A Disease in the Public Mind

by Thomas Fleming

  It need hardly be added that “sin” is not an idea that can be found in the U.S. Constitution. Religion had invaded American politics in a totally unexpected way. It was not, as William Lloyd Garrison had hoped, by a mass conversion, but as the justification for flinging hatred at fellow Americans.

  Old Man Eloquent was still holding the floor when Congress adjourned, and that meant he would have the floor when it reconvened for its next session in December. By that time, President Martin Van Buren had become so discouraged by the deluge of petitions and angry sermons against annexing Texas emanating from New England and the Yankee Midwest that he abandoned the idea as politically ruinous to his hopes for a second term.7

  Abolitionists hailed this retreat as a victory over The Slave Power. But Texas was too big and its potential too huge to go away. Angry southern Democrats and southern Whigs became determined to make it part of the Union, no matter what the abolitionists—or the Mexicans—thought. Their determination increased exponentially when they learned that the British were negotiating with the Texas government, offering them recognition if they agreed to abolish slavery. London even proposed the sort of compensation for the Texans’ freed slaves that had persuaded the West Indian planters to accept emancipation.

  The British claimed the offer was part of their policy to eliminate slavery around the world. Not a few people saw it as a continuation of their previous attempts to restrict America’s growth toward world power status. Not even John Quincy Adams favored it. He told two antislavery men who were going to a World Anti-Slavery Convention in London that he distrusted “the sincerity of the present British administration in the anti-slavery cause.”8

  • • •

  An unprecedented clash between a new president and Congress finally brought Texas into the Union as a slave state. In 1841, John Tyler became the first vice president to succeed a president who had died in office. His predecessor, William Henry Harrison, had been a Whig who expired after only a month in the White House. Tyler was a Virginia Democrat with a distinguished lineage. His father, also named John, had been Thomas Jefferson’s roommate at the college of William and Mary and a three-term governor of Virginia. No one was surprised when the younger Tyler became Virginia’s governor in his mid-thirties and a senator at thirty-seven. He had voted with the Whigs to protest Andrew Jackson’s tendency to ignore Congress and rely on his presidential powers to run the government. The Whigs had added Tyler to their presidential ticket to attract wavering members of the larger Democratic Party.

  When the Whigs, led by Senator Henry Clay, attempted to launch a program of expensive public works projects, they collided with Tyler’s Democratic roots. Convinced that federal power should be kept to a strict minimum, he relentlessly vetoed their bills. The Whigs lacked the two-thirds Congressional majority needed to override him. Whig rage at Tyler reached epic proportions. He was regularly burned in effigy in the North and South. At one point his entire Whig cabinet, except Secretary of State Daniel Webster, resigned in a body.

  Eager to be elected president in his own right, Tyler looked for an issue that would attract both Whigs and Democrats. There sat Texas, all but begging for his embrace. The idea coalesced with one of Tyler’s deepest political convictions: expansion was the key to America’s continuing political peace and economic prosperity. He also saw expansion as the eventual answer to the problem of slavery. He had inherited this belief in diffusion from James Madison.

  President Tyler first tried to annex Texas by treaty with Mexico. That prompted Secretary of State Daniel Webster to resign. Tyler made Senator Calhoun Webster’s successor and chief negotiator. The president also persuaded Andrew Jackson to write an open letter urging annexation, lest Texas “be thrown into the arms of England.” The treaty failed to get a two-thirds vote in the Senate. In the political conventions for the election of 1844, both the Whigs and the Democrats refused to nominate the “accidental president,” as Tyler was often called.9

  This rejection only made Tyler more determined to bring Texas into the Union. Soon after the voters chose a pro-admission Democrat, James K. Polk, as the new president, Tyler announced that Texas could be annexed by a joint resolution of both houses of Congress. He argued this move would only ratify the expressed will of the American people in their choice of Polk, a disciple of Andrew Jackson. The proposal outraged John Quincy Adams and his small band of antislavery supporters in Congress. They had already issued an address to the people of the United States warning that the annexation of Texas was a “slaveholders’ plot”—fresh evidence of how Slave Power paranoia was gaining a grip on their minds.

