CHAPTER 24
Mr. Border South Whig was Mr. Northern Democrat’s best hope that Southern Democrats would ease annexationist pressure. Henry Clay, who had a lock on the 1844 Whig presidential nomination, offered annexationists so little that Martin Van Buren in contrast almost looked like a roaring annexationist. In a battle with Clay over Texas, Van Buren could offer the South much more for slavery.
1
Neither Henry Clay nor any other viable national Whig candidate could offer the South much on Texas or on any slavery-strengthening proposal, for Northern Whigs stonewalled against every Slavepower argument. The contrast between Democrats and Whigs on this point was enormous and never more pivotal than in 1844. Southern Democrats had long since discovered, particularly in gag rule politics, that enough Northern Democrats would probably cave in, however begrudgingly and resentfully, to southern demands. Southern Democrats could campaign to consolidate slavery in Texas, never believing that the crusade might cost them their party—or worse, their nation.
Only briefly had Southern Whigs believed that sectional sprees might be cost free. Back in 1836–8, when the Opposition/Whig movement divided to conquer, the party’s states’ righters had been more free than Southern Democrats to be loose cannons on gag rule issues. But after the Whig Party united in the late 1830s, Southern Whigs became the politicians deterred from demanding federal consolidation of slavery. Southern Whigs’ intransigent northern wing peculiarly taught, as Southern Democrats’ appeasing Yankee allies did not, that Southrons who insisted on proslavery legislation would destroy their national party and perhaps their nation.
Southern Whigs thus had to weigh the possibility that Texas might be abolitionized against the certainty that campaigning for annexation would split their party. As partisans no less than patriots, Southern Whigs treasured their party’s role in maximizing commerce, restraining Caesars, upholding communal morality national and local against Jacksonian untrammeled individualism. So Southern Whigs swiftly decided that Texas’s charms were less precious than Whiggery. Southern Democrats, if faced with the same choice between losing Texas and forfeiting everything else politically dear, might well have opted for party too. The question remained whether Union could endure with only one southern party facing that sobering choice—and whether the party restrained from battling for slavery could prevail in a section eager for Texas.
2
Henry Clay expressed Southern Whigs’ sense of annexation’s relatively low priority in his so-called Raleigh Letter of April 17, 1844.1 The Whigs’ imminent presidential candidate issued this statement on Texas almost simultaneously with Calhoun’s Pakenham and Van Buren’s Hammet letters. While Clay concurred with Van Buren in opposing the Calhoun-Tyler treaty, the two treaty opponents differed on post-treaty annexation policy. Van Buren announced he would go for Texas, even if he could not persuade Mexico to accept the fait accompli, assuming a national majority preferred war and annexation to peace and no Texas. Clay, in contrast, would halt annexation unless Mexico assented. He would also deny Texas entrance into the Union, no matter whether Mexico agreed, should “a considerable and respectable portion of the confederacy” express “decided opposition.” Only with no “hazard of foreign war” and “general concurrence” of both sections would he annex Texas.
General concurrence! Henry Clay sounded like John C. Calhoun. The Kentuckian’s notion that neither section ought to pass a law unless the other section concurred resembled Carolina gospel. Still, one lesson of 1844 was that Clay merely continued his longtime relationship with the spirit of 1832. Only Calhoun changed—changed portentously from negator to apostle of federal impositions.
On slavery issues, Clay had always opposed impositions on either section. In the late 1830s, he had urged that a northern antislavery majority must halt, if the southern minority differed. He now demanded that national annexation must be aborted, if most Northerners objected. Do Nothingism on slavery, for or against, without general concurrence: that would best keep both sections inside the system.
Until Texas, Calhoun too had stood for barring sectional blocs from actions, gagging northern abolitionists from petitioning, stopping federal authorities from censoring southern mails. But with annexation, Calhoun’s dogma that only general concurrence justified federal intervention dissolved into the demand that the federal government must intervene to shore up slavery, however many Northerners objected. Southern extremists now would use federal power to save Texas. They would later demand federal action to run down slaves, to protect slavery in national territories, and to annex enslaved Cuba. King Cotton sought the power of King Numbers. If you Southerners can rally a majority, shrugged Martin Van Buren, I’ll defer to your mandate. If Southerners dare defy “considerable and respectable” northern sentiment, warned Henry Clay, I’ll bar their way.
