by Mark Stein
We were awakened by a noise like distant thunder, and a trembling of the earth, which brought us both to our feet. The dash of the water against the bank of the lake, and rattling of the limbs in the tree-tops—now and then the falling of a dry branch in the water, or near us on the ground—all these things first led me to believe there was a storm approaching. But no. There was not a breath of air stirring.… It soon became still. My friend said, “May be, he is de shake of de earth.”
It was indeed an earthquake, the first of several that, in 1811 and 1812, devastated parts of what are today Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
Making their way through forests where no traces could be found of the paths along which they’d come, Walker and Zegon eventually arrived at the point on the river across from their village. There, Walker tells us, his friend’s face “turned pale as death. The cause was soon visible. No smoke arose from the chimneys of our habitations, and not a single human being could be seen.” After fashioning a raft and crossing, they discovered that all the homesteads lay in shambles and that everyone had fled. They encountered only a neighbor, returning to assess the damage, followed by Walker’s father, desperate to find his son.
The French inhabitants of Little Prairie, determining that the structures were beyond repair, and knowing they were destined to become a minority now that their land had become part of the United States, opted to migrate to Canada. The Walkers returned to Kentucky, but John came back some months later, despite the fact that earthquakes and aftershocks were continuing. The unsteady ground presented a desolate landscape, absent of all but a few human beings, though evidence of their former presence remained scattered about—not the least of which was their cattle, now roaming free. In one of the greatest examples in American history of “Finders, keepers / Losers, weepers,” Walker took possession of the land and the cattle, enclosing the herds in far-reaching barriers he fashioned using the rivers and streams. He was, in his own words, “the natural heir to Little Prairie.”3
Land that Walker wanted but didn’t “inherit” he purchased at rock-bottom prices from owners who had opted, like those of Little Prairie, to leave the area, or whose livelihoods had evaporated in their absence. Walker’s holdings quickly spread west toward the St. Francis River.
Anyone who, as Walker demonstrated, so intuitively understood power would also have foreseen that Missouri would become the most powerful state in the region. It had access to the two most important rivers in the American hinterland (the Mississippi and the Missouri) and possessed the land where they converged: St. Louis. Not surprisingly, Walker’s efforts to include his land in Missouri commenced immediately after its initial petition for statehood. This 1817 document, circulated and signed primarily by citizens in the vicinity of St. Louis, proposed a southern border that simply extended the line that ran across the bottom of Virginia and Kentucky at (with some irregularities) 36°30’.4 Had it been adopted, this proposal would have put Walker’s land in Arkansas.
The following year, Missouri’s territorial legislature passed its own proposal for statehood. It sought far more extensive boundaries, including the region where Walker owned land, along with additional land below 36°30’. Clearly, residents of those regions had persuaded the legislature to rethink the citizens’ proposal. Yet between the time of the legislature’s 1818 proposal and the enactment of statehood by Congress in 1819, the area below 36°30 was reduced to include only Walker’s region between the Mississippi and St. Francis Rivers.
Missouri legislature’s proposal
Looking back some years later, Missouri Senator George W. Carleton spoke of how Walker had met with the people who would define the boundaries and so eloquently stated the reasons his region was more properly part of Missouri that he succeeded in persuading them.5 Nonpoliticians remembered things differently. The Kansas City Star reported that, after convincing the territorial legislature to propose boundaries including his land, Walker went to Washington “with his old, muzzle-loading shotgun, not with any intention probably of ridding the country of any budding statesmen, but just to let them know at the capital that he was in earnest.” More likely is that Walker relied on something other than a shotgun or eloquence to convince the lawmakers, something neither party would want recorded—such as money. Indeed, no record of this wealthy landowner’s presence in Washington has been found in any newspapers or in any annals of Congress, despite the fact that shotguns in Congress were newsworthy even then, and eloquent reasoning is not something lobbyists keep private.
