American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  During these years Texas was arousing national attention. As the Indians were forced west, whites were moving on toward the Southwest and Northwest, driven by high hopes and economic need. By the mid-1820s Stephen F. Austin was achieving in Texas a dream that his father Moses had hoped to realize when he secured a commission from the feeble government of New Spain to settle three hundred American families there. Settling in Bexar, Stephen Austin offered a guarantee of good conduct by the Americans in exchange for grants of land and promises of religious freedom from the Spanish, who wanted the empty land filled up as a buffer against Indians and marauding frontiersmen.

  This deal, which threw Texas open to colonization by thousands of settlers seeking her rich bottomlands, worked well until it was threatened by Mexico’s revolution against the mother country. For more than a year Austin, ignorant of the language, the laws, and the leaders of the revolutionary government, haunted the chambers of the constantly changing officialdom in Mexico City. Receiving some concessions, Austin returned to Texas and served as a benign despot on his immense holdings, as well as a trusted adviser to the other empresarios. Almost 20,000 Americans flooded into the province. Operating nearly independently of Mexican authority hundreds of miles away, the Texans seemed to some to have virtually realized the Jeffersonian paradise of a small republic.

  This near-idyll was shattered when the Mexicans, alarmed by an abortive effort to establish the “Republic of Fredonia,” barred the admission of additional Americans into Texas or the introduction of more slaves. After much agitation by the aroused Texans, a convention resolved that Texas must become an autonomous state within the Mexican federal union. Austin carried the resolves to Mexico City, only to be thrown into jail. By the time he was released months later, in the fall of 1835, war had broken out in Texas much as it had in Lexington and Concord sixty years before. Mexican soldiers had ridden into the hamlet of Gonzales with orders to confiscate a small brass cannon, which the Texans were determined to keep. They not only kept it but used it to fire on the Mexicans. The Texas struggle became one for independence, as Sam Houston, proclaiming that the “work of liberty has begun,” issued a call for volunteers.

  Six thousand Mexicans under General Santa Anna marched against the rebels. Reaching San Antonio late in February 1836, they found a company of Texans holed up in the Alamo, under self-styled Colonel Buck Travis, a pugnacious soldier-politico only twenty-seven years of age. Travis appealed to the “People of Texas and All Americans in the World” for help “in the name of Liberty,” but no help came. With matchless determination and heroism the 187 Texans held off the assaulting force of 3,000 Mexicans for ten days, until they were overwhelmed and massacred. The bodies of Davy Crockett and James Bowie, as well as Travis, lay in the carnage. Santa Anna’s forces now swept on with sword and torch, overrunning American settlements and reaching Galveston Bay. After fleeing toward the United States border, the Texans rallied on the banks of the San Jacinto. With the cry of “Remember the Alamo!” on their lips, they overran a detachment of Mexicans they surprised in their beds, killed six hundred of the enemy, and captured Santa Anna.

  With the surrender of Santa Anna, the war seemed over, and the way prepared for joining the United States. But Washington was cool to the Texas petition for annexation. President Jackson feared that merely recognizing Texas would hurt relationships with Mexico and disrupt the Democratic party. John Quincy Adams charged on the floor of the House that the Texas revolution was part of a proslavery conspiracy. Already entangled in the internal politics of the United States, the Texans would have to await further foreign and domestic developments before they could gain admission to the Union.

  The white occupation of the Northwest was more peaceful but no less adventurous. Ever since the expedition of Lewis and Clark, the two thousand miles of plain and mountain between the Mississippi River and the Pacific had been the home of a peculiar breed of half-traders, half-explorers. These were the mountain men, whose lives were later glorified in the stories of Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and Jedediah Smith. A few of these pioneers had settled in Oregon and turned to farming under the watchful eye of Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company, which controlled the territory north of the Columbia River. Others stayed in California, nominally a Mexican possession but in fact governed loosely by the local military. In California the mountain men were joined by a second group of Americans, Yankee merchants who arrived by sea. Prominent among these was “el Bostono,” Thomas O. Larkin, the American consul at Monterey. Skilled in both business and diplomacy, Larkin created from a five-hundred-dollar loan a sprawling coastal trade in California hides, Hawaiian sugar, and New England imports, while his quiet influence on the military commandant and other important citizens slowly moved the local Mexicans toward yearning for an independent California.

