But removal also sparked wars. The Florida Seminoles battled federal troops attempting to remove them for years. Slave owners wanted the Seminoles out of Florida to prevent slaves from running away into their swampy homeland. Several chiefs signed a removal treaty in 1832, but the war leader Osceola represented the will of the majority who wanted to stay. Osceola inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Americans, and the war dragged on for years. By 1842 the majority of Seminoles had been harried west, though hundreds remained in the Everglades, where their descendants still reside. The United States declared an end to the Seminole War after spending twenty million dollars and the lives of more than fifteen hundred soldiers to dislodge some three thousand Indians from their land.
The Sauk and Fox people of Illinois fought a shorter, yet in some aspects nastier, war against the Americans. Again, several chiefs were bribed into signing a treaty ceding their lands east of the Mississippi and settling on reservations across the river. But a dissident leader named Black Hawk protested. “My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold,” he declared. “The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence. Nothing can be sold but such things as can be carried away.” In 1832 Black Hawk led two thousand followers back across the Mississippi into Illinois, panicking settlers. The state militia confronted the Indians. Black Hawk sent a delegation to parlay with the skittish volunteers, who promptly fired on the peacemakers. Black Hawk loosed his army and routed the Illinoisans. Then he and his people fled into Wisconsin, where the outraged militia cornered them. Many, including women and children, were slaughtered as they attempted to retreat back across the Mississippi.6
The American proponents of removal prettied-up their ethnic cleansing by trumpeting the magical powers of the Far West. Across the Mississippi, Indians would discover the ease and space either to disappear gracefully or to learn white ways. Politicians and reformers returned to this logic repeatedly. The West was the American time-out region, where problems were sent to stew and solve themselves. Want to alleviate poverty, banish religious nonconformists, abolish slavery or sustain it, bring the country together under the banner of territorial expansion? The West was the answer. Of course, this line of thinking ignored reality. Many Indians were early adopters of Christianity, market capitalism, and representative democracy, and the same bursting population in need of land and commercial opportunities that propelled Americans west insured that there would be no time out from colonization. Sooner than anyone thought, whites would arrive on the doorsteps of removed Indians, see the evidence of successfully transplanted communities with governments, schools, ranches, and even plantations with slaves, and demand once again that the “savages” hand over the “empty” land.
John Ross. From Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America . . . , 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1836–44).
. . .
Planters on the frontier of the Old Southwest—the states of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, as well as the territory of Arkansas—were infamous for driving their slaves beyond the point of endurance, and slaves in the upper South trembled at the thought of being “sold down the river.” Some of them came when their masters relocated, but most were brought in by slave traders. Chained together in long coffles, enslaved men, women, and children were driven hundreds of miles from the upper South to miserable encampments in the wilderness. Black workers cleared the pine forests, drained the swamps, plowed the ground, and then planted, chopped, and picked the cotton. “We require more slaves,” settler William Dunbar wrote from the Mississippi frontier; “ordinary men are worth $500 cash, women $400 and upwards.”7
Slavery lent its full measure to the violent character of frontier life. Samuel Townes was one of many southwestern masters who drove his slaves hard. Impatient that his black women were picking less than half the cotton of the men, he insisted that his overseer “make those bitches go to at least 100 [pounds per day] or whip them like the devil.” The lashings, he later noted, improved their productivity. Combining the everyday violence of slavery with the unsettled social conditions of the frontier—large numbers of unattached men, excessive drinking, and endemic Indian-hating—produced a lethal brew. Visitors were horrified by the dueling, fistfighting, and brutal practical joking. These conditions, argues historian Joan E. Cashin, produced a frontier planter class obsessed with independence and inclined toward aggression, both in society and at home. Don’t “hang around Mother and drivel away your life,” Townes wrote to his younger brother in South Carolina. Come west, where “you can live like a fighting cock with us.” Such men emerged as the dominant species in the Old Southwest.8
Townes encouraged his brother to relocate, but opportunities for men to rise in the cotton belt quickly grew slim. The Old Southwest was a society of great inequality, a land of “nabobs and nobodies.” By the 1820s the nabobs—the elite class of planters—included some of the wealthiest men in America. More millionaires lived in the Natchez district of Mississippi, it was said, than anywhere else in the country, even New York City. But the vast majority of whites were nobodies—small, aspiring planters with a handful of slaves or hardscrabble farmers subsisting on the thin soils of the pine barrens or grazing cattle on the prairie grasses. The nabobs grew richer and gobbled up the farms of nobodies. Pushed out of one frontier, they searched for another. An army of nobodies pushed for Texas, including David Crockett of Tennessee, the most renowned ne’er-do-well in American history.9
Black Hawk and his lieutenants in chains. From George Catlin, Catalogue of Catlin’s Indian Gallery of Portraits . . . (New York, 1837).