Choose ye between us, a delighted Van Buren chortled to Southern Democrats after both candidates’ letters were published. Capture your congressional mandate for Texas, he in effect told annexationists, while I stop Henry Clay from nullifying your victory. Once the people demand annexation, we must obey their instruction. But do not press Texas upon me until our mutual masters, the people, speak.
3
The Magician’s very cockiness about finessing Calhoun produced special fury when Southern Democrats scorned his clever stall. Van Buren erred, most of Van Buren’s best southern friends sadly concluded, in thinking that delay was tolerable. An exasperated Sam Houston would not wait, England would negotiate a Texas-Mexico settlement, Englishmen would flow into their new El Dorado.2 Van Buren also miscalculated, Van Buren’s friends lamented, in thinking that Southern Democrats’ most dangerous opponent was necessarily Clay, who admittedly promised less on annexation. The more threatening foe might be President Tyler, who promised far more. Given the perceived peril, both to slavery in Texas and to Southern Democrats who compromised on immediate annexation, no staller could have many southern votes in the Democratic Convention.
Van Buren’s best southern friends sent him that word. Their sorrowing letters read as if a death in the family had occurred. Van Buren’s southern cronies had cherished the political wizard, helped bring him to national power, rejoiced in his victories, suffered through his defeats. Now they had to tell him that he was finished in their section.
Thomas Ritchie found the task particularly sad. For two decades, Ritchie, editor of the Richmond Enquirer, had been Van Buren’s man in Virginia. Now, Ritchie felt compelled to fracture the Albany-Richmond alliance. “I had set my heart upon nothing more sincerely than to see you reelected,” wrote Ritchie. “But we cannot carry Virginia for you.” Why? I enclose my letters about your Hammet Letter. “Read them and judge for yourself.”3
Ritchie’s mail testified to the Jacksonian South’s sense of crisis. “The safety of the South,” wrote one Virginia Democrat, demands annexation. “No delay should be indulged.” “Yankees must realize,” declared another, that Texas “is a speculative question with them; a practical & operating question with us of the utmost magnitude.” Northern allies must “give us a Texas candidate, or we must split.”4
Northern Van Burenites found this latest southern blackmail insufferable. We have eternally caved in on tariffs and gag rules, wrote United States Senator Silas Wright of New York. Now, after “ungrateful” Southerners had refused to delay annexation at least until we could win an election and negotiate with Mexico, “I cannot advise to throw away the North.” Wright was “for looking at home some and not South [at] all.”5
Northern Whigs had for years charged that Van Buren, by looking South, turned the southern minority into a national majority. Van Buren now urged that the northern majority must rule, first in the party, then in the nation. He would begin the Democratic National Convention with a majority of delegates. His followers would demand his nomination. This time, southern bullies must yield to democracy’s master, the majority.
4
Unfortunately for Van Buren, the decisive issue at the late May 1844 Democratic Convention became the size of a legitimate majority.6 Van Burenites, who would possess a simple majority for their man on the first presidential ballot, demanded nomination by a majority as small as one. The Democratic Convention of 1840 had been newly run on that principle. But anti-Van Burenites, led by Robert Walker, sought a return to the more traditional convention rules of 1832 and 1836: a two-thirds majority necessary for nomination.
Van Buren lost this vote on the rules because his majority was not hard enough. Van Buren’s support was particularly soft in areas where a rival chieftain aspired to be the party’s nominee, should the New Yorker falter. The best example, James Buchanan’s Pennsylvania, was unanimously pledged to Van Buren on the first presidential roll call. But Pennsylvania’s “Van Buren” delegates split their votes on the pivotal rules question, 12 for nomination by two-thirds, 13 for simple majorities. In all, northern delegates voted 102–58 for majorities of one, while southern delegates voted 90–14 for nomination only by a two-thirds majority. That split gave anti-Van Burenites their victory on the rules, 148–116. It was the same old story: a healthy fraction of Northerners plus most Southerners gave the minority section majority control over the nation’s majority party.7
On the first ballot for presidential nomination, the majority section still sought to impose its candidate. Martin Van Buren received 146 votes, 55% of the convention and but 31 votes short of the now-needed two-thirds majority. Only 27 of 161 northern delegates voted against him. Only 12 of 105 southern delegates voted for him. As usual, the most northern areas of the South were least southern. Van Buren won nine of the 30 Border South delegates, and only three of the 75 Middle and Deep South delegates. The numbers posed the issue. Could the black-belt South nullify Van Buren’s national majority in the party?8
The answer, during the rest of the bitter day, was You bet. Through seven ballots Van Buren’s support slowly shrunk. Van Buren loyalists angrily determined to nullify everyone else. On the day’s last tally, Van Buren’s original 146 delegates had sunk to 99, sufficient to prevent any other candidate’s two-thirds majority. The party, in peril of dissolution, adjourned till the morrow.
