Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Fortunately for the American nation, internal disorder enveloped the Hispanic southland first. Had the American internal conflict developed earlier, the Jacksonian dream—that the nation and its people were mightier than their ideology or passing internal quarrels, and that the nation could be glorious either with slavery or without it, as it had been in the past—might have had a very different end. The Republic of Texas, not the United States, might have battled Mexico in a long and mutually disastrous war for the West, while the former nation split the continent into three separate, weak, and hostile English-speaking states.
If the Mexican War was eventually recognized by both the North and South as a national war, the issue of slavery had already poisoned the peace. The Wilmot Proviso, repeatedly put before Congress, tried to prohibit slavery in any territory gained through the war. This was construed by some to mean not only California but also the disputed lands in south Texas and New Mexico east of the Rio Grande. In all this sound and fury, North and South, there was no real understanding that slavery, based on cotton agriculture, had reached its natural limits. It had no future west of the 98th meridian; where the Balcones Scarp began in Texas, the rainfall, and the plantation system of the 19th-century South, abruptly ended. From the middle of the state, on a line almost even with Austin, the rainfall dribbled away from 30 inches annually to 15 or less across the vast plateaus. The farm line halted in crippled agony roughly along the San Antonio and Nueces rivers toward the south. The Spaniards had failed to plant vast
haciendas
here, not because they were fools but because the country was suited under the technology of the times mainly for wild Indians. The land of the numberless buffalo, and the arid mesas of the far West, was a Comanche paradise, but a nightmare vista to men who earned a living with the hoe, and whose whole history had never had to cope with a lack of wood and water.
The sincerity of the men who battled each other in the Senate of the United States, arguing whether the Southwest should be slave or free, cannot be doubted. Their intelligence concerning the land itself was extremely faulty.
The slave territory question, which was to tear the nation apart, immediately embroiled the State of Texas in a new boundary dispute—this time with the United States. Texas had claimed the Rio Grande not only as its border in the south, but westward as far as Colorado. This included half of New Mexico, with the capital, Santa Fe, in Texan territory. The claim was just as specious, but no more so, than the claim for the land south of the Nueces. Neither in the far south nor the far west was it supported by Spanish or Mexican history. Polk, however, and his Secretary of State, James Buchanan, supported the Texan rights to both areas.
But if Polk could involve the United States in war by executive action, he could not define internal boundaries except by action of Congress, and this was a subject on which the Congress would not be stampeded. The land south of the Nueces was never in serious dispute, but New Mexico had Spanish-speaking settlers, Northern American traders, and a history of its own.
It was separated by many hundreds of miles from the populated portions of Texas, across Indian country. There were geographic, economic, and social reasons why New Mexico should not be part of Texas, but the territory was separated more for emotional than logical reasons by what seems to have been a genuine conspiracy against Texan sovereignty by certain Americans.
When General Stephen Kearny's Army of the West occupied Santa Fe in 1846, Kearny helped organize an interim local government, which paid no attention to Texan pretensions. This infuriated the Texas Legislature and Governor, who were assured, however, by Polk and Buchanan that Texas's claim would not be prejudiced. But the argument of whether slavery was to be allowed in this territory, which it would be automatically if it became part of Texas, paralyzed all official action in Washington. Buchanan was unable to deliver.
Meanwhile, two events occurred. In New Mexico, sentiment against the Tejanos was stirred up by American interests, mostly traders who had come in from the north. It was not hard to alienate the thoroughly Mexican population against Texas, and this was done both by speeches and by newspaper. United States Army officers abetted and assisted in this work. Then, again with the cooperation of the Army, a political convention assembled at Santa Fe in November 1848. This convention sent a petition to the United States government, requesting territorial status, and asking that slavery be kept out of New Mexico. New Mexico had its own labor institution, peonage, but this was not understood or acted upon by Congress until ten years later. Meanwhile, the State of Texas took the bull by the horns in early 1848, even before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified. The legislature created "Santa Fe County," which conveniently included all of New Mexico east of the Rio Grande. A Texas magistrate, Spruce Baird, was dispatched to New Mexico to take control.
Judge Baird made the hazardous journey to Santa Fe only to be informed coldly by the commander of U.S. forces there that the local regime would be sustained against Texas by the army "at every peril," unless ordered otherwise by Washington. The army was on safe ground. Polk's Administration was ending; the new President, Zachary Taylor, was a Whig and favored statehood for the "conquered" territories. Taylor died in office, but he was succeeded by Millard Fillmore, who was even more adamant, and who was prepared to use force against Texas if it pressed its claim. Slavery and free soil advocates were again stalemated in Congress. Frustrated, Baird had to return to Texas—significantly, by way of Missouri. There was no safe passage to Santa Fe, except through Mexico or U.S. territory.
When Baird reported this federal interference, there was great indignation in Texas government circles. Governor Wood, and his immediate successor, Hansborough Bell, proposed to send state troops to Santa Fe. Other politicians demanded secession from the Union. On the record, this was a betrayal of faith, because Texas had been specifically promised the disputed territory, first by Major Donelson in 1845, and the map attached to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo showed the Texas boundary following the Rio Grande to its source.
Mirabeau Lamar's old argument against annexation—that Texas would be made subject to the interminable conflicts and irreconcilable prejudices of other Americans in other states—had come true.