  A new element loomed in the Pacific territories during the 1840s, thanks to the golden reports sent back by travelers and settlers. Imaginations throughout the American West were stirred by descriptions of a land where “perpetual summer is in the midst of unceasing winter…and towering snow clad mountains forever look down upon eternal verdure.” After many months of correspondence, several groups interested in emigration agreed to meet at Independence, Missouri. Most of the families who gathered at Independence that spring of 1843 and following years were fairly prosperous; they would start the year-long trek across the continent with all the wagons, stock, and household goods needed to homestead the new land. Other young couples and single men, drawn to the adventure but lacking means to make the trip on their own, hired themselves out to wealthier pioneers as teamsters and laborers.

  As good frontier democrats, the travelers elected the officers of their wagon trains. Campaign techniques were impromptu; candidates mounted a barrel and spoke in their own praise, and then the voters literally lined up behind the man of their choice. “These men were running about the prairie, in long strings,” a journalist reported. “The leaders…doubling and winding in the drollest fashion; so that, the all-important business of forming a government seemed very much like the merry schoolboy game of ‘snapping the whip.’ ”

  These boisterous elections seldom produced the sort of leaders who could stand up to the hardships of the trail. As the path grew steeper and rockier, the oxen fewer and leaner, the Indians more adept at robbing a camp or hamstringing a horse, the trains broke down into small groups or individual families—who found the going even harder alone. Winter typically saw the pioneers still high in the mountains above the Willamette and Sacramento valleys, and the older settlers left their cabins time and again to rescue the new emigrants. The travelers lost their stock, their wagons, sometimes all of their possessions along the trail. They arrived in the new land penniless but confident that they soon would make good.

  Relations between Larkin and the newcomers were strained, for the untutored chauvinism of the Americans worried the native Californians and undermined Larkin’s scheme for independence. But another knowing settler, John Augustus Sutter, greeted their arrival with pleasure. But he had left Switzerland in the 1830s, drawn by the New World’s promise of wealth and freedom. His dream took shape on the banks of the Sacramento River, where his ranch and trading post made him the effective lord of northern California. But he was a lord without subjects; the only inhabitants of his “New Helvetia” were a handful of half-breeds and broken-down mountain men. Now the wagon trains would bring him tenants and customers. Perhaps when they arrived in force he would be able to complete his perennial project of building a mill on the Sacramento.

  In the meantime, Sutter sent a few hired hands out to dig a ditch and test another location for the millrace.

  ANNEXATION: POLITICS AND WAR

  The 1840s brought an extraordinary conjuncture of popular attitudes, political leadership, and diplomatic and military opportunity, the outcome of which would add over 1,200,000 square miles to United States territory. Within one decade—indeed, within one presidential term—Americans fought a diplomat
ic war in the Northwest and a shooting war in the Southwest that expanded their lands by well over one-third. Nothing like this could or would ever happen again.

  The popular idea lying behind this expansionism gathered force rapidly in the 1840s. Later called “Manifest Destiny,” it was a concept cloudy enough to appeal to many needs and hopes, compelling enough to sustain determined leadership. It meant expansion, legitimated by Heaven or the fates, inspired by economic interest, territorial greed, and missionary idealism—expansion toward the western coast, or over the whole North American continent, or perhaps even the whole hemisphere. Congressman Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois told Congress that he would “blot out the lines on the map which now marked our national boundaries on this continent, and make the area of liberty as broad as the continent itself.” That was the alleged purpose of Manifest Destiny—to bring the blessings of liberty and democracy, of Christianity and commercialism, to backward peoples. All this was mixed with boosterism. Said an Indiana congressman: “Go to the West and see a young man with his mate of eighteen,” and thirty years later “visit him again, and instead of two, you will find twenty-two. That is what I call the American multiplication table.”

