Lone Star Nation

by H. W. Brands

  Houston’s angling in English waters was intended to attract the attention of the United States. It achieved its purpose, inspiring President John Tyler to propose a treaty of annexation, which Houston accepted. But this was the easy part, as anyone familiar with American politics knew; much harder was to persuade the Senate to accept the treaty. Houston guessed that the job was too big for Tyler, America’s first accidental president (following the pneumonic death of William Henry Harrison). So he called on his old commander, the hero of New Orleans.

  Andrew Jackson’s health had declined dramatically since he left the White House. He suffered from insomnia, vertigo, dropsy, shortness of breath, and constant pain in head and body. Yet he was still the most formidable figure in American politics: the old lion of the nation’s oldest party, the embodiment of the people’s will. His enemies detested him as much as ever but kept a wary distance. His friends still loved him and hung on his—fewer and fewer—public words.

  Houston knew that Jackson had followed the annexation debate and that he remained committed to its positive outcome. In a letter of February 1844, Houston assured the old general they were in perfect agreement on the issue. “I am determined upon immediate annexation to the United States,” Houston said. Yet many Texans were wary, in light of their prior experience with the United States. Much was riding on the action of the Senate, and much would be lost if the treaty failed.

  My venerated friend, you will perceive that Texas is presented to the United States as a bride adorned for her espousal. But if, now so confident of the union, she should be rejected, her mortification would be indescribable. . . . Were she now to be spurned, it would forever terminate expectation on her part, and it would then not only be left for the United States to expect that she would seek some other friend, but all Christendom would justify her in a course dictated by necessity and sanctioned by wisdom.

  Jackson rose to Houston’s challenge. The old general launched his final campaign. He issued instructions to his lieutenants Francis Blair and William Lewis to mobilize the troops in the Senate. Texas, he told Blair, was “all important to the security and the future peace and prosperity of our Union.” He added, “I hope there are a sufficient number of pure American democrats to carry into effect the annexation of Texas.” To Lewis he wrote, “I hope this golden moment will be seized to regain Texas.” (With other Democrats, Jackson held that Texas had been part of Louisiana till bargained away by John Quincy Adams in 1819. For this reason they often spoke of “regaining” or “reannexing” Texas.) Should the present opportunity be squandered, Jackson contended, Britain would capitalize on America’s failure and weld Texas into an alien empire blocking American expansion. The United States would break up that empire sooner or later, but doing so “would cost us more blood and treasure . . . than we have spent in gaining our independence and our last war with Great Britain.” In another letter to Lewis, Jackson made this point more emphatically: “Houston and the people of Texas are now united in favor of annexation. The next President of Texas may not be so. British influence may reach him, and what can now be got from Texas, freely and peaceably, may evade our grasp and cost us oceans of blood and millions of money to obtain.”

  To the argument that annexation might provoke a war with Mexico, Jackson rejoined that Mexico had been attacking Texas these eight years, and it was time for America to make it stop. “The United States having been the first nation that acknowledged Texian independence, are we not bound to be the first to boldly step forward to put an end to this savage, marauding war?” Opponents worried that Britain would fight to prevent annexation; the victor of New Orleans refused to be cowed. “I say for one, ratify the treaty and take all the consequences.” Texas must be American, sooner or later. “Can there be any prospects of a more favorable time? I answer no.”

  By this point Henry Clay, the leading candidate among the Whigs for the 1844 presidential nomination, had announced against annexation. Martin Van Buren, the favorite among the Democrats, was waffling on the issue. Because Van Buren had been Jackson’s vice president and personally anointed successor, many in America wondered whether he spoke for Old Hickory. Jackson made clear that Van Buren did not. Jackson defended the restraint of his own administration and Van Buren’s on the Texas question but said that the time for restraint was past. Texas had shown its ability to stand on its own. “Eight years have elapsed since the memorable battle of St. Jacinto, and there has been no serious attempt by Mexico to occupy the country, and it is certain none can be made with any chance of success.” Texas offered herself for annexation and was entirely within her rights in doing so. But she might not do so again. If rejected by the United States, she must turn to Europe for assistance. “What would then be our condition? New Orleans and the whole valley of the Mississippi would be endangered. The numerous hordes of savages within the limits of Texas and on her borders would be easily excited to make war upon our defenseless frontier.” Annexation would serve Texas, but would serve the United States even more. “She is the key to our safety in the South and the West. She offers this key to us on fair and honorable terms. Let us take it and lock the door against future danger.”

