CHAPTER 25
Unfortunately for Van Burenites, Texas and Slavepower aggression could not be kept separate. When the lame-duck Congress returned to Washington in December 1844, the lame-duck Tyler administration reiterated that Senate and House could and should admit Texas by simple majorities.
Tyler and Calhoun’s proposal, branded as proslavery because coming from them, soon bore a worse Slavepower taint. A few Southern Whigs sought to reverse electoral defeats they had suffered from being labeled soft on Texas. They would enable Texas, once admitted to the Union, to balloon into five slave states.
1
On January 13, 1845, Whig Congressman Milton Brown of Tennessee introduced an amendment to the Tyler-proposed joint House-Senate resolutions admitting Texas by simple majorities. Brown’s amendment would allow Texas state legislators to carve out of their now-to-be-admitted state up to four areas, each automatically to be admitted as future states. The surviving segment of Texas could remain a fifth state.
The House eventually made explicit Brown’s implicit indication that a chunk lying wholly north of the Missouri Compromise 36°30′ line could only be admitted as a free state. But as in the Missouri Compromise, any chunk south of 36°30′ would be admitted, slave or free, as inhabitants desired. The principles of the nation’s most sacred compromise, cheered Milton Brown, would avoid future controversy over division of Texas.1
Some compromise, scoffed Northerners. The relatively tiny area of vast Texas north of the 36°30′ line was widely considered both uninhabitable and not legitimately part of Texas. Should that inconsequential segment ever be peopled and established as legitimate Texas turf, the region still could not become a free state unless the Texas legislature agreed to let erring brothers go. Texas solons could meanwhile arrange for four enslaved chunks to be cut off south of 36°30′. The remaining part of Texas, including all area north of 36°30′, could remain a fifth slaveholding state.
Milton Brown’s ultra-southern Texas proposal recalled Maryland Whig Congressman William Cost Johnson’s ultra-tight gag rule proposition. With Texas, as with the gag, anti-party extremists first pressured Southern Democrats to push Northern Democrats. In both cases, however, pressure reached its climax when Southern Whigs competed with Southern Democrats to see who could do most for slavery.
Behind Milton Brown’s climactic imperiousness lay Southern Whigs’ frustration at Texas politics. The combination of Northern Whigs unwilling to compromise and Southern Democrats eager to secure uncompromising annexation had lately left Southern Whigs haplessly hiding from an inescapable issue. Only in normally Whig Georgia were resulting losses worse than in Milton Brown’s Tennessee, usually a Whig stronghold, now a spot where Clay’s 1844 margin over Polk was all of 0.01 % of votes cast. The Milton Browns felt compelled to reverse this electoral trend before it overwhelmed them.
Joseph H. Peyton, a Tennessee Whig congressman who supported Milton Brown’s plan, explained the partisan strategy privately to a political titan back home. Brown’s addendum to Democrats’ annexation proposal, Peyton cheered, was “well calculated to trip the heels” of Tennessee Democrats and “to prevent them from making capital out of a question that should never have been made a party question.” Under our plan to turn the one slave state of Texas into five, “the South could acquire a wonderful increase in political power.” Nothing could better “check the infernal spirit of abolitionism.”2
When publicly defending their strategy for out-doing the Democracy, Milton Brown’s Southern Whig supporters demonstrated that they shared Southern Democrats’ claustrophobic mentality. Both Whig Senator Ephraim Foster of Tennessee, who wrote Brown’s amendment, and Whig Congressman Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who helped guide the measure through the House, presented illuminating addresses. Both the Tennessean and the Georgian were from customary Whig strongholds lost or almost lost in the 1844 elections. Both were eager to strike back at Democrats’ damning charge that they were soft on Texas. Yet neither wished to be seen as devoted to slavery. By agitating for annexation while apologizing for slavery, Foster and Stephens deepened the portrait of a trapped world longing for escape valves.