. . .
In contrast to the United States, newly independent Mexico announced its intention to establish full social equality regardless of caste or color. “All the inhabitants of the country are citizens,” declared the Plan of Iguala of 1821, “and the door of advancement is open to virtue and merit.” Attracted by these ideals, a small number of free African Americans emigrated from the United States to the northern Mexican province during the 1820s. Samuel H. Hardin and his wife came, he wrote, because Mexico’s laws “invited their emigration,” and Virginian John Bird moved because he believed that he and his sons “would be received as citizens and entitled as such to land.” Several free black heads of household were granted land by the Mexican government.10
But the number of free blacks was miniscule compared to the enslaved thousands who were brought by their masters. The arrival in Texas of the Americans—many with slaves—caused enormous concern in Mexico. But in 1824, when Mexican leaders declared their country a republic and adopted a federal constitution, they made no mention of slavery. Texas was joined with Coahuila, its southern neighbor, as one of the states. In 1827, after much debate, the legislature of Coahuila-Tejas adopted a law barring the further importation of slaves and promising the eventual emancipation of the children of existing slaves. There was momentary panic among slave owners, but with the support of leading Tejanos, the legislature passed a new law that allowed planters to import new slaves under the ruse of “contract labor.” But in 1829 liberal Mexican president Vicente Guerrero proclaimed an end to slavery throughout Mexico. “It is not conceivable that a free Republic should subject some of its children to slavery,” declared one legislator. “Let us leave such contradictions to the United States of North America.” Intense lobbying by Austin and leading Tejanos persuaded President Guerrero to issue an exemption for Texas, thereby excluding the abolition order from the only part of Mexico where slavery was important.11
But antislavery forces remained powerful in Mexico City. In 1830 Mexican officials canceled all pending empresario contracts, banned further immigration from the United States, and authorized the occupation of Texas by the Mexican army. But Americans with their slaves kept pouring in from the Old Southwest, escalating tensions and adding yet more guns to the Texian cause, whatever that might be. For the crackdown had split the Texians in
to contending factions. Stephen Austin rallied the moderates in a Peace Party, arguing that Texas should remain part of the Mexican nation but with more autonomy, legalized slavery, and free trade with the United States. Leading Tejanos shared many of these sentiments. Indeed, marriage frequently sealed the alliance of Texians and Tejanos. Erastus “Deaf” Smith, one of the first Anglos to settle in San Antonio, married into the prominent Duran family, and James Bowie, a Louisianan best known for his knife, courted and married the daughter of the vice governor of the province, bringing him into close association with the most prominent Tejano families. Seeking Hispanic allies, Austin asked the ayuntamiento, or town council, of San Antonio, where Tejanos were in the majority, to issue a statement in support of his political program. But despite their sympathy for Austin’s plan, the San Antonio Tejanos declined, fearful of the Anglo majority in the north of the province, where Texians outnumbered Tejanos seven to one.
