Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The Lone Star flag flew proudly and perilously over Texas for ten years, but not through Texans' choice. The problem was the political situation that had developed within the past half-dozen years inside the United States.
President Adams had been prepared to buy Texas in the 1820s, and Jackson sent his first Minister to Mexico, Anthony Butler, with an obvious interest in obtaining the region. But by the middle 1830s Monroe's old worry, that further expansion of the nation westward might threaten its very existence, was proving ominously true. Suddenly, the question of annexation of Texas became inseparably linked with the whole question of Negro slavery in the United States.
On May 25, 1836, shortly after the news of San Jacinto was celebrated in Washington, and when petitions and resolutions to recognize Texan independence were pouring into Congress, John Quincy Adams suddenly denounced the Texas Revolution on the floor of the House. He stated the whole purpose of the revolution and ensuing war was "the reestablishment of slavery in territory where it had already been abolished through Mexican law" and attacked the President bitterly for sending General Gaines to the border "in defense of slavery." It was quite true that the Southern states wanted the entry of Texas to strengthen their minority in Congress vis-à-vis national affairs, and the Northern states desired to prevent any such reinforcement. But to let the whole question of the acquisition of an immense western territory turn on such a matter was, in retrospect, a very parochial view. It was one that Westerners like Houston and Jackson could hardly comprehend. They had very little ideology; they tended to see slavery as an economic problem, but above all, they believed in the expansion of the territory and power of their own race, and trusted it to find its moral solutions in good time. Houston and Jackson almost equally despised Northern abolitionists and Southern nullifiers; both threatened the greater Union. From the language they used, it appears that in 1836 Westerners, Southerners, and Northerners all had different concepts of what the American Union was all about. The problem transcended slavery, but slavery became the common emotional tool. The old South, where in 1820 the only antislavery societies in the country existed, began to defend what was a moral liability no one liked very much with incredible intransigence. The Northern abolitionists gradually began to mount an attack on the institution of slavery that could not be supported under the existing framework of the Union.
Adams's speech attacking Texas showed everyone, including the President, that annexation had become political dynamite. It was uproariously supported by most of the Northern press, and by Northern opinion generally. In the North, not only the Missouri Compromise but the idea of compromise itself was almost dead. One hope in the old South, and great fear in the North, was that Texas would open a great band of slave expansion through the Southwest. This opinion revealed an utter ignorance of geography: climate itself, and the Great Plains, made any such expansion of the cotton kingdom impossible. With Anglo-Texas along the Brazos, chattel slavery had reached its natural geographic limits in the United States.
While Texan agents lobbied for recognition and continued to press their resolution for annexation, the matter was deferred for the elections of 1836. Van Buren was Jackson's man, but he was elected by such a small majority that the lame-duck President was hamstrung. Jackson still wanted to recognize Texas, but Van Buren's friends argued now that any such move would damage Van Buren's administration before it began. The hope of immediate annexation of Texas was completely gone, after Adams's stand; the distinguished Massachusetts Congressman spoke against Texas almost every day of the summer of 1836, and even the question of recognition of Texas's independence was very much in doubt.
Jackson's agent in Texas, Henry Morfit, sounded the local situation out in August and September 1836. Morfit reported back that Texas's best hope of continued independence lay in the "stupidity of the rulers of Mexico and the financial embarrassment of the Mexican government." Morfit was not impressed with Texas's prospects otherwise and advised the President to go slow. Jackson's Secretary of State, John Forsyth, was disturbed because Texas's referendum for annexation seemed to put the United States in a bad light. The quick vote for annexation seemed to show the whole revolution had been part of an expansionist plot. Forsyth advised Jackson not to recognize Texas, until Great Britain or some other major power did so first.
