suffrage, had multiplied the damage. Withdrawal of the propertied and enfranchisement of the barely propertied had given “very unworthy and incompetent” demagogues disastrous “success.”
Virginians demonstrated their enervation by falling for Martin Van Buren, incompetent national demagogue. Van Buren, warned Upshur, would only temporarily compromise on slavery and scoff at abolitionists. Once slaveholders were sufficiently dazed, the magician would lift the antislavery rabbit out of his egalitarian hat. Van Buren’s audience, hating inequality, would reward the leveler with four more years of patronage. The deluded South would follow Virginia’s lead and submit.5
Abel Upshur’s anti-Van Buren Whiggery did not yield John Tyler’s high hopes that States’ Rights Whigs could command the party. Nor did Upshur share his Whiggish friend Nathaniel Beverley Tucker’s zest for disunion.6 Upshur instead usually favored Calhoun’s pet panacea—finding the right issue to educate Southerners out of both parties and into a southern convention. Once slaveholders shed a nonslaveholder’s consciousness and realized that an unequal social institution demanded an elitist political agenda, planters would create their own party to crusade for their own prerogative. With one party standing foursquare for Slavepower, northern politicians would flock to the potentially dominant new coalition. No need, then, to seek “a Southern Confederacy!—We can get a Southern Convention, and what more do we need?”7
Upshur’s scenario needed an Upshur to bring it off. Some intellectual must use pure ideas to warn Southerners away from impure demagoguery. Upshur hoped that his legal and proslavery articles in the late 1830s would make him the saving man of mind. His writings emphasized that slaveholders lacked the political ideology to match their social conceptions, that a rejection of mobocracy and belief in prerogative would rally a class that could see politicians’ deceptions. Planters with unequal social power, when taught to seek unequal political power, might even elevate their teacher to the United States Senate.
Alas, his publications provoked little elevation. “I do not believe 200 people in Virginia know that such a work exists,” Upshur groused after one largely unread tome was published. Politicians showed even less interest in the egghead. Whigs only “condescended to think of me” when “they had work for me to do, but as to offices and honors, they reserve them for others.” He had, the thwarted patriarch cursed, “frequently had occasion to remark that for the last half of my life I have been almost something.”8
Almost something! Here, as so often, Upshur sounded like Calhoun. Calhoun too believed he had spent the last half of his life as almost something. Calhoun too prayed that the detached intellectual could reorganize politics along ideological lines. Calhoun too believed that pure southern issues could arouse a pure states’ rights party to purify the Union and thus prevent disunion. Calhoun, with his Washington notoriety, could at least dream of becoming the reigning philosopher statesman. But how could Calhoun’s clone in the Virginia provinces, unheralded, unread, unknown, ever exercise power over anyone, save over a tiny group of eastern Virginia Neanderthals as powerless as himself?
In mid-1841 the answer amazingly surfaced. President William Henry Harrison died. Abel Upshur’s longtime eastern Virginia friend, Vice President John Tyler, became President. After Tyler reluctantly defied the Whig Party and practically the whole cabinet resigned, the President’s range of choices shrunk to his own intimates. Upshur, a hero in Tyler’s speck of Virginia, was a natural cabinet choice. The former almost-something, now Secretary of the Navy, could urge his theory on a President.
With “nothing to hope for from the Clay portion,” Upshur hammered at Tyler, the President must “form a party of his own, of which the St. Rights Party may form a nucleus. In this way, he will draw … individuals of both parties who profess his principles; and when you add to them the multitudes who are always on the strong side, whatever it may be, you have a decided majority.” The oft-ridiculed States’ Rights Whig dream of becoming more states’ rights than Democrats might become reality yet. Calhoun’s scoffed-at-dream of a pure states’ rights party might at last prevail.9
So wrote Abel P. Upshur during his first heady days as the intellectual with power. A year and a half later, the theorist knew how naïve he had been. Clay in the Senate made the issues. Upshur in the cabinet remade nothing. “I have no hope for the country,”Upshur despaired to his Virginia friend Beverley Tucker on March 13, 1843, three months before becoming Secretary of State.10
This missive to Tucker, never noticed in the history books, should rank with Thomas Jefferson’s “Wolf by the ears” letter and one or two others as the most illuminating single southern document on the coming of the Civil War. The letter, written three months before Pearl Andrews’s interview with Lord Aberdeen, explains all by itself why the soon-to-be Secretary of State would find Duff Green’s news alarming. The letter also reveals why Old South reactionaries with Abel P. Upshur’s mentality would precipitate Texan Annexation imminently and revolution in 1860.