Now, starting in 1849, there began several lasting trends in Texan–Washington relations. These were to continue in some degree for a century, and for the first thirty years of statehood, the crisis was acute. Texans tended to resent all national interference, even when there was a national consensus, in their own affairs, whether the matter was a question of boundaries, finances, or internal politics. The dominant Texan view of the American Union was that it was composed of sovereign states. The federal apparatus was seen primarily as a convenient tool to do those difficult or expensive things the people of the state could not, or would not do for themselves: frontier defense, postal and diplomatic services, harbors and roads. The problem of frontier defense, in fact, had been paramount in the decision for annexation; Texas could never be secure so long as it had a border quarrel with ten million hostile Mexicans to the south. Texans expected the state and federal governments to remain approximately coequal, each in its own sphere. If this was a simplistic view of national government, it was not specious: it was almost exactly the dominant view of Americans in 1789. The people who had marched southwest from Appalachia had not left the 18th century; they still held to "strict construction of the Constitution," with no erosion of state powers in favor of the central government. The mystique of the "nation," a 19th-century notion, had not replaced their own mystique of race, blood, and soil, based on the battle for the ground on which they stood.
Intensely touchy about national interference in local matters, Texans were equally certain that the national government was niggardly toward them, and never did enough. There was one genuine basis for this growing belief: in 1845 Texas disbanded its army and turned the problem of its frontiers over to the federal authorities, who were constitutionally bound to protect national borders. The federal authorities handled the frontier problem, which at most times men in Washington only dimly understood, quite poorly. In the 1840s and 1850s, neither the War Department or the U.S. Army had much understanding of the Plains Indian frontier. No state had ever come into the Union with more than half its territory unsettled, and with at least 20,000 extremely warlike Amerinds living within its borders. And these were Indians of a type the army had not fought before.
For long periods, between 1845 and 1875, and even later, the federal government tried to make peace with Indians and Mexicans, or failed to act, along a frontier where warfare and bloodshed was already endemic, a way of life. Some two hundred Texans were killed by Indians or carried off into captivity in the year 1849 alone. The U.S. Army kept only a few thousand soldiers in the state, and these were heavy infantry—mounted only occasionally on mules. They provided no defense against the wide-ranging Comanches, while Washington refused to push a war with the Comanches home. People were still being killed on the outskirts of Austin, where the state capital was fixed again in 1850. The Texas people grew increasingly bitter, and the Governor, over the objections of the local army commanders, again and again ordered state troops, the Rangers, into the field.
The Army disliked the Ranger operations. The Rangers grew to hold the army in increasing contempt. The reasons were simple enough; the two forces, state and federal, operated under conflicting orders and sets of rules. The army tried to police the frontier primarily by keeping the peace. The Texans rode to punish the Indians and to push them back. The state again and again demanded that Texas be rid of hostile Indians, while Washington remained reluctant to act. All this created understandable tension.
Two other trends that were strongly established at this time were the habit of securing federal monies through political action and the policy of the state government to seek windfalls to shore up its inadequate financial structure. Two such windfalls—provided no other state—came with annexation and were the result of President Jones's coy politics with the now eager President Polk. The Republic's finances had always been chaotic. Even Houston's strict financial discipline could not prevent continuing deficits, and these came on top of the revolution and Lamar's expensive wars. In Texas the only commodity of value was the endless land. This already had great symbolic, even mystic value, but very little of the Republic's lands could be translated into ready cash. In fact, because the problem of more people was primary, the Republic continued to give its lands away.
On annexation, the Federal Congress appropriated $5,000,000 to defray some of the Republic's debts, which the United States assumed; and to satisfy the remainder, the state was permitted to retain title to all its public lands. Thus, there were no federal or national public lands whatsoever in Texas; the state owned all undistributed lands within its borders. But in the 1840s and 1850s, this land was of little use to settle the continuing debts. One reason was that the Comanches still held possession, even if they had no recognition under the law.
The Republic's debt was of two kinds: revenue and nonrevenue. The nonrevenue debt was that owed to individuals, mostly Texans who had contributed goods or services during the revolution or Lamar's Indian wars. Most claims were small. The revenue debt was that owed to holders of Republic of Texas bonds, for which the customs receipts of the country had been pledged.
After 1845, the Texas state government used its $5,000,000 to settle the nonrevenue claims, for obvious political reasons. The Federal Treasury, saddled with the revenue debt, protested strongly, but in vain, while millions in claims, many by foreigners, went unpaid. The state government, after exhausting the initial grant, continued bankrupt; the claims were pressing, while millions of dollars in new state services were still required.
It must be understood that Texas had never had a true money economy during the colonial and Republican years, and there was no source of wealth except land within the state. Texans had vast respect for acres, but none for paper money. Further, they had fought a revolution to escape oppressive regulation. No local government was inclined to impose a direct tax of any kind; no planter was inclined willingly to accept one.
This background gave both the central government and the state leverage to settle the New Mexico boundary dispute. As part of the last great national compromise over the slavery question, the series of acts called the Compromise of 1850, Texas was offered $10,000,000 for its claims to the Upper Rio Grande. In this national compromise, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun met in debate for the last time, and very nearly saved the Union, over Calhoun's obstruction. During the Congressional action, Sam Houston and the Texas delegation in Washington, working through the Maryland delegation, were able to secure the Boundary Act, by which Texas sold the United States its rights to Colorado and New Mexico.
The act was strongly attacked in Texas by demagogues who argued that one provision—the retention of $5,000,000 in escrow to make sure the revenue debt was paid—impugned state honor, and that Texans should never surrender a foot of "sacred" soil. Against this cooler heads prevailed. Houston and many responsible conservatives ignored the question of "federal interference" and fought the issue out on the grounds that Texas had more desert lands already than it could use and that the old debts, sooner or later, had to be paid. The deal was actually a tremendous bargain for Texas; sentiment swung, and the Boundary Act was ratified by a special state election in which the planter vote was decisive. These men controlled the state government, and they needed money.