  Jackson didn’t say so in public, but he knew that the fight for annexation was his last battle. And it might be his most important, for on Texas turned everything he had struggled decades to achieve. “The subject has carried me on until I am gasping for breath,” he wrote William Lewis. “It is a subject that involves a magnitude of interest in it for weal or for woe to the United States. . . . My dear Major, although I know my time is short here below, I love my country, and this subject involves its best interest—the perpetuation of our republican system, and of our glorious union.”

  Jackson’s foe in his final contest was his longtime enemy, John Quincy Adams. In the eight years since the Texas revolution, Adams had identified himself ever more closely with abolition. He successfully defended the slave-mutineers of the Spanish Amistad, who seized their vessel and sailed for freedom only to be tried for piracy. “Extraordinary,” noted Justice Joseph Story of Adams’s summation before the Supreme Court. “Extraordinary for its power and its bitter sarcasm, and its dealing with topics far beyond the record and points of discussion.” Adams led the opposition, so far unsuccessful, to the “gag rule,” which stifled debate in the House on slavery. For his pains he was subjected to death threats and innumerable slanders and libels. “Yet my conscience presses me on,” he wrote in his diary. “Let me but die upon the breach.”

  Adams wasn’t surprised that the Democrats would stoop to saying he had given away Texas, but neither was he going to let their mendacity go unchallenged. When Jackson joined the chorus of condemnation of the 1819 treaty and denied foreknowledge of its terms, Adams demonstrated that Jackson had in fact approved the treaty in advance, and he denounced as “bold, dashing, and utterly baseless lies” Jackson’s claims to the contrary. Adams warned the people of the North: “Your trial is approaching. The spirit of freedom and the spirit of slavery are drawing together for the deadly conflict of arms. The annexation of Texas to this union is the blast of the trumpet for a foreign, civil, servile, and Indian war. . . . Burnish your armor, prepare for the conflict. . . . Think of your forefathers! Think of posterity!”

  Adams’s warning fell on ears attuned to a different siren. Though Jackson’s lobbying failed to get the Texas treaty past the Senate, it ruined the candidacy of Van Buren and enhanced the prospects of another Jacksonian, James Polk, the engineer of the defeat of David Crockett, and an ardent annexationist. Polk was a dark horse going into the Democratic convention, but he won the nomination on the strength of his Jacksonian connections and his expansionist promises. He captured the general election by the same means, leaving Clay stuck in a straddle between his southern roots and his northern aspirations.

  John Tyler could interpret the election results as well as anyone. With little to show for his tenure as president till now, he determined to place his mark on the America
n map by annexing Texas before leaving the White House. America had never annexed another country, and politicians and constitutional scholars puzzled as to how it might be done. A treaty, requiring two-thirds in the Senate, remained an impossibility, so Tyler turned to a joint resolution, which needed a simple majority in each house.

  John Quincy Adams made his last stand in the lower chamber. He cited his record as secretary of state and president to prove that he had nothing against expansion per se. Only slavery and a decent respect for America’s neighbors prevented him from endorsing the annexation of Texas. “If slavery were totally abolished forever in Texas, and the voluntary consent of Mexico could be obtained, I would vote for the annexation of Texas tomorrow.” But under current conditions he couldn’t approve any such thing. As the momentum for annexation grew, Adams foresaw only disaster. “The Union is sinking into a military monarchy, to be rent asunder like the empire of Alexander or the kingdoms or Ephraim and Judah. . . . The prospect is deathlike.”

