CHAPTER 23
To move ahead on Texas, the Tyler administration had to induce two historical retreats. First, Texas authorities endeavoring to test the English road away from annexation had to turn back towards America. Then American leaders seeking to evade annexation had to risk the issue.
The twin turnaround looked remote, for each retreat from annexation reinforced the other. Sam Houston’s movement away from the United States left the American establishment pleasantly free to avoid the problem. American politicians’ avoidance left Sam Houston disinclined to gamble on America. How could the weakest President in American history break this vicious circle—and in an election year no less?
Only in one place. The Tyler administration had to squeeze agreement out of Sam Houston before debate could be compelled in America. An American President with scarce a domestic follower retains one initiative. He can negotiate a treaty. He can force the Senate to consider ratification. He can compel would-be Presidents to take a stand on his actions. John Tyler could pressure an evasive establishment to make a historic decision on Texas—if he could convince the fleeing Sam Houston that the decision might be favorable.
1
Even Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur had trouble convincing himself that the constitutionally required two-thirds senatorial majority for an annexation treaty could be rallied. In late 1843, Upshur outlined his best hope to John C. Calhoun’s friend, Virgil Maxcy.1 First we must obtain the treaty, wrote Upshur. Subsequently we must convince Southerners that only annexation can prevent English-induced emancipation. Then slaveholding politicians might insist on ratification. Enough Northerners inside an existing party might cave in before the demand. Alternatively, determined Southerners might cajole sympathetic Northerners into a new major party. The resulting annexation party might run Tyler, or more likely Calhoun, for the presidency. Either titan might rally the first ideologically pure states’ rights majority.
Upshur here as usual sounded like Calhoun. The right issue might inspire the right reorganization. The Virginian also here displayed Calhoun-like dissimulation: he too wished to dominate mobocratic scenes he affected to despise. The Virginian would have enjoyed four more years in an uncompromising states’ rights administration. His greater pleasure would have been that no compromising President, whether Martin Van Buren or Henry Clay, could keep Southerners drugged while English antislavery seeped into Texas. More widely, Upshur considered the South’s apathy about Texas a symptom of a ruling class deadened to egalitarianism’s corrosive dangers. Calhoun’s or Tyler’s pro-annexation candidacy, prayed Upshur, might rouse patriarchs to anti-egalitarian vigilance about far more than annexation.
The selfishness infecting Upshur’s elitist dream reflected not his wish to secure the presidency for a friend but instead his desire to secure his reputation for the ages. “I can make” this Texas issue, the Secretary of State wrote Beverley Tucker, “the question of the day.… If I can succeed in this matter, it will be something.”2
I, I, How that I WILL MATTER does soar from the page and illuminate the zealot who would shove lessers backwards. But first the reactionary had to convince Sam Houston that an annexation treaty would pull Texas ahead. That initial step long kept the would-be hero stuck in the Washington mud.
Upshur’s largest trouble was that Mexico had requested and secured negotiations with Texas. The English were asking Mexican negotiators to grant Texas permanent independence. Sam Houston considered the upcoming talks in Mexico City worth pursuing, unless the Tyler administration could guarantee a two-thirds annexation majority.
About the lonely Upshur’s ability to rally such a huge majority, Houston had reports from Upshur as well as from Texas’s man in Washington, Isaac Van Zandt. The American Secretary of State, when offering negotiations towards annexation on October 16,1843, wrote Van Zandt that a treaty would present annexation in “the most proper” and “strongest manner.” But Upshur could not “offer any positive assurance that the measure would be acceptable.”3 Van Zandt, rushing Upshur’s letter to Sam Houston by special messenger, added that he saw “little probability that so propitious a moment will soon, if ever again occur.”4
This promising assessment failed to deliver the key promise: that the most propitious moment would be propitious enough. So Sam Houston dismissed the messenger bearing Washington letters with a shrug. Throughout the fall of 1843, an increasingly desperate Upshur received back from Houston City only a frenzied letter from William Murphy, American chargé at the Texas capital. Texas authorities had leaked to Chargé Murphy copies of recent correspondence between Mexican President Santa Anna, English chargé in Mexico Percy Doyle, English chargé in Texas Charles Elliot, and Texas President Sam Houston. The correspondence revealed that the two English diplomats had served as go-betweens, helping ease Texas and Mexico towards negotiations. Sam Houston, as usual, had encouraged everyone to help him out, leaving all parties free to think he would help them out.
Houston’s game was too deep for the poor American diplomat Murphy, whose brain had for weeks been befuddled by an unrelenting Mexican flu. “This most extraordinary correspondence,” Murphy raved to Upshur, proved that Texas, under British direction, was drifting towards Mexican rapprochement and emancipation. Unless Upshur took “some immediate quick step,” warned Murphy, “the great” and “fatal” blow at slavery would “be struck here.”5
Upshur’s response displayed again the judge carefully examining the evidence. The jurist scrutinized every comma and colon in Houston’s smokescreen of a correspondence. The judgment was that the Texas president could out-dissimulate any Cuffee in Accomac County. Houston schemed, thought Upshur, to trick Mexico into ceasing combat or to trick England into rescuing Texas. Still, Upshur thought the Texas trickster showed “a remarkably good understanding with England and an obvious leaning towards that power.” With England’s “influence” being “strenuously exerted and seriously felt,” imminent Mexican-Texas negotiations must cause us “uneasiness and apprehension.”6
The Texas government escalated Upshur’s apprehension with its belated answer to the Secretary’s offer of annexation negotiations. The response was penned an eternal, to Upshur, six weeks after the messenger bearing annexation proposals had rushed up to Sam Houston. On December 13, 1843, Texas Secretary of State Anson Jones wrote that his country could not trade “the expectations which now exist of a speedy settlement through the good offices of” England “for the very uncertain prospect of Senate ratification of an annexation treaty, however desirable that might be.”7
Upshur received these to him deadly tidings on January 13, 1844. Seeking help in the emergency, the chief American diplomat confided in the tiny coterie of Washington annexation supporters. The most helpful zealot, because the only one in the Senate, was Robert J. Walker of Mississippi. Second in helpfulness, because possessing a hitherto secret pro-annexation letter from ex-President Andrew Jackson,8 was Congressman Aaron Brown of Tennessee. If Robert Walker would assure Andrew Jackson that the Senate would ratify a treaty, and if the American ex-President would assure the Texas president that their old dream of annexation could now become reality, Sam Houston might turn away from England.
Senator Walker accordingly wrote ex-President Jackson on January 16, 1844, “confidentially and in haste,” that “the annexation of Texas depends on you.” An annexation treaty, Robert Walker predicted, “would receive the vote of nearly every Democrat in the Senate, and many Whigs, and I think would succeed. But delay the measure one or two years, and Texas is lost forever. May I then request you to write by the first mail to President Houston, and urge him to … make a treaty of annexation.”9
Andrew Jackson swiftly wrote the prescribed letter to Sam Houston.10 Meanwhile, Upshur worked on Van Zandt. The American Secretary of State promised the Texas minister that after a treaty was signed and before senatorial ratification was sought, President Tyler would order the American Navy to the Gulf, to protect Texas against Mexico. Van Zandt reported that auspicious offer to President Houston.