Upshur called governmental reform “impossible” because “the people do not wish it.” Property holders with “a real stake in the government … would be right in their opinions, if they were not deceived.” But “for a long time, … political managers” had controlled the government and deluded even the wealthy.
“The radical defect,” explained the imminent Secretary of State, “is in the constitutional body. How can a country be governed, except by those who own it? The moment the right of suffrage ceased to belong to the soil, the axe was laid at the root of our institution. … When those who have no stake in the country are allowed to govern it,” one ends up with “the very riot of the largest liberty” and “the rapid overthrow of all free institutions.”
“Particular causes” are “at work,” declared Abel P. Upshur, “to expedite the catastrophe.” The last Congress witnessed both an escalating campaign to spread universal suffrage and an expanding abolitionist “conspiracy against the South & its institutions.” Rising egalitarianism on both sides of the color line showed that slavery “must perish, or else it must be fought for.” Yet so long as demagogues “shall retain … influence,… the South will be deceived, and kept asleep, until her hair will be shorn, & the Samson will wake up, only to find himself powerless.”
Upshur moved on to his immediate concern. “As connected with this subject,” he warned Tucker, “I anticipate an important movement in regard to Texas.” A weak republic exposed to Mexican invasion “must make the best bargain it can. England alone can save” Texas, and “England will drive … a Jew’s bargain.” Texas will trade its few slaves for permanent independence.
Should and would the South allow England to fashion a free labor Texas? Upshur saw difficulties both ways. If Texas was emancipated, he “feared” southwestern slavery could not “exist surrounded on all sides by free States.” But if Texas remained enslaved, he feared slavery could not persist in the Old South, for Texans would drain away too many slaves. Upshur preferred that slaves be kept in states where they now lived, for then “the natural increase of the slaves will enable every man to be a slaveholder.” Instead of a Virginia population divided between shrinking slaveholders and increasing nonslaveholders, wrote the former conservative leader at the Virginia Convention of 1829, you would “have a homogeneous population, bound together by a common interest.” Freeing Texas and halting territorial expansion might actually save the institution in the oldest, most worthwhile South!
Abel P. Upshur here prefigured the best argument Whigs of his persuasion would press against the Tyler administration’s eventual annexation treaty, an annexed Texas would draw slaves from old states and thus lessen the Slavepower’s sway. Upshur also here gave a foretaste of an imminent irony: the most rabid Old South reactionaries often would oppose southern territorial expansionism, even expansion to slaveholder-friendly areas such as Mexico and the Caribbean. Old East oligarchs with Upshur-like mentalities instinctively feared that moving out and conquering might doom a world which needed to stay home and consolidate. Upshur resembled a hero in a William Gilmore Simms novel, preferring settled parishes to lawless frontiers.
But the Virginian also saw that basing policy on a distaste for the beckoning frontier would disastrously isolate Old South reactionaries from New South energy. Most Southerners, continued Upshur’s March 13 letter to Tucker, “will take” the view that abolition in Texas would be a disaster. The consequence of English attempts to emancipate Texas will be either a southern “revolution in support of slavery, or a surrender” of slavery “in despair. The latter, I believe, will be the end of it.”
Upshur moved on to prove how sincere were his fears. Beverley Tucker, Upshur knew and worried, owned slaves in Texas. “I wish you would weigh these things,” Upshur beseeched his friend, “not only as a politician, but as a question involving your own interest. I greatly fear that your slaves in Texas will be lost to you, if you do not remove them.” “Nightmares” such as this, gloomed the President’s closest advisor, “weigh upon my mind, … for every day’s observation confirms” that “they are right. But although, as politicians, we may see & deplore these things, it will never do to fold our arms & submit without an effort.”
