Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
During these months Houston consistently attempted to damp the war; he refused to respond to public demands to attack Mexico. There was no doubt that world opinion, everywhere except in South America and the United States northeast, favored Texas, but Houston used this favorable opinion primarily for propaganda purposes. He asked Britain and France to "require of Mexico either the recognition of the Independence of Texas, or to make war upon her according to the rules established and universally recognized by civilized nations." Santa Anna's decimation of Texas "pirates" backfired, like his executions at Goliad. Under some pressure from abroad, Santa Anna offered Texas a peace treaty, in return for the recognition of inherent Mexican sovereignty. Houston might have taken this, had his goal been anything less than union with the United States. Houston realized that this would block annexation for years, if not forever. Santa Anna, of course, was seeking two things: a way to satisfy Mexican notions of national honor, and at the same time, without recovering Texas, to keep the United States from arriving on the Rio Grande.
Houston, wisely, did not reject the overture, but used it to proclaim a truce, on June 14, 1843. Mexico and Texas negotiated, with British mediation. These talks solved nothing, but they did give an excuse for a general armistice—not recognition or peace—which went into effect in early 1844. Houston was stalling, because the annexation question had risen again.
The great irony of these years was that while Houston never wanted anything but annexation and worked both directly and deviously for it, it was actually Mirabeau Lamar who knocked open the door. The Texas Congress had claimed not only the Rio Grande but passed a resolution claiming the Californias as Texas soil. This was not so ridiculous as it sounded, since the western boundaries of Texas were as yet undefined by international or any other kind of law. The Republic, on fighting free of Mexico, was in a position to claim anything outside of U.S. territory in the West it could take or hold. Houston vetoed the Californias bill, but it was repassed over his veto.
Lamar's unsuccessful Santa Fe expedition, not Houston's moderation, had aroused new interest in the United States. The public was titillated by the journal of an American newspaperman who joined it for a "vacation." The sufferings of the expedition and the brutalities of the Mexicans were recounted in heroic terms. In Washington, where there was already growing interest in the Pacific coast, and which was involved in a dispute with Great Britain over Oregon, the government was chilled by the concept of an aggressive Texas, expanding west. It was one thing to write off the Brazos slave country; it was something else to relinquish the entire Southwest, from sea to sea. Jackson and many other far-seeing men already felt the United States must acquire California and Oregon and thus be forever strategically secure in the hemisphere.
Further, Lamar's vigorous assertion of sovereignty, carrying the flag west and showing it with the Texas Navy on the high seas, gained him the great-power recognition of Britain and France. This roused new American fears: if Texas lacked the power to dominate the American West, its commercial treaties with Great Britain seemed to allow British influence its return. Captain Charles Elliot, the British chargé d'affaires, did not trust Sam Houston and suspected he was being used as a cat's-paw, but still the British worked to gain influence where they could.
This fear of British penetration—a Texas allied with Great Britain, disputing possession of the Far West, created certain nightmares—caused President Tyler to swallow legality and open negotiations for annexation, on October 16, 1843. Mexico had still not surrendered Texas, and the United States was still bound by treaty obligations, but it simply could not afford to leave a vacuum for British power to fill. Houston cannily now played coy. He refused to let negotiations proceed until he had the assurance of American protection. He got this. There was a growing feeling in many Washington quarters that strategic considerations overrode domestic politics or even the danger of war with Mexico.
On April 12, 1844, the Texans Isaac Van Zandt and J. Pinckney Henderson signed a treaty of annexation with John C. Calhoun, by which Texas would become a Territory of the United States.
The U.S. Senate, however, lacked the Secretary of State's concern for dominant strategy. On June 8, the Senate rejected the treaty, through a strange alliance of antislavery men and Southerners who demanded full statehood for Texas now. Another factor in this defeat was the imminence of the national elections. Few Senators were sure of public opinion on Texas.