Without Americans’ fear of “insidious” English attempts to exert “undue influence,” Van Zandt also reported to headquarters, “I should despair” of a treaty’s “success.” But Van Zandt believed that anti-English sentiment would sweep “the entire vote of the South and West, regardless of party,” and the whole Democratic Party, regardless of section. Should distrust of England not quite attract the two-thirds majority necessary to ratify a treaty, Van Zandt added, a simple majority in both houses might admit Texas as a new state. Should even that ploy fail, the pro-treaty faction “will neither permit us to be attacked nor cease its powerful support until annexation shall be effected.”11
Sam Houston soon received corroborating proof of annexationists’ staying power. On the same day that Robert Walker wrote Andrew Jackson, Abel P. Upshur wrote his chargé in Texas, William Murphy, instructing Murphy to pass the letter on to Houston. Upshur’s letter personally exposed President Houston for the first time to the intransigent annexationist.12
“Texas has, for some time past,” analyzed Upshur, needed “the protection of some stronger power.” Because America had unfortunately snubbed earlier Texas overtures, Texas leaders had to listen to English overtures. “Probably” by “this time,” Texas was “in some degree committed to that government.”
In explaining why Southerners would not tolerate that commitment, the Virginian was again the judge reconsidering the evidence. Gone from the letter meant for Houston’s eyes were the Secretary’s old apprehensions about England influencing Mexico to influence Texas. Upshur now believed that Texas would become independent under English auspices, while still retaining slavery. After that, however, slavery could not last “ten years, and probably not half that time.”
American slaveholders, the American Secretary of State explained, would never risk that delicate property in a British dependency. Instead, free labor Englishmen would come to the English-secured republic. After a time, England would “stimulate” English migrants to abolish a non-English institution, and she “will furnish the means of accomplishing it.”
The same vision of an emancipating English population movement had earlier inspired Pearl Andrews and had lately appalled Albert Burnley, Beverley Tucker’s slaveholding partner in Texas. Upshur, a Tucker intimate, had likely seen Burnley’s recent letter on the subject. Burnley’s conception of future trouble had far less “ifs” involved than old Tyler administration speculations regarding if Texas would respond favorably if Mexico responded favorably to England’s iffy pressure. The Burnley theory was instead a projection of America’s past onto Texas’s future. White population movement into relatively lightly enslaved areas of the more southern North and the more northern South had helped make slaves dispensable throughout the American borderland. The resulting sale of bondsmen southwards had encouraged Upshur’s Williamsburg friend Thomas R. Dew to believe that Virginia was too far north for permanent slavery. Well, Texas was too far south to be allowed that emancipation by population movement which had freed the southern North and was diluting slavery in the northern South.
Northerners would join Southerners, Upshur warned Houston, in finding a free labor, English-allied neighbor intolerable. Northern manufacturers would particularly rage when Texans smuggled English goods duty-free into America. Southern slaveholders would especially storm when runaway slaves fled to emancipated Texas. War between England and America would result. Texas would then be “ground to powder” amidst a world-wide “conflict of stronger powers.”
Let Texas instead, counseled Upshur, annex her power to American might. His investigation of “opinions and views of the Senators” had revealed that “a clear constitutional majority of two-thirds” would ratify an annexation treaty. But “if Texas shall reject our overtures, and throw herself into the arms of England,” the American government would destroy former brothers, become “bitterest foes.”
On February 10, 1844, Chargé Murphy handed this carrot and stick of a letter to Sam Houston.13 Four days later, in the glare of that missive, in consideration that Robert Walker, Andrew Jackson, and Isaac Van Zandt all concurred in Upshur’s prediction of a two-thirds majority for ratification, and perhaps out of fear that the unsteady Murphy or the manipulative Van Zandt might leak these tidings to pro-annexation Texans, Houston yielded to Upshur. The Texas president first squeezed out of Chargé Murphy an agreement that American army units would be added to Upshur’s promised naval protection, should Mexico attack. Houston also secured Murphy’s pledge that the American military would be deployed during the negotiation period, nor merely, as Upshur had promised, after negotiations yielded a treaty.14
The crafty student of Indian tactics here expanded his options at the moment a stronger power had apparently forced one dubious option upon him. Should those Upshur-Van Zandt-Walker senatorial estimates prove chimerical, maybe a foolish Mexican attack would force, or clever Texas diplomacy could induce, proslavery Americans to replace antislavery Englishmen as guarantors of Texas’s independence. With instructions to pursue that alternative vision should Mr. Upshur’s fantasy prove illusory, Houston dispatched a second Texan to help Van Zandt negotiate an annexation treaty.15
2
I, I, I. How Abel P. Upshur had fulfilled the boast that I will make history. By chasing a treaty almost all American leaders were fleeing, then imagining a two-thirds majority where none existed, then demanding that Sam Houston act on the chimera, Upshur had manipulated the Texas manipulator towards gambling on America. Houston’s reluctant decision, Upshur correctly foresaw, would awaken enough Southerners to demand that enough Northerners stop shrinking from decision. How many Americans have so successfully set their own historic prophecy in motion?
Upshur never had the pleasure of answering that question. The Secretary of State died six days before news of Sam Houston’s agreement reached Washington. The manner of his death heaped strange circumstance atop cruel timing.16 Upshur was killed in another of those accidents which punctuated the Texas saga so often as to compel thought about the accidental in history. On February 28, 1844, Upshur, the Secretary of State who had been Secretary of the Navy, was enjoying a Potomac River cruise aboard the Navy’s new sloop of war. A new gun, named “The Peacemaker,” was demonstrated. The weapon backfired. The diplomat not unresponsible for the imminent Mexican War was smashed to the deck and killed. The sloop of war bearing “The Peacemaker” was named the Princeton. The deceased reactionary, having lately sought nouveau Texas in order to press American history backwards, had 33 years earlier been thrown out of Princeton University for fighting to preserve students’ ancient prerogatives. The commander of the Princeton was Robert Stockton. The naval captain would soon fulfill the Upshur promise which had helped nudge Sam Houston towards the bargaining table and would ease two nations’ soldiers towards their graves. Stockton would command the naval force sent to the Gulf to protect Texas from Mexico.
Upshur’s manner of death highlighted ironies in the triumph he never knew he had scored. He had hoped annexation would make the Whig Party, or some reorganized new party, a pure states’ rights vehicle. Instead an impure Democratic Party would save a version of Upshur’s annexation proposal, and in the saving would prevent John Tyler from organizing Upshur’s vaunted pure party. Upshur had hoped that his issue would save slavery in Union. The treaty he did so much to secure instead would damage Union and, because of disunion, slavery too. More personally, Upshur had prayed annexation would transform an Accomac County judge who was almost somebody into a celebrated heir of the Virginia Dynasty. Instead, his death, coming just before an annexation treaty provoked headline confrontations, killed all chance of his becoming known or cheered by any public beyond his province. He had aimed so high, at a world as elevated as he thought his intellect. He left behind a grubby world not knowing which southern visionary was most responsible for pushing the Slavepower towards temporary victory and final devastation.
3
Abel P. Usphur would at least have approved of the politician-as-intellectual who outshadowed him in history books. John Tyler appointed John C. Calhoun to finish Upshur’s work. The new Secretary of State reached Washington on March 29, 1844. The much-delayed second Texas negotiator arrived a day later. Upshur and Van Zandt had already agreed on so much that final negotiations swiftly transpired, without any discernable Calhoun input. On April 12, President Tyler announced that an annexation treaty had been signed and would be sent to the Senate for its advice and hopefully its consent.17
Ten days ensued before the document traveled down Pennsylvania Avenue. The administration knew that senators would demand pre-treaty correspondence. Copies had to be made. Upshur’s successor also needed time to write a prosecuting attorney’s summary, explaining why evidence in Judge Upshur’s correspondence should convict England of seeking emancipation in Texas.18 On April 22, 1844, the Senate received the pre-treaty correspondence, the treaty, and a covering letter from John C. Calhoun, declaring the national treaty a sectional weapon, designed to protect slavery’s blessings from England’s documented interference.