The debate in Congress over Missouri statehood suggests how Walker could have operated without attracting attention. It was highly emotional, touching on the nation’s very existence. At issue was slavery in the states to be created out of the Louisiana Purchase. What ultimately resulted was the Missouri Compromise, prohibiting slavery in any new territory or state north of 36°30’, with the exception (this being the compromise) of Missouri. In the newspapers and the halls of Congress, attention was closely focused on this issue, thereby enabling Walker to go about his particular business unnoticed. Indeed, the only time the debate turned to the “boot heel” being appended to Missouri’s southern border was when Rhode Island Senator James Burrill Jr. declared, “With respect to the boundaries of the new state, I desire more definite information.… By a certain bill which has been laid on our desk by mistake, it appears that certain other boundaries have been thought of, and I wish to know the cause of this variation of boundaries.” The record shows no response being provided.
Immediately after Missouri became a state, Walker made his first public appearance in the political arena. He became the sheriff in his neck of the woods, New Madrid County. He was just twenty-four years old. He went on to be the county’s presiding judge and later created the city plan for the town of Caruthersville, close by where Little Prairie had been. There he lived out his days and is buried alongside the Methodist church.
· · · TEXAS, LOUISIANA, OKLAHOMA · · ·
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
The Massachusetts Texan
Mr. Onis … was willing that the boundary line with the United States should extend to the South Sea [Pacific Ocean].… [But] we would yield something of the western line we had proposed … that she might have a barrier for Santa Fe. I told him … if Spain had come to the determination. to begin the line at the Sabine. I could not express the disgust with which I was forced to carry on a correspondence with him upon subjects which it was ascertained that we could not adjust.
—SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN QUINCY ADAMS1
John Quincy Adams is widely remembered for the use of his middle name, distinguishing him from his more famous father, who is widely remembered for doing the things the Founding Fathers did. One thing the Founding Fathers indisputably did was to leave the next generation a tough act to follow. This challenge was vividly illustrated in the life stories of John Adams’s three sons: one rose to become, like his father, a president; the other two failed to sustain successful careers and died as alcoholics.
As this second generation moved into the presidential ranks, the major rival to John Quincy Adams was Andrew Jackson. Adams was seen as representing the upper class from which all the previous presidents had come, and even as a bit monarchical, being the eldest son of a president. Jackson, on the other hand, represented the prototypical American, newly minted by democracy, whose citizens possessed no class (in both senses of the phrase). Both men, however, despite their differences, played key roles in establishing what is today the eastern border of Texas.
The event that ultimately resulted in today’s eastern border of Texas was the Louisiana Purchase. When President Thomas Jefferson acquired this region from France in 1803, John Quincy Adams was a thirty-six-year-old senator from Massachusetts and Andrew Jackson, the same age, was a judge in Tennessee. The document conveying the land described its boundaries as being “the Colony or Province of Louisiana with the same extent that it has now.” Other than the Mississippi River
and the Gulf of Mexico, the extent of the “Colony or Province of Louisiana” was debatable at the time with both Spain to the west and England to the north. Sixteen years would pass before those borders were finally specified.
A primary reason for the delay was the fact that the young United States and England were still not on the best of terms, particularly when relations deteriorated into the War of 1812. Spain, therefore, was in no hurry to dicker, figuring it would do better if it waited, aided the British here and there, and then negotiated its border with a bruised and battered United States.
Adams and Jackson, meanwhile, were taking on increasingly significant roles in what would ultimately determine that Spanish border. Jackson, now a general, became a national hero for his victory during the war at the Battle of New Orleans. Technically, his victory was after the war since, unbeknownst to him, the war had ended two weeks earlier when American emissary John Quincy Adams negotiated the Treaty of Ghent.