  Adams had also tried to persuade the House Foreign Affairs Committee, of which he was chairman, to approve a resolution declaring that any attempt to annex Texas by Congress would be null and void. He argued that it violated the Constitution, and the people of the free states should refuse to accept it. Adams followed this up with a tour of northern New York and the Midwest. Everywhere he called for “the extinction of slavery from the face of the earth.” But he offered no proposals on how this goal could be achieved. Instead, his speeches were drenched with hate-filled rants about The Slave Power.10

  In Washington, DC, Senator Calhoun issued a reply to Adams’s campaign. He said American slavery was drastically different from the brutal version that the British had abolished in the West Indies. He even praised the British for this “wise and humane” decision. In America, slavery was a reasonable, rational political institution, whose “employees” were far better off than the factory workers of England and New England. Slavery was vital to the “peace, safety and prosperity” of the southern states. There was therefore no reason why it should not thrive in the state on their present border, Texas.

  The statement added vigor to this new disease of the public mind, which would soon became epidemic in the South. It had just enough truth in it to seem persuasive to men and women of the 1840s. American plantation owners were more humane than the British and French planters in the West Indies, who resorted to horrendous cruelties to intimidate slaves and worked them to death as a matter of policy. But Calhoun’s refusal to consider slaves as human beings with a natural longing for freedom nullified his argument.11

  • • •

  President Tyler was the personification of self-confidence as he pressed forward with his proposal to annex Texas by a majority vote in Congress. His attractive second wife, Julia, wooed Congressional votes with spectacular White House receptions and dinners. The president flourished another statement by Andrew Jackson, issued, it soon became apparent, from his deathbed. “You might as well try to turn the current of the Mississippi,” the ex-president declared, “as to turn the Democracy [the Democratic Party] from the annexation of Texas.” With this endorsement, and a Democratic majority looming in Congress after the 1844 elections, Tyler had good reason to be confident.

  John Quincy Adams could only sit helplessly in the House of Representatives, watching the pro-Texas momentum build to avalanche proportions. On January 24, 1844, he made a last despairing speech against it. He even said he would applaud Texas in the Union, but only if it were purged of slavery. No one even bothered to answer Old Man Eloquent. President Tyler ordered the issue to a vote, and it passed overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives. In the Senate the vote was much closer, 27 to 25, revealing the growth of antislavery hostility in the northern states. The delighted Tyler immediately dispatched a courier to Texas with the news. He returned with Texan acceptance by a unanimous vote of the legislature.12

  In Boston, the Massachusetts legislature declared the annexation of Texas unconstitutional. They had never delegated to Congress the power to accept a “foreign country” into the United States, and the Bay State would never agree to such an idea if slavery was in the equation. Nor would they agree to permit any future state to join the Union unless slavery had been abolished within its borders.

  In Congress, John Quincy Adams predicted that Texas was only a first step in the im
perial plans of The Slave Power. After Texas would come the conquest of Mexico, then Canada. In a letter to a friend he added that these triumphs would be followed by an invasion of South America, while in Washington a Caesar would arise to rule a third of the world with guns and bayonets. Adams was too old to do anything about this dark vision. He told his friends—and his son, Charles Francis Adams, now a power in the Massachusetts legislature—that it would be the task of the younger generation to arm themselves and prepare for immense sacrifices to prevent this crucifixion of “freedom and truth.”13

  • • •

  Was President James Polk, a slave owner like Andrew Jackson, part of a Slave Power conspiracy? Fortunately, this question can be answered. Along with a legacy of dynamic presidential leadership, Polk left a diary that has given historians insights into his private thoughts and feelings. Slavery was simply not that important in his view of the American future. It was Manifest Destiny that gripped the new president’s mind.

  Polk saw a West growing ever stronger and more populous as settlers poured into it, peopling California and Oregon as well as Texas. When a thriving America stretched from sea to sea, she would have the leisure and the wealth to summon her native ingenuity and find a peaceful solution to slavery.