The respite, for tired delegates, meant more exhausting politicking. Hours of conversing, caucusing, and conniving yielded one conviction. The party needed a new candidate acceptable to all factions. The search for such a soul went in several false directions.
Then an ideal figure emerged. James K. Polk of Tennessee, former speaker of the national House of Representatives, while a fervent annexationist, had stuck with Van Buren after the Texas issue intruded. Young Hickory, as Polk was called, had thus stood positioned as the southern annexationist best suited to heal party wounds by becoming Van Buren’s vice presidential nominee. When Van Buren’s presidential nomination stalled, Van Burenites grumpily agreed that so acceptable a vice presidential nominee could move up on the ticket. Anti-Van Buren annexationists were not grumpy at all about this slaveholder fervent for Texas.
The party’s deliverance was finalized on May 29,1844, with James K. Polk’s unanimous nomination. When the Polk bandwagon rolled through the hall, South Carolinians, with their usual disgust for mere party, observed only as spectators above in the gallery. Someone asked for the Carolinians’ approval. “South Carolina seconds the nation,” came down the answer from on high. John C. Calhoun’s treaty had found its home in the Jackson Party, with his state almost back in the fold and Van Buren’s supporters restive inside the movement.9
The way Southern Democrats had to force even James K. Polk, that loyal Van Burenite, upon Van Buren partisans indicates one last time that unconditional annexation, at least in the campaign of 1844, required an intransigent slavocracy. Still, once Northern Democrats had been bullied into the southern policy, Polk’s was a version of annexationism less obnoxious in the North. Young Hickory, although a slaveholder, was primarily a political operator. The Tennessean never understood why others waxed hot on slavery. He never linked bondage and annexation. He saw Texas as military shield of the Southwest and vital to his own goal, an American opening on the Pacific. James K. Polk lusted not as much for Texas, the former Mexican possession, as for that still-retained Mexican prize, California. Polk saw California harbors, particularly San Francisco, as the key to trade routes to the Orient. His was not the southern mentality of the depressed 1840s—claustrophobic, cramped, craving a safety valve, but the southern mentality of the prosperous 1850s—expansive, thrusting out, seeking more land and markets.10
Or rather, Young Hickory’s was the Young American mentality of the post-Tyler age. Polk was the first Southerner important in the Texas story to fit the Manifest Destiny label. His persona was of an American operator equally interested in the far North and the far South. He would propel democracy and enterprise forward by annexing both Texas and Oregon. The South’s drive for Texas had passed from the men needed to secure a party nomination, worried sectionalists who could inflame Southern Democrats, to the man needed to win a national election, the national imperialist who might defuse the North’s resentment of the Slavepower.
5
A week after the Democratic Convention came together on Polk’s imperialism, the Senate split apart on Tyler’s treaty. A two-thirds majority was required for ratification. Instead the Senate rejected the treaty by over two-thirds, 35–16, on June 8, 1844.11 Whigs voted 27–1 against ratification, Democrats 15–8 for approval. Northern Democrats barely managed a majority against the Slavepower, 7–5, with one abstaining; Northern Whigs opposed annexation, 13–0. Southern Democrats affirmed the treaty, 10–1; Southern Whigs said no to Tyler, 14–1.