Under these circumstances, Jackson's message to Congress in December 1836, was cool toward Texas and proposed a delay in recognition. This dismayed the Texas government, just as it must have puzzled the Mexicans, who did not understand the terrible split in opinion within the United States. Relations with Mexico were badly strained. The Mexican minister, Eduardo de Gorostiza, circulated a paper condemning Jackson for dispatching General Gaines to the Sabine. This pamphlet both broke diplomatic courtesy and angered Jackson. Gorostiza picked up his credentials and went home, but the Mexican government supported his stand. However, there was no danger of a real war with Mexico at this time; the government was in collapse, the treasury was bankrupt, and the nation was impotent. The United States had nothing to fear from Mexican anger, but this was not clearly seen in some Washington quarters.
Hoping to break the diplomatic impasse, Houston and Stephen Austin decided to send Santa Anna to Washington. The Mexican dictator himself had come up with a long-visioned plan, by which the United States and Mexico would establish a new border, on the Rio Grande. In return for a cash payment, the United States would be free to annex Texas. This plan, which was denounced both in Mexico and the United States, had enormous merit, for both countries. It might have avoided another war. But Santa Anna had no real powers now to negotiate, which Jackson knew, and further, Jackson was in no position politically to absorb Texas. The capitals of both nations, in 1836–37, singularly lacked historical vision.
Santa Anna arrived in Washington on January 17, 1837. He was received courteously, spent six fruitless days in discussions, and then sailed from Norfolk for Vera Cruz. Jackson offered to entertain the Mexican's offer to sell Texas provided it came through regular diplomatic channels, which was impossible, and he also tried to include California in the deal. Santa Anna departed owing some $2,000 in expenses, which the Texas government eventually reimbursed.
On April 19, 1837, Anastasio Bustamante again became President of Mexico, assuring a new hard line. Any hope of continued negotiations died here. Santa Anna, discredited by his defeat in Texas, retired to Jalapa to await a better day.
The Texans in Washington swallowed their frustration and tried to keep in Jackson's favor. Jackson refused to put direct pressure on Congress to recognize Texas. His term was running out, and he had little real power. But from the sidelines Jackson kept up a devious game. Earlier Stephen Austin wrote to a Washington correspondent that if the United States was not prepared to extend aid and recognition, Texas might have to look elsewhere. Jackson turned this letter over to the Congress, with a notation that further stalling might alienate Texas forever. Austin and Sam Houston were to find this argument the most effective one they had, both in securing recognition and eventual annexation. Neither Austin nor Houston had any desire to become involved with Britain, quite the opposite, but only the threat of concessions to Great Britain, and the specter of a new British colony in the middle of America, seemed to have any effect on the antiexpansionist Northeast. Houston continued the policy after Austin's death.
A resolution to recognize Texas floundered in both the Senate and the House for months. Representative Waddy Thompson of South Carolina and Senator Robert J. Walker of Mississippi labored to pass the measure, which had been tabled as late as February 26, 1837, by a House vote of 98 to 86. The resolution was watered down, in the House version. It now merely provided money for the sending of "a diplomatic agent to Texas whenever the President of the United States may receive satisfactory evidence that Texas is an independent power and shall deem it expedient to appoint such a minister." The original words "the independent Republic of Texas" were stricken out. The measure was a wonderful example of American euphemism and political compromise, to say nothing of passing the buck.
Even then, it passed the House only because most members either thought it would die in the Senate, or be implemented at the discretion of Martin Van Buren, who was neutral and would do nothing. Pacifying the Texas lobby with what was considered a "cheap vote," many House members lukewarm to Texas voted for it. It carried 121 to 76.
Through some dazzling political footwork, Walker added the Texas resolution to a general civil appropriation bill before the Senate on March 2. This rider survived an attempt to knock it out, 24–24. This Senate action sent the bill to the President for signature on Friday, March 3, less than twenty-four hours before he left office. Jackson signed it.
Then, he drafted a message to the Senate. He wrote he now deemed it proper and expedient to acknowledge the independence of Texas, and he nominated Alcée La Branche of Louisiana to be chargé d'affaires to Texas. Jackson finished this message late on the evening of March 3. Thus, not with a flourish but with neat footwork, was history made.