  With remarkable energy and diligence, Polk tackled his presidency with his eyes on these western goals. California was another vast territory, with only six thousand Mexicans and a few Indian tribes inhabiting a natural wonderland of unspoiled forests and primeval valleys. The territory included the future states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, all virtually unpeopled. To its north, the Oregon territory was entangled with a foreign claimant, Great Britain, acting on Canada’s behalf. The British disputed America’s claim that it stretched to the fifty-fourth parallel of latitude—the border of Russian-owned Alaska. After running for president on a slogan of “Fifty four forty or fight,” Polk avoided a war with a compromise, accepting the forty-ninth parallel as Oregon’s northern border in negotiations with Britain.

  At first the president hoped he could acquire California and confirm American annexation of Texas without a war with Mexico. His envoy to Mexico City offered large sums for peaceful possession of both territories. Polk wanted to extend the Texas border to the Rio Grande, a far more natural dividing line than the wandering Nueces River, which had been the Texas border for a long time. He was ready to pay generously for this concession.

  Unfortunately, bankrupt Mexico did not have a government. It was a shifting sands of competing politicians, some inclined to pragmatism, others to virulent hatred of the Yankee colossus to the north. On New Year’s Day 1846, a Mexican general named Mariano Paredes overthrew the legally elected president, accusing him of a willingness to make a “treasonable” bargain with the Americans. The Yankee-haters were in control, and they marched an army to the Rio Grande with talk of reconquering Texas. Polk ordered Brigadier General Zachary Taylor to advance to the same contested border with 3,554 men—almost half the 7,200-man American army.14

  • • •

  On April 24, 1846, General Taylor ordered a cavalry captain and his troop of dragoons to investigate a rumor that 1,600 Mexican horsemen had crossed the Rio Grande. Two days later, the Mexican guide who had accompanied the troopers stumbled into camp and reported they had been ambushed. Sixteen had been killed, the rest captured. General Taylor rushed a message to President Polk: “Hostilities may now be considered as commenced.”

  The news reached Washington in two weeks, lightning speed for those days, and Polk asked Congress to agree that “war exists by act of Mexico.” Both houses concurred with massive majorities. Only two Whig senators from New England and fourteen Whig Congressman, led by John Quincy Adams, voted no.

  Now came the much larger question: Could the Americans win this war? Many people in the United States and outside it had grave doubts. The tiny American army had fought no one but a few Indian tribes since 1815. The Mexican army was 32,000 strong, and many of these soldiers were veterans, thanks to Mexico’s numerous revolutions.

  The Americans had a secret weapon that virtually no one appreciated. Since the War of 1812, when their untrained militia armies had floundered to disaster in Canada, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point had produced over a thousand graduates. Not a few of them were in the American regular army. Still others returned from civilian life to officer regiments in the fifty thousand volunteers that Polk persuaded Congress to raise.15

  • • •

  Even before President Polk wrote his war message and the volunteers arrived to support the regulars, West Pointers in Taylor’s little army demonstrated what professional soldiers could achieve. In two hard-fought battles, they inflicted shattering defeats on the much larger Mexican army. Meanwhile the energetic Polk launched smaller armies into what are now the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and California. In the next year they would conquer these territories with virtually no gunfire or bloodshed.

  The battlefield victories on the Rio Grande and the prospect of conquering the other territories thrilled most Americans. Men rushed to enlist in the volunteer regiments. Two thirds came from the western states, where Manifest Destiny was virtually an article of faith. Almost no fighting men came from New England. There the war was denounced and damned as a plot of The Slave Power. James Russell Lowell summed up their attitude in his satiric poem, The Biglow Papers.

  They just want this Californy

  So’s to lug new slave states in

  To abuse ye and to scorn ye,

  An’ to plunder ye like sin.16

  • • •

  In spite of the opening defeats, the Mexicans refused to negotiate. General Taylor led an army of regulars and volunteers into Mexico and captured Monterrey in a bloody battle. Polk, still hoping for an early peace, smuggled General Santa Anna into Mexico—he had been living in exile in Cuba—on the promise that he would sign a peace treaty. Instead Santa Anna seized control of the government and attacked Taylor’s army at Buena Vista. Again the Americans won a victory thanks largely to the West Pointers in their ranks, notably the artillerymen. Still the Mexicans refused to negotiate.