The five Northern Democrats who massed behind the South included James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. On Texas, as he had been on the gag rule eight years earlier, future President Buchanan was to the southern side of ex-President Van Buren. Texas, said Robert Walker’s Pennsylvania friend, “will be the means of gradually drawing the slaves far to the South,” where they may “finally pass off into Mexico.”12
The safety valve theory did not appease Van Buren’s northern senatorial supporters. But Polk was their man, and Van Buren had promised to follow public orders on annexation. Should Polk’s version of imperialism secure him the White House, pro-Van Buren senators might have to rally with Buchanan behind Southern Democrats. Aided by a couple more Whig turncoats, the Democratic Party might then annex Texas by a majority of one, assuming some way could be found for senatorial majorities short of two-thirds to annex.
Before annexation negotiations had begun, Texas Minister Isaac Van Zandt had told Sam Houston that ways might be found for simple majorities to annex. Van Zandt may have gleaned the idea from Abel T. Upshur, or more likely Robert Walker. At any rate, three days after the treaty was defeated, President Tyler suggested how King Numbers might sneak around the Constitution. While the Senate had to approve a treaty by a two-thirds vote, both houses of Congress could admit a new state by respective majorities of one. So forget about annexation by treaty, Tyler urged Congress following defeat of his treaty. Instead admit Texas by simple majorities.13
By now seeking to bypass the two-thirds constitutional requirement for ratification after lately insisting on a two-thirds requirement for the Democratic Party’s nomination, southern annexationists appeared to be playing fast and loose with majoritarian rules. That appearance was particularly damning to ideologues such as Calhoun, who had long urged that republics required minority safeguards. These Southrons’ disregard for any republican procedure in their way caused Yankees and even some key Southerners to bridle at their bullying.
The resulting bitter senatorial confrontation on Tyler’s proposed evasion of the two-thirds roadblock was the first public congressional explosion over Texas, the treaty having been considered in secret session. The angriest protagonists were not a Northerner and a Southerner but two warriors from different Souths. George McDuffie, aging former South Carolina Nullifier, defended John C. Calhoun’s new loyalty to King Numbers. Senator Thomas Hart Benton, fiery Missourian, Van Buren partisan, and the only Southern Democratic senator to oppose Tyler’s treaty, attacked the latest Slavepower attempt to overcome lack of constitutionally prescribed numbers. Never had the gulf between the young western Border South and the elderly eastern Deep South seemed so cavernous.
Thomas Hart Benton, Missouri’s senator ever since the state entered the Union, was no longer the youngest hero of the freshest West. But the senator, like his state, retained a middle-aged vigor. Benton cherished his own scarcely enslaved city, St. Louis, for being barely a southern and utterly a western metropolis. Benton would bet Missouri’s future on attracting more white frontiersmen, not on keeping its relatively few black slaves. If that did not sound very southern, so be it. Benton would boost Missouri’s western thrust and allow its southernness to diffuse away.
Benton told the Senate that he had long favored annexation, but only to consolidate the West. This nonsense about a southern crisis over Texas was Calhoun’s latest attempt to manufacture secession. Tyler’s treaty, “far from securing the annexation of Texas, only provides for the disunion of these states.”
Benton the Democrat, like Henry Clay the Whig, was the classic border pacifier. He was “no bigot or fanatic in the cause of slavery.” He wished to add Texas in a way which would please North as well as South. He would accordingly reduce Texas to the size of the largest current state. He would then abolish slavery “in one half” of the remaining Texas territory. His proposal, he bragged, would “withdraw slavery from the whole left bank of the Rio Grande.” He would thus soothe the North and consolidate the Union.14
Where Thomas Hart Benton of the more lightly enslaved new Border West would free half of Texas for vigorous free laborers, George McDuffie of the more thickly enslaved ancient Atlantic South would keep all of Texas enslaved to save fading slaveholders. McDuffie looked the way his message sounded: ever so much older than Benton. The comparison seemed the starker because only a decade previously, when Benton had been the middle-aged zealot of the Border Southwest, McDuffie had been the young hotspur of South Carolina. On the stump campaigning for nullification, McDuffie had slashed at Forty Bale demons who would imprison Carolina. But where Benton had picked up momentum with age, McDuffie had aged prematurely. Almost paralyzed from bullet wounds, almost breathless from tuberculosis, almost penniless from Carolina’s sour economy, he felt himself and his world to be squeezed as if in an airless closet. His fellow senators could barely hear his whispered plea for an escape valve.