  The acolytes of Manifest Destiny were less creative or talented than they were dogged and determined. James K. Polk, their exemplar, was the oldest of ten children of a prosperous North Carolina farmer; he had been a frail youngster, a dutiful student at the University of North Carolina, and a hard-working Tennessee lawyer, before starting his climb up the political ladder, from state legislator to congressman to Speaker of the House to governor of Tennessee. A Jackson man from first to last, he had the old general’s aid in winning the Democratic party nomination in 1844 as the nation’s first dark horse.

  “Who is James K. Polk?” the Whigs scoffed, but they found he was a President of plan and purpose. At the start of his administration he was determined to achieve four measures: tariff reduction; the independent treasury; settlement of the Oregon boundary question; and the acquisition of California. Backed up by an equally determined Cabinet and staff, supported in Congress, where he still had influence, Polk won these four measures—and then quit.

  Oregon came as an early test of Polk’s determination. Both Britain and the United States had long laid claim to the magnificent spread of half a million square miles lying roughly between the 42nd and 54th parallels. Both claims were based mainly on early explorations—the British, most notably on George Vancouver’s of 1792; the American, on Lewis and Clark’s of 1803-06. So impressive was each side’s case, and so tangled the issues, that Webster and Ashburton avoided the dispute in their 1842 negotiations. But American settlers in Oregon, especially in the lush Willamette Valley, were pressing for a settlement, and the British wished to clarify the status of their Hudson’s Bay Company, which dominated the fur trade in the vast expanse.

  The Americans had their champions in Congress. “Let the emigrants go on; and carry their rifles,” declaimed Thomas Hart Benton. “We want thirty thousand rifles in the valley of the Oregon…to annihilate the Hudson’s Bay Company, drive them off our continent, quiet their Indians, and protect the American interests.”

  Elected on a Democratic party platform that had sharpened the issue by flatly claiming “our title to the whole of the Territory of Oregon is clear and unquestionable,” Polk proceeded to take a strong line in his public pronunciamentos while still trying to deal privately with London. The result was a deluge of jingoism as even small boys picked up the cry “Fifty-four Forty or Fight,” and the British attitude stiffened. Congress passed a resolution authorizing the President to terminate joint occupation of Oregon. Throughout 1845 there was talk of war—over territory three thousand miles from Washington and many weeks of sailing time from England.

  Still, the foreign policy makers were able to transcend the war clamor they had helped create. Polk authorized his Secretary of State, James Buchanan, to offer the British a division at the 49th parallel. This was not the first time Washington had made this proposal, but now it failed to include a concession of free navigation of the Columbia River. Richard Pakenham, the British minister in Washington, rejected the proposal out of hand without referring it to London. He was disavowed by his government, which then proposed arbitration, but by now Polk had his back up. He would wait for Britain to make some substantial concession. The “only way to treat John Bull,” he told a congressman, “was to look him straight in the eye.”

  A series of events, more than men’s statecraft, made a settlement possible. Stronger leadership by “little Englanders” in Britain, a decision by the Hudson’s Bay Company to move its main depot from Fort Vancouver on the Columbia to Vancouver Island (thus strengthening Aberdeen’s argument that a presence on the river was not crucial), and the rising concern over the gathering potato famine in Ireland, brought a new proposal of the 49th parallel from the British. Although Polk remained unyielding, most of his cabinet members wanted a settlement, urging the President to try a most interesting tactic—to refer the proposed agreement to the Senate for previous advice, rather than for ratification or rejection. This way, the senators would take the political heat, whichever way they decided. None too eagerly, Polk agreed.

  The Senate took its advice-before-consent role seriously. Amid general surprise, the upper chamber advised the President to accept the British proposal as it stood. Polk complied. While by now the Oregon question had become entangled with slavery and Mexico, the simple result in the Northwest was that Americans had got neither “fifty-four” nor “fight” but a fair and lasting “forty-nine.”