Democrats, charged both these Southern Whig congressmen, endangered the South and the Union by evading the question of Texas’s future division. So enormous a land mass invited separation. That controversy could devastate the South. The majority North, declared Foster, would “wash out the stain of slavery” as a condition of dividing Texas. The South, already trapped on its northern flank “and driven back to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico,” would next be “commanded to take the water.” Foster “for one, answered—No!” The Southern Whig called “upon every” southern senator to “draw the sword” for multiple slave states from Texas.
From this highpoint of southern righteousness, Foster descended to stagger around the question of slaveholders’ rectitude. I am, he said, “no advocate of slavery in the abstract. Undoubtedly slavery was an evil.” The curse had been “fastened upon us and could not be got rid of.” Still, Foster bragged, when “he went home,” his “slaves come to him with words of affection and love.” Fanatics would insufferably “destroy all these associations.”3
Alexander Stephens’s torturous path towards southern righteousness reveals even more than Ephraim Foster’s, for little Alec would soon become a soaring proslavery orator. In 1845, however, Alexander Stephens declared himself “no defender of slavery in the abstract. Liberty always had charms for me.” The Georgia congressman had no wish to see slavery “extended to other countries.” But “a stern necessity, bearing the marks and impress of the hand of the Creator himself,” kept southern blacks enslaved. By adding representatives of already enslaved Texas to slaveholders’ congressional contingent, Stephens would expand not slavery but the South’s power over its own predicament.4
Ephraim Foster and Alec Stephens, like so many apologetic Southerners at the time of Texas, lived on that nervous borderline between shame and pride. They found slavery a festering danger to southern moral, economic, and racial health. They also found outside agitators who would imprison them with free blacks unconscionable. They were proudly forging safety valves for excess slaves and decent relationships with familial servants. And how were their pains rewarded? With northern cries that they were despicable tyrants and that their safety valves must be sealed off!
To add to the fury of the Alexander Stephenses, Democrats had won an electoral landslide by conflating Southern Whigs with the South’s worst tormentors, John Quincy Adams and holier-than-thou New England Whigs. Stephens, Foster, and Brown would set the record straight. They would defy Northern Whigs who sounded and acted as if Southerners were depraved. They would bolster slaveholders’ control over slavery’s fate five times more than Democrats’ mere annexation. With that determination, and the resulting Milton Brown Amendment, yet more Southerners, with yet more pride at handling their shame, proposed yet another safety valve, and in the proposing made Texas a southern salvation still harder for Northerners to stomach.
2
Southern Democrats, as usual, would not allow Whigs to become more successfully aggressive on slavery-related matters. A few of you may be able to propose better southern defenses, Democrats taunted the Milton Browns and Alexander Stephenses, as they had taunted William Cost Johnson on his extreme gag rule proposal. But your party tilts too far northwards to pass anything leaning southwards. Only the Democratic Party can secure a boon to slaveholders because only Southern Democrats can force northern allies to heel.
Southern Democrats were right. Just about every Northern Whig scorned this latest Slavepower power grab. Their Yankee wing’s intransigence led most Southern Whigs in the House to run away from Milton Brown. Among Border South Whig congressmen, no one voted for the Brown Amendment. Even in Middle and Lower Souths, Milton Brown could manage only an even split of Whig congressmen.
Democrats saved Milton Brown Whiggery. Southern Democrats voted to add Brown’s amendment to the joint congressional resolution admitting Texas 59–1. Northern Democrats concurred, 50–30. As usual, Lower North Democrats were the South’s best allies, voting 33–5 to allow Texas to carve itself into five states. Meanwhile, Upper North Democrats voted Northern Whigs’ way, 2517. So by a vote of 118–101, Milton Brown’s future-division amendment was added to the joint congressional resolution admitting Texas by simple majorities. The House then approved the amended joint resolution, with the National Democracy again powering the Slavepower and only eight of 26 Southern Whigs concurring with Milton Brown.5
3
The amended joint resolution now faced a harder test in the Senate. While the South-leaning Democratic Party controlled the House by almost a two-to-one majority, the North-leaning Whig Party controlled the Senate, 28–24. The previous June, this same Senate had scuttled Tyler’s treaty of annexation 35–16, with one Northern Democrat abstaining. Only 15 to 24 Democrats and one of 28 Whigs had voted aye. The Whig Lone Ranger was John Henderson of Mississippi. Even if every Democrat now joined Henderson in approving the far more southern package of Texas plus the Brown Amendment, two more Whig senators would be needed for Whiggery, Milton Brown-style, to pass.