McDuffie believed that British threats endangered Texas, and Texas was necessary for “our very existence.” You cannot “pen … up” our “superabundant slave population … within their present limits.” Texas must “operate as a safety valve” until “the Providence of God shall provide some natural and safe way of getting rid of this description of people.” You, sir, McDuffie softly hissed at Benton, are the Brutus who would slay your homeland.15
Benton retorted that the traitorous McDuffie would slay the republic. As for my being Brutus, declared the Missourian, he would not, like Brutus, fall upon his sword. He would save his weapon for traitors “who appear in arms against their country.” With these words, Benton smashed his fist on George McDuffie’s desk. McDuffie, sick and emaciated, just stared back.16
No playwright could have penned a better transition scene. McDuffie epitomized Neanderthals who longed for Texas to escape a wretched finale. That longing had helped create a severe enough southern sense of crisis to defeat Van Buren and promote Polk. But theories about diabolical English lords had not sufficiently impressed enterprising Northerners, much less marginal Southerners such as Benton. The Upshurs, Calhouns, and McDuffies had exerted their power. The future of the issue now lay with the swaggering Mr. Benton—and with the virile Mr. Polk’s ability to win a national mandate for western energy.
6
James K. Polk’s major opponent was Henry Clay, nominee as expected of the Whig Party. The Tennessean’s chances over the Kentuckian in the South were enhanced when another Southerner aborted his third-party challenge. President John Tyler had intended to run on a pro-treaty independent ticket if neither Democrats nor Whigs nominated an immediate annexationist. But Polk’s nomination made Tyler’s race both counterproductive (because annexationist votes would be split) and unwinnable (because the regular party candidate running on the same issue had too great an advantage). Andrew Jackson, intervening for the last time, wrote public letters, enabling Tyler, that old Jacksonian turncoat, to return to the fold honorably and endorse Polk.17
A bandwagon for James K. Polk swiftly developed in Middle and Lower Souths. The more Southerners thought about Texas, the more glorious became racial, economic, political, and military boons of Tyler’s treaty. Moreover, fear of English manipulation of Texas increased as the campaign progressed, for a new and more sensible theory became omnipresent about how England would intervene.
Abel P. Upshur had anticipated the shift in southern concern. Upshur’s first fear, that England would pressure Mexico into pressing Texas to emancipate, had lost its hold on the Virginian even before he pressed Sam Houston into negotiating. Upshur had then envisioned an upsetting second scenario: England would drop its suggestions to Mexico, hoping that a permanently independent Texas would emancipate slaves. Movements of English population to English-protected Texas would succeed where diplomatic ultimatums would fail.
Bases for Upshur’s initial apprehension about England pressuring Mexico evaporated the summer after Upshur died. Lord Aberdeen came to realize that the tactic enraged Americans, inspired annexation, and thus made an independent Texas less likely. Aberdeen also came to see that England could hardly pressure Mexico to make emancipation in Texas a precondition for independence, since England had already unconditionally recognized enslaved Texas.
The better way, Aberdeen realized, was to forget about emancipation until Texas secured independence. Then England might quietly help accomplish abolition. By explicitly repudiating former antislavery gestures, Aberdeen would take the heat out of Calhoun’s steaming rhetoric; and by helping Texas achieve independence, England would chill Sam Houston’s interest in annexation. Aberdeen even toyed with a so-called Diplomatic Act, whereby France and England would guarantee whatever boundaries Mexico and Texas agreed on.18
Aberdeen’s June 3,1844, letter to his American Minister Richard Pakenham both answered Calhoun’s famous Pakenham Letter and tested the proposed Diplomatic Act on England’s man in Washington. “Her Majesty’s Government,” declared Aberdeen, “have no intention to press at this time the abolition of … slavery on … Texas.” Nor would England “press the Government of Mexico to make the abolition of domestic slavery a sine qua non … for the recognition” of Texas. “But Her Majesty’s Government, although abstaining from such interference, do not the less deplore … slavery,… and they reserve themselves the right, … wherever they may think it expedient … to offer friendly counsel to Texas to take measures for the ultimate liberation of the country from the stain and calamity of domestic slavery.” Aberdeen closed by “again unequivocally” reiterating “that counsel alone, and not dictation, would be employed” (emphasis mine).19