This put the question squarely into the Presidential campaign, where two of the leading contenders, Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren, hoped it would never appear. Clay, the Whig, could not support annexation; he would lose too many Whig votes in the North. Van Buren, trying for a comeback in the Presidency, chose wrong, and cut his political throat. The leading Democrat contender for the nomination, he tried to make a deal with Clay on Texas, to keep it out of the campaign. This lost him Jacksonian support; Andrew Jackson, who was still a power, and the Western expansionists threw their support to a virtual unknown, James Knox Polk, of Tennessee.
Polk was a friend of Sam Houston; in fact, he had succeeded to Houston's old seat in the House. He was a Jacksonian through and through, and "King Andrew," now rapidly failing, managed his whole campaign. Polk won the Democratic nomination. He went on to assail the quibbling Clay, who probably wanted the Presidency far too much. Polk, who never wanted it at all but took it as part of a plan of dominant Jacksonian policy, attacked on two issues: Texas and Oregon ("Fifty-Four Forty or Fight"). His running mate, George Dallas of Pennsylvania, backed annexation.
There is some evidence the American Anti-Slavery Society overplayed its hand. William Lloyd Garrison roared that "All who would sympathise with that pseudo-republic hate liberty and would dethrone God!" But 90 percent of Texans were neither slaves nor slavers, and Houston himself was no friend of that peculiar institution. The coupling of Oregon—into which New Englanders were moving—with Texas made thousands see the true territorial issue, which was, as Sam Houston said, whether the glory of the United States would culminate too soon.
Men such as Jackson and Sam Houston, certainly, were seeing a distant, almost impossible dream: the future world preeminence of the United States. It is almost certain, in retrospect, that Houston's motives were different from Mirabeau Lamar's only in degree. Sam Houston, as he had promised, never forgot the land of his birth when he made Texas his abiding place.
In the campaign of 1844 opinion changed. Even Northern newspapers. which had attacked annexation in the past, now editorialized that annexation was inevitable and that it should be done with grace. Polk won, by a narrow popular vote. It was enough, however, to assure that Polk would acquire more territory for the United States than any President, including Jefferson, had ever done before.
Tyler read this mandate, and placed the annexation issue before the Congress once again.
Houston, meanwhile, came to the end of his second administration. This time, he had the satisfaction of seeing his policy vindicated at the polls. The "Houston" candidate won the Presidency in 1844, defeating the "war" or "Lamar" man, Burleson, 7,037 to 5,668. Dr. Anson Jones, Houston's successor, in general was pledged to Houston's goals. His victory was attributed, even by him, to Houston's popularity. Houston had galled Texans mainly on four things: higher tariffs, the movement of the working government from Austin to Houston, the "coddling" of the Indians, and his failure to secure the release of Texan captives in Mexico. Against these faults he could claim two accomplishments: he had not involved the Texas planters in a major war—in fact, he had gone out of his way to avoid one—and he had allowed eastern Texas to develop without governmental interference. Lamar's dreams of glory caught the Texas mind, but they also strained the economy beyond endurance. The vote for Dr. Anson Jones and Burleson, who favored Lamar's policies, split dramatically between east and western Texas. The old cotton counties, particularly the country east of the Trinity, went for Jones. The newer, western regions of the Republic preferred Burleson.
Now, in early 1845, the pendulum shifted. The United States, which had coolly put Texas off for almost a decade, was now almost desperate to annex the Republic. The government was committed to it; a majority of the people were in favor. But, with Polk's election, it was Texas's turn to delay and play for the greatest advantage. After consultations among Tyler, President-elect Polk, and Polk's new Congress, a much more liberal annexation bill was presented to Congress.
The new terms called for the admission of Texas as a full state, provided it passed its own ordinance before January 1, 1846; the ownership of all public lands in Texas by the state, not the federal government, upon annexation; the permission to divide Texas into four more states, with slavery banned north of 36° 30'. A provision was also made that if Texas refused these terms, the President was empowered to adjust them. This bill passed February 26, 1845.
Andrew Jackson Donelson, the U.S. representative in Houston, presented these terms to Jones. A few days later, Polk was inaugurated and he wrote to Donelson urging no delay. But Jones and his cabinet were now holding high cards and playing for tantalizing stakes.