So wrote the man destined to become in three months the Secretary of State whom historians would accuse of cynically spreading some idiocy about English intervention in Texas. The letter reveals instead a reactionary so sure that the English would intervene in Texas that he was privately warning his pal to remove slave property from the soon-to-be-abolitionized zone. The letter also reveals an ideologue determined not to “submit without an effort” to a New World egalitarian “nightmare” epitomized by the danger to Texas.
Most of all, this special document highlights the special situation about to unfold in American history. An anti-extremist political culture, where mainstream pragmatic politicians almost always dominate and zealots on the left or right almost always fume at the fringes, had managed to bring to power, inevitably partly by accident, one of its most far-out extremists. Moreover, this right-wing ideologue was ascending at the right moment and in the right place to give mainstream history a shove in the most shattering direction. A President’s accidental death and a section’s non-accidental anxieties had meshed to give that American “impossibility,” the ultra in command, capacity to maximize a political explosion.
No matter to Abel P. Upshur that his national political experience was limited to waving a despairing pen at compromising mainstreamers. Like James Henry Hammond at the time of the gag rule, Upshur was no shrinking violet of a political novice, ready to defer while the more experienced governed. The Virginia patriarch came to power armed with both pride in his high-minded appropriateness for high office and determination to oust a generation of dimwitted egalitarians. He would be the latest philosopher statesman in the unfortunately disrupted Virginia Dynasty. And this was the warrior, Tyler’s new Secretary of State, who received Duff Green’s letter, calling on the Tyler administration to seize the Texas issue, reassert the States’ Rights Whig vision, awaken the southern ruling class, and forge a national party dedicated to saving slavery.
2
The surprise, once one sees the world Secretary of State Upshur’s way, is that the Virginian did not leap to annexation upon experiencing Green’s letter. Instead, this devotee of abstract theory suspiciously scrutinized Green’s facts. But then again, Upshur’s deliberative approach to evidence came naturally to an ex-judge. Precisely Upshur’s combination of zeal for principle and passion for evidence made him seem to the somewhat theoretical, somewhat practical Tyler the right pragmatic abstractionist to have as head counselor.
Upshur’s very vigilance about whether facts fit theoretical preconceptions should warn others against knee-jerk dismissal of evidence he judiciously sifted. Judge Upshur found Duff Green’s indictment against Great Britain too loose because of the missing connection between Pearl Andrews’s supposed proposal and Lord Aberdeen’s supposed promise. Readers of these pages may have joined the ex-judge in spying Duff Green’s contradiction. Those not as cautiously discerning as the jurist should respect his judiciousness the more.
Duff Green had reported Pearl Andrews as proposing that English financiers of abolition be repaid with Texas land. Green had also reported Lord Aberdeen as answering that the English government would guarantee interest on the loan. What loan, Upshur puzzled, if British capitalists would be paid in land to finance emancipation? Upshur supposed alternative schemes had been proposed. He wrote to his chargé d’affaires in Texas, asking for a clarification of Andrews’s “precise terms.”