Southern Whig senators, usually powerless in their party and on the Senate floor, for once could determine a historic outcome. The faction rose to the occasion. Its few members creatively debated among themselves whether the imprisoned South should risk a break for Texas, and whether Southern Whigs should risk a bolt to the Southern Democrats. The result was the most sophisticated discussion yet of that southern claustrophobia everywhere underlying Texas annexation.
These Whig sophisticates were no ivory tower intellectuals. Like Milton Brown and House compatriots, Southern Whig senators were primarily politicians in a tight squeeze. The few Whig senators who supported annexation gloomed most about allowing Southern Democrats all the glory over Texas. The many Southern Whig senators who held the line against Slavepower expansionism worried most about the party-shattering consequences of defying Northern Whigs. Still, the very way these politicoes publicly rationalized their positions indicates again that Southern Democrats’ views about Texas had partially infected their opponents.
Senator William Archer of Virginia was the most conflicted Southern Whig, for he relished Robert Walker’s safety valve while deploring John C. Calhoun’s majoritarianism. Archer, a sometimes Tyler confidant and chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, had told the Senate back in June 1844 that an Upper South world of “mere grain and vegetable production” required a “drain for slave labor in Texas” to achieve “the highest advantage.” His constituents also faced race war à la San Domingo without “the appropriate drain for their redundant slaves.”6
But in February 1845, William Archer emphasized that he feared King Numbers more than he valued the safety valve. Archer trembled at “the will, however transitory or excited, of a numerical majority.” The gullible mob was putty in the hands of that “worst of all earthly mischiefs, demagogues, usurping … the will of the numerical majority for their own purposes.”
The Founding Fathers, cheered this Virginia Whig, had counterpoised a Senate based on property against a House based on numbers. This aristocratic chamber had sole power to decide whether a treaty adding more numbers to the Union should be ratified. A one-third senatorial minority could halt expansive treaties. The South, still possessing over one-third the senators, could safeguard the Constitution at just the point Northerners could swell King Numbers into an absolute despot.
Now, winced William Archer, John C. Calhoun would demolish this minority protection in the name of rallying a simple majority for a joint resolution admitting a slave state. Archer preferred to remember that simple majorities could destroy permanent minorities. No boon such as the safety valve was worth allowing the North dictatorship over how, when, and where American mobocracy would balloon.7
William Archer here summoned Abel P. Upshur’s principles against Upshur’s successors’ attempt to detour around the unachievable two-thirds majority for an annexation treaty. In all those years as an almost somebody back in Accomac County, Judge Upshur had called the Constitution the only states’ rights hope against King Numbers and demagogical retainers. After becoming Secretary of State, Upshur had played the long shot that annexation might enable states’ rights ideologues to oust demagogues and rally mobs.
Archer shuddered at such a gamble. He would love to have Texas, but only the safe constitutional way, by a two-thirds ratification of a treaty. In the name of salvaging minority principle, he would restrain the encircled minority from securing its vital Texas outlet by an illegitimate simple majority.
A couple of Deep South Whig senators, John Berrien of Georgia and Alexander Barrow of Louisiana, attacked the Tyler administration’s maneuver more totally than could the Middle South’s William Archer because they distrusted Robert Walker’s safety valve.8 An outlet to Texas enabling the South’s slaves to drain away looked to these gentlemen like one of those nineteenth-century bleedings fatal to the patient. Berrien and Barrow admitted the South was ill. Because of overproduction, said Louisiana’s Alexander Barrow, cotton prices were low. But could prices “be raised by adding to the Union the finest cotton region in the world?” The slave drain from the aging South, regretted Georgia’s John Berrien, made slaveholding states increasingly scarce. But would Southerners who rushed to Texas strengthen an institution thereby “shorn of its strength” in “Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee?”
