A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  The Independent Treasury became the pole star of the Van Buren presidency, but was hardly the kind of thing that excited voters. Whigs wanted another national bank, and lost again as Van Buren’s Treasury bill passed in 1840. Meanwhile, without the BUS, the American banking system relied on private, state-chartered banks to issue money.

  The panic exposed a serious weakness in the system that could be laid at the feet of the Democrats. A number of states had created state banks that were specifically formed for the purpose of providing loans to the members of the dominant party, particularly in Arkansas and Alabama.39 In other states, the legislatures had provided state government guarantees to the bond sales of private banks. Either way, these state governments made a dramatic and unprecedented intrusion into the private sector, and the legislatures expected to tax the banks’ profits (instead of levying direct taxes on the people). Packing the management of these banks ensured that they provided loans to the members of the ruling party. These perverted state/bank relationships had two things in common: (1) they occurred almost exclusively in states where the legislatures were controlled by the Jacksonians; and (2) they resulted in disaster when the market was subjugated to the demands of politicians. Arkansas and Alabama saw their state banks rapidly go bankrupt; in Wisconsin, Mississippi, and the Territory of Florida, the banks collapsed completely. Stung by their failed forays into finance, Democrats in some of these states (Arkansas, Wisconsin, then later, Texas) banned banks altogether.

  And so even as the national economy revived by itself, as many knew it would, Arkansas, Mississippi, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, and the Territory of Florida all teetered on bankruptcy; witnessed all of their banks close; or owed phenomenal debts because of defaulted bonds. Lacking any banks to speak of, Missouri—the center of the fur trade—often relied on fur money—hides and pelts that circulated as cash.

  Van Buren rightly warned that “All communities are apt to look to government for too much…especially at periods of sudden embarrassment or distress.” He urged a “system founded on private interest, enterprise, and competition, without the aid of legislative grants or regulations by law [emphasis added].”40 This might have been laudable, except that Van Buren’s party had been directly responsible for the “aid of legislative grants or regulations by law” that had produced, or at the very least contributed to, the “embarrassment and distress” that the government was called upon to relieve.

  Those seeking to portray Van Buren as a free-market politician who brought the panic to a quick end have to explain why voters were so eager to give him the boot in 1840. It was no accident that Van Buren spent four years dodging the most important issue of the day, slavery; but then, was that not the purpose of the Democratic Party—to circumvent all discussions of the Peculiar Institution?

  Tippecanoe and Tyler Too

  By 1840, Van Buren had sufficiently alienated so many of the swing voters who had given him a decided edge in 1836 that he could no longer count on their votes. The economy, although showing signs of recovery, still plagued him. His opponent, William Henry Harrison, had run almost from the moment of his defeat four years earlier. Old Tippecanoe came from a distinguished political family. His father had signed the Declaration of Independence (and later his grandson would win the presidency in his own right). An officer at the Battle of Tippecanoe (1811), then at the Battle of the Thames (1813), both of which helped shatter the grip of the Indians in the Old Northwest, Harrison already had political experience as governor of Indiana. Like Calhoun and other disaffected Jacksonians, Harrison had once stood with the Democrats, and shared their states’ rights sentiments. Also like Calhoun, he thought the federal government well within its constitutional rights to improve harbors, build roads, and otherwise fund internal improvements. Although he favored a national bank, Harrison did not make the BUS his main issue. Indeed, many of his critics complained that they did not know what Harrison stood for.