Whatever the terms, Upshur had “no doubts … that the English Government has offered its cooperation.” The ex-judge was once again judicious in stressing the limited danger of that cooperation. Under normal circumstances, Texas abolitionists “would scarcely merit grave consideration. Their numbers, it is believed, are very small; and the state of public opinion in that country is by no means favorable.” Only the “present situation” of Texas made unpopular fanatics potentially popular. Impoverished, underpopulated Texas would be driven to obtain support against Mexico, if not from the United States then from England, even “upon terms of great hardship and many sacrifices.” You must accordingly find out, Upshur urged his man in Texas, what transpired between weakened Texas and determined England.11
3
The answer was soon forthcoming, from London instead of from Texas. On July 12,1843, Foreign Secretary Aberdeen met again with Lewis Tappan. Aberdeen asserted that the British government “would not guarantee the interest” on an antislavery loan and could not “in its present situation” consider “advancing money to Texas” (emphasis mine). Perhaps not catching the hint that English policy might change, the discouraged American philanthropist asked whether cabinet members were “so friendly to emancipation as their predecessors were.” Can Americans “doubt it?” Aberdeen answered. He “concurred most heartily” with the Antislavery Convention’s “general views” on Texas.12
On July 20, Aberdeen bluntly asserted to Texas Minister Ashbel Smith his and his nation’s antislavery preferences. Ashbel Smith had requested an interview to disabuse Her Majesty’s chief diplomat of any notion that Pearl Andrews represented Texas. Aberdeen was equally determined to assure Texans that England might help abolition, if some future Andrews did represent Texas’s preferences. The resulting exchange of views was more important than Aberdeen’s meeting with Andrews in leading Upshur and Tyler to push annexation.
Ashbel Smith officially informed Lord Aberdeen that Pearl Andrews’s adventuring was “wholly unauthorized, disclaimed, and disapproved of” by Smith’s government. Andrews, Smith continued, was equally unrepresentative of Texas public opinion. Abolitionists were scarce in the Lone Star Republic. Yet Pearl Andrews was babbling all over London that the English government had promised him “means of reimbursing or compensating the slaveowners.” Are there grounds “for these assertions?” asked Smith.
Aberdeen answered that England would never “interfere improperly.” The Texas government must interfere with its own internal institution first. Then England might consider aid to be proper. Pearl Andrews had accordingly been turned down. But “the well-known policy and wish of the British Government to abolish slavery everywhere,” added the foreign secretary, made “abolition in Texas … very desirable.”
Where Aberdeen had hinted to Lewis Tappan that under future circumstances England might finance the desirable, the Scottish peer treated Ashbel Smith to a stronger expectation. Aberdeen “was not prepared to say whether the British Government would consent hereafter to make such compensation to Texas, as would enable the slaveholders to abolish slavery. The object is deemed so important perhaps they might, though he could not say certainly.”
Perhaps they might! Ashbel Smith exploded that English compensation would degrade and disgrace Texas. Aberdeen, as if trying to convert Ashbel Smith to Pearl Andrews’s views, soothingly observed that “such things can be done as not to be offensive.” With those words, Lord Aberdeen officially and slightly reluctantly brought Andrews’s part in the annexation drama to an end.13
Elsewhere in London, Pearl Andrews had discovered a new mission. This Christian capitalist unsuited to defying mobs had excitedly picked up in British reform circles a safer way to save America with enterprise. The seeker would soon recross the ocean, his soul again on fire, this time zealous to sell English secretarial shorthand as the key to saving American capitalism!14
The comic climax illuminated why this restless seeker could count but fleetingly in the tale of Texas. For a few weeks, the erratic reformer had indirectly furthered Upshur’s and Tyler’s suspicion of England. But by the time suspicions about Aberdeen climaxed in annexation, the President and Secretary of State no longer suspected that the Scottish peer’s sins included offering Pearl Andrews a loan. The American authorities knew from Ashbel Smith that Aberdeen might offer some future Andrews-style loan only if some future Andrews represented Texas’s public and governmental opinion. That announced possible willingness was the lasting aftertaste in Abel P. Upshur’s mouth of Pearl Andrews’s wacky pilgrimage, no aspect of which struck the American Secretary of State as in the least amusing.