A South dumping population and wealth through the safety valve, emphasized Berrien and Barrow, would miss the constitutional protections traded for Texas. Fewer southern states would mean greater northern power and vaster free labor commonwealths, increasingly capable of annexing yet more free areas by simple majorities. Southern states’ rights “would be placed at the mercy of that most tyrannical of all tyrannical kings, King Numbers.”
King Numbers! Calhoun’s words, again and again thrown back at Calhoun, emphasized how much Mr. Nullifier had changed. The Carolinian no longer positioned himself where he had stood in the Post Office Controversy, attacking Andrew Jackson’s proposed federal censorship of abolitionist mailings, lest majoritarian power later damage the slavocracy. Calhoun now wanted the federal majority’s hands heavily laid on a southern hinterland where he judged slaveholders were fatally weak.
In response to his old dirge that the federal power deployed could come back to haunt the South, Calhoun implicitly answered that slaveholders must gamble. Federally secured Texas was vitally needed to shield the South’s vulnerable outposts from enemies beyond the gates—beyond the ocean. Compared with this new Calhoun, William Archer, John Berrien, and Alexander Barrow were like old turtles, receding back into crusty constitutional shells.
Calhoun’s advantage was that in the 1844 elections, black-belt voters had voted for annexation. Three Whig senators took the lesson to heart. John Henderson of Mississippi, who alone among Whigs had voted for John Tyler’s treaty, was now joined by William Merrick of Maryland and Henry Johnson of Louisiana in voting to admit Texas by a simple majority.
The trio of Whigs believed the South must have the Texas outlet. Confine blacks “within narrow limits” and allow multiplying slaves to become “so much more numerous than the whites,” emphasized Maryland’s William Merrick, and “I cannot contemplate with composure the scene.”9 A South overcrowded with blacks, added Mississippi’s John Henderson, would be the more vulnerable to antislavery agitators encamped just beyond. An “Anglo-American” population in Texas, “alien in interest, policy, and nationality,” would be “a nucleous, a place of refuge, to which the discontents of our country will resort.” And why must Southerners tolerate this incendiary British encampment on their hinterlands? Because, Henderson scoffed, Yankee moralists wished “the slavery interest… pressed a little more to the wall,” and slaveholders “rendered a little more uneasy.”10
John Henderson’s two new allies, previously his opponents on Tyler’s treaty, had lately suffered Democrats’ charges that only southern traitors would back anti-Slavepower Whigs against Texas. With relief and resentment, these Southern Whigs now condemned Northern Whigs who had embarrassed them. “Opposition” to Texas, “proceeding from” the northern “quarter, for such” an anti-southern “purpose,” declared Louisiana’s Henry Johnson, “had operated powerfully” to push him towards annexation.11
Henry Johnson, convert to annexationism, and Alexander Barrow, still against admitting Texas, were both slavery’s defenders. The two Louisiana Whig senators differed only on the best strategy for slaveholders entrapped. Alexander Barrow, along with John Berrien of Georgia and William Archer of Virginia, believed that escape via safety valves and majorities of one would lead to more hopeless imprisonment. Henry Johnson, along with John Henderson of Mississippi and William Merrick of Maryland, believed that a healthy civilization must cut past cagers, however dangerous the jail break. Both sides in this debate made their cases cogently. The thwarted slaveholder omnipresent in all debaters’ rhetoric seemed endangered whether he charged or retreated.12
That intellectual stalemate aside—and Southerners could not put aside anxiety about prisons from which there were no good escapes—Southern Whigs’ confrontation with each other yielded a political victor. In a Senate split 28–24 the Whigs’ way, the three Whigs who deserted an overwhelmingly anti-annexationist party altered the balance of power. Assuming every Democratic senator now massed behind Milton Brown’s gift to slaveholders, John C. Calhoun would secure a narrow—and perchance dangerous—conquest of King Numbers.