  Seventeen parallels south of the 49th lay Washington’s old treaty-line border with Mexico, and to the southeast of that line lay the great curving Rio Grande, flanking Texas. Tyler had hoped to turn Texas into the political rallying ground of his presidency, with nationwide support for annexation as the main prop of his re-election bid. But Calhoun, Secretary of State after the resignation of Webster and the death of his successor, Abel Upshur, chose to focus on protection of slavery as the main justification for annexation. The Senate rejected Calhoun’s narrow sectional case after a bitter debate, thus leaving the explosive issue of Texas for Polk. Even more than Oregon, it was a divisive question, cutting across parties, regions, and factions. Accusing Tyler of a slaveholders’ conspiracy to enlarge the dominion of bondage, abolitionists used the issue of annexation to arouse Northerners over slavery. In the election of 1844 Van Buren’s opposition to annexation alienated his mentor Jackson and thousands of other Democrats.

  Henry Clay, the Whig nominee, typically tried to straddle the issue and typically came to be labeled “proslavery” by the abolitionists and “opportunistic” by the South. The Democrats had taken a forthright stand, calling for the “reannexation of Texas at the earliest practicable period.” And, with Polk, the Democrats had won.

  Deserted by his party, lame duck John Tyler still had four months to go in the White House following the election, and he wanted to make the most of them. Fearing that an annexation treaty would again be defeated in the Senate, Tyler used the device of a joint resolution, requiring only simple majorities in House and Senate, to push through approval of an annexation agreement with Texas. Ignoring any need to gain Mexico’s consent, the resolution provided that, with the agreement of Texas, as many as four additional states might be formed from her territory; Texas could retain her own public lands but must also pay her own public debt; and the Missouri Compromise line of 36º30? would be extended to Texas.

  Four days later Polk took the oath of office, and then the implacable escalation began.

  March 28, 1845: Mexico breaks off diplomatic relations with the United States.

  May 28: General Zachary Taylor receives orders to hold his troops in a state of readiness to advance into Texas.

  June 15: Taylor is ordered to occupy a position on or near the Rio Grande.

  July 4: A convention called by President Anson Jones of Texas accepts the annexation terms.r />
  July 26: Taylor advances into Texas and establishes his base on the south bank of the Nueces.

  The gathering crisis eased a bit in the autumn when the exhausted Herrera regime, beset by extreme nationalists, signaled a wish to parley. Mexican leaders, long concerned over Washington’s partiality to Texas, were naturally indignant at the annexation treaty and at threatening U.S. military moves. Polk sent John Slidell, a Spanish-speaking Louisiana politician, to Mexico City with instructions to offer Herrera $5 million for New Mexico, $25 million or more for California, and agreement on the Rio Grande as the northeastern boundary in exchange for American assumption of claims held by its own nationals against Mexico. Slidell arrived in Mexico only to learn that he would not be received as minister plenipotentiary, since the Mexicans wished to negotiate before officially resuming relations. Polk, however, refused to change Slidell’s status to that of a commissioner, and the Mexicans ignored the envoy. But Slidell’s presence had helped to turn public opinion against the Herrera government, and as 1845 ended the nationalist general Mariano Paredes launched a successful coup. Playing to popular fears that Slidell’s mission was not a gesture of conciliation but a foray to gain territory, Paredes declared he would fight for Mexico’s claim to all of Texas.

  The leaders in Washington and Mexico City now made a fateful set of decisions. On January 13 the War Department ordered Taylor to occupy positions on the Rio Grande across from Matamoras, where Mexican forces were camped; a few days later, Paredes sent General Mariano Arista north with reinforcements and secret instructions to push Taylor back beyond the Nueces. As it took about two weeks for messages from the Rio Grande to reach either capital, the soldiers were on their own. Actions in Texas were following a separate course from events in Washington and Mexico City.