4
At the July 20 conference with Ashbel Smith where Lord Aberdeen ended Pearl Andrews’s Texas adventures, the Englishman gave the Texas minister, and through him the Tyler administration, something more permanent to worry about. On July 1, Aberdeen had begun a new initiative with a dispatch to his chargé d’affaires in Mexico, Percy Doyle. Aberdeen noted that Mexican and Texan negotiators would imminently discuss Santa Anna’s peace proposal: that Texans could govern themselves if they conceded Mexicans’ theoretical sovereignty. By insisting on those terms, Aberdeen pointed out, Mexico could at best save only empty honor. Mexican authorities might instead consider “whether the abolition of slavery in Texas would not be a greater triumph, and more honorable to Mexico, than the retention of any Sovereignty merely nominal.” Doyle should suggest that Mexico grant Texas independence if Texas would make blacks independent.15
Twenty days later, at his conference with Ashbel Smith, Aberdeen officially told the Texas minister of this hitherto secret overture. I have instructed British chargé to Mexico Percy Doyle, the British foreign secretary stated, “to renew the tender of British mediation based on the abolition of slavery in Texas and declaring that Abolition would be a great moral triumph for Mexico.” Smith, stunned, claimed Texas would reject any such overture. Whatever you think, Aberdeen closed the interview by emphasizing, your government should know what I think.16
Probably within a week of Ashbel Smith storming out of his office, Lord Aberdeen received Charles Elliot’s communique about what Sam Houston thought. Elliot reported Houston as desiring, in the best of worlds, that the Texas predicament could be solved in the way Aberdeen had suggested in his despatch of July 1 to Mexico: with Texas and Texas’s slaves both permanently free. The signal from Sam Houston apparently encouraged Aberdeen to send a slightly stronger signal to the Mexican government.
On July 31, the British foreign secretary wrote again to Percy Doyle in Mexico City. I lately informed Texas’s man in London, reported Aberdeen, that if “Texas should confer entire emancipation,” our government would “press that circumstance upon … the Mexican Government as a strong additional reason” for their acknowledgement “of the independence of Texas.” Doyle “should press … earnestly on the attention of the Mexican Gov’t our desire that Mexico waive … nominal sovereignty” and substitute for it the condition “of the absolute abolition of … slavery.” Aberdeen thus completed his signs to Texas and to Mexico that England would “press earnestly” the Utopian wish Sam Houston had expressed to Charles Elliot, assuming all concerned sent back favorable signs.17
Ashbel Smith despatched news of England’s position to Sam Houston, with the usual copy to Isaac Van Zandt in Washington. The Texan in London, having for months tried to manufacture worry, was now worried himself. English moral pressure on Mexico was an announced reality; English economic help to Texas was an announced possibility; might not Smith’s beleaguered friends in Houston City now go for some English antislavery scenario? “From the paramount influence of England in Mexico,” Smith conceded, “the British Government might without difficulty” prod Mexico into insisting on emancipation in exchange for Texas independence. Nor did Smith doubt that Englishmen “can, and if they promise, doubtless will furnish money” to help Texas free its few thousand slaves.
But Smith begged his government to remember Texas’s third crying need. The republic needed not only peace and cash but also settlers. English free laborers would not migrate to Texas, he had been told, even if the Lone Star Republic became an English protectorate.18
Back in Texas, slaveholders doubted what Ashbel Smith had been told. Assuming Texas, under England’s protection, freed itself of Mexico, and assuming American slaveholders passively allowed a little England on their borders, why wouldn’t Englishmen flock to the anglified El Dorado? Some Texas slaveholders worried that, even without international stabilization, incoming free laborers would soon drown out the few slaves.
Albert T. Burnley, for example, wrote Beverley Tucker in September 1843, of his “great uneasiness lately” about English interference. Burnley, a Kentuckian migrated to Galveston, was Tucker’s partner in Texas slave investments. Burnley confirmed Upshur’s warning to Tucker that English interference would make investment in Texas slaves precarious. “Slaveowners,” wrote Burnley, “will not move to the country, while the stability of slave labor is questioned.” Preponderances “of nonslaveholders over slaveholders will daily increase.” Texas nonslaveholders with “land to sell” could easily be persuaded that “a tide of immigration” from England “would soon make land in demand at a fair price. Suppose this state of things brought about—& many of our most thinking men believe it will be.” Suppose also that England offers cash for slaves and help with Mexico. Then abolition could be “acomplished at the polls.” Burnley concluded that “the South ought now to insist on interference. I tell you, there is danger, & no time to lose.”19Beverley Tucker probably shared this letter with friend Upshur.