4
Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton would not allow such a Slavepower triumph. Benton, George McDuffie’s antagonist in the previous session and the only Southern Democrat who had voted no on the annexation treaty, would never vote yes on an annexation still more slavery-oriented. Where Milton Brown wished to allow annexed Texas to turn itself into five slave states, Thomas Hart Benton wanted Texas, if annexed, to be split equally into slave and free areas.13 As Benton had explained to Missouri constituents the previous summer, he relished annexation, “but for none of the negro reasons—or as it ought to be pronounced on this occasion, nigger reasons.”14
Northern Van Buren Democrats considered only Benton’s Negro-free annexationism acceptable. These Yankee partisans remained bitter that Southern Democrats had dumped Van Buren for rejecting immediate annexation. Now Southerners’ demands had escalated more insufferably, just as had happened with gag rules. “What have northern men ever gained by yielding to” such demands? asked Senator John Niles of Connecticut. “What did Van Buren get for his strong leaning to southern interests, so as to bring upon him the reproach of Northern man with Southern principles?” John Niles could favor Texas only Thomas Hart Benton’s way, “as a great national question.” He could not tolerate Milton Brown’s “hateful” transformation of annexation into so much “a southern question and a slavery question” as to wreck “the Democratic Party of the North.”15
Southern Bentonians and Northern Van Burenites came to realize that while Brown’s potential future division of Texas into five slave states seemed too southern, Benton’s freeing of half a slave republic seemed too Yankee. Thomas Hart Benton’s realization was especially acute. In January 1845, the Missouri legislature instructed the state’s senators and representatives to secure annexation, Slavepower-style.16 Benton, who forever tiptoed on the edge of being not southern enough even for not-very-southern Missouri, now struck himself as precariously north of his constituents. On February 5,1845, he edged southwards. He dropped his proposed division of Texas into slave and free territories. He instead introduced a resolution silent on future divisions and calling for fresh negotiations with Texas as to boundaries and other matters.17
Benton’s proposed new negotiations would erase the taint of the Tyler administration’s old slavery-motivated negotiations. A new treaty would also be shorn of the taunt of Milton Brown’s five-part potential division. Bentonian annexation would moreover require that two-thirds of the Senate consent to the revised diplomatic accord. The Missourian’s wording thus offered national annexation with judicious delay, without surrender to the South, and with the possibility of rejecting any new treaty.
Southern Democrats, denouncing these latest delays and maybes, continued to insist on immediacy and Brown’s possible future dividends. Meanwhile, many Northern Democrats dug in their heels behind Benton’s salutory stall and golden silence about future divisions. Texas, which could not be annexed even by a simple majority without unanimous Democratic Party support, seemed to be joining the just-scrapped gag rule as a casualty of more southern pressure than Northern Democrats could bear.
5
The impasse paralyzed the Polk administration before the President-elect could take office. James K. Polk, concerned, negotiated secretly to unite his party. The not-yet-President’s private promises remain obscure. But Polk supported a sleight of hand worthy of the Little Magician. Congress, ran the magic formula first devised by Robert Walker, should authorize the President to administer either Thomas Hart Benton’s or Milton Brown’s versions of annexation. The chief executive could come to the decision which senatorial Democrats lacked the unanimity to make.
For irreconcilable factions to unite behind this nondecision, each group had to believe the imminent President would decide on their version of annexation. Polk, a skilled political dissimulator, left each side with the impression he would administer their policy. Polk meant what he said to Southerners and meant to appear friendly to the Van Burenite faction. Van Buren partisans came away convinced the President-elect would follow Benton’s route to annexation. Southern Democrats trusted the Tennessee slaveholder to administer the policy of his fellow Tennessean, Milton Brown. The last inch towards annexation, Abel P. Upshur’s dream, required one of those dissimulating politicos, Cuffeelike all things to all voters, which Upshur had introduced annexation to destroy.18
On February 27, six days before Polk’s inauguration, the Senate voted 2725 to admit Texas according to Tyler’s formula of simple majorities and to give the President the choice of accomplishing that end Brown’s or Benton’s way. All Democrats and the three turncoat Whigs, Merrick of Maryland, Johnson of Louisiana, and Henderson of Mississippi, voted aye. All Northern Whigs and 12 Southern Whigs voted nay.19
The next day, the Democrat-controlled House concurred in the Senate compromise by almost a strict party vote.20 The Whig count was especially revealing. Of the eight Southern House Whigs who had previously voted for the Milton Brown Amendment, six, including Brown, now voted against annexation possibly with the Brown Amendment, one, Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, abstained, and only one, Alabama’s James Dellet, voted for the possibility of Texas becoming five slave states.