Ironically, Spain was now far more battered and bruised. Between 1810 and 1819 (the year of the treaty creating the present-day eastern border of Texas), Spain lost control of Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. More important, in terms of the United States, twice during this period the United States seized portions of Spanish Florida. At the outset of the war, the Florida Panhandle had extended all the way to the banks of the Mississippi River opposite New Orleans; by the time Adams had concluded the Treaty of Ghent, the Panhandle ended underneath Alabama, where it remains today.
With its empire in the Americas beginning to crumble, Spain decided the time had come to reduce the extent of its colonial claims in order to shore up what remained. Thus in 1818 it commenced negotiations over where the Louisiana Purchase ended and the Spanish colony of Mexico began. To give itself leverage in that negotiation while, at the same time, reducing its colonial claims, Spain also offered to sell Florida to the United States as part of the deal.
John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) (photo credit 18.1)
The United States, meanwhile, had emerged from the War of 1812 far less battered than Spain had hoped. Its new president, James Monroe, was even preparing to draw a boundary around all the Americas, in effect posting a sign—the Monroe Doctrine—saying “Europe Keep Out.” The text of the doctrine would be written by the man with whom Spain was now to negotiate, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams.
Adams and his Spanish counterpart, Don Luis de Onís González Lopez y Vara, had barely said their hellos when Andrew Jackson came crashing through. General Jackson was in Florida, where he had just crushed a rebellion by the Seminole Indians. He had been authorized to cross into Florida, a Spanish possession, since the United States maintained that Spain had not lived up to its agreed-upon obligation to stop Indians in its colony from crossing into the United States to engage in attacks. Jackson now moved his troops to Pensacola—where there were no rebellious Seminoles but there was Spain’s principal fortification—and conquered the fort. He then quickly took control of the Florida Panhandle, claiming it was necessary to keep the Seminoles subdued.
“Last night I received a note from the Spanish Minister,” Adams wrote to President Monroe, “requesting an interview on affairs of the last importance to Spain and the United States.”2 Señor de Onís was furious: General Jackson’s attack was an act of war. Spain demanded to know if the president had authorized the general’s actions. If the president had not, Spain demanded to know what the president intended to do to General Jackson.
The diplomat in Adams viewed Jackson as a loose cannon. In his journal he wrote that the general’s actions in Florida were “embarrassing.” Still, the politician in Adams recognized shrewdness in those same actions, further noting in his journal that if one publicly criticized what Jackson had done, one would “give offense to his friends, [and] encounter the shock of his popularity.” Most significant, the secretary of state in Adams noted a valuable nugget in the dustup: Spain, not having retaliated, was apparently weaker than the United States had thought.3
Adams consequently decided to stake out an ambitious opening bid in his negotiations over the border. “I would henceforth never recede an inch from the [Rio] Bravo,” he wrote, referring to the river now known as the Rio Grande, which he proposed as the new southern boundary of the United States.4 This boundary would follow the Rio Grande to its source in the Rocky Mountains, then follow the Rockies north to the Colorado River, then follow the Colorado River to the Gulf of California. In 1848 all this would become part of the United States (with the exception of Baja California). In 1818, however, it was a hefty opening bid.
Adams-Onis Treaty, 1819
Amazingly, Onís did not immediately say no. Adams’s reading of Jackson’s actions in Florida and the reactions to them had been accurate. Realizing that the Americans perceived its weakness, Spain sought to cover up by claiming that when Adams had referred to the Colorado River, they had thought that meant the Red River. “How this mistake could have been made is inconceivable to us,” Adams wrote, in conferring with the U.S ambassador in Spain, “inasmuch as we know of no maps which call the Red River of Natchitoches the Colorado.”5 The Colorado River and the Red River, being on opposite sides of the Rockies, would make for rather different borders.
Jackson, meanwhile, remained in hot water, facing a congressional investigation into whether or not he had disobeyed orders. Though he and Adams were both eyeing the 1824 presidential election, no personal enmity yet existed. Adams invited Jackson to dine at his home, an invitation Jackson declined, saying that he was accepting no social engagements during the investigation. Shortly thereafter, Jackson made a point of apologizing for declining the invitation.
