by H. W. Brands
While Margaret prayed to be spared such a fate, Houston dreamed of this stunning conclusion to his remarkable career. But any aspirant to the American presidency in the mid-nineteenth century had to negotiate the narrowing channels of slavery politics, which tightened treacherously upon California’s application to the Union. Henry Clay, returned to the Senate after losing the presidency to Polk, proposed to wrap California in a package acceptable to North and South alike. The North would get a free California (the California constitution barred slavery) and an end to the slave trade in the District of Columbia, while the South would get a stiffened fugitive slave law and the possibility of slavery in the rest of the Mexican cession. To sweeten the deal for Texas, the federal government would assume the former republic’s crushing debts.
Clay’s compromise bill elicited the greatest Senate debate in American history. Clay himself spoke for days on behalf of his measure. John Calhoun, too weak to address the Senate in his own voice, and coughing blood from the tuberculosis that would kill him before the debate ended, had an associate read a rebuttal that was as incendiary as anything the old nullifier had ever written. Daniel Webster riposted that such sentiments as Calhoun’s were irresponsible and incipiently treasonous.
Sam Houston had special standing in the affair, hailing from the state that had set the whole crisis in motion. He sided with Calhoun and most of the South in holding that Congress had no right to speak on slavery in the admission of new states. Under the Constitution, Congress could—and must—insist that the states applying for admission have republican governments, but beyond that, Houston said, Congress could not go without trampling the rights of the people. “The Congress of the United States does not possess the power to legislate upon the subject of slavery, either within the Territories or in any other section of the Union. . . . In the formation of their constitutions, under which they ask admission, the people of the Territories have the right to give their own form to their own institutions, and in their own way.”
Yet Houston’s democratic faith in the people didn’t prevent him from denouncing those people who spoke of extreme measures in the event their side didn’t get everything it wanted in the present debate. Northern abolitionists were “a contemptible minority,” he said, while southern secessionists were “ultras” blind to the danger of the course they advocated. This danger was nothing less than “a war of dissolution, the worst of all wars; a war not of race, a war not of language or of religion, but a war of brothers, the most sanguinary of mortal strife.” Houston urged his colleagues to set aside sectionalism and seek the national interest. “I call upon the friends of the Union from every quarter to come forward like men and to sacrifice their differences upon the common altar of the country’s good, and to form a bulwark around the Constitution that cannot be shaken.” In the current climate, this was no small request. “It will require manly efforts, sir, and they must expect to meet with prejudices growing up around them that will assail them from every quarter. They must stand firm to the Union, regardless of all personal consequences.” Houston acknowledged that he wasn’t a religious man, but he almost wished he was, that he might request the aid of the Almighty. “I cannot offer the prayers of the righteous that my petition might be heard. But I beseech those whose piety will permit them reverently to petition, that they will pray for this Union and ask that He who buildeth up and pulleth down nations will, in mercy, preserve and unite us. For a nation divided against itself cannot stand.” Beyond this, Houston’s one request was that in the event that prayers and the wisdom of the people proved unavailing, he not live to see the result. “I wish, if this Union must be dissolved, that its ruins may be the monument of my grave and the graves of my family. I wish no epitaph to be written that I survive the ruin of this glorious Union.”
He didn’t get his wish. The decade after the Compromise of 1850, as Clay’s ultimately successful omnibus measure was called, witnessed the fulfillment of the fears of every friend of the American Union. The Fugitive Slave Act outraged the North by compelling complicity in the return of escaped bondsmen (and others merely alleged by interested parties to have escaped), while the admission of free California continued to rankle the South. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and opened those two territories to slavery should settlers there choose it; in the process the act provoked a guerrilla war in “bleeding Kansas” and furnished recruits to the new, antislavery Republican party. The Supreme Court declared in the 1857 Dred Scott case that Congress had no authority to bar slavery from the territories, a decision that appeared to corroborate the slaveholder-conspiracy theories of abolitionists and other northerners, with slaveholding Chief Justice Roger B. Taney cast as arch-conspirator. John Brown’s botched but bloody effort to start a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, and the reverence accorded the convicted murderer on his way to the gallows, convinced southerners that the real conspiracy was in the North. Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election, with solely northern support, made the perfection of the antislavery conspiracy seem merely a matter of time.
Houston watched the descent toward dissolution with sickening dread. He called the Kansas-Nebraska bill “an eminently perilous measure” and urged the South not to repeal the Missouri Compromise. Repeal, he said, would provoke the North and unsettle the Union. “Maintain the Missouri Compromise! Stir not up agitation! Give us peace!”
He stayed in the Senate another half decade but, as a southern Unionist, found himself increasingly isolated. His cachet in the country as a whole continued to be formidable; Democrat Andrew Johnson of Tennessee asserted, as his party surveyed its presidential prospects, “All agree that if Sam Houston could receive the nomination that he would be elected by a greater majority than any other person.” But as the Democrats’ center of gravity drifted from West to South, from the land of Jackson to that of Calhoun, an outspoken Unionist stood no chance of being nominated. In the late 1850s secessionist sentiment seized the Texas legislature, and in 1859 it forced Houston from the Senate.