The Milton Browns had to retreat because their Whiggish bid for Texas had only consolidated Democrats’ claim to the treasure. More clearly than ever, Brown’s proposition had demonstrated that Democrats had the votes to swell Slavepower and Whigs did not. Teaching counterproductive political lessons at home and infuriating Southern Whigs’ best northern friends was no way to escape political claustrophobia. The Milton Browns preferred to cut their losses, disavow their momentary venting of frustration, get with the emerging Whig principle of no further expansionism, and hope that gigantic Texas would satiate Southerners’ expansionist appetites.
6
After the House-Senate joint resolution gave the President his option on annexation, almost everyone thought the next move was the President-elect’s. They forgot that His Accidency still resided in the White House. Pushing the historic process he had begun to completion seemed to John Tyler the soul of statecraft as well as a boost for reputation. Delay might encourage the impatient Sam Houston to turn toward England. Benton’s formula, new negotiations and then a new senatorial debate on ratification, at very least meant delay. Why give Polk carte blanche to choose an option which might push Texas towards Lord Aberdeen? So thinking, and under Calhoun’s urging, President Tyler, on the eve of departing the White House, dispatched a courier to Houston City, offering Texas admission to the Union under Milton Brown’s formula for possible future division.21
Outraged Van Burenites attacked Tyler for “stealing” a decision Congress had meant to award to Polk. But a commodity retained has not been stolen. Polk still could recall the courier bearing Tyler’s decision. On March 7, the new President in fact ordered the old President’s courier to halt, pending further orders.22 Three days later, Polk, after consulting his cabinet, made his decision, the decision. Tyler’s courier should proceed.23
Polk concurred with Tyler’s reasons as well as Tyler’s reversible decision. Had negotiations been reopened, per Benton’s plan, Polk privately explained, “great delay would necessarily have taken place, giving ample opportunities to British and French intrigues to have seriously embarrassed, if not defeated annexation.”24 Among important southern annexationists, Polk was the least fanatical about slavery on southwestern fringes, about Aberdeen’s antislavery gestures, about sparseness of bondage in Texas, and so on. Yet even he, significantly, thought European intrigues made settling the issue a matter of immediate crisis.
The only British intriguer wholeheartedly committed to abolition in Texas now escalated his intrigues. Charles Elliot, it will be remembered, was that English chargé in Texas who had sent Pearl Andrews as his messenger to England. Elliot now appointed himself messenger to Mexico. Elliot sought and secured a 90-day delay in Texas’s answer to America, so that he might seek Mexico’s offer of permanent independence. Then the Lone Star Republic could choose between a secure republican destiny inside or outside the American republic.
Under cover of an absurdly big white hat, Elliot arrived unrecognized in Mexico City. Under the gun of annexation, Mexican authorities agreed to Elliot’s proposition. The Texas people could stand free of Mexico, as long as Texans stood free of America.
Elliot, still hiding under the huge hat, marched back on Houston City. This time the camouflage was spotted and the plotter identified. No matter, thought the underling. History has been shaped my, I mean my Lordships’ way.25
Their lordships differed. Elliot’s superiors blasted their underling for an unauthorized intervention they called sure to anger America and make annexation more likely.26 Their reasoning, unworthy of educated peers, again showed them to be chary abolitionists. America, having already voted to annex, needed no further shove towards annexation. Nor did Mexico, by offering Sam Houston’s favorite alternative to annexation, push Texas towards accepting annexation. Elliot did what any determined abolitionist would. He played his last antislavery card. His skittish superiors showed for the last time that they were more worried about too dangerous an involvement with the New World.