  The prospect grew even grimmer, in Adams’s view, when the House joined the Senate in approving annexation. Three days before leaving office, Tyler affixed his signature to the joint resolution.

  Jackson was dying by now. He received the good news from Francis Blair. “I congratulate you, dear General, on the success of the great question which you put in action,” Blair said. Jackson, his thin body become a wraith, his burning eyes finally clouded, responded softly, “I not only rejoice, but congratulate my beloved country. Texas is reannexed, and the safety, prosperity, and the greatest interest of the whole Union is secured.”

  C h a p t e r 2 2

  The Trial of Sam Houston

  In March 1861, the governor of Texas sat quietly in the house the state had built for its chief executives in the city named for his only equal in the pantheon of Texas heroes. Night had fallen across Austin, but more than night was falling across America, and Sam Houston waited to hear the latest ill tidings. He had just passed his sixty-eighth birthday, and he felt every one of those years. His San Jacinto ankle had never healed properly, and it reminded him at each step of his day of triumph. His arrow wound from the Horseshoe Bend still suppurated, recalling his time with General Jackson. Between the ooze and the limp—the first a mark of his service to the United States, the second to Texas—he did better sitting than standing these days.

  He had outlived most of his peers from those earlier times. Stephen Austin, of course, died in the year of Texas independence. Andrew Jackson died in the year of annexation. John Quincy Adams collapsed and died in the House in 1848, still declaiming against slavery, still convinced that Texas foretold the wreck of the Union. Santa Anna survived, but he had more lives than a cat.

  Houston hadn’t believed it then, and he hated to admit it now, but Adams—not Jackson—had been right about Texas and the Union. As soon as the American Congress offered annexation, Houston had thrown over the British. “Supposing a charming lady has two suitors,” he explained to an audience wondering at his apparent change of heart.

  One of them she is inclined to believe would make the better husband, but is a little slow to make interesting propositions. Do you think if she was a skillful practitioner in Cupid’s court she would pretend that she loved the other “feller” the best and be sure that her favorite would know it? [Laughter and applause.] If ladies are justified in making use of coquetry in securing their annexation to good and agreeable husbands, you must excuse me for making use of the same means to annex Texas to Uncle Sam. [Laughter and cheers.]

  The laughter faded, however, when annexation and a consequent dispute over the boundary of Texas triggered the war with Mexico that Adams had predicted. The conflict suited James Polk, who employed it to acquire California and round out the American Southwest. It also suited Santa Anna, in a different way. In the year of Texas’s annexation to the Union, the Mexican leader had again overreached himself and thereby united disparate elements of the opposition; these combined to force him from power and from the country. “Mexicans!” he declared as he embarked for Cuba. “In my old age and mutilated, surrounded by a wife and innocent children, I am going into exile to seek a resting place among strangers. Mercifully forgive the mistakes I made unintentionally, and believe me, in God’s name, that I have labored sincerely that you should be independent, free and happy.”

  He wasn’t gone long, though, before Polk conspired to send him back to Mexico. On the theory previously endorsed by Houston and Jackson, Polk judged that Santa Anna would make mischief in Mexico upon reentry, and no sooner had the second war for Texas begun—with fighting along the Rio Grande—than the American president directed U.S. naval commanders in the Caribbean to let Santa Anna through their blockade of the Mexican coast.

  Polk’s thinking proved as wishful as Houston’s and Jackson’s on the same subject. Santa Anna rallied Mexican forces against the American invaders, dashing to meet Zachary Taylor at Buena Vista in the north, then racing to cut off Winfield Scott at Cerro Gordo on the road from Veracruz. The hero was again in his element defending Mexico from invasion, and between his battlefield bravery (he led from the front and had horses killed beneath him) and his stirring speeches (“Mexicans! You have a religion: protect it! You have honor: free yourselves from infamy! You love your wives, your children: liberate them from American brutality!”) he inspired his countrymen to resist the invaders with surprising effectiveness. Yet he couldn’t overcome the backbiting and suspicion that had characterized Mexican politics since 1810 (to which, of course, he had contributed his full share), and he couldn’t keep Scott and the Americans from capturing the Mexican capital in the summer of 1847. He tried to arrange a surrender, but the Mexican congress couldn’t bring itself to face defeat, and his efforts earned him another exile. He narrowly escaped capture by Texas Rangers serving under the American flag but bent on avenging the Alamo and Goliad; only a safe-conduct issued by the U.S. commander of the Jalapa district allowed him to pass through the Ranger ranks, while the Texans gnashed their teeth and longed for the days under Houston when they ignored orders at pleasure.