Yet the ordinary people of Texas still responded to the hero of San Jacinto, and Houston had hardly returned from Washington before they elected him governor. Meanwhile his supporters outside the state persisted in hoping for a Houston presidency. After the Democratic party split in the summer of 1860, Houston’s friends put his name forward at the convention of the Constitutional Union party. He narrowly lost the nomination to John Bell of Tennessee.
Passion drove politics that season, and the secessionist fever rose by the week. Houston tried to talk it down, with a passion of his own. To a crowd in Austin he spoke of what he had hoped to accomplish in his long public life, and what the secessionists endangered. “Upward of forty-seven years ago,” he said of his service with Andrew Jackson, “I enlisted, a mere boy, to sustain the national flag and in defense of a harassed frontier.” A belief in the Constitution and the Union had motivated him then, as it motivated all who joined him in those parlous times. “And when again, in 1836, I volunteered to aid in transplanting American liberty to this soil, it was with the belief that the Constitution and the Union were to be perpetual blessings to the human race, that the success of the experiment of our fathers was beyond dispute, and that whether under the banner of the Lone Star or that many starred banner of the Union, I could point to the land of Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson as the land blest beyond all other lands, where freedom would be eternal and the Union unbroken.” Houston had watched the Union grow and prosper. “I have seen it extend from the wilds of Tennessee, then a wilderness, across the Mississippi, achieve the annexation of Texas, scaling the Rocky Mountains in its onward march, sweeping the valleys of California, and laving its pioneer footsteps in the waves of the Pacific.” This empire of liberty and prosperity was what the secessionists were determined to destroy.
Houston summoned the spirit of Old Hickory to oppose the wreckers. “I invoke the illustrious name of Jackson and bid you not to prove recreant to his m
emory. . . . To the national men of long service, to the young men who have been reared to love that name, I appeal. The same issue is upon you that was upon him. He stood with the Constitution at his back and defied disunion.” Jackson’s example should strengthen his followers against sectionalists of all parties. “Let the people say to these abolition agitators of the North, and to the disunion agitators of the South, ‘You cannot dissolve this Union. We will put you both down; but we will not let the Union go!’ ”
Houston hoped reason would prevail but feared it would not. And he wished again, if it did not, to be spared the sight of the rending of everything he had struggled to achieve. “It has been my misfortune to peril my all for the Union, so indissolubly connected is my life, my history, my hopes, my fortunes with it. And when it falls, I would ask that with it might close my career, that I might not survive the destruction of the shrine that I had been taught to regard as holy and inviolate since my boyhood. I have beheld it, the fairest fabric of government God ever vouchsafed to man, more than half a century. May it never be my fate to stand sadly by gazing on its ruin!”
And now, five months later, he awaited a delegate from the convention that had decreed Texas secession. The election of Lincoln had prompted several southern states to make good their threat to leave the Union. Texas moved more slowly than the rest, in no small part because Houston employed every device he could think of to frustrate what was clearly a majority sentiment among Texas voters. He refused to call a special session of the legislature or summon a convention to consider secession, as had been done in other states; when a convention gathered over his objection, he belatedly brought the legislature into session, to muddy the political waters. But his obstructive efforts failed. The convention endorsed secession, and a popular referendum ratified it. The convention then drafted a new constitution for Texas, attaching the state to the Confederacy and requiring Texas officials to swear allegiance to the Confederate government.
Houston watched all this from the governor’s house on a hill across from the state capitol. Now he waited for the convention’s emissary, who would formally notify him of the convention’s action and of his new duty.
George Chilton arrived at eight. He advised the governor that the convention required his oath at once; should he fail to comply, he would be removed from office.
Chilton wasn’t half Houston’s age, having been a child at the time of San Jacinto. And his service to Texas paled beside the decades Houston had devoted to his adopted country and state. Consequently Chilton could hardly object when Houston requested more time to consider his response to the convention’s demand. By noon the next day, Houston said, the convention would have its answer.
That night was the longest of Houston’s life. Past twelve and far till dawn, he struggled with his conscience, with what was left of his ambition, and with history. The irony of his predicament must have forced a wry smile to his face even as it banished sleep from his brain. He, the man who had done more than any other to attach Texas to the Union, was now required to approve the severing of Texas from the Union. Each weary step as he paced the pine boards of the mansion recalled the personal price he had paid; his ankle hurt more on some steps, his thigh on others. To choose between Texas and the Union was to deny the meaning of half the pain he had suffered to bring them together.
The irony was personal, but it was more than that. Houston had fought a war, risking life and reputation, to free Texas from Mexico and make Texas part of the American Union; yet the very success of that war had taught Texas and the South how to dismantle the Union. The secession of Texas from Mexico in 1836 supplied a model for the secession of the South from the Union a quarter century later. In each case secession was defended in terms of states’ rights, said to have been traduced by an overweening central authority. Santa Anna had destroyed the Mexican constitution of 1824 by a few swift blows; the North and the Republicans, southerners asserted, had been undermining the American constitution of 1787 for decades. In each case slavery played a role. In Texas in the 1830s slavery was one concern among several; in the South in the early 1860s it was the defining grievance of the Confederacy. Many southern secessionists in 1861 doubted that the North would fight, or if it did that its efforts would avail any better than those of Mexico against Texas in 1836. Hadn’t a handful of Texans defeated the hosts of Santa Anna? With such inspiration, did it matter that the North outnumbered the South?