Texans, when rejecting Mexico’s offer of independence, illuminated a more important reason for Elliot’s haplessness. Whatever their commitment to slavery, Texans had been committed to joining the North American slaveholding republic. Texas slaveholders could only falter if American slaveholders allowed their exposed southwestern flank to spin in the wind of England’s cautious maneuvers. The game had accordingly always been the American South’s to win, assuming the Upshurs and Calhouns convinced enough Southerners to force Northern Democrats’ hand. After Southerners squeezed annexation out of the Democratic Party, Charles Elliot could only delay his defeat. On freedom’s birthday, July 4, 1845, the Texas Convention virtually unanimously chose to consolidate enslaved Texas in enslaved America.27 The question was now whether Mexico would permit American acquisition of Texas—and whether Mr. Polk would tolerate Mexico’s continued clinging to California.
7
The answers, and the crises they provoked, would usher in what historians call the Age of Sectional Controversy. But the whole tale of Texas annexation had been an epic of sectional controversy, just as sectional controversy had sporadically festered within Jacksonian America. We have watched the sectionalizing of the Jackson Party as it unfolded, step by tiny step. It is well, after following each twist of a long journey, to step back and survey the terrain.
Andrew Jackson’s Texas stand was an appropriate climax for a movement born disproportionately sectional. Jackson always attracted lopsided support in the far South and heavy opposition in the far North. Consequences were long hidden, for Jacksonian Democracy was born national too. Jackson’s emphasis on white men’s equality was gospel everywhere in the nation, outside the oldest, crustiest South. Jackson’s removal of Indians and enslavement of blacks might seem anti-egalitarian to latter-day democrats. But in his time and especially in his Southwest, where democracy perished at the color line, “superior” whites’ unequal power over “inferior” reds and blacks furthered chauvinists’ ideal egalitarian republic.
Jackson’s party organization institutionalized racially-selective egalitarianism. The party rallied white male commoners to shape decisions. The party also sought compromise between its factions, so that no white man unequally imposed his will on another. Jackson’s spoils system, annoiting every white Tom, Dick, and Harry as equally fit to rule, and his Bank War, assaulting Nicholas Biddle’s unequal power over white folk, captured white egalitarian imaginations. John Quincy Adams and fellow Whigs were tagged with the unpardonable American label: undemocratic about whites.
Jackson’s war on the Nullifiers also sustained racially selective egalitarianism. Old Hickory most disliked John C. Calhoun for wishing elitists to rule whites as well as reds and blacks. Where Jackson’s New South, was removing malapportionment laws, Calhoun’s Old Carolina was preserving extra power for richer whites. Unless wealthy folk could veto King Numbers on the national level too, believed Calhoun, all hierarchical authority, including slaveholders’, was doomed.
Jackson, by opposing such anti-egalitarian Nullifiers, won the nation’s white egalitarian heart all over again. But Martin Van Buren, the rightful heir for Jackson’s King Numbers white republicanism, had trouble keeping Calhoun isolated. Emerging abolitionists, with their emphasis on universal equality, made Southerners nervous. James Hammond, no henchman of Calhoun’s but as elitist a republican, introduced the gag rule to block uninhibited egalitarian discussion. For the first time, southern party politicians joined Calhoun supporters in urging more slaveholder control over white debate and decision than the three-fifths clause provided, lest control over blacks be lost.
Van Buren handled the anti-egalitarian demand the egalitarian way. He would isolate Calhounites with a compromise wherein neither Southern nor Northern Democrats dictated to the other. The resulting Pinckney Gag Rule violated white men’s egalitarianism by somewhat restraining white republican debate. But precisely because the gag was compromised and no Southern Democrat imposed unconditional surrender on a Northern Democrat, the Democratic Party shakily salvaged its white egalitarian mission.
The mission faltered because Van Buren’s compromised gag could not hold. Deep in Dixie, when the party system became truly competitive, rivals disputed how to ease apprehensions about outside meddlers. Van Buren’s solution, compromise, invited the initial Southern Oppositionist/Whig response: compromising is disloyal. The result was yet another faction in the South, Whig added to Calhounite and Cooperite, occasionally putting pressure on Southern Democrats to support slavery all the way. The final consequence was William Cost Johnson’s uncompromising gag rule and Southern Democrats’ insistence that Northern Democrats unconditionally surrender to it. Northern Whigs, with absolutely no sympathy for their states’ rights brethren, tore into this minority dictation. Northern Democrats, barely enough of them, reluctantly voted that Southerners who enslaved blacks could altogether gag whites.