  Harrison’s inscrutability stemmed largely from his middle-of-the-road position on slavery, especially his view that whatever solution was enacted, it had to emanate from the states. He did urge the use of the federal surplus to purchase, and free, slaves. In 1833 he wrote that “we might look forward to a day…when a North American sun would not look down upon a slave.”41 Despite Van Buren’s nebulous position, Calhoun had no doubts that “the soundest friends of slavery…were in the Democratic party”; moreover, had either Harrison’s or Van Buren’s hostility to slavery been apparent, it would have been impossible for a Liberty Party to appear in 1840.42 Unlike Van Buren, it should be noted, Calhoun did not wish to avoid discussion of slavery, but, quite the opposite, he relished confronting it head on to demand concessions from the North. “[C]arry the war to the non-slave holding states,” he urged in 1837.43

  Van Buren had the recession working against him. Old Tippecanoe started his campaign at age sixty-eight, and it appeared that age would, in fact, prove detrimental to his aspirations when, seeking the Whig nomination, rival Henry Clay’s supporters suggested Harrison retire to his log cabin and enjoy his hard cider. Harrison turned the tables on his opponents by adopting his “Log Cabin and Hard Cider Campaign.” It appealed to the masses, as did the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” referring to his Virginia vice presidential candidate, John C. Tyler. Harrison could also count on almost 200,000 votes of the men who had served under him at one time or another, and who knew him as “the General.”

  When the totals came in, Harrison and Tyler carried nineteen states to Van Buren’s seven and crushed him in the electoral college, 234 to 60. (Ironically, Virginia voted for Van Buren and not her two native sons.) Harrison had improved his popular vote totals by almost 2 million from 1836. Paradoxically, it was the first true modern campaign in the two-party system that Van Buren had created. Vote totals rose from 1.2 million in 1828, when Van Buren first inaugurated the party machinery, to double that in 1840; and from 1836 to 1840, the popular vote skyrocketed up by 60 percent, the “greatest proportional jump between two consecutive elections in American history.”44

  Old Tippecanoe would not live long to enjoy his victory. Arriving in Washington in February 9, 1841, during a mild snowstorm, Harrison delivered the March inaugural in a brisk, cold wind. The new president then settled in to deal with an army of job seekers—a gift from the Van Buren party system. On Clay’s advice, Harrison gave Webster his choice of the Treasury or State Department—Black Dan chose to be secretary of state—but otherwise the president-elect kept his distance from Clay. With the Whig victory, the Kentuckian had taunted the Democrats with their defeat and “descriptions of him at this time invariably contain the words ‘imperious,’ ‘arrogant,’ ‘domineering.’”45 Whether he could manipulate Harrison is doubtful, but before Clay had the opportunity to try, Harrison caught a cold that turned into pneumonia. On March 27, 1841, a doctor was summoned to the deteriorating president’s bedside, and Harrison died on April third. Daniel Webster sent his son to recall Vice President Tyler from Williamsburg, arriving to join the mourners at the Episcopal Church. America’s shortest presidency had lasted one month, and Old Tippecanoe became the first chief executive to die in office.

  Upon Harrison’s death, Democrats fidgeted, terrified that Clay would seize power and make Tyler his “pliant tool.”46 Instead, they found former Democrat John Tyler quite his own man. Although he was elected to Congress as a Jeffersonian Republican, he broke with Jackson in 1832 over the BUS veto. But he also voted against the Missouri Compromise bill, arguing that all the Louisiana Territory should be open to slavery.

  At age fifty-one, Tyler was the youngest American president to that point—ironically following the oldest. He had not actively sought the vice presidency, and he owed few political debts. There was a brief stew about Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 6, in which the Constitution said that if the president died or could not discharge the duties of his office, “the same shall devolve on the Vice President.” But the same what? Powers? Title? Was a special elect
ion necessary? A weaker, or less confident (certainly less stubborn), man would have vacillated, and many constitutional historians suspect that the Founders intended for the vice president to remain just that, until a new election made him president in his own right.47 Instead, the Virginian boldly assumed that the office and duties were his, and he took control. In a little-noticed act, Tyler cemented the foundation of the Republic for future times of chaos and instability.

  A classic ticket balancer with few genuine Whig sentiments, Tyler nevertheless immediately antagonized many of the extreme states’ rights advocates from his own state and other parts of the Deep South by retaining nationalistic “Black Dan” Webster as his secretary of state.48 This, too, set a precedent of a succeeding president accepting as his own the cabinet of the person who had headed the ticket in the general election.

