Lone Star Nation (59 page)

Sam Houston issued a mournful proclamation. “The Father of Texas is no more!” the president said. “The first pioneer of the wilderness has departed!” If Houston remained ambivalent about Austin, if anything persisted of the scorn he had felt for the empresario, he cast such feeling aside in the face of death. “As a testimony of respect to his high standing, undeviating moral rectitude, and as a mark of the nation's gratitude for his untiring zeal and invaluable service, all officers civil and military are required to wear crape on the right arm for the space of thirty days.” Garrisons would fire salutes of twenty-three guns, one for each Texas county, and would hang black for the “illustrious deceased.”

C h a p t e r   2 0

Slavery and Freedom

A
ustin might have reflected, in his final moments, that it was a family curse to falter with the promised land in view. Moses Austin had conceived the Texas colony but succumbed before it was born; Stephen delivered Texas to the American doorstep but died before the child was taken in.

If pneumonia—the same malady that felled his father—hadn't killed Stephen, the fight for annexation might have. At least it would have broken his heart, for it revealed that whatever Austin's purpose in founding a colony in Texas, others had turned the founding to their own ends. For Austin, slavery had been the price of attracting colonists to Texas, an evil currently necessary but perhaps not always so, and certainly not essential to his larger vision of putting ordinary people on the extraordinary land of Texas. But for those who fought over annexation, slavery was the crux of the issue. Texas—Austin's Texas, Austin's promised land of opportunity—became a symbol in American politics not of personal freedom but of chattel slavery.

John Quincy Adams never forgave Andrew Jackson for the war Old Hickory and his partisans, including Sam Houston, had waged upon Adams's presidency. Nor did he ever accept the democratic revolution that sent the Tennesseean to the White House and himself home to Massachusetts. The rapid spread of the democratic disease was shocking; it touched even Adams's alma mater, which awarded an honorary degree to Jackson. “I
could not
be present to see my Darling Harvard disgrace herself by conferring a Doctor's degree upon a barbarian and savage who could scarcely spell his own name,” Adams told his cousin, who happened to be Harvard's president.

Like most of the Adams men (and more than a few of the Adams women, including his mother, Abigail), John Quincy Adams could be crotchety, even misanthropic. And he grew testier with age and political disappointment. But enough of the family's proprietary feeling for the republic remained, and enough of Adams's desire to thwart the demons of democracy, that he eschewed retirement and instead offered himself as a candidate for Congress. And sufficient respect for the Adams name persisted in Massachusetts, and sufficient Yankee determination to stem the tide that was draining political influence from New England to the West and South, that Adams's constituents returned him to Washington.

Adams took his seat in the House of Representatives midway through Jackson's first term. He endorsed the president's strong stand against the nullifiers of South Carolina but otherwise found little to like in Jackson's approach to governance. The president's popularity was simply further testimony to the ignorance of the masses. Adams's own isolation in Congress, an isolation that grew by the year, he took for righteousness. “To withstand multitudes is the only unerring test of decisive character,” he said.

The multitudes most needed withstanding, Adams believed, on the subject of slavery. Before he entered Congress, Adams had given slavery little thought. He didn't approve of the institution, but neither did he deem it especially dangerous to republican virtue. Yet events of the 1830s convinced him that slavery placed America in mortal danger. Foremost of these events was the war for Texas.

With the rest of America, Adams had observed the emigration to Texas swell from a trickle to a flood. He had long applauded westward expansion; treaties he negotiated as secretary of state gave America its first solid claim to the Pacific shore. But the expansion he sought had been an expansion of American liberty, and when he learned that the emigrants to Texas were re-fixing slavery upon that Mexican province, in the face of Mexican law, his enthusiasm for Texas evaporated.

Adams wasn't alone in seeing slavery in a new light. The age of democracy was also the age of a growing opposition to slavery. As the ideology of the everyman took hold across the country, the existence of a large class permanently beyond the pale obtruded on the American conscience. Northerners had shed slavery as part of the democratizing trend; now they felt free to criticize the South for failing to do the same. Some went so far as to embrace abolitionism, which, while nowhere a majority view, nonetheless set the moral tone for much of the antislavery movement. And the tone grew shriller with time. William Lloyd Garrison, the noisiest of the abolitionists, damned not only slavery but a political system that allowed the slaveholders to indulge their wickedness. Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution, which he called “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell.”

Southerners viewed the abolitionists with scorn. It was easy to be moral, they said, when the economy of one's region didn't depend on slave labor. And by dishonoring the Constitution, the abolitionists brought upon themselves blame for the demise of the Union, should matters come to that. Defensive southerners responded by taking the offensive, celebrating slavery as an instrument for good, for the civilizing and Christianizing of benighted and heathen Africans. Slavery was proclaimed a fundament of southern life, a keystone of a superior culture.

Because the Constitution seemed to protect slavery in the states, much of the debate over the future of the institution was hypothetical and anticipatory, an argument about what would happen as the Union expanded into new territories. Texas made the debate real and immediate. The outbreak of fighting there alerted advocates of slavery and opponents alike that Texas might soon be a candidate for admission to the Union. Both sides deemed Texas a test of the political viability of their views. If the opponents of slavery could block annexation, they might contain the noxious institution. If slavery advocates could win the admission of Texas, new horizons opened in the Southwest.