  The war ended in what appeared a brilliant victory for the United States, with Mexico accepting American control of Texas and additionally ceding California and New Mexico to the United States. And the victory seemed even more brilliant just months after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when word arrived that a carpenter in California digging a race for a sawmill had discovered gold. By 1848 the spirit of “manifest destiny” infused American politics, and many Americans found it easy to believe that heaven had anointed them to take and civilize the whole of North America. But nothing seemed such patent proof of the destinarian case as the gold discovery. For a quarter millennium the gold of California had been hidden from the Spanish, for a quarter century from the Mexicans; but it hadn’t eluded the Americans for a quarter year. Polk and the expansionists had expected the Mexican War to pay for itself in the long run; to see it pay so soon—and in gold, no less—was enough to convince the most skeptical that God was an American.

  Yet the golden lining came with a cloud. Although Texas had entered the Union as a slave state, the condition of the rest of the Mexican cession vis-à-vis the peculiar institution had to be determined. Until the gold discovery, most observers assumed that whatever arrangements needed to be made could be made slowly, as the newly acquired territory—mostly desert or mountains, and dauntingly distant from the populated areas of America—filled slowly with people. The Louisiana Purchase, to cite the obvious precedent, was still half empty a half century after Jefferson acquired it. But the gold rush to California overturned all expectations. By the middle of 1849 California had more than enough people to qualify for statehood; by the end of that year those people had written a constitution and sent it to Washington, with emissaries who demanded California’s admission to the Union.

  Sam Houston was there to greet them. To no one’s surprise, Houston had been chosen to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate upon annexation. That he acc
epted the office, however, wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Houston had remarried (after a belated divorce from Eliza), and his new wife, Margaret, didn’t want him to leave Texas. She hoped his retirement from the Texas presidency in December 1844 would bring him home to her for good. A poet, she put in verse her vision for him and the family they were creating:

  This task is done. The holy shade

  Of calm retirement waits thee now.

  The lamp of hope relit hath shed

  Its sweet refulgence o’er thy brow.

  Far from the busy haunts of men,

  Oh! may thy soul each fleeting hour

  Upon the breath of prayer ascend

  To Him who rules with love and power.

  It was a fond hope, but Margaret could have guessed her husband wouldn’t find contentment communing with God. He heeded Margaret sufficiently not to seek public office, but he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—decline an office that sought him. When the people of Texas, speaking through the Texas legislature, insisted that he serve them in the Senate of the United States, he didn’t say no.

  Houston’s return to Washington excited great comment. His appearance was more striking than ever. He walked with the limp from San Jacinto, but still he towered over ordinary men. His mane and side whiskers were silver now, topped by a white beaver hat and set against a multicolored Cherokee blanket draped over his dress coat. President Polk might have been the political heir of Jackson, but Houston was Old Hickory’s spiritual heir and first scion in the line of democratic descent. It was Houston, rather than Polk, who had hastened to Jackson’s deathbed in Nashville, only to arrive moments late. He instructed his young son, the eldest of eight children he would have with Margaret, to mark the moment. “My son,” he said, “try to remember that you have looked upon the face of Andrew Jackson.” As Polk’s presidency wound down, many in Washington thought the magnificent Texan—the conqueror of Santa Anna, the George Washington of the Lone Star republic—ought to assume Jackson’s political mantle. Returning from a White House reception that saw Polk off, Houston wrote to Margaret: “I suppose that not less than one hundred persons of both sexes spoke to me on the subject of bringing you to the White House, and living there! It may be so!!”