Jackson requested the Texan agents to come to the White House, for "the pleasure of a glass of wine." At midnight, the President of the United States raised his glass: "Gentlemen, the Republic of Texas." The Texans, William Wharton and Memucan Hunt, drank to that. Jackson had another toast: "The President of the Republic of Texas."
Jackson was a frontiersman; he never forgot a friend. It is perhaps significant and revealing that President Jackson, "King Andrew," spent his last hours in office talking about Texas, and reminiscing about one of "his boys, who had beaten it back and made good." Jackson capped his career in the White House by recognizing Texas. Banks and gentry and current ideology might come and go, nullifiers and abolitionists and all their accursed quarreling kind fade into dust—the land was wide and went on forever, and Jackson's America was still pointed toward the western sea.
The news of U.S. recognition caused celebrations throughout Texas, but it left Sam Houston with all his enormous problems intact. The first, and most pressing, was not the still-existent state of war with Mexico but the Texas standing army, now completely composed of a horde of ill-fed and intractable American volunteers. The army had rejected Mirabeau Lamar; when Lamar resigned his commission to become Vice-President, the army chose Felix Huston as its chief. Huston was a military adventurer of the old filibuster stripe. To get rid of him, Sam Houston appointed a capable new officer, Albert Sidney Johnston, to the supreme command. Felix Huston not only refused to go, but he seriously wounded Johnston in a trumped-up duel. Then, Huston went to Columbia to lobby in the Texas Congress for his bright new plan: a march on Matamoros, Mexico.
Now, Sam Houston was aided by American experience and tradition. He solved his army problem the same way George Washington did, two generations before. While Huston was away, the President furloughed the army with the exception of some 600 men. He could not discharge it, because he could not meet the arrears in pay. But he gave all the men a furlough, and never bothered to call them back. This may have exposed Texas to Mexican danger, but it effectively got rid of the threat of military dictatorship, as Huston's clamoring army faded away.
The Lone Star State was sovereign, but Houston found it $1,250,000 in debt. The financial figures for the revolution may have seemed more those of a corporate business than an emerging nation, but the money trouble was serious. Houston was able to feed his rump army now only by personally signing government notes. Henry Smith, the Texas Secretary of the Treasury, was in an incredible position: he could not perform his duties because he had no official stationery, and there was no money in the Treasury to buy any. Most local officials were being paid in kind, and the proliferation of offices required now by a new national government strained the resources of twenty-three counties beyond endurance. The fact that many officers served out of patriotism, without pay, has sometimes been overlooked.
Houston, with the vote for annexation of September 1836, considered his mandate called for him to damp the war with Mexico, avoid Indian trouble on the frontier, and try to get Texas into the United States. These aims, and his finances, required him to follow a quiet, conservative policy.
Texas formally claimed the Rio Grande as its southern boundary in 1836, and this meant no hope of a settlement with Mexico. Historically, the Mexican counterclaim of the Nueces as the Texas boundary was correct; the Nueces, not the Rio Grande, had been the boundary between the province of Texas and the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, formerly Nuevo Santander. No Anglo-Texans lived south of the Nueces, but for that matter, only a few Mexicans lived north of the Rio Grande. The land was empty. The only real merit to the Texans' claim was that the Rio Grande was a much better defined boundary than the tiny Nueces, which looped up into Comanche country northwest of Béxar and dribbled out, but despite that, they held it vehemently and were not likely to give it up. Many intelligent Mexicans saw that Anglo-Texas was now an undigestible nut, and gone forever, but the claim for the Rio Bravo put national honor to new strains.
Mexico refused to recognize Texan independence, and a formal state of war went on, although for some years there was no fighting. This state of war held back Texan settlement at Goliad and Refugio, and even San Antonio remained outside the normal Anglo-Texan sphere. Texas ruled the settlement at San Antonio, but few Anglo-Texans lived there. There was only a tiny garrison, and now and then a Texas magistrate arrived.