From Texas and from London, Virginians in the White House were hearing that the enduring difficulty went way beyond the flighty Pearl Andrews. The lasting trouble was Texas’s bind, what with Mexico menacing, slaveholders rarely immigrating, slaves not extensively present, and America not annexing. Given these abnormal circumstances, Texans might reject slave labor solutions to the population shortage, assuming England promised free labor solutions and enslaved America promised nothing at all.
Yet Upshur and Tyler, even after hearing from Ashbel Smith what Lord Aberdeen was earnestly pressing on Mexico, still did not press for annexation. President Tyler suspiciously noted that the intelligence “derived unofficially” from the same Texas minister to London who had been trying to frighten the administration toward annexation. American action would be mandatory only if the administration received official confirmation that England had pressed “abolition” as “the basis of interference.”20 Secretary of State Upshur, considering confirmation imminent, asked Texas Minister Van Zandt to seek instructions from Sam Houston in case Tyler offered annexation.21
Upshur and Tyler swiftly received confirmation. In a public exchange in the English House of Lords in August 1843, Lord Brougham, leader of Her Majesty’s opposition, told Lord Aberdeen he saw “a very great chance” that Texas would abolish slavery, assuming Mexico would then recognize the republic. Could the English government convert Mexico to that strategy?
Aberdeen answered that “every effort on the part of Her Majesty’s Government would lead to that result.” He would not “produce papers.” Betraying diplomatic confidences “would not contribute to the end they had in view.” But “the noble and learned Lord” could rest assured that Aberdeen was pursuing Brougham’s suggestion. Brougham delightedly sat down.22
A month later, in late September 1843, the Tyler administration read about this parliamentary exchange in the newspapers.23 Ashbel Smith had clearly concocted no tale about English desire to influence Mexico. Rather, the English government had publicly announced its effort to prod Mexico towards prodding Texas to emancipate. The initiative, moreover, had bipartisan English approval.
True, Lord Aberdeen’s prod, even in its more insistent July 31 form, was but “earnest pressing.” The world’s richest nation, however, if encouraged by Texas and Mexico and not scared off by the United States, could easily move from verbal pressing to lucrative offers of settlers, cash, and more-favored-nations trade concessions. Mexicans, unable to govern Texas, and Texans, unable to secure sufficient population, might both eventually accept such honorable and profitable terms, always assuming America would not offer the annexation alternative.
To Upshur and Tyler, the time had arrived to rid the world of that assumption. As in gag rule times, antislavery danger was still slight. But once again, the distant threat, if not early checked, looked capable of escalating. Only annexation would be an obviously effective check. Only a steep uphill fight could secure congressional ratification of any annexation treaty.
Nevertheless, the Secretary and the President decided the fight had to be initiated. On October 16, Upshur met with Texas Minister Van Zandt and urged immediate negotiations towards an annexation treaty.24 The administration had made its decision. Now decision-making on annexation passed to Texans, and ultimately to the American people.
5
The Tyler administration’s decision to seek an annexation treaty has been called precipitious, premature, taken before all the facts were in. The indictment is usually based on the wrong evidence. According to the ancient accusation, Duff Green’s erroneous information about Lord Aberdeen’s alleged promise to Pearl Andrews produced the administration’s decision. But neither Andrews nor Green caused the administration to act. Abel P. Upshur’s critical letter to Beverley Tucker in March 1843, shows an ideologue predisposed to believe in English interference months before Green supplied evidence. Upshur’s suspicious response to the Green evidence shows an ex-judge determined to set tangled facts straight before deciding. Tyler and Upshur opted for annexation only after a public parliamentary exchange confirmed Ashbel Smith’s private report that England had “earnestly” pressed Mexico to pressure Texas towards abolition.
A better indictment of the administration’s decision would stress that no one yet knew how Mexico and Texas would respond to Aberdeen’s verbal pressing, or whether England would move beyond this pressure to stimulate better responses. Even from a southern extremist’s viewpoint, a prudent diplomat could wait and see where Aberdeen’s “mere” words might lead. Witness John C. Calhoun’s advice to the Tyler administration.