Still, if the perfect gag rule weakened the Democracy’s monopoly over white egalitarianism, the party’s national hegemony and unity were barely damaged. The Gag Rule Controversy was a sideshow throughout the late 1830s and earliest 1840s, just as Jackson’s post office censorship proposal was an aside in 1835. Bank controversies held center stage. Van Buren sustained control. Calhoun remained out.
Then came annexation, a crisis as important as the Bank War in defining Jacksonian “Democracy,” a controversy as important as the Kansas-Nebraska affair in illuminating causes of the Civil War. Once again, as with congressional debate in the District of Columbia, Southerners worried about outside attack on a spot, this time pre-annexation Texas, where slavery was relatively lightly spread. Once again an Old South reactionary who condemned egalitarian white republicanism, this time Abel P. Upshur, provoked the controversy in order to save slavery the elitist way. Once again, Van Buren tried to compromise the white egalitarian way—with a national and democratic party arranging a settlement where no Southern Democrat dictated to a Northern Democrat.
But Van Buren again proved hapless in the face of southern anxiety about controlling blacks. Once again Calhoun’s followers and a few Whigs, this time President Tyler and Congressman Milton Brown, pressured Southern Democrats to wring concessions from northern allies. Just enough Northern Democrats again whispered an ever more resentful You win. Northern Whigs issued an ever more thundering How undemocratic. And this time, on this pivotal Texas issue, Andrew Jackson sided with John C. Calhoun against Martin Van Buren.
What remained alien to Jacksonian “Democracy” was not just the joint annexation resolution ultimately passed, implicating the white egalitarian system in shoring up black slavery. Annexation was also inimical to Jacksonian “Democracy” because blackmailing southern minorities insisted that northern majorities cave in or else. Only Polk’s dissembling could accomplish for the Democratic Party what nothing could accomplish for the Whigs: keep a national party united when imperious slaveholders lay down ultimatums.
The new centrality of the slavery issue achieved for Northern Whigs what no economic issue had previously effected: pin that curse word undemocratic all over Democrats. John Quincy Adams had his revenge. Agitation about the Slavepower’s three-fifths clauses and gag rules and territorial lust was no longer a side issue. Jacksonian “Democracy” stood centrally for minority dictation to the majority, should the Slavepower find federal law necessary to protect slavery. The only trouble, from exultant Northern Whigs’ perspective, was that Southern Whigs were as vulnerable for being part of an increasingly anti-southern party as Northern Democrats were vulnerable for being part of an increasingly pro-southern party.
These national disputes occurred partly because of different regional forms of white men’s egalitarianism. Slavery led to an especially anti-egalitarian version of mid-nineteenth-century republicanism in eastern Virginia and in South Carolina. Elitist republicans from these ancient areas precipitated the Nullification, Gag Rule, and Texas crises, as they would provoke the Secession Crisis of 1860.
Here and in newer Souths too, dictatorial control over blacks also led sometimes to quasi-dictatorial ways of controlling whites. Lynching, censorship, and cries about loyalty, although neither constantly present south nor always absent north, were a much more valued means of controlling heresy in the South. Southern slaveholders could also be more imperious than northern leaders amongst white folks in neighborhood gatherings. Ultimatums to Van Buren Democrats and gag rules on white discussion were national manifestations of a southern republican atmosphere which allowed uncensored, uninhibited egalitarian discussion to proceed only so far.
The Age of Sectional Controversy was just beginning? Hardly. Rather, during the Age of Jackson, a pattern of controversy over black slavery and its impact on white republicanism developed, within and between sections and parties. In the Texas Annexation Controversy, the pattern finally mocked Jacksonian “Democracy,” undercut prospects that Van Buren Democrats could long remain Democrats or that Southern Whigs could long remain Whigs, and carved inexorable ruts a long way down the road to disunion.