This infamous Calhoun document, the so-called Pakenham Letter of April 18,1844, was ostensibly addressed to Richard Pakenham, England’s minister to the United States. Calhoun here belatedly answered Lord Aberdeen’s communication of December 26,1843, also ostensibly addressed to Pakenham but written for American authorities.19 Lord Aberdeen’s letter conceded that England was “constantly exerting herself to procure the general abolition of slavery throughout the world.” Aberdeen also admitted that he had urged Mexico to link Texas’s independence and emancipation. But England, Aberdeen claimed, had never sought “to compel, or unduly control.” If “other States act with equal forebearance,” Mexico and Texas will continue to “be fully at liberty to make their own unfettered arrangements with each other, both in relation to the abolition of slavery and to all other points.”
Calhoun’s response sought to show why Judge Upshur had, and a southern jury should, view England’s words as indictable offenses. Aberdeen’s letter admitted what Upshur had considered damning facts: that England was “constantly exerting herself” to press world-wide antislavery and that Her Majesty’s government had counseled Mexico to press antislavery on Texas. To top off a supposedly conciliatory letter, Aberdeen hinted that soft antislavery counsel might escalate into a harder antislavery effort, should proslavery nations dare to issue ultimatums.
Soft persuasiveness seemed to Calhoun hard enough. Assuming America looked the other way, wouldn’t Mexico swap already-lost Texas for English trade concessions? Assuming America failed to offer annexation, wouldn’t Texas trade a few thousand slaves for English cash, settlers, and protection from Mexico?
Calhoun’s Pakenham Letter aimed at driving Southerners to see England’s soft threat in this hard-headed way. The administration, wrote the Secretary of State, “regards with deep concern the avowal” that England was “constantly exerting herself” to procure world-wide antislavery. The administration was also appalled that England was urging emancipation as “one of the conditions on which Mexico should acknowledge” Texas. “It would be difficult for Texas in her actual condition,” emphasized Calhoun, “to resist” this pressure, even “supposing the influence and exertion of Great Britain” remained within Lord Aberdeen’s “limits.”
An emancipated Texas, continued the Carolinian, would give “Great Britain the most efficient means of effecting in the neighboring States of this Union what she avows to be her desire to do in all countries where slavery exists.” A free labor Texas “would expose the weakest and most vulnerable portions” of slaveholders’ “frontiers” to inroads. But while England’s hope is to end what she calls our evil, warned Calhoun, our mission is to perpetuate what we consider our blessing. Under southern Christian slavery, bragged the American Secretary of State, “the negro race” has attained an unprecedented “elevation in morals, intelligence,” and “civilization.” The United States, concluded Calhoun, “acting in obedience” to racial “obligation,” and “as the most effectual if not the only means of guarding against the threatened danger … has concluded an annexation treaty.”
Look what Calhoun here outrageously did, administration opponents instantly exploded. The explosion echoes in historical accounts. Calhoun, runs the charge, took a treaty unratifiable unless Northerners acquiesced and made it an obnoxiously southern document. The Secretary took an acquisition defendable on grounds of national military protection and defended it solely as protection of slavery. Calhoun also weighed down the treaty with fulminations about slavery’s blessings which all Southerners allegedly already believed and few Northerners could abide. The Secretary of State thus supposedly transformed a treaty ratifiable as national Manifest Destiny into a doomed document pitting North against South. Why would this abstractionist be so pragmatically stupid as to kill his own treaty?
No pre-Civil War mystery is less mysterious. Calhoun here pursued the policy he had deployed since nullification times. First he would find the issue to teach Southerners that outsiders hid antislavery intent behind camouflaged methods of proceeding. His issue would arouse southern apologists from their preference to diffuse blacks away. An awakened Slavepower would then compel Northerners into a pure states’ rights party, which would settle the precipitating issue the South’s way.
These rouse-the-South-first tactics were hardly Calhoun’s quaint addition to the Tyler administration’s Texas policy. Upshur had plotted the strategy before conceiving that Lord Aberdeen might nudge Mexico. Tyler would later claim this South-first gambit was Upshur and Calhoun’s counterproductive ploy.20 But the President, at the time, delayed sending the treaty to the Senate so that Calhoun’s proslavery letter could be written and Upshur’s proslavery correspondence could be copied. That proslavery correspondence, involving Duff Green, Pearl Andrews, and Lord Aberdeen, would have provoked Northerners into correctly seeing the administration’s annexation policy as proslavery, had Calhoun never written to Pakenham.
Indictments of Calhoun’s Pakenham Letter as unnecessarily proslavery and counterproductive to annexation also rest on misunderstandings of when the southern mainstream mentality evolved and how an American majority came to admit Texas in 1844–5. Calhoun’s lesson on slavery’s blessing was indeed a stupid addendum, assuming Southerners had universally hailed bondage ever since the purported Great Reaction of the mid-1830s. But, as we will see, the Texas Annexation Controversy demonstrates that most Southerners still yearned to diffuse the “evil” away, only fifteen years before the Civil War.
Again, Calhoun’s emphasis on annexation to save slavery was bad statecraft, assuming Northerners otherwise would have approved of Tyler’s treaty. But nothing would have made Northern Whigs tolerate the document, and Northern Democrats would have to be forced to swallow their distaste for the accord. Calhoun’s scenario of rallying enough slaveholders to push enough Northern Democrats to stop evading the issue was exactly the way the election of 1844 and its annexation aftermath transpired.
4
Those who claim history would have happened another way, with sufficient Northerners accepting Tyler’s treaty without sufficient Southerners shoving, are ignoring the history of this question. Northern Whigs had for years been warning that this monstrous Slavepower land-grab was coming. Northern Democrats had for years been evading the taint of a Slavepower expansion that was likely to produce a war against Mexico and still more annexations of formerly Mexican territory. Just what massive northern power block was now going to turn against its traditions because a despised President ordered an about-face—unless some massive southern power bloc compelled such a turnaround?
Assuredly, neither Northern nor Southern Whigs were going to march behind John Tyler. For a quarter-century, John Quincy Adams’s Yankee faction had been attacking the Slavepower’s three-fifths clause as despots’ need and democracy’s shame. For a decade, Northern Whigs had warned that Texas would be the Slavepower’s next outsized demand after the gag rule. For three years, Whigs northern and southern had loathed Tyler as slayer of their popular mandate. Almost all Whigs were predictably at Tyler’s throat from the minute he announced the treaty, which was two weeks before Calhoun’s Pakenham Letter was published.21
For purposes of clarity, the Gag Rule and Texas controversies have here been separately analyzed. But the artificial segmentation hinders understanding of Northern Whigs’ integrated perception: both slavery issues triumphed in Congress because the Slavepower enslaved the Democratic Party and thus the not-so-democratic republic. Artificially segregating Whigs’ response to gag and Texas crises also hinders awareness that the two issues came to climax at the same time. The same Congress of 1844–5 which abolished the gag rule admitted Texas.
Another long-related issue, the three-fifths clause, was simultaneously inspiring its greatest Northern Whig resistance since the Missouri Controversy. In March 1843, the Massachusetts legislature proposed amending the United States Constitution to delete the three-fifths clause. On December 21,1843, John Quincy Adams presented the proposed amendment to the national House of Representatives. Adams became chairman of the committee selected to consider the proposal. When he could not prevail in the committee’s deliberations, Adams joined with Ohio’s Joshua Giddings in issuing a dissenting report.22
A policy awarding tyrants extra representatives for owning slaves, charged the two Yankees, violated “the first and vital principles of republican popular representations.” The South’s swollen power led to disproportionate numbers of Southerners in the House, the White House, the Supreme Court. The Slavepower’s undemocratic power led to undemocratic gag rules. Now Southerners would annex Texas, a huge slave area. The Slavepower would then use its swollen power to drive the United States into a war with Mexico to secure still more slave states. The Slavepower would emerge too gigantic for mere democrats to control.