Calhoun wrote Upshur in late August 1843, that England was “using all her diplomatick arts and influence to abolish slavery” in Texas. Calhoun called the danger “great and menacing, involving in its consequences the safety of the Union, and the very existence of the South.” Calhoun advised Upshur to demand explanations from England, Mexico, and Texas. “If Great Britain should not explicitly disavow” Texas emancipation, Upshur must “rouse the South.” But “annexation ought not” be “agitated,” cautioned Calhoun, “till discussion has prepared the publick mind” and until unsatisfactory answers came from England, Mexico, and Texas. Here was hardly the Calhoun of the textbooks: that Father of Secession, always first to press the South towards disruption. Here instead was the Calhoun of the Nullification Controversy: an extremist cautiously trying to delay hotheads from acting prematurely.25
Had Tyler, true to his usual delaying tactics, accepted Calhoun’s usual advice to wait and see, the President might have discovered that he had exaggerated the English menace. Tyler was right that England ideally wished Texas to emancipate. The President was wrong to buy the Duff Green thesis that England, supposedly desperate about supposedly lazy West Indian free blacks, was determined to force the issue. Lord Aberdeen never shared Duff Green’s racist economics. The foreign secretary’s concern about abolition was sheerly ideological and as containable as the cynical Green thought every sheerly moralistic commitment to antislavery would be. Only if Texas and Mexico sent back signals of potential interest and only if the United States continued to run away from annexation might England’s “earnest pressing” escalate to financial incentives to both Texas and Mexico. But if Mexico or Texas shouted No Thanks, or if the United States turned tail and annexed, England would press no more.
At the moment of deciding to use annexation to halt English pressing, Tyler and Upshur, as Calhoun warned, knew nothing about whether Mexico and Texas would encourage Lord Aberdeen to press on. England’s undiplomatic chargé in Mexico City, Percy Doyle, was tangled in a farcical controversy over a stolen English flag at the times Lord Aberdeen’s notes of July 1 and 31 arrived. Doyle, putting second things first, poured energies into demanding that Mexicans surrender the emblem.26
Before Aberdeen could ask Doyle for the third time to press England’s Texas gambit on Mexico, the English foreign secretary received a warning from America. In a November 1843 interview, American Ambassador to London Edward Everett told Aberdeen of the Tyler-Upshur fury about English “earnest pressing.” Aberdeen conceded to Everett that England had suggested a Texas-Mexico emancipation rapprochement. The Scottish peer reassured the American that Mexico had not responded. Aberdeen did not promise to cease pressing for a response. But the Englishman now realized that pressing Mexico might counterproductively press America toward annexation.27
This new knowledge may have given Lord Aberdeen pause about insisting that Doyle forget the cursed flag and get on with discerning whether Mexico would surrender an emancipated Texas. Before Aberdeen could probe Mexican pre-annexation attitudes further, the announcement of a Texas-American annexation treaty would demand a post-treaty English—and Mexican—policy. We will see that the new Mexican policy would be acceptance of Texas’s independence. We cannot know whether English “earnest pressing” or subsequent English offers of delectable trade concessions might have yielded the same Mexican decision to accept the fait accompli of Texas independence, had annexation not occurred.