Regarding the situation with Spain, Adams and Jackson continued not only to work well together but to see eye to eye. “I called on General Jackson,” Adams wrote in his diary, “and mentioned in confidence to him the state of the negotiations with the Spanish Minister, and what we had offered him for the western boundary, and asked what he thought of it.” The two men continued these discussions the following day at Adams’s home, where they could speak more privately.
Adams and Onís proposed and counterproposed for another twelve months as they honed in on a boundary, much of which remains today in the eastern border of Texas. Adams’s eventual success, which helped propel his nomination for president in 1824, was due in no small measure to the assist he had received from Jackson’s adventure in Florida. Jackson’s military successes likewise propelled his nomination in the same election. Still, their relations remained good—so good that Adams and his wife hosted a ball in Jackson’s honor in January of that year, to help refute the view that Jackson was uncouth and slovenly. “It is the universal opinion,” Mrs. Adams wrote afterward, “that nothing has ever equaled this party here, either in brilliancy of the preparation or elegance of the company.”6
Two other candidates ran in the 1824 presidential election: Speaker of the House Henry Clay and Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford. As it turned out, none of the four received the necessary majority of votes in the Electoral College, so the decision went to the House of Representatives. Despite the fact that Jackson had won the plurality of electoral votes, the House chose John Quincy Adams.
The political manipulations behind this decision set the stage for an Adams-Jackson rematch in the 1828 election. This was a campaign that set a new low for mudslinging, stooping even to insinuations regarding Jackson’s wife. Today’s campaigns look tame by comparison. This time around, Jackson won.
Then as now, the candidates were hardly as evil as the opposition’s claims. Likewise, the mudslingers were not necessarily in the control of the candidates. Adams disclaimed any connection to the accusations made about Mrs. Jackson. Jackson, however, knew for a fact that Adams was responsible, according to press reports quoting “an anonymous source.”7 As for the truth, Adams lamented in his diary, “In the excitement of contested elections and of party spirit, judgment becomes the slave of will. Men of intelligence, talents, and
even of integrity on other occasions, surrender themselves up to their passions.”
The bottom line in politics is always a complicated line. In this case, we can actually see that complicated line. It is the eastern border of Texas.
· · · ARKANSAS, OKLAHOMA · · ·
SEQUOYAH
The Cherokee Line
Se-Quo-Ya, who invented the alphabet of the Cherokee language … what has become of this remarkable man?… Is he still alive? Or does his venerable head repose beneath some unknown clod of the grand prairie? These are questions that we cannot now satisfactorily answer.
—EMANCIPATOR AND WEEKLY CHRONICLE, DECEMBER 4, 1844
The fact that only one state line preserves a treaty with American Indians reflects both the absence of respect for their lands and the special status those treaties accorded each tribe—not of independent nations, as the Cherokees maintained, but of “dependent domestic nations,” as the Supreme Court ruled in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831). Thus the boundaries in Indian treaties are unaffected by state lines. The one state line that does preserve a treaty with an Indian nation is the line (bent, as it happens) separating Arkansas and Oklahoma. Among those responsible for this line was Sequoyah, a man most remembered for his development of written symbols for the Cherokee language.
Sequoyah and his fellow Cherokee leaders were, in a sense, the Founding Fathers of today’s Cherokee Nation, whose land is now in Oklahoma but had been in the southern Appalachians and upper Tennessee River Valley. European Americans’ Founding Fathers emerged when the progress of the colonists led to their quest for independence from the British. A similar progression also led to American Indians’ quest for independence. Like our Founding Fathers, the Cherokee leaders shared both a desire for freedom and profound disagreements. Sequoyah, like Thomas Jefferson, was not only politically involved but also had a scholarly and inventive mind. Highly revered today, Sequoyah was also, in his own day, like Jefferson, highly reviled.