But there was a deeper irony. Houston, like Jackson and all who won political distinction in the age of democracy, placed his confidence in the people. “The people are always right: that is the dogma of the republic,” Alexis de Tocqueville had scribbled in the same notebook in which he marveled at the election of David Crockett. Houston agreed, regarding both the phrase being the dogma and the people being right. The people could be unruly and intemperate, as his soldiers were unruly and intemperate during the retreat across Texas in 1836. But eventually the people got it right, as his men got it right at San Jacinto, and as the people of Texas got it right—if he did say so himself—in conferring on him the highest offices at their command.
The people were a tide nothing could resist for long. They had broken down the barriers to voting in the United States in the early nineteenth century. They had swarmed into Texas against the wishes of the Mexican government. They had made the independence of Texas inevitable, seizing that province in fact before they seized it in name. They had demanded the annexation of Texas to the United States and ultimately compelled Congress to take Texas in.
During all that time Houston had seen the people as a progressive force. Democracy could be rough; no one who knew Indians and loved many of them as Houston did could be other than dismayed at what American democracy had done to them. But on balance the expansion of democracy, the growth of the American Union, had been a blessed thing. Democracy delivered opportunity; it meant better lives for more ordinary men and women than had ever enjoyed such opportunity in other times or places.
Yet now democracy was destroying the Union. Houston had held out against secession until the people of Texas spoke; he had hoped against reason and evidence that they would see the error of their intended ways. He didn’t doubt that secession would lead to war—and not a war like that against Santa Anna but a conflict so violent as to make the Alamo and San Jacinto seem mere skirmishes.
It was a bitter draft for Houston to swallow: that the people could be so wrong. And it left him at a loss. The people of Texas had chosen disunion, and the representatives of the people now demanded that he swear allegiance to the secessionist confederacy. During his sleepless night, hobbling on his Texas ankle, rubbing his Union wound, he pondered his alternatives. The voice of the people, or the voice of his conscience? Texas or the Union?
In the dark, cold hours of dawn he reached his decision. The convention wanted his answer; instead he addressed it to a higher authority: the people.
Fellow citizens:
In the name of your rights and liberties, which I believe have been trampled upon, I refuse to take this oath.
In the name of the nationality of Texas, which has been betrayed by this convention, I refuse to take this oath.
In the name of the constitution of Texas, which has been trampled upon, I refuse to take this oath.
In the name of my own conscience and manhood, which this convention would degrade by dragging me before it, to pander to the malice of my enemies . . . I refuse to take this oath.
Houston understood the consequences of his refusal. “I am ready to be ostracized sooner than submit to usurpation. Office has no charm for me, that it must be purchased at the sacrifice of my conscience and the loss of my self-respect.”
It was the saddest moment of his life. “I have seen the patriots and statesmen of my youth, one by one, gathered to their fathers, and the government which they had created rent in twain; and none like them are left to unite it once again. I stand the last almost of a race, who learned from their lips the lessons o
f human freedom.”
Houston died in 1863, in the month of the battle of Gettysburg. He lived long enough to see his dire forecasts of the horrors of civil war come true, but not long enough to see the Union survive its greatest trial, nor to see Texas re-joined to the land of his birth. Though he mourned the losses Texas suffered during the war (his son was gravely wounded at Shiloh), he would have believed that democracy won in the end, as the American people secured popular government against the forces of particularism and disunion. And he would have been gratified to know that the two causes closest to his heart—the Union and Texas—could cohabit again in peace.
He had always thought that Texas and the Union were cut from the same cloth, that the republican principles of 1836 were indeed those of 1776. The lesson of both fateful years was that people must govern themselves, even if—or especially if—self-government required rebellion against forms and institutions received from the past, and even if the people were far from saints. Houston couldn’t speak from personal acquaintance of the patriots of ’76, but he would have been the first to acknowledge the imperfect pedigrees and mixed motives of those who fought beside him in the Texas revolution. Stephen Austin might have been above reasonable reproach, having lived as a loyal citizen of Mexico till Santa Anna overturned the Mexican constitution and drove him to revolt, but nearly everyone else was an opportunist of one sort or another. William Travis had abandoned his debts and pregnant wife to come to Texas, where he made trouble for the Mexican authorities as a way of making the reputation he had always coveted. James Bowie, having swindled himself into a corner in Louisiana, crossed the Sabine to continue his swindling on Mexican soil. David Crockett hoped to recover in Texas the political career he had lost in Tennessee. And of course Houston himself, crushed by love and dazed by drink, had traveled to Texas to find the man he had been before Eliza broke his heart.