  A number of problems greeted the new president, most notably the depression still lingering from Van Buren’s term. It had left the nation with a deficit of more than $11 million, which caused some in the May 1841 special session of Congress to press for additional tariffs. Tyler resisted. He did side with the Whigs on the distribution of monies from the sales of public lands and, in true Whig fashion, denounced the Independent Treasury as an unsatisfactory means of dealing with economic distress. Most stunning, this Virginian called for a new effort to suppress the slave trade.

  Clay, meanwhile, thinking that a Whig occupant of the White House equated with victory for his American system, immediately pushed for a new BUS. When a Whig bill for a new national bank came out of Congress in August 1841, however, Tyler vetoed it, as well as a second modified bill. Far from opposing a national bank, Tyler disliked some of the specific provisions regarding local lending by national bank branches, and he might have yielded to negotiations had not Clay, full of venom at the first veto, taken to the Senate floor to heap scorn on the president. Rumors swirled that the Whigs planned to spring a trap on Tyler by inserting phrases he would object to, then threatening to encourage his cabinet to resign if he dared veto the second bill. For the second time in ten years, the national bank had become the centerpiece in a political struggle largely removed from the specifics of the bill.

  By that time, the Whigs felt betrayed. Although doubtless that some of the dissatisfaction originated with the Clay faction, their protests were an astounding response by members of one party to their own president. It did not end with the bank bill either.

  Whigs and Tyler clashed again over the reduction in tariff rates. By that time, the tariffs existed almost exclusively for generating federal revenue. Any beneficial effects for American industries—if any ever existed at all—had disappeared by 1830, but the tariff still held great appeal for those industries that could keep prices high because of protection and, more important, to the politicians who had money to dole out to their constituents. It was that money, in the early 1840s, that was in danger of disappearing if the scheduled rate reductions already enacted drove the rates down from 33 percent to 20 percent. Consequently, two bills came out of the Whig Congress in 1842 to delay the reductions, and, again, true to his earlier Democratic heritage, Tyler vetoed them both. With his shrinking constituencies about to abandon him, even to the point of suggesting impeachment, Tyler conceded on a third bill that delayed some tariff reductions, but at the same time ended plans to distribute federal revenues to the states. Tyler not only managed to make himself unpopular, but by forcing concessions, he also eliminated the few bones that the Whigs had hoped to throw to southern interests. In response, the South abandoned the Whigs in the midterm elections, giving the House back to the Democrats. Tyler’s bullheadedness in vetoing the bank bill sparked a rebellion in which his entire cabinet resigned.

  The resulting gridlock proved problematic for American foreign policy. Tyler had navigated one rocky strait when Daniel Webster, prior to his resignation as secretary of state, negotiated a treaty with the British in 1842 called the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. It settled the disputed Maine boundary with Canada, producing an agreement that gave 50 percent of the territory in question to the United States. He also literally dodged a bullet in early 1844, when, with Webster’s replacement, Abel Upshur, and Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the president visited a new warship, the Princeton, with its massive new gun, the “peacemaker.” Tyler was below decks during the ceremony when, during a demonstration, the gun misfired, and the explosion killed Upshur, Tyler’s servant, and several others.

  Following Upshur’s death, Tyler named John C. Calhoun as the secretary of state. This placed a strong advocate of the expansion of slavery in the highest diplomatic position in the government. It placed even greater emphasis on the events occurring on the southern border, where, following Mexican independence in 1821, large numbers of Americans had arrived. They soon led a new revolutionary movement in the northern province known as Texas.

  Empire of Liberty or Manifest Destiny?