“The treaty for the annexation of Texas,” Adams soon added in his diary, “was this day sent in to the Senate and with it went the freedom of the human race.” This “mad project,” warned the editor of the Boston Atlas, will be resisted “with pen, with tongue, with every nerve and muscle of our body,” aye “with the last drop of our blood.”23
5
If Calhoun could not harden Northern Whig’s already rock-hard opposition to annexation or increase Southern Whigs’ loathing of Tyler, did the Pakenham Letter transform the South’s traditional best northern friends, the Democrats, into foes of Tyler’s treaty? Not a chance. Northern Democrats’ opposition to the treaty, like Whigs’, preceded the Pakenham Letter and drew on a decade of pre-treaty history. The chief architect of Northern Democrats’ long-standing policy of stalling off Texas was now the section’s almost unanimous choice for the presidential nomination. The moment Martin Van Buren heard of Tyler’s treaty and before he could know Calhoun was writing anybody, he penned his response to the President’s initiative. This so-called Hammet Letter was Public Evidence #1 that Tyler’s treaty, not Calhoun’s polemics, reinvigorated Northern Democrats’ traditional unease about annexation.24
To Martin Van Buren, Tyler’s surprise presentation of an annexation treaty in April 1844 looked like a rerun of James Hammond’s surprise demand for a gag rule in December 1835. Once again, Van Buren was cruising towards the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Once again, a Carolina extremist threw up a last-minute southern roadblock. Once again, Northern Whigs’ fury at the South pointed up the political danger for Van Buren in going all the way with far-out slaveholders. Once again, the New Yorker’s solution was to give in a little to the South and stand up a lot to Calhoun. The Magician thereby would keep southern extremists isolated, Southern Democrats mollified, Northern Democrats safe, while all the while keeping his presidential bandwagon rolling.
In early 1836, Van Buren’s sleight-of-hand had taken the form of the Pinckney Resolutions: admit antislavery petitions and send them to a committee, thereby appeasing northern constituents, then automatically table abolition requests, thereby appeasing Southern Democrats. In late April 1844, the Magician’s dexterity shaped the policy enunciated in the Hammet Letter: reject this annexation treaty, thereby helping to win the 1844 presidential election in the North, but hold out possibilities for future annexation, thereby helping to keep Southern Van Burenites distant from Calhoun.
In the Hammet Letter, Van Buren advised the Senate to forget Tyler’s treaty. Ratification was premature. Mexican approval had not been sought. The American people had not been consulted. This treaty, a repudiated President’s last gasp for political survival, might cause an unnecessary war for an unpopular policy.
The New Yorker’s opposition to this annexation treaty, however, came fused with a pledge to administer annexation, assuming he could negotiate Mexican acquiescence in the deed. Van Buren also promised to move ahead with annexation, even if Mexico balked, assuming the American majority wished to risk war. Once the people had spoken, their President must carry out their wishes, “be the consequences what they may.”
Van Buren here challenged Southern Van Burenites to prove that the Jackson majority—any national majority—thought war with Mexico preferable to non-annexation of Texas. The ex-President here also announced that he might be friendlier to Texans than he had been during his last White House tenure. Then again, Mexican and/or Yankee rejection of annexation might make the Magician his old unfriendly self.
Van Burenites would soon be claiming that the Hammet Letter was an annexationist’s document. Martin Van Buren, so the argument went, pledged to annex Texas the patriotic, peaceful, politic way. He would win the election, then seek Mexican approval for annexation. Should his diplomacy fail, he would let a national Manifest Destiny groundswell sweep Texas into the Union in a few years. Only the South’s counterproductive zealotry, Van Burenites concluded, stopped annexation from transpiring the popular democratic rather than the undemocratic Slavepower’s way.
The Van Burenite annexationist scenario rested on the alleged probabilities that Sam Houston would have waited while Van Buren slowly tested American and Mexican sentiment, that Mexico would have succumbed to the Magician’s magic, or that some infatuation with Manifest Destiny would have overcome the northern public’s distrust of Slavepower land grabs and fear of Mexican War. Each of these scenarios, had Martin Van Buren been elected President, is a guess.
Guesses the other way are as plausible. Houston had long since been fed up with Van Buren’s stalling. Mexico had long ago determined to stop annexation. Van Buren had long feared that Manifest Destiny sentiment would never overcome northern repugnance for huge enslaved Texas, especially if annexation meant a war against Mexico likely to yield more tropical land for the Slavepower. Martin Van Buren, political strategist extraordinaire, filled his Hammet letter with conditions because Northern Whigs’ anti-annexation fury made unconditional annexation too politically risky.
Above all else, the Van Burenite scenario of inert Southerners passively waiting for Northerners to go tipsy over Manifest Destiny is the proverbial Hamlet with Hamlet left out. As we will see, much more than Calhoun’s Pakenham Letter was driving Southern Jacksonians away from Van Buren, towards conviction that delay must be renounced. Maybe in some fantasy where the South was transformed into a non-South, the North might have secured Texas Van Buren’s way, sometime down some other road. But since the South was the South, the history which happened turned on whether Southern Democrats would demand and secure a presidential candidate pledged to immediate annexation.
Immediacy especially separated Van Buren’s Hammet and Calhoun’s Pakenham letters. Van Buren, apostle of sectional adjustment the two-party way, offered southern supporters a delay tolerable in the North. Calhoun, warrior against two-party compromising on slaves, demanded that Southern Democrats force Northern Democrats to stop stalling. Van Buren said approach Mexico one last time, then maybe we will annex. Calhoun said no maybes would suffice, not a moment could be lost. Van Buren spied no crisis requiring instant decision. Calhoun saw Sam Houston drifting into Lord Aberdeen’s orbit, unless America stopped stalling. Van Buren would be politic. Calhoun cried that politics-as-usual would leave slavery fatally outflanked in the Southwest. The question, in this climactic battle between Van Buren and Calhoun for the soul of the Jackson Party, was whether southern moderates would demand that Northern Democrats go to war for the Slavepower.
6
Southern Democrats were at first annexation’s only potential soldiers. Southern Whigs would never risk this battle. They knew that John Quincy Adams-style Northern Whigs would never budge and that Henry Clay-style Border Whigs would never waffle more than an inch on so provocative a Slavepower demand. With the Upshur-Tyler-Calhoun Texas treaty, as with James Hammond’s gag proposal, the politically critical question was whether southern extremists could pressure moderate Southern Democrats to pressure Northern Democrats into lining up behind the Slavepower.
Calhoun’s effort to push the Democratic Party toward annexation and away from Martin Van Buren possessed one immediate advantage: Van Buren himself. Southern Democrats usually liked Van Buren’s anti-inflationary banking and currency policies. That attitude had led Calhoun back to Van Buren in 1840. But most Southerners, emulating Calhoun, had never warmed to Van Buren, had always suspected the Yankee’s alleged friendship for slavery, and had ever considered him a devious manipulator. In the perspective of the illusionist’s long-standing image in the South, the Hammet letter was no annexationist’s long-run plan but the Magician’s latest package of “ifs” and “maybes” adding up to not much.
Still, Van Buren was the party leader, he had been conceded the party’s presidential nomination, and he was the pet of Northern Democrats necessary to win a national election. Calhounite extremists had to convince Southern Democrats that Van Burenite stalling and evasion would be so disastrous for enslaved Texas that an immediate annexation ultimatum would have to be issued to Northern Democrats. Zeal for annexation would furthermore have to be instilled in Southern Democrats almost overnight. The Democratic National Convention would convene less than two months after Tyler sent the Senate the treaty.