Texas’s likely interest in the Aberdeen initiative, assuming the administration had followed Calhoun’s advice to wait and see, is equally uncertain despite more pre-annexation evidence. Had Tyler followed his typical policy of waiting, he would have received back only Sam Houston’s typical ambiguity. Aberdeen had sent Houston a signal that, assuming the Texas government wished abolition, England might help. Houston sent back a signal that, assuming England was serious, Her Majesty’s government should provide more than vague talk of perhaps helping Texans to emancipate. “To my mind,” Houston declared in a speech in Huntsville, Texas, in October 1843, “England does not care about the abolition of slavery.” Slaves, Englishmen knew, would develop “a new country in one eighth the time it would take by free labor. … England don’t want you, in my opinion, Gentlemen.”28
Sam Houston here threw Duff Green back at the English. Don’t you believe, Houston in effect challenged Lord Aberdeen, that your emancipated colonies should have stayed enslaved? If England answered with proof of antislavery commitment, the timid Tyler might awaken American slaveholders. If slaveholders still slumbered while England quietly offered cash, migrants, escalating pressure on Mexico, Sam Houston, indifferent himself to slavery, might take emancipation more seriously. Either way, watchful waiting and incremental signals between nations, the stuff of conventional diplomacy and of John Tyler’s usual delaying, would slowly reveal where everyone stood. Then a non-precipitious decision could be made.
Judge Upshur had marched on Washington determined to rout such cautious politics. Southerners who waited for overt antislavery acts, steamed the judge, would still be waiting after slavery’s fate was sealed. No overt American act would transpire, for demagogical Van Burens camouflaged their every act. No international explosion would occur, for the ultra-cautious Aberdeen and the ultra-duplicitous Houston would steathfully glide towards each other. No one could say whether England could quietly induce Mexico to accept these drifting policies. But did Mexico matter? That tottering regime could hardly stop English financiers and settlers from silently investing in Texas opportunities. Such quiet English transfusions could make Texas too robust for Mexico to challenge. English free labor migrants could meanwhile make Texas slaveholders too superfluous to matter. And nothing more overt would ever occur than “earnest pressing” in a secret diplomatic note.
Upshur believed only annexation would stop this non-overt process. But Northerners would not annex a slave republic unless Southerners demanded it, and Southerners, dulled by demagogues, snoozed. Hints of English interference, alarming to a trained jurist, would not automatically awaken unsuspicious commoners. Judge Upshur would have to become national prosecuting attorney, arranging camouflaged indications so cogently that a southern jury could see the danger of “mere” words. No jury could be summoned, however, until he secured a treaty.
Upshur here, as in so many ways, anticipated revolutionaries of 1860. Southern Unionists would then argue that President-elect Abraham Lincoln threatened no overt acts against slavery. The difference was that in 1860 immoderate extremists, isolated from established institutions, had to make a revolution to force an understanding that abolition required no overt acts. In 1844, Abel P. Upshur, accidentally and not-so-accidentally influencing a President, might use conventional diplomacy to force an awakening.
“England is determined to abolish slavery throughout the American continent and islands,” Upshur privately wrote John C. Calhoun on the eve of the administration’s decision. The Lone Star Republic’s “present condition” created “an absolute necessity” for Texans to throw themselves “upon the protection of some stronger power. That power must be either England or the U. States.” If a supine South allowed crafty England to save desperate Texas from revengeful Mexicans, abolition in the Lone Star Republic would be only the “beginning.” Louisiana and Arkansas slaves would “find an asylum” by fleeing across the border. An even more encircled South would have more leaks on its frontiers.
The danger, urged Upshur the consciousness-raiser, must be used to educate slaveholders to see through two-party politicians. Texas must be “a Southern question, and not one of Whiggism and Democracy.” Slaveholders must be “roused” to demand Texas “as indispensable to their security. In my opinion, we have no alternative.”29
By demanding annexation when even Calhoun counseled less precipitous options, the hell-bent Upshur fed the hesitant Tyler an issue to save the administration. The secretary thereby helped overcome the President’s usual inclination to watch and wait. Abel P. Upshur, one of the most obscure American Secretaries of State, was among the most important. By pressing the President to end his delay, Upshur helped make academic the question of what might have happened to slavery in Texas if the United States had continued to allow Lord Aberdeen to press silent signals. With Lord Aberdeen, as with Thomas Jefferson and Pearl Andrews and eventually Abraham Lincoln, committed reactionaries would not permit cautious softhearts to try tentative gestures on not-so-enslaved areas. The question instead was whether unpopular extremists could sell their provocative policy to dissimulating Texans, doubtful Americans, and a distrustful political establishment in both major parties.