  President Polk ordered another ten-thousand-man army under the command of General Winfield Scott to invade Mexico at Vera Cruz and march to Mexico City to dictate peace. This was a high-risk gamble. Could ten thousand men conquer a country of eight million? Military experts in Europe, including the Duke of Wellington, predicted disaster.

  Scott staffed his army with as many West Pointers as he could obtain. In particular, he asked for a soft-spoken Virginia captain named Robert E. Lee. In the ensuing campaign, Lee became the most talked-about soldier in the American army. Again and again, he found ways to outflank and outwit Santa Anna’s larger army.

  Confronted by a twelve-thousand-man force on Cerro Gordo, a conical thousand-foot ridge guarding the only pass into the Mexican interior, Captain Lee ventured alone into the surrounding underbrush and found a path that enabled the Americans to attack the Mexican rear.

  The next day General Scott routed the stunned Mexicans. During the assault, Captain Lee led a brigade around the enemy flank to seize a road through a crucial pass behind the Mexican lines. The panicked enemy fled down narrow footpaths, their army disintegrating into a mob.17

  Advancing over the mountains into the magnificent Valley of Mexico, Scott and his men confronted another daunting combination of man-made and natural defenses. One of the most formidable was the Pedregal, an immense lava field that stretched for miles along the left flank of the fortified village of Contreras. There was nothing in this wilderness of jutting rocks but a few stunted shrubs and a winding mule path. General Scott asked Captain Lee to see if there was a way across this stony desert.

  Lee returned with a sketch of a possible road. Scott immediately put five hundred men to work building it under the captain’s supervision. The result was a flank attack that swept the Mexicans out of Contreras in seventeen minutes. The commander in chief called Lee’s
night trips across the Pedregal “the greatest feat of physical and moral courage performed by any individual . . . in the campaign.” The forty-year-old captain was promoted to brevet lieutenant colonel on the spot.18

  The Americans captured Mexico City in a final assault, with Lieutenant Colonel Lee again working out maneuvers and troop dispositions designed to maximize surprise and minimize casualties. At a victory dinner in the capital, General Scott declared that without Lee and his fellow West Pointers, “this army multiplied by four” could not have conquered Mexico.

  Many other graduates had distinguished themselves in the war’s battles. At Buena Vista, Colonel Jefferson Davis and his three-hundred-man regiment of Mississippi rifleman stopped the charging Mexican cavalry and infantry three times, saving Zachary Taylor’s outnumbered army from destruction. In an attack on the fortress of Chapultepec, outside Mexico City, artillery Lieutenant Thomas Jackson led a “one gun charge” up the road, ignoring blizzards of Mexican bullets and cannonballs. But no one came close to matching Robert E. Lee’s accomplishments. Back in the United States, General Scott called him “the very best soldier that I ever saw in the field.” At another point, when someone speculated that America and Britain were likely to go to war again because of London’s imperialistic ambitions, Scott said the government should insure the life of Lieutenant Colonel Lee, even if the cost was $5 million a year.19

  Throughout the next decade, an awareness of Lee’s talents spread from the army to the general public. In 1852 he was appointed superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy. There he distinguished himself by doing his utmost to keep sectional conflict to a minimum. Again and again, he stressed that the academy was a “band of brothers” who should not allow the dispute over slavery to rupture the harmony of the cadet corps—and by implication, the unity of the nation.

  • • •

  In 1846 a Pennsylvania Democratic congressman named David Wilmot introduced a resolution into a fundraising bill, declaring that slavery should be banned in every single foot of territory acquired from Mexico. One of Wilmot’s motives was resentment against President Polk for taking the Democratic nomination away from Martin Van Buren in 1844. Another motive was to become the mantra of many northern politicians: no quarrel with slavery where it existed but opposition to letting it spread. Wilmot called his proposal “the White Man’s Proviso.” With almost breathtaking candor, he added: “I want to have nothing to do either with the free Negro or the slave Negro. We wish to settle the territories with free white men.” In many ways Wilmot was more racist than John C. Calhoun.20