For moderates to turn almost instantly immoderate, some predisposition to believe and to worry had to exist. Among Southern Democrats, Texas in fact already stirred vague dreads. A sense of potential crisis especially informed the inaugural address of Governor Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi, delivered on January 10, 1844, almost three months before the Texas treaty was signed.25
Annexation, Brown told constituents, obviously would be “desirable.” The fertile prairies would enrich some Southerners. Texas congressmen and senators would augment southern political security. The vast land mass would consolidate a peaceful Mississippi Valley.
Despite these desirable gains, Mississippi’s governor continued, only one circumstance would make the desirable “indispensable.” The South must not “stand idly by, whilst Texas,” a neighboring slaveholding republic, is “drawn inch by inch into the meshes” of England, “a wiley nation that has never failed to do us injury” and is “the national personification” of “stealthily advancing” abolition. Albert Gallatin Brown did not doubt Texans’ friendship for America or for slavery. But Texas, “worn down by … a protracted war and constantly menaced by a formidable enemy,” was almost out of “money and almost without friends.” Desperate Texans might have to accept English offers to provide protection against Mexico and to pay for emancipated slaves. Hints “already” abounded in “diplomatic circles” that England would make these offers. Should something harder than hints appear, Brown concluded, Southerners had better demand the “indispensable.”
Indispensable. Brown’s word indicated Calhoun’s opportunity. The Pakenham Letter showed Southern Democrats what England preferred to do in Texas, assuming the United States allowed England her preferences. That proof of possible English antislavery counsel and funding, should a non-annexing United States permit England to become Texas’s best friend, disturbed some of the most sensible Southerners.
Witness United States Senator William Rives of Virginia. Rives, a Whig, rightly called himself no southern agitator, for “I deeply lament” slavery’s “existence.” Rives, former Ambassador to France, also rightly called himself “no agitator or alarmist” about “foreign powers.” But “I have not been able to blink the import—the true and naked import—of this communication of Lord Aberdeen.” Here is “a bold and formal announcement of a settled policy on the part of one Government to use its influence and exertions to procure the abolition of certain institutions of another.”
Some gentlemen, Virginia’s United States senator noted, ridiculed Aberdeen’s “extraordinary diplomatic paper” as a “mere wish” for abolition. “Aberdeen’s naked and unreserved” pronouncement, answered Rives, “sounds to my ear very differently from a mere wish.” The director of English foreign policy had announced, in “all the ‘pomp and circumstances’ of an official communication,” deployment of “moral and diplomatic propagandism (to say the least).”26 The sober William Rives here demonstrated that Calhoun’s words, emphasizing Aberdeen’s confessions, had nudged Southerners towards seeing the Texas episode as at least worrisome.
7
Still, Senator Rives was not worried enough to favor President Tyler’s treaty or to demand that the Whig Party run a pro-Texas presidential candidate. With Southern Democrats, as with William Rives, Calhoun could only begin to provoke a sense of crisis. The South Carolinian remained too distrusted as an enemy of two-party politicians. The Pakenham Letter could rally Southern Democrats against the party’s northern establishment only if powerful insiders lent instant credibility to the outsider’s alarm.
At this moment of acutest need, Calhoun received the most precious Jacksonian gift. For a decade and more, Andrew Jackson had taught Democrats that the arch-Nullifier concocted alarms about slavery solely to break up the Union. By anointing Van Buren rather than Calhoun as heir, Tennessee’s favorite slaveholder had steered his movement away from becoming primarily a sectional racist’s crusade and towards becoming primarily a national anti-bank instrument.
Now the old general urged a portentous shift. He demanded that his supporters nominate someone other than Van Buren. His former disciple, explained Jackson, disastrously failed to see the Texas situation as an immediate crisis. Jackson’s widely circulated opinion lent enormous credibility to Calhoun and fateful legitimacy to Jacksonianism as a pro-South movement.
In the year 1844, Andrew Jackson looked incapable of anything so significant. Old Hickory now usually resided on what looked very much like his deathbed. His coughs turned catching a breath into exhausting exertion. His headaches transformed lifting his head into debilitating vertigo. His rectal discharges soaked sweaty sheets with a blackened crimson mass of putrid clots. His well-meaning physicians purged his already streaming bowels with calomel powders. His would-be saviors also depleted his waning powers with frequent bleedings. His grieving friends invaded his dimming consciousness only with a pale letter now and then. His trembling hand could barely scratch a response.
His barely readable words sufficed. His letters summoned especially his first army, fellow southwestern racists, to new battle against old enemies. Jackson had risen to national prominence as the warrior who swept Englishmen and Indians out of Southwesterners’ path. He had piled up mammoth southwestern majorities partly because he figured to continue as President his good work as general. Old Hickory had not disappointed. His Indian removal policies had cleared the way for Georgians, Alabamians, Mississippians, and Louisianians to exploit blacks, without red skins or red coats interfering.
Another old southwestern hero now reminded Jackson of new obligation. Andrew Jackson had promised Sam Houston that an annexation treaty would be ratified. Houston, upon receiving the treaty, called Jackson on the promise. Should ratification be delayed or rejected, Texas’s president wrote the American ex-President, Texas’s “mortification would be indescribable.” She would be a bride “spurned” at the American altar not once but thrice; “all Christendom would justify her” in seeking “some other friend.” If American politicians expected to “postpone” ratification “to a more convenient season,” to serve “party purposes and make a President,” concluded Houston, “let them beware.”27
Houston here again displayed his ability to know his man and in the knowing to marshal the stronger to fight for the weaker. Jackson began composing public letters almost as soon as he received Houston’s private appeal. Old Hickory warned fellow Democrats that “delays are dangerous. Houston and the people of Texas are now united in favor of annexation. The next president of Texas may not be so. British influence may reach him.”28
Jackson joined Calhoun and Tyler in seeing Texas’s vulnerability as England’s opportunity. “Mark this,” the ex-general commanded: Texas requires “aid from some nation and that aid must not be permitted to come from Great Britain.” Jackson concurred with the administration that if America rejected annexation and thereby drove Texans towards England, the Lone Star Republic “will have to resign her negroes to England at $250 a head.”29
But where Calhoun the Carolinian saw black freedom as the dire threat, Jackson the Southwesterner feared more that both Englishmen expelled to Canada and Indians removed to trans-Mississippi domains would re-enter former haunts. England, once having gained a base in the Lone Star Republic, would excite “hordes of savages within the limits of Texas and on her borders … to make war upon our defenseless borders.” “British influence exerted over the Indians and negroes, a Canady on our west as well as the north, servile war, an asylum for all runaway slaves”—what a dismal situation all this for the safety of the South and West.30
Soon English soldiers would be swarming over white men’s dissolving frontier, continued Jackson. British troops based in Texas could seize “Memphis and Baton Rouge,” possess “New Orleans, and reduce all our fortifications.” Regaining the Mississippi and the Gulf would cost America “oceans of blood and millions of dollars.” Texas was the vital “key to our future safety—take and lock the door against all danger of foreign influence,” and “without delay, for delay is dangerous.”31
Jackson did not here endorse Texas as part of any Manifest Destiny to seize the hemisphere. Rather, Jackson, like Calhoun, would protect what had already been captured. The Tennessean, like the Carolinian, saw his world in claustrophobic terms. Englishmen and Indians were closing in. Texas must not be an enemy fortress. The Democratic Party must sweep the shaky Slavepower outpost inside a fortified Union. Jackson’s protegé, Van Buren, must be demoted for evading what could not be delayed.