That provided an opportunity for Austin’s opponents, who organized themselves as the War Party, demanding immediate annexation by the United States. William Barret “Buck” Travis, a volatile and ambitious young lawyer from Mississippi, was ringleader of this group. Travis had come to Texas to escape creditors and a failed marriage, leaving his wife behind to nurse his infant son and fend off bill collectors. As he described in a letter, Texas gave him several comeback options. He might succeed, make a “splendid fortune,” and recover his good name and influence. Or he might be killed by the Mexicans and leave a fond memory for his son, who could claim that his father “died for his country.” In 1832 Travis and his fellow hotheads attacked the garrison in charge of collecting taxes in Galveston Bay. The moderates tried to distance themselves from the assault, sending Austin to Mexico City to plead their loyalty. But government officials arrested him, and Austin spent the next eighteen months in a windowless cell.12
Jail converted Austin to annexation, but leadership of the Texas revolution had already passed to the War Party. The leaders soon included two former Tennessee politicians. David Crockett came to resuscitate his political career after losing a congressional election. And Samuel Houston, whose Tennessee governorship came undone when his wife left him, came on the recommendation of his good friend President Andrew Jackson, who wanted Houston there as his informal agent. Brash, charming, and desperate, Crockett and Houston gambled their future and the lives of their followers on breaking Texas away from Mexico.
In October 1835, in response to the uprising at Galveston and revolts brewing in other provinces, Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna issued a decree abolishing all state legislatures and placing the central government directly in charge of local affairs. He then marched north with an army of several thousand, intent on crushing all opponents in his path. Santa Anna’s dictatorship unified the moderates and the radicals, the Texians and the Tejanos, and together they took up arms. They besieged the town of San Antonio, forcing the Mexican troops stationed there to withdraw. Houston, placed in command of the rebel forces, withdrew to the east in the face of Santa Anna’s advance, leaving behind a detachment under William Travis to hold the town. The defenders—including James Bowie and David Crockett—holed up behind the fortified walls of a ruined mission known as the Alamo.13
Travis ought to have retreated, given the Alamo’s minimal strategic significance. Santa Anna could have ignored it, sweeping north after Houston’s army. But the Alamo fight was not about making smart military choices; it was about defending honor and instilling obedience. Travis sent Tejano captain Juan Seguín to inform Houston that he intended to defend the Alamo to the last, and Santa Anna sent his main force against the fort to deliver his own message: that he would destroy the Alamo and kill every last man to demonstrate his might. The siege ended on March 6, 1836, in a ninety-minute assault that cost the lives of some 250 Texians and several hundred Mexican soldiers. Santa Anna had the bodies of the Alamo defenders burned so that there could be no memorial.
Yet no one forgot the Alamo. News of the defeat arrived at the little village of Washington-on-the-Brazos shortly after a meeting of Texian delegates on March 2 had declared Texas an independent republic. Over the next several weeks, the two sides traded atrocities. At Goliad, Santa Anna captured and executed 371 Texians. At San Jacinto, Texians revenged the Alamo and Goliad by slaughtering more than 600 Mexicans. Captured after the battle, Santa Anna was forced to sign a treaty granting Texas its independence.
“Crockett’s Fight with the Mexicans.” From Ben Hardin’s Crockett Almanac, 1842 (Boston, 1841). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
In its new constitution Texas legalized slavery and barred the residence of free persons of color. “I love the country, but now look at my situation,” free black rancher Greenbury Logan, who owned a spread in the Austin colony, wrote in a petition to Texas authorities requesting permission to remain. “Every privilege dear to a free man is taken away.” Texas independence made Tejanos equally leery. Anti-Tejano sentiments flourished among Texians after the war. Juan Seguín, the Alamo veteran and postwar mayor of San Antonio, was forced to flee with his family to Mexico. A group of Texians petitioned to disenfranchise Tejanos, declaring them to be “the friends of our enemies and the enemies of our friends.” Texas achieved liberty from a tyrant, but race and ethnic divisions etched the borders of the Lone Star Republic, deciding who would stay, who would go, and who would enjoy the fruits of the wartime sacrifices of both Anglos and Tejanos.14
. . .
