by H. W. Brands
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: “CITIZENS 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? . . . PEOPLE OF THE NORTH! WILL 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.
And to the Texans themselves. Spurned by the United States, still claimed by Mexico, Texas reluctantly embarked on a career as independent republic. Though hindsight would hallow the years of Texas nationhood—Texas schoolchildren would be taught to cherish the fact that their state, alone of the eventual fifty, had once been a separate republic—to those who lived through them, they were fraught with danger and confusion.
The gravest danger was the one that had prompted Spain and then Mexico to grant Moses and then Stephen Austin permission to found their colony. If anything, the threat from the Comanches and other Indian tribes grew during the Texas revolution. The Texas rebels broke Mexico’s power without replacing it with their own, and the Indians lost no time in taking advantage of their opportunity. “Bastrop county suffered more from Indians during the year 1836 than for any other year of its history,” Noah Smithwick remembered. “I could mention numbers of its best men who were killed during that year.” Bastrop County served as an instructive example of the Indian troubles, and Smithwick was an informed witness. At the northern edge of Austin’s colony, Bastrop bordered the region the Comanches still claimed for their own, and with many of the American men gone to fight the Mexicans, the Indians raided far down into the colony. Smithwick took leave of the anti-Mexican army to enlist in a ranger company established to hold the northern frontier against the native warriors. From January 1836 he rode up and down the Colorado River chasing Indians, recapturing livestock, reclaiming captives, and generally conducting a war that paralleled the war against Mexico. The casualties in this war were fewer than those in the struggle against Mexico, but the engagements were no less brutal in their smaller way. Raid and reprisal, stalking and ambush, scalping and mutilation characterized the tactics of both sides. The fighting continued long past San Jacinto and the withdrawal of Mexican forces from Texas, with neither Indians nor Anglos having a clear advantage.
Upon his inauguration as Texas president, Sam Houston tried to end the Indian war. This suited Smithwick and most of those he knew. “The white people, weary of the perpetual warfare which compelled them to live in forts and make a subsistence as best they might, hailed the proposition for a treaty with delight,” Smithwick wrote. The Comanches along the Colorado were also tired of the fighting, and they agreed to negotiate. They spoke no English, and the Anglos no Comanche, but the Indians knew some Spanish, as did Smithwick, who accordingly became a treaty commissioner for the Texans. The Comanches insisted that Smithwick travel to their camp, to negotiate on their own turf. His comrades warned him not to go, but he decided to chance it. “Knowing that there is a degree of honor even among Indians touching those who voluntarily become their guests, I yielded to the stress of circumstances and agreed to accompany them back to their camp.”
Along with nearly every other Anglo in Texas, Smithwick considered the Indians savages, and as a ranger he had battled them fiercely. But he appreciated their better points, and he approached their camp with a relatively open mind. First to catch his eye were the captives: one Anglo woman and two Anglo boys, and one Mexican woman and two Mexican boys. Of the six, the Mexican woman was the only one who indicated any desire to leave the Comanches. She had been captured as a grown woman and was homesick. But the others had been taken young, had grown up among the Comanches, and considered themselves Comanches. One, an Anglo lad of about eighteen, in fact had been captured twice by Smithwick’s rangers, but each time escaped and returned to his adoptive people. The Comanches also had a captured Waco child. One of Smithwick’s hosts, Chief Quinaseico, explained that his band of Comanches had surprised a camp of Wacos and killed them all, except that one boy. “After the fight was over I went into a lodge and found this boy, about two years old, sitting beside its dead mother crying,” Quinaseico explained to Smithwick. “My heart was sorry for him, and I took him up in my arms and brought him home to my lodge and my wife took him to her bosom, and fed him, and he is mine now.”
Smithwick spent several weeks with the Comanches. Various aspects of their lives and customs struck him as noteworthy. They were entirely carnivorous, subsisting on buffalo and other game. This gave them an advantage over tribes that grew corn and squash or gathered pecans and tubers, for they had no particular territory they had to defend. Unlike most tribes, the Comanches eschewed alcohol, which gave them another advantage, especially in dealings with whites, who relied on liquor in Indian diplomacy. Though terrible against their enemies, the Comanches were quite orderly among themselves. “They were the most peaceable community I ever lived in,” Smithwick said. “Their criminal laws were as inexorable as those of the Medes and Persians, and the code was so simply worded there was no excuse for ignorance. It was simply the old Mosaic law, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ . . . In cases of dispute, a council of the old men decided it, and from their decision there was no appeal.” While the Comanches merrily tortured enemies who fell alive into their hands, they treated each other with kindness and respect. “I never saw a woman or a child abused. The women, as in all savage tribes, were abject slaves, but their inferiority was their protection from the chastisement which ‘civilized’ husbands sometimes visit on their wives. An Indian brave would have felt it a burning disgrace to strike a woman.”
Smithwick’s sojourn included conversations about the relative claims of Indians and Anglos to Texas. “I had many long, earnest talks with those old Comanche chiefs, and I could not but admit the justice of their contention,” Smithwick said. “The country they considered theirs by right of inheritance; the game had been placed there for their food.” A chief named Muguara put the aboriginal case most succinctly:
We have set up our lodges in these groves and swung our children from these boughs from time immemorial. When game beats away from us we pull down our lodges and move away, leaving no trace to frighten it, and in a little while it comes back. But the white man comes and cuts down the trees,
building houses and fences, and the buffaloes get frightened and leave and never come back, and the Indians are left to starve, or, if we follow the game, we trespass on the hunting ground of other tribes and war ensues.
Smithwick asked if the Comanches would agree to settle down and become farmers. “No,” Muguara answered, “the Indians were not made to work. If they build houses and try to live like white men they will all die.” So what was the solution? Muguara put it simply: “If the white men would draw a line defining their claims and keep on their side of it, the red men would not molest them.”
Smithwick thought this a good idea, and he took it to Sam Houston. The Texas president agreed in principle. But he discovered that the Texas legislature, like Texans generally, held a different view. Houston had negotiated a treaty with his old friends the Cherokees, designed to secure their rights in the new republic, only to have the legislature reject it. Houston was fairly certain that what was withheld from the Cherokees would never be offered to the more warlike Comanches. As he sadly told Smithwick, “If I could build a wall from the Red River to the Rio Grande, so high that no Indian could scale it, the white people would go crazy trying to devise means to get beyond it.”
Houston was right, as his successor demonstrated. The Texas constitution forbade consecutive terms for president, and Houston was followed in 1838 by Mirabeau Lamar, the dashing horseman of San Jacinto (who won election by default after both his principal rivals committed suicide). Lamar launched an aggressive campaign to drive the Comanches north of the Red River. The bloody symbol of Lamar’s approach was the “Council House fight,” an 1840 incident in which a large delegation of Comanches visiting San Antonio to arrange a peace settlement was seized by Texas authorities, triggering gunfire that killed thirty-five Comanches, including a dozen chiefs and several women and children, and seven Texans. The affair sparked a summer of raids and reprisals that reciprocally ravaged Texas towns and Comanche villages, killed scores of fighters and noncombatants on both sides, and thoroughly unsettled the frontier. At great and unsustainable expense, the Texans forced the Comanches north. But only the wishful among the Texans imagined that the Comanches’ tactical retreat terminated the historic contest for control of the vast Texas plains.