They stood now together, those old enemies, Calhoun and Jackson, as always from different southern worlds, as always seeing southern dangers from different perspectives, but now shoulder to shoulder as if it was still 1828 and John Quincy Adams still must be defeated. The resurrected alliance, however, did not so much recall 1828 as repudiate 1836. Jackson would now make Calhoun’s policy rather than Van Buren’s candidacy key to a national Jacksonian campaign.
That historic reversal augured such a redefinition of Jacksonian “Democracy” as to make Jackson’s old allies beseech the dying leader to change his mind. The chief pleader, Frank Blair, Sr., a powerful Border South Democrat and a devoted member of Jackson’s early Kitchen Cabinet, had helped define Jacksonianism as a coalition of moderate Northerners and Southerners, opposed to high nationalism to the north and traitorous sectionalism to the south. Van Buren, Blair’s post-Jackson hero, had been the man to further that centrist vision.
Now Blair, editor of the pro-Van Buren Washington Globe, begged his old chief to realize that Calhoun remained the same old fiend. The South Carolinian’s outrageous letter to Pakenham, Blair charged, deliberately sought “to drive off every northern man from the support of the measure.” The result would be Senate defeat of Calhoun’s treaty “by an overwhelming vote.” Then the arch-Nullifier would urge “dissolution of the Union, and a Southern Confederacy as the only means of obtaining” Texas. Could you be “against Mr. Van Buren,” asked Blair, “whose measures under existing circumstances present the only hope of giving Texas again to the whole Union?”32
So many times before, Old Hickory had snapped up such bait. This time, the ex-President was not tempted. I grant you, he wrote Blair, that Calhoun’s Pakenham Letter is indiscreet. But Jackson “shed tears of regret” over Van Buren’s “fatal letter” to Hammet. Jacksonians “cannot abandon principle,” however much “we may be attached to men.” Van Buren seemed not to understand that “the best interest of the South as well as the safety of our country, are now in jeopardy by the secret interference of England.” The “safety of the republic” required instant “annexation regardless of the consequences.” The Democratic Convention, concluded the Democratic Party’s hero, must nominate someone who understands the Jacksonian imperative.33
With this climactic declaration for Calhoun’s precipitancy and against Van Buren’s delays, Jackson had not so much replotted his course as emphasized a direction there from the beginning. From its inception, Jacksonianism, to Jackson, had involved white men’s freedom to exploit equal opportunities, without Indians or bankers or abolitionists or Englishmen interfering. For a time, Jackson had focused on the National Bank as the monster. But southwestern epics had always excited this Southwesterner’s imagination. Englishmen had always been a great enemy, Indians a treacherous hindrance, slaves a labor necessity. In hunkering down now to consolidate a safe Southwest and to fortify an outflanked labor system, Andrew Jackson, to John Quincy Adams’s delight, highlighted the old question about Jacksonian “Democracy.” Just how democratic could this pro-mail censorship, anti-Indian, pro-gag rule, anti-abolitionist, pro-Slavepower crusade truly be? Adams for two decades had struggled to make the question stick. Now Jackson would glue the question like tarpaper to the meaning of his movement.
8
While Andrew Jackson stressed English pressure as an immediate southwestern crisis, another southwestern Democrat stressed a southeastern crisis. Robert J. Walker, United States senator from Mississippi, had recruited Old Hickory to reassure Sam Houston that a treaty would be ratified. Once Houston agreed to negotiate with Upshur, Walker authored an enormously influential pro-Texas pamphlet. Walker’s polemic is allegedly proof positive that preposterous propaganda led to annexation.34
Robert Walker’s “propaganda” urged that an annexed Texas, instead of helping to perpetuate slavery, would beneficiently diffuse blacks away, first from the oldest South, eventually from an emancipated North America. Failure to annex, in contrast, would lead to British-induced emancipation in Texas, then to Yankee-induced emancipation in the South, then to freed blacks swarming northwards towards their liberators.
Southerners’ northern allies understandably relished this argument. The Walker thesis transformed sorely pressed Northern Democrats from traitors who knuckled under to the Slavepower into heroes who would diffuse blacks farther from the North. Equally understandably, except to those who cling to the myth that Virginians united behind perpetual slavery in the mid-1830s, Robert Walker lent renewed life to old Upper South prayers that slavery would be diffused to the Deep South.
But the stunner is that the new prophet of abolition through diffusion was a senator from Lower South, New South Mississippi. The shock dulls upon realization that Senator Robert J. Walker, temporarily of Mississippi, was born, bred, and remained a representative type of James Buchanan’s Pennsylvania. Ever since gag rule days, Buchanan had been bending almost all the way south on slavery policies, while still hoping that the “evil” would someday drain out of America. Buchanan’s Lower North posture, while too southern for Van Buren’s Upper North New York, was right for Pennsylvania, the largest northern state on the South’s border. Senator Buchanan would be an avid consumer of Senator Walker’s black-removal reasons for annexing Texas. Less than a decade later, Robert Walker, ex of Mississippi, having lived back north since 1845, would be President Buchanan’s selection to be governor of Bleeding Kansas.35
The Walker-Buchanan allegiance began as a familial connection of Pennsylvania’s leading political clans. Robert Walker’s father was a politically influential Pittsburgh attorney. Young Robert, after earning degrees with high honors from the University of Pennsylvania, married the superbly connected Mary Bache, whose close relatives included some of James Buchanan’s closest cronies and Benjamin Franklin, American prophet of pragmatic enterprise. The Bache-Dallas-Walker clans found Buchanan’s appeasement of southern anger to be pragmatic wisdom for an enterprising commonwealth close to the fire-eaters.
Robert Walker, Buchananite, early journeyed towards a fire-eaters’ mecca. With his brother Duncan Walker, he moved to Natchez, Mississippi, in 1826. There his uncle had grown very rich very quickly as a land speculator. Duncan Walker so craved the habit as to move in 1834 to that grandest arena for land speculation, Texas. Robert Walker remained in Mississippi to tend to family interests.
Events rewarded Robert’s caution. Duncan Walker died in 1836, after languishing in Mexican prisons for his part in the Texas Revolution of 1835. Robert Walker, heir to brother Duncan’s Texas lands, was determined to avenge his brother’s death. Opportunity to help annex Texas and thus punish Mexico came when the Pennsylvanian-turned-Mississippian was elected to the United States Senate in 1836.
This native Northerner secured southern office in the classic outsider’s way: by waxing hotter than slaveholders about those cool towards slavery. Robert Walker kept his Yankee-style dislike of bondage to himself. He was the quickest draw in the Southwest at shooting down opponents as soft on slavery. He also surpassed every Southwesterner, including Andrew Jackson, in articulating his adopted region’s desire for Texas.
At the height of annexation, Robert Walker bore an unfortunate resemblance to the annexationist he most admired. Lung disorders had turned Senator Walker, like ex-President Jackson, into a cadaver-like creature gasping for breath. Walker was for months at a time as imprisoned in his bedroom as was the dying Jackson. Mississippi’s favorite convalescent was barely five feet tall. He weighed under 100 pounds. His withered skin stretched over protruding bones. His huge head bobbed on a shrunken body. He almost seemed to illustrate his theory that loss of the Texas outlet would seal the doom of imprisoned Southerners.
Back when Presidents Jackson and Van Buren had stalled on annexation, Senator Walker had dissented haplessly. When Van Buren drove for the White House during the Tyler years by steering away from Texas, Robert Walker, establishment Democrat, worked on the anti-establishment administration, trying to encourage President Tyler to go for annexation. When John Tyler, maybe a little because of Walker’s urging, allowed Upshur to have his way with Sam Houston, and Houston, perhaps a lot because of Jackson’s Walker-induced promises, reluctantly agreed to negotiate with Upshur, Walker celebrated rapprochement by writing his Letter on Annexation.