John Quincy Adams launched the annexation debate in Congress with a thunderous salvo. In the final week of May 1836, while Americans were absorbing the news of San Jacinto, Adams digressed from discussion of an Alabama relief bill to declare preemptive war on what he deemed the conspiracy to foist slave Texas on the American republic. The conspiracy, Adams said, had been years in the making. President Jackson had tried to pry Texas from Mexico by money and threat. The effort had failed and poisoned relations between the United States and Mexico. “A device better calculated to produce jealousy, suspicion, ill will, and hatred could not have been contrived.” The motives of the administration became clear in the denouement. “This overture, offensive in itself, was made precisely at a time when a swarm of colonists from the United States were covering the Mexican border with land-jobbing, and with slaves introduced in defiance of Mexican laws, by which slavery had been abolished throughout that republic.” The attempt continued. “The war now raging in Texas is a Mexican civil war, and a war for the re-establishment of slavery where it was abolished.” Into this civil war the conspirators were attempting to thrust the United States. Adams knew of the movements of General Gaines along the Sabine. And as the one who, as secretary of state, had made the Sabine the border between the United States and Mexico, he knew that Jackson's claim to the Neches was insupportable by law or custom. The only explanation for Gaines's actions was that the administration wanted an excuse to enter the disgraceful war—the “war between slavery and emancipation”—under way in Texas. “Every possible effort has been made to drive us into the war, on the side of slavery.”

Adams demanded to know whether the members of the House understood what a war for Texas would entail, and he proceeded to tell them. “Your war, sir, is to be a war of races—the Anglo-Saxon American pitted against the Moorish-Spanish-Mexican American, a war between the northern and southern halves of North America, from Passamaquoddy to Panama. Are you prepared for such a war?” What would be America's cause in this war? “Aggression, conquest, and the re-establishment of slavery where it has been abolished. In that war, sir, the banners of freedom will be the banners of Mexico; and your banners, I blush to speak the word, will be the banners of slavery.”

What if America won the war? Would the slave conspiracy be satisfied? By no means! “Suppose you should annex Texas to these United States; another year would not pass before you would have to engage in a war for the conquest of the island of Cuba.” The powers of Europe would not stand idly by. Spain, of course, would defend Cuba, while Britain would resist the expansion of American influence—and American slavery—toward Central America and the Caribbean. Britain had abolished slavery in her own empire, and for reasons of conscience and mercantile competitiveness she would oppose its spread under the American flag. A war against Britain was a real possibility. A more ignominious struggle was hard to imagine. “Sir, what a figure, in the eyes of mankind, would you make, in deadly conflict with Great Britain, she fighting the battles of emancipation, and you the battles of slavery; she the benefactress, and you the oppressor, of human kind!” Nor would the wars that followed the taking of Texas be solely against foreign foes. Only the foolish or willfully blind could not see the “inevitable consequence of them all: a civil war.”

Adams's antislavery, anti-Texas views resonated across the North. Benjamin Lundy, an itinerant abolitionist and editor who claimed the distinction of having converted William Lloyd Garrison to abolition, published a series of tracts entitled, first,
The Origin and True Causes of the Texas Revolution Commenced in the Year 1835,
and, subsequently and more descriptively,
War in Texas, a Review of Facts and Circumstances, Showing that this Contest is a Crusade against Mexico, Set on Foot and Supported by Slaveholders, Land-Speculators, &c., in Order to Re-Establish, Re-Extend, and Perpetuate the System of Slavery in the United States
. Lundy reprinted Adams's House speech against Texas, along with anti-Texas editorials from such journals as the New York
Sun,
which asserted that the annexation of Texas would “inevitably
DISSOLVE THE UNION
.” The
Sun
elaborated: “The slave states having this eligible addition to their land of bondage, with its harbors, bays, and well-bounded geographical position, will ere long cut asunder the federal tie which they have long held with ungracious and unfraternal fingers, and confederate a new and distinct slaveholding republic, in opposition to the whole free republic of the North.” Lundy, speaking in his own voice, demanded: “C
ITIZENS OF THE FREE STATES
!—Are you prepared to sanction the acts of such freebooters and usurpers? . . . Are you willing to be
MADE THE INSTRUMENTS
of these wanton aggressors? . . . P
EOPLE OF THE
N
ORTH
! W
ILL YOU PERMIT IT
?”

The opposition of Adams, Lundy, and the others had little effect on Andrew Jackson. The president deferred recognition of Texas for several months, hoping Santa Anna might succeed in persuading the Mexican government to accept a treaty transferring Texas and California to the United States. Recognition would ruin the chances for any such treaty. But as his days in office dwindled and nothing hopeful came from Mexico City, Jackson decided to go ahead. He invited William Wharton to the White House to share the good news and a glass of wine. Upon leaving, Wharton wrote to friends in the Texas government: “I have at length the happiness to inform you that President Jackson has closed his political career by admitting our country into the great family of nations.”

If Jackson had had six months more in office, he might have taken the next step to annexation. Mexico had been his stumbling block, and, having given up on Mexico, he would gladly have confronted the American opponents of annexation, starting with Adams, whom he despised as much as ever. But time ran out, and he retired to the Hermitage with his Texas dream unfulfilled.

His successor, Martin Van Buren of New York, lacked Jackson's courage, determination, and popularity. Van Buren's political influence rested on an unstable coalition of northern and southern interests; to reach for Texas risked pulling the northern prop from under himself. And when his first year in office produced the worst financial panic since the depression that had helped populate the Austin colony in the early 1820s, Van Buren lost all desire to court more controversy than he had to. Texas he would leave to future presidents.