There were important men in Texas who saw not only a chance for a Texan empire stretching to the Pacific but, with gloomy prophecy, the possibility of other Southern states seceding from the Union and joining Texas. The British, who had at last tried to move strongly into the Republic, and the French minister, Comte de Saligny, used all their diplomatic skills now to prevent annexation. President Jones, and his very able Secretary of State, Dr. Ashbel Smith—the man who had written the Texan white paper that had brought so much French and British pressure on Santa Anna in 1843—were not much inclined toward a Texan empire. But they did want to avoid offending the two European powers; there had been some promises made that, with annexation, would be impossible to keep.
Captain Elliot and Saligny jointly proposed to Jones that nothing be done for ninety days, while France and Britain pressured Mexico into signing a treaty of recognition and peace. Santa Anna had been replaced with General Herrera, and now, at the eleventh hour, Herrera was convinced that Mexican intransigence was producing the worst of all worlds: the final loss of Texas and the planting of the U.S. flag on the Rio Grande. He gave Captain Elliot a signed treaty that recognized Texas's full independence, provided the Republic did not join the United States, in May 1845. But it was far too late; the American government had acted first.
Smith and Jones proposed to place this treaty before the Texas Congress, which was now called to meet on June 16, along with the U.S. treaty of annexation. But Jones quickly realized that Texan sentiment for annexation was too strong now; the people had overwhelmingly shown acceptance of the liberal American offer. Virtually all the propertied people in Texas favored union: annexation offered military protection from both Mexico and the Indians, U.S. postal and other services, and a sound currency and financial system. The retention of public lands by the state, and the American acceptance of the Rio Grande boundary, pacified the land-hungry, belligerent western counties. Texans were, as the Union was then construed, surrendering nothing and gaining much. They already paid high customs fees and tariffs; this was the only real source of income for the Republic; and in those days the federal government collected no taxes and left virtually all internal regulation to the states. Jones did not wait for his Congress to convene; he called for a general convention to be elected at once, to meet July 4.
When the Texas Congress met at Washington-on-the-Brazos, it rejected the Mexican treaty and recommended the American treaty be approved. The convention that assembled a few days later adopted the U.S. offer with only one dissenting vote and began immediate work on a state constitution. This constitution embodied most of the forms of the old Republic and also borrowed heavily from the state constitution of Louisiana. The constituent assembly that wrote it included an unusual number of able men: T. J. Rusk, J. Pinckney Henderson, Isaac Van Zandt, R. E. B. Baylor, N. H. Darnell, Hiram Runnels, and José Antonio Navarro of San Antonio. Navarro was the only member born in Texas. Eighteen writers came from Tennessee, eight from Virginia; Georgia furnished seven, Kentucky six, and North Carolina five. Among these men were scions of several distinguished American families, several former members of Congress, a chief justice of Alabama, and a former Mississippi governor.
The constitution provided for a popularly elected governor, with a term of two years. Other high officials were to be appointed, though five years later this was changed, and the attorney general, comptroller, and treasurer were to be elected. The legislature met biennially.
Specific Texas provisions, which became fundamental Texas law, were continued: the anticlerical provision that no minister of the gospel could serve in the legislature; the guarantee of separate property rights for married women; exemption from foreclosure of private homesteads; an anti-corporation law. The planters of Texas already hated "soulless corporations." Only a two-thirds vote of the Texas House could create a private corporation, and no bank under any circumstances might incorporate.
The constitution was approved, along with annexation, by a vote of approximately 4,000 to 200 on October 13, 1845. It was immediately accepted as adequate by the Congress of the United States. On December 29, 1845, Polk signed the act that merged the Lone Star into many, and in a brief ceremony, on February 19, 1846, the Texas flag fluttered down. The last President of the Republic handed over his authority to the new governor, Pinckney Henderson. Sam Houston and Tom Rusk were new United States Senators, and a United States army already stood on Texas soil.