In the popular piece, Walker admitted to constituents for the first time, under cover of a useful political reason for annexing Texas, that he hoped his adopted homeland would be drained as clean of slavery as his native Pennsylvania had been. Annexed Texas’s vast and fertile prairies, cheered Walker, would draw slaves from cramped and exhausted old southeastern domains. This whitening process would occur “not by abolition, but against and in spite of all its frenzy, slowly and gradually, by diffusion, as it has already thus nearly receded from several of the more northern of the slaveholding states.” Purchase of Louisiana and Florida had already helped drain 500,000 blacks from the Chesapeake. Annexation of Texas would double the rate of diminution. Delaware would be drained in 10 years, Maryland in 20, Kentucky and Virginia in 40. From Texas, transplanted slaves would eventually diffuse southward, into still richer tropics. Slavery will thus “disappear from the limits of the Union” by a “gradual and progressive” process, “without a shock, without a convulsion.”
Walker contrasted this salutary migration with the convulsive migrations inevitable if Texas was not annexed. Flow of English population to Texas would free the Lone Star Republic. A South hemmed in by an England-supported Texas to the west and Yankees to the north, once coerced by outsiders into emancipation, would swarm with blacks poised to move northwards. Blacks who migrated would drive northern white men’s “wages to the lowest point in the sliding scale of starvation and misery.” Northern jails and asylums would “be filled to overflowing; if indeed any asylum could be afforded to the millions of the negro race whom wretchedness and crime would drive to despair and madness.” Northerners as well as Southerners, concluded this Pennsylvanian ruling in Mississippi, had a racial stake in securing Texas as “the safety-valve of the whole Union, and the only practical outlet for the American Population.”
Walker’s safety valve argument was reprinted in most newspapers in the black-belt South, Whig and Democratic, just about every time with ecstatic editorial praise. That almost-unanimity indicates the power of Walker’s “propaganda.” Southern Whigs in particular might have been expected to condemn Southern Democrats’ favorite annexation argument. Yet Robert Walker’s safety valve conceptions most often went publicly undebated.
The lack of debate is revealing because the proposition was so debatable. Posterity can hardly credit Robert Walker’s vision of a Slave South in imminent danger of being imprisoned on too little land with too many blacks. Huge areas of the Southwest remained untilled in 1844, including large sections of rich river bottomlands. The ratio of undeveloped land to available labor was so large as to invite campaigns within ten years to reopen the African slave trade. Yet no southern opponent of annexation apparently ever told Robert Walker to be sensible about all the wide-open spaces beyond some alleged southern jail.
Again, only one southern leader, and he not even a Whig, called Walker on the fantasy that slavery would eventually diffuse out of America through the Texas way-station. Senator Arthur Bagby, Democrat of Alabama, termed “the idea of slavery going off by a sort of insensible evaporation” into “the great desert between Texas and Mexico” as, “to say the least, a bit preposterous.”36 Neither Bagby nor any other southern opponent of Tyler’s treaty, Whig or Democrat, called preposterous another of Walker’s debatable visions: that annexed Texas would totally drain slavery from the more northern slave states.
With all southern speakers agreeing that Texas could drain the elderly South of slaves, the question remained whether said diffusion would be beneficial. A handful of Southern Whigs called Walker’s safety valve pernicious. Waddy Thompson of South Carolina, for example, wondered how addition of one new slave state would compensate for slavery “very soon” disappearing from “Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky.” Even in South Carolina, annexation would make slaves “an incumbrance which we shall be glad to get rid of; and I confess for myself that it will afford me very little consolation in riding over my fields, grown up in broom-sedge and washed into gullies, to be told that… slavery still exists and is prosperous” in Texas.37
Waddy Thompson’s public logic recalled Abel P. Upshur’s private handwringing in that pivotal March 1843 letter to Beverley Tucker. The imminent Secretary of State had then speculated that annexing enslaved Texas might depopulate the oldest South. Waddy Thompson’s 1844 doubts about diffusion also anticipated imminent South Carolina arguments against further Mexican/Caribbean annexations. Diffusing slaves out of the older South, many Southerners’ conception of the ideal future as late as the Texas annexation story, would remain this encrusted minority’s pet hate.
The very fact that Waddy Thompson’s anti-safety valve argument powerfully resonated with one side of advanced southern thought makes the essential point even sharper: how revealing that so sensible a dissent appeared so relatively infrequently in Texas times. Waddy Thompson’s cogent dissent is also revealing because founded on not-so-cogent assent to Robert Walker’s master assumption: that Texas would remove slavery from the older South. When dubious assumptions suffuse all sides of a cultural mentality, a revelation of a world is at hand. Anyone who claims to understand the Slave South must stand ready to explain why, as late as 1844, Southerners found a safety valve to remove slavery instantly plausible—and usually a cause for persistent rejoicing.
9
Explanation must start with the fact obvious on the face of Robert Walker’s argument: that much of this culture still prayed that slavery, under the right conditions, might be terminated. Ever since Jefferson’s day, removing ex-slaves had been considered an indispensable condition for black freedom. Ever since Missouri Controversy times, diffusion of slaves into new territories had been considered a viable step in the right black-diluting direction. John Tyler, in Missouri Controversy times the prime congressional advocate of diffusion as a safe route to emancipation, was now the President who called Walker’s safety valve southern orthodoxy. In Tyler’s eastern Virginia, the most orthodox theorist had lately been Thomas R. Dew, who had called diffusion of slavery southwards the best safety valve for a state too far north to be permanently enslaved.
Thomas R. Dew’s conception of beneficient black diffusion had outlasted the prime competing vision. Colonization had seemed to many apologists a plausible alternative removal scheme in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Diffusion to Africa had been debated in Maryland and Virginia legislatures and in the national Congress. But after those confrontations, African colonization came to seem both beyond state resources and lethal to national Union. To adopt a national colonization policy, even to consider Charles Mercer’s petition from the American Colonization Society, was to guarantee South Carolina’s secession. Safe colonization of blacks in Africa became so politically unsafe as to provoke cries of disloyalty, including from Waddy Thompson, during William Cost Johnson’s late gag rule forays.
No one called Robert Walker “untrue.” Walker’s safety valve, like Thomas R. Dew’s, gave stymied visionaries who had dreamed that blacks might be diffused out of a lily-white republic a non-heretical way to dream on. Both Walker and Dew shunned heretical government interference between master and man, as in post-nati or colonization laws. Each would whiten the South by stimulating private sales, per ongoing geographical redistributions of North America’s Slavepower base. Dew would push blacks towards the tropics by building state roads and canals. He believed that state internal improvements would invigorate Virginia’s economy, attract white migrants to the Old Dominion, and allow entrepreneurs to cash in on superfluous servile labor down river. Walker would pull blacks down from the nontropics by annexing Texas’s lush prairies. He believed that annexation would intensify the Lower South demand for slave labor and quicken the drain of blacks away from Upper South regions. Neither diffusionist would deplete government coffers a penny, in contrast with colonization schemes widely considered very expensive.