Aberdeen’s underling in Washington had the good sense not to hand Calhoun this letter. Pakenham also kept to himself Aberdeen’s language about forbearing only “at this time” from offering Texas “friendly counsel” about “the ultimate liberation of the country from the stain and calamity of domestic slavery.” Pakenham instead officially informed Calhoun that Aberdeen had dropped “friendly counsel” to Mexico. Pakenham also shot back a letter to Aberdeen, warning that the proposed Diplomatic Act would hasten annexation. Aberdeen dropped the plan.20
The British foreign secretary was now reduced to one antislavery scenario. After enslaved Texas became permanently independent, English settlers, ideas, and cash might propel Texans towards emancipation. That remnant of a position looked to Southern Democrats to be the worst threat yet. As Thomas Ritchie’s Richmond Enquirer explained such fears on June 29, 1844, if Texas became permanently independent with England’s help, “thousands of voters,” Englishmen with antislavery inclinations, would flow to England’s new protectorate. The new Texans, “at the ballot box, will as effectually accomplish the object [of emancipation] as if it were made a formal article” of a treaty with England and Mexico. Only annexation, concluded Ritchie, could guarantee slavery’s survival on our southwestern flank.21
Ritchie’s conclusion, confirming Upshur’s final judgment, remains cogent in retrospect. With hindsight as at the time, one could endlessly dispute whether England could have induced Mexico to induce non-annexed Texas to emancipate. But slavery could indisputably have become shaky in a permanently non-annexed Lone Star Republic, especially if a Texas-England rapprochement had blossomed. American slaveholders would scarcely have moved many slaves into such a dangerous situation, not with all the uninhabited river valleys still left in the southern United States, not when American law barred the importation of slaves from foreign nations. The unintended consequence of the once-again-critical African slave trade edict was that American slaves brought to the foreign republic of Texas could not be legally dispatched back across the border, if English antislavery did advance. Not “propaganda” but the logic of the situation lay behind fears that only nonslaveholders would migrate to a permanently independent Texas. That population movement would make slaves, never relatively prevalent anyway, even more inconsequential.
I have “never feared the direct interference of England with slavery in Texas,” claimed Albert T. Burnley, who in 1844–5 twice repeated his earlier warning to his partner in Texas slaveholding pursuits, Virginia’s Beverley Tucker. But Burnley had worried before and did currently “fear, in case annexation is rejected,” that only nonslaveholders will migrate to Texas. Then “the people of Texas (encouraged by England) will themselves abolish slavery by the Ballot Box.”
Burnley urged Tucker to think again about what they “had best do in such a contingency.” The Texas entrepreneur knew “it is generally thought that we cannot bring our” slaves back across the United States border. Maybe the partners could break the American law. But our enterprise, concluded Burnley, like the institution of slavery in Texas, is “very uncertain.”22 That all-too-plausible uncertainty about unannexed Texas made Southern Democrats’ case for annexation in mid-1844 the more treacherous for Henry Clay to ignore.
7
In late July 1844, a month after Thomas Ritchie’s Richmond Enquirer warned of England’s possible new departure, Henry Clay issued a new public letter on annexation. In this so-called Alabama Letter, Clay declared “no personal objection to the annexation of Texas.” He would “be glad to see it, without dishonor, without war, [and] with the common consent of the Union.” Even antislavery Americans should consent to annexation, counseled Clay, for slaveholders’ migration towards the Caribbean tropics would eventually doom slavery in Texas, as in the South. The institution “is destined to become extinct, at some distant day, in my opinion by the operation of the inevitable laws of population. It would be unwise to refuse a permanent acquisition … on account of a temporary institution.”23
Northern Whigs, enraged by Clay’s newly announced personal preference for Texas, accused Clay of waffling from his previous opposition to annexation. A slight waffle had occurred. In his April 1844 Raleigh Letter, Clay had said nothing about Texas’s desirability under any circumstances. He had only discussed Texas’s undesirability under present circumstances.
But Clay’s overriding consistency revealed more about the man and his Border South world than did his slight shift. He retained his previous position that only “general concurrence” made slavery-related laws viable. “The paramount duty of preserving the Union intact,” Clay continued to emphasize, demanded opposing any slavery law which either section found undesirable.