The West offered a mirage of an escape: a refuge for the Indians blocking the expanding empire of liberty, a place where nobodies might become nabobs. But bringing western territories into the union threatened to split the country apart rather than heal it. It is not hard to see why some Americans came to reject the theory that territorial expansion would diminish tensions created by territorial expansion.
Juan Seguín. Painting by Jefferson Wright, 1838. Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
The United States recognized the Republic of Texas on March 3, 1837. But the United States did not manifest its destiny by immediately incorporating the breakaway Mexican province into the union. Debate the year before over the admission of Arkansas as a slave state had once again seriously split northern and southern representatives, and politicians feared that the nation might not survive a battle over Texas. Former president John Quincy Adams had returned to Washington as a congressman from his home district in Massachusetts (the only ex-president to serve in elective office), and he led the fight against the admission of any more slave states. How tragic and disgraceful, Adams declared on the floor of the House of Representatives, that the noble Anglo-Saxon race had ceased to carry the burden of freedom and instead had carried slavery into a country where it had been legally abolished. Was there not land enough for slavery already? “Have you not Indians enough to expel from their fathers’ sepulchres?” he asked sarcastically.15
Presidents Jackson and Martin Van Buren decided to steer clear of Texas annexation, believing that the preservation of their Democratic Party coalition across sectional lines required them to keep mum on slavery. The issue came up again during the term of President John Tyler, a slave owner and a fierce partisan of southern interests, who assumed office after the sudden death of William Henry Harrison in 1841. Tyler negotiated a treaty of annexation with the Texans but failed to win the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate.
By the presidential campaign year of 1844, expansionists had become desperate to break the logjam. James K. Polk, Democrat from Tennessee, ran on an explicitly expansionist platform calling for the “reoccupation of Oregon and the re-annexation of Texas at the earliest practicable period.” Linking Texas and Oregon, the Democrats hoped to shift the focus from the expansion of slavery to expansion in general, implying with the curious “re-“prefix that their opponents were stifling Americans’ providential right to overspread the continent. Adams and other opponents of new slave states smelled a rat. What Americans n
eeded, they argued, was not more land but more improvement—meaning vigorous federal support for economic development—of the land they already had. No, countered the Democrats, more meant better. The federal government should acquire more land and open it to the regular farmers and their multiplying offspring.16
The election’s outcome demonstrated just how divided Americans were on expansion and many other issues. With just 49.6 percent of the national vote, Polk became the second president to win office without a popular majority, although he carried fifteen of twenty-six states. Had Henry Clay, the Whig candidate, attracted five thousand additional ballots in New York—where a third antislavery party drained support—he would have won the electoral college. But the Democrats took these results and declared a mandate for national expansion. Though he was nominally a Whig, lame-duck President Tyler pressed Congress to admit Texas through the device of a joint resolution, which required only a simple majority. Democrats pushed the measure through, presenting Polk with an accomplished fact when he assumed office in March 1845. The president offered the Texans admission, and by the end of the year the Lone Star had become one of twenty-eight on the flag of union.
Campaign poster from the presidential election of 1844. Library of Congress.
Democrats moved next to the Oregon question. In his first annual message to Congress, Polk announced his intention to take all of the Pacific Northwest from the British, prior agreements and claims be damned. “Away, away, with all these cobweb tissues of rights of discovery, exploration, settlement, contiguity, etc.,” thundered editor John L. O’Sullivan. But in private, Polk negotiated a treaty with Great Britain, dividing Oregon at the forty-ninth parallel. The Senate ratified the agreement in June 1846. By that time Polk desperately needed a peaceful resolution on the northern border, for he had provoked a full-scale war with Mexico on the southern one.17
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