Walker’s mode of removing blacks, cost-free to government, might also bail out hard-pressed capitalists. In this economically depressed period, Old South slaveholders, looking for ways to stimulate a sour slave-based economy, conceived that slave diffusion to fresh New South territory might yield economic salvation. In this period must be emphasized because an important historical theory holds that Southerners, constantly perceiving slavery to be an economic burden, constantly sought fresh land as a pecuniary safety valve.38
That explanation misses changes over time. When cotton prices were high, planters believed their labor system was economically better than the North’s. The best southern pecuniary moment and one of the most depressed times in the free labor North, the late 1850s, would lead Southerners to soar with pride over the slave labor system’s supposed superiority. With cotton selling at 12 cents a pound and prices for scarce slaves mounting towards $2000 in the presecession decade, Slavepower expansionism would be based on euphoria about prosperity rather than on fears of bankruptcy. In the 1850s, some planters would desire more Africans to diffuse to already possessed and underenslaved virgin prairies. Meanwhile, imperial merchants would seek more Caribbean land to escalate a booming slave staple economy.
Robert Walker’s moment, the mid-1840s, was economically gloomy, which is why his safety valve speculations sound like an attempt to bail out an outmoded labor system. Amidst a depressed economy which had continued with only brief breaks since nullification times, slaveholders feared they would be stuck with useless slaves on worn-out soil. They could not, like impersonal employers, cut losses by slicing payrolls. They could only sell off personal servants at some cost to their consciences and at insufficient gain to their pocketbooks. Losses might swell unless new planters on new lands developed new need for more slaves. Nowhere was the economic tremor of the 1840s more evident than in the older eastern South, where rotten crop yields compounded rotten prices and intensified the search for a way out.
A glorious escape route, once Robert Walker pointed to it, was through the safety valve. Texas prairies were fabled for fertility. There, went the dream, one could make a bonanza even with six-cent cotton. Southwestern demand for slaves might increase slave prices, bailing out the less prosperous Southeast. But close the safety valve, heap redundant slaves back on the decaying older South, and black hands would be increasingly idle.
That prospect inspired racial as much as economic fears. With an attitude running from jealousy to disgust, whites had long considered blacks overly promiscuous. What would be the fate of a stagnating South bottled up between the Atlantic on the East, an anglified Texas on the West, and free labor to the North, containing blacks breeding like rabbits? We will be “smothered and overwhelmed by a festering population that was forbidden to migrate,” answered Congressman Isaac Holmes of South Carolina, “pent in and walled around on exhausted soil—in the midst of a people strong in idleness” and incited “to revolt and murder.” Holmes called imprisonment without a safety valve the most “awful calamity … in the widest stretch of his imagination.”39
United States Senator Chester Ashley of Arkansas echoed Southeasteners’ concerns and indicated why Southwesterners thought they might someday need Walker’s safety valve too. “Annex or not,” feared Ashley, “the time must come when the number of negroes would be so large that their labor must be unproductive.” Trapping “this population within the limits where it now exists” could lead only to race war and “utopian schemes of the abolitionists.” Annexing “Texas would at least put off the day. He did not say it would finally prevent it; but it certainly would defer it.” It would open an outlet through which Southerners “might eventually get rid of an intolerable burden.”40
10
Intolerable burden! Southern congressmen and senators talked that way about slavery constantly during the Texas Controversy. Whether William Rives was defending the Pakenham Letter or Robert Walker was extolling the safety valve or Chester Ashley was cringing at a South bottled up, the southern leader who with Calhoun defended slavery as a permanent positive good was as scarce as hen’s teeth. Representatives in Congress who called slavery good during the Texas debates, all four (!) of them, were angered to be exceptional on this subject. For example, Isaac Morse, congressman from Louisiana, “denied the principle which seemed to have been assumed here, as a thing being conceded, viz: that slavery was an evil.” He regretted “to hear from the lips of any southern gentlemen the admission that slavery was an evil.”41
Southern lips did emit that admission. The one word explaining the admission, and explaining all other words tumbling from Southern Democrats about a southern crisis, was claustrophobia. Abel Upshur articulated the claustrophobia of a naysayer trapped in King Numbers’s republic. John C. Calhoun expressed the claustrophobia of a slaveholding perpetualist, imprisoned with slaveholding apologists and facing English siege. Andrew Jackson voiced the claustrophobia of a Southwesterner potentially squeezed by Englishmen, Indians, and fugitive slaves. Robert Walker illuminated the claustrophobia of the declining Southeast, pent up with too many increasingly dispensable black “barbarians.” As Michael Hoke, Democrats’ candidate for governor of North Carolina, summed up all these feelings about being hemmed in, England, after “winding herself about us like the terrible anaconda,” but awaited “an opportunity … to crush us.”42
Through the safety valve and past the anaconda, annexationists spied relief everywhere. A racially imprisoned culture could send away blacks. A financially depressed region would acquire an economic El Dorado. A politically outnumbered slavocracy would gain at least one new state and two new senators; and immense Texas might later be hacked into more states with more senators. And why should the South be denied this racial outlet, this economic strength, this political power, this safety valve for southeastern woes, this barrier against southwestern Indians, above all this protection against an abolitionized English protectorate smack on slaveholders’ Louisiana-Arkansas border? Because Yankees thought Slavepower was immoral! This was indeed a crisis. The South must demand the territory.
11
Southern drives for territory, historians have proclaimed too many times, involved impractical attempts to procure lands impossible for slaves to work. Let the Texas affair bury this canard forever. Annexation involved the largest acquisition of a southern land mass; some Englishmen did rather hope to plant free labor on it; the land was politically and economically sublime for slavery; and annexationists demanded the soil to solve practical, political, racial, economic, military, demographic, and moral problems at the heart of southern concern for half a century. Texas exploded on Southern Democrats’ political agenda—literally exploded faster than even Calhoun had hoped—precisely because so many Southern Democrats for so many reasons suddenly found the Lone Star Republic a merciful practical release.
Not all Southern Democrats jumped to that conclusion. Even if they happened to be Democrats, Southerners agreed on very little. Border South Democrats remained especially antagonistic to a Union-threatening, Mexican Warinviting land grab down South. Frank Blair, Thomas Hart Benton, and other Missouri Jacksonians positively froze at the ascendancy of Calhoun’s Slavepower imperialism over Van Buren’s a-southern democracy.
Calhoun had always feared that Southerners such as these borderites, not committed to perpetuating slavery forever, would back off from the actions necessary to preserve the system. Jacksonian apologists for slavery in Middle and Deep Souths, enraptured with diffusing slavery away through Robert Walker’s safety valve, proved Calhoun was partly wrong. Border South Democrats, however, already had their safety valve: sale of slaves to states further south.
With no reason to feel the claustrophobia of a black belt trapped without an outlet, the Border South’s claustrophobia took a different form. The region’s inhabitants felt potentially squeezed between Northerners and Southerners who would make border turf a Civil War battlefield. Caring much more about permanent Union than about what they called temporary slavery, the Border’s Southern Democrats required a ton more of the proslavery consciousness-raising Calhoun included in the Pakenham Letter before they would risk Slavepower crusades.
Democrats in the Middle and Deep South received all necessary consciousness-raising in the few weeks between the signing of the Texas treaty and the beginning of the National Democratic Convention. Once Calhoun demonstrated English antislavery and Jackson issued a call to the colors and Walker pleaded for a safety valve, Texas became the hottest Middle and Lower South political property since Andrew Jackson’s stock soared in the late 1820s. After Texas captured their imaginations, Middle and Deep South Democrats could not nominate someone who would hedge on annexation, lest John Tyler run for re-election as the Southerner who hedged not at all. Tyler’s supporters had called a third party national convention, to meet at the same time as the Democratic National Convention. Should the Democratic Party shrink from Texas and Tyler campaign for re-election and the safety valve, the Southern Democratic Party could suffer a defeat worse than the loss to Harrison four years earlier. With this practicality added to other practical reasons why the Texas issue took off among Middle and Lower South Democrats, Slavepower competition to do most for slavery screwed the most pressure yet on Northern Democrats—and on Martin Van Buren.