Southerners noted all these qualifications on Clay’s endorsement of possible future annexation. Northerners noted the endorsement itself. With everyone unhappier, the politician who had inched slightly forward inched slightly back. In September 1844, Clay issued still another public letter. This time, he deemphasized possible future circumstances and re-emphasized opposition to annexation under present circumstances.24 Once again, opponents said he flip-flopped. Once again they were slightly right. But once again, Henry Clay’s consistent opposition to Texas, should the North object now or in the future, courted political defeat in Deep South areas where Whigs had for a decade been gaining.
Whig campaigners, desperate to avoid disaster in the Lower South, had few options, all poor. Several Southern Whigs repeated Waddy Thompson’s argument that the safety valve would depopulate the South and thus weaken the Slavepower. More urged that Clay, once President, would act on his personal desire for Texas. Most avoided the subject and stressed Whig commercial policies.25
Poor economic times invited that stress. The debilitating cotton depression, the worst and most prolonged in antebellum southern history, was lifting somewhat but still hovering as it had been for seven long years. In 1840, Whigs had rallied hard-pressed agriculturalists to demand more from their national government than the passive burial of national funds in federal basement vaults. In 1844, Southern Whigs dared to add that protective tariffs might protect southern farmers. Prohibitive taxes on imported manufactured cotton goods might boost demand for the South’s glut of cotton, since protected American textile factories might expand. Southerners now “very generally considered” free trade “an ‘obsolete idea,’” Robert Toombs, Georgia’s favorite young Whig, gloated privately to the faction’s senior senator, John Berrien.26
Toombs here displayed too much youthful enthusiasm about free trade becoming a relic for slaveholders. Yet southern attitudes about the national state were changing. Calhoun’s followers now sought national power to shore up slavery on southern fringes. Then why not shore up markets at the southern core?
The question highlighted the southern lesson of 1844. One essence of Southern Whiggery, its faith in using governments state and national to bolster commercial markets, was never more appropriate, never more stressed—and not remotely enough. The trouble was that traditional Whiggery rallied some 45% of southern voters—and 45% was not 50%. In presidential election years, stress on loyalty to slavery could secure the last 5%. That is why southern cries of disloyalty abounded in weeks and sometimes months before a President was elected—and why those periodic cries are such a poor guide to why the solid 45% of each party’s constituency remained true to partisan allegiances, no matter what slavery issue came up.
The swing vote remained crucial. In 1836 and 1840, Southern Whigs’ skill at loyalty politics had helped secure those elusive final percentage points separating narrow victory from narrow defeat. But in 1836 and 1840 when the New Yorker Van Buren ran against the Tennessean Hugh White and then the Virginia native William Henry Harrison, loyalty debates had focused on a matter congenial to Southern Whiggery: whose candidates were born furthest southwards? Now in 1844, loyalty politics featured a matter devastating to Southrons in John Quincy Adams’s party: Which national alliance could secure proslavery legislation? In 1844, Whigs stood damned as soft on Texas, therefore soft on slavery.
Arguments about commercial markets could not then move enough commercial farmers. Worse, annexation was itself a glorious ruling-class economic issue, offering visions of virgin land for slaveholders and multiple buyers for slaves. Worse still, Texas, a landowner’s as well as a slaveholder’s mecca, offered sublime vistas to nonslaveholders. The Lone Star Republic was the newest New World epitome of vast, cheap, fertile land for the downtrodden. Precisely that lure of wide-open prairies made nonslaveholding English migrants potentially devastating to slavery’s prospects in Texas, should American annexation fail.
American development after American annexation made more sense to Southerners of all classes. Poor Henry Clay, when he tried to claim a morsel of that solid southern sense for himself, became apostle of nonsense to Northern Whigs.
8
No wonder, then, that in November 1844, James K. Polk reversed a decade of growth for the Whig Party in the Lower South. Where Hugh Lawson White had carried Georgia in 1836 and William Henry Harrison had added Mississippi and Louisiana in 1840, Clay lost every state in the Deep South. Where White had picked up 48.5% of Deep South popular votes in 1836 and Harrison had soared to 52.3% in 1840, Clay’s share sank to 45.4% in 1844.27
In Border and Middle Souths, Clay managed to hang on to the five states Harrison had captured in 1840. But the Whig Upper South margin of victory narrowed ominously. Tennessee, home state of Hickories Old and New but a Whig bastion since 1836, now belonged to the Whigs by only 113 votes of some 120,000 cast. Even in the Border South, the Whig percentage sank from 55.7% in 1840 to 50.5% in 1844, the party’s weakest showing since 1828.