  Manifest destiny, often ascribed to the so-called Age of Jackson (1828–48), began much earlier, when the first Europeans landed on the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century colonial frontier. Later, eighteenth-century Americans fanned out into the trans-Appalachian West after the American Revolution, exploring and settling the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. It was from this perspective, then, that Jacksonian Americans began to see and fulfill what they believed to be their destiny—to occupy all North American lands east and west of the Mississippi and Missouri river valleys. Thomas Jefferson had expounded upon a similar concept much earlier, referring to an Empire of Liberty that would stretch across Indian lands into the Mississippi Valley. Jefferson, as has been noted, even planned for new territories and states with grandiose-sounding names: Saratoga, Vandalia, Metropotamia, and so on. The Sage of Monticello always envisioned a nation with steadily expanding borders, comprised of new farms and citizen-farmers, bringing under its wings natives who could be civilized and acculturated to the Empire of Liberty.

  During the 1830s and 1840s the embers of Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty sparked into a new flame called manifest destiny. It swept over a nation of Americans whose eyes looked westward. The term itself came from an 1840s Democratic newspaper editorial supporting the Mexican-American War, in which the writer condemned individuals and nations who were “hampering our [America’s] power, limiting our greatness, and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”49 Ralph Waldo Emerson’s speech the “Young American” extolled the virtues of expansion, and John L. O’Sullivan agreed: “Yes, more, more, more!”50

  Given that most of the expansionist talk revolved around Texas and points south, the popularization of manifest destiny by the press, to a certain extent, validated the abolitionists’ claim that a “slave power” conspiracy existed at the highest reaches of power. A majority of newspapers owed their existence to the Democratic Party, which in turn loyally supported the slave owners’ agenda, if unwittingly. Even the Whig papers, such as Horace Greeley’s Daily Tribune, which was antislavery, indirectly encouraged a western exodus. Then, as today, contemporaries frequently fretted about overpopulation: President James K. Polk, in his inaugural address in 1845, warned that the nation in the next decade would grow from 3 to 20 million and obliquely noted that immigrants were pouring onto our shores.51

  There were other, more common, economic motives interwoven into this anxiety, because the Panic of 1837 created a class of impoverished individuals eager to seek new opportunities in the West. Yet many of these individuals were white Missourians, not slaveholders, who headed for the Pacific Northwest, where they aimed to escape the South’s slave-based cotton economy and the slave masters who controlled it. Complex economic motives constituted only one voice in the choir calling for manifest destiny. Religion played an enormous factor in the westward surge as Great Awakening enthusiasm prompted a desire to expunge Spanish Catholicism, spread Protestantism, and convert the Indians.

  Othe
r than California, if any one area captured the imagination of American vagabonds and settlers, it was Texas. Before Mexican independence, Texas had failed to attract settlers from Spain and subsequently proved difficult to secure against Indian raids. Since few Mexicans would settle in Texas, the Spanish government sought to entice American colonists through generous land grants. Moses Austin had negotiated for the original grant, but it was his son, Stephen F. Austin, who planted the settlement in 1822 after Mexico won independence from Spain. By 1831, eight thousand Texan-American farmers and their thousand slaves worked the cotton fields of the Brazos and Colorado river valleys (near modern-day Houston). Although the Mexican government originally welcomed these settlers in hopes they would make the colony prosperous, the relationship soured. Settlers accepted certain conditions when they arrived, including converting to Catholicism, conducting all official business in Spanish, and refraining from settling within sixty miles of the American border. These constraints, the Mexican government thought, would ensure that Texas became integrated into Mexico. However, few Protestant (or atheist) Texans converted to Catholicism; virtually no one spoke Spanish, even in official exchanges; and many of the new settlers owned slaves. The Republic of Mexico had eliminated slavery in the rest of the country, but had ignored the arrival of Americans slaveholders in Texas. With the Mexican Colonization Act of 1830, however, the government of Mexico prohibited further American settlement and banned slavery in the northern provinces, specifically aiming the ordinance at Texas. These disputes all led to the 1830 formation of a Texan-American independence movement, which claimed its rights under the Mexican Constitution of 1824.