Clay did much less well than Harrison in the North too.28 The shift from John C. Calhoun’s mentality to James K. Polk’s enabled Democrats to claim, rightly, that their candidate was no Slavepower expansionist. Polk wanted Oregon as much as Texas, and California even more. He would oust England everywhere west of the present United States. A presidential campaign for national imperialism divorced from a southern crusade for slavery, a political impossibility in 1844 until the Tyler administration forced the issue and Southern Democrats forced an expansionist candidate, had now become a promising northern reality.
Promising, at least, in the four midwestern states of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana. In this northwestern corner, Democratic campaigners truly were the Manifest Destiny spokesmen unfortunately painted as everywhere omnipresent in latter-day history textbooks. In the Midwest, Polk partisans called acquisition of Texas and Oregon not a southern but a western concern, replete with free land for frontiersmen and safety for American frontiers. That argument helped turn around the two parties’ fortunes in the four midwestern states. In 1840, Van Buren had been overwhelmed in Ohio and had won only Illinois, very narrowly. In 1844, Polk overwhelmed Clay in Illinois and lost only Ohio, very narrowly. Throughout the quartet of midwestern states, Democrats’ total popular vote rose 20% between 1840 and 1844, while Whigs’ rose only 4%.
East of Ohio, Northern Democrats were more chary of Manifest Destiny. In New York, Silas Wright, second only to Van Buren in Van Burenite hearts, ran for governor. Wright espoused the Little Magician’s salutory stall rather than James K. Polk’s immediate annexationism. “But a few years will pass,” Wright predicted, before Oregon and Texas could be “peacefully and honorably” annexed.29 While Wright honorably stalled on Texas, Democratic politicians in New York and Pennsylvania hustled to court new foreign voters in New York and Philadelphia slums. Henry Clay would blame his defeat on first-time immigrant voters’ surge to the Democracy, a ghetto voting wave utterly unlike midwestern farmers surging towards frontier expansionism.
Still, while nothing so simple as a northern referendum on Texas occurred, the issue hurt Clay more than he admitted. The election was so close that little things meant much. Clay’s slight waffles on Texas might well have led a few disgusted Northern Whigs to stay home on Election Day. Only a comparative handful of stay-at-homes could have turned the election around, for Polk won by only 5,106 out of 470,062 votes in New York and by only 3,422 out of 52,096 votes in Michigan. The shift of these states’ 41 electoral votes would have transformed a 170–105 Polk Electoral College victory into a 146–129 Clay triumph.
To complicate analysis of why Clay lost this election in the North even further, those Yankee Whigs turned off by Clay’s Texas waffling had an alternative to staying home. They could vote for the non-waffling third-party candidate, the Liberty Party’s James K. Birney. The ex-Kentucky slaveholder pledged never to annex Texas or any other slave territory. Birney picked up 3,632 votes in Michigan and 15,812 in New York, enough ballots to swing both states and thus the election to Polk, assuming Birneyites otherwise would have voted for Clay.
That assumption, unfortunately, is debatable. Birney, a Democrat, was an attractive protest candidate for Jacksonians who disliked Polk’s annexationism. Then again, those Northern Whigs who thought anti-annexationism more important than old Jackson-Whig issues perhaps seized on Birney’s candidacy to make that statement.
Amidst all this haze about whether immigrants’ votes or Birney’s candidacy or Clay’s waffling or annexationism’s midwestern appeals deprived Whigs of a northern victory, two conclusions remained clear. First of all, northern voters had nothing like demanded Manifest Destiny. While Polk secured 14,838 more Yankee votes than Clay, the anti-annexation candidates, Clay and Birney, together secured 47,462 more northern votes than Polk. Secondly, Polk’s formula of desectionalizing Texas and nationalizing expansionism had certainly not killed off the Northern Democracy.
Van Burenites would more likely kill off the national party if they blocked Democrats’ southern electoral mandate. Martin Van Buren had promised to follow the election returns in formulating future annexation policy. His northern crowd might now have to bow to southern decision, assuming James K. Polk could keep Texas annexation divorced from Slavepower domineering.