Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (30 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
Although Turner’s rebellion also ultimately failed, it changed the South. Born in 1800, Turner was a mystic and preacher who used his visions and biblical authority to build a devoted following. In August 1831, Turner and about seventy followers started their rampage. Beginning with his own masters, Turner embarked on a death march that spared no one. The whites around Southampton, Virginia, were thrown into utter panic, many of them fleeing the state. Turner’s small army, lacking discipline, halted its march, allowing a group of whites to attack. Turner counterattacked, but was soon vastly outnumbered and went into hiding. Thousands of soldiers were pressing the search for this one man who had thrown the country into hysterical terror. A massacre of any slaves even suspected of complicity followed. Turner eluded capture for some two months, during which he became a sort of bogeyman to the people of the South. To whites and slaves alike, he had acquired some mystical qualities that made him larger than life, and even after his hanging, slave owners feared his influence. Stringent new slave laws were passed, strict censorship laws aimed at abolitionist material were passed with Andrew Jackson’s blessing, and, perhaps most important, the militant defense of slavery took on a whole new meaning.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
W
ILLIAM
L
LOYD
G
ARRISON
(1805–79), in the first issue of the abolitionist journal
The Liberator
(1831):
On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.
Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party was largely an outgrowth of Jackson’s personality and individual opinions rather than of the strict orthodoxy associated with modern party politics. And Jackson’s popularity was undeniable, resulting in his handy 1832 reelection (55 percent of the popular vote; 77 percent of the electoral vote), which also brought in New York politico Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) as the new vice president.
Jackson’s personal platform was fairly simple: suspicion of the upper classes and big business, typified by the Bank of the United States, which Jackson vetoed in 1832; freedom of economic opportunity, including elimination of Indians to open up their lands for white expansion; increased voting rights (for white men, at least); and a general opening of the political process to the middle and lower classes, which had been closed out by the earlier, gentry-based administrations. On the growing question of the Union versus states’ rights, Jackson tiptoed a cautious path, proclaiming a strong Unionist position but tending to limit the powers the federal government held over the states, the ostensible reason behind his opposition to the Bank of the United States.
Jackson’s general popularity almost completely stifled opposition, but not entirely. Out of the ashes of the old Federalists came heirs of Hamilton who believed in a national approach to economic problems, coupled with the more extremist states’ rights advocates and those who simply disliked Jackson and feared his unchecked power. From this loose coalition a new party started to take life with two congressional giants, Daniel Webster (1782–1852) and Henry Clay (1777–1852), its most prominent leaders. In 1834, they took the name Whigs, recalling the pre-Revolution days when patriots adopted that name to contrast themselves with Tories loyal to the British Crown. For this new generation of Whigs, the tyrant was not a foreign monarch but King Andrew, as Jackson was called by friend and foe alike.
The Whigs mounted their first presidential campaign in 1836, but failed to coalesce behind a single nominee, sending out three favorite sons instead. William Henry Harrison, a former general, did best, with Hugh White and Daniel Webster finishing far out of the running. Easily outdistancing them was Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s vice president and handpicked successor, who also carried the distinction of being the first president born an American citizen. An adept tactician, Van Buren had begun to master the new politics of group voting, or “machine politics,” and was responsible for delivering New York’s electoral votes to Jackson. But he utterly lacked Jackson’s ability to win popular support. A severe economic depression during his term—the Panic of 1837—ruined Van Buren’s chances for a second term, but he was really undone by a new Whig strategy that turned the tables on Andrew Jackson’s earlier campaign against John Quincy Adams, which had cast Adams as a remote aristocrat.
In the “log cabin” campaign of 1840, the Whigs cast Van Buren, nicknamed Martin Van Ruin, as a bloated aristocrat. They presented themselves as the people’s party and General Harrison (1773–1841), their candidate, as a common man living in a log cabin. In fact, he was from a distinguished family, the son of one of the Declaration’s signers. He was also presented as a war hero in Jackson’s image for his battles against Tecumseh at Tippecanoe. With Virginia’s John Tyler (1790–1862) as his running mate, their campaign slogan was the memorable “Tippecanoe and Tyler too!” The campaign of 1840 was a raucous affair, with huge rallies, an impressive voter turnout, and plenty of hard cider spilled. One linguistic legacy of the campaign: a distiller named E. C. Booz bottled whiskey in log cabin–shaped containers. Although the word “booze” was derived from the Dutch word
bowse
, Booz reinforced the use of the word, and soon it became a permanent part of the language.
One month after he was inaugurated, Harrison fell ill with pneumonia and died. John Tyler, his vice president, a Virginian and an ardent states’ righter, became the first “accidental president.”
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
J
OSé
M
ARíA
S
áNCHEZ,
a Mexican surveyor, sent on an expedition to the border of Mexico, which then included Texas and Louisiana (April 27, 1828):
This village has been settled by Mr. Stephen Austin, a native of the United States of the North. It consists, at present, of forty or fifty wooden houses on the western bank of the large river known as Rio de los Brazos de Dios. . . . Its population is nearly two hundred persons, of which only ten are Mexicans, for the balance are all Americans from the North with an occasional European. Two wretched little stores supply the inhabitants of the colony: one sells only whiskey, rum, sugar, and coffee; the other rice, flour, lard, and cheap cloth. . . . The Americans . . . eat only salted meat, bread made by themselves out of corn meal, coffee, and home-made cheese. To these the greater part of those who live in the village add strong liquor, for they are in general, in my opinion, lazy people of vicious character. Some of them cultivate their small farms by planting corn; but this task they usually entrust to their negro slaves, whom they treat with considerable harshness. . . . In my opinion the spark that will start the conflagration that will deprive us of Texas will start from this colony.
When Jackson left office, there were clearly unanswered questions about the nation’s future. Southern politicians were already setting forth the argument that because states had freely joined the Union, they could just as freely leave. And while there was much talk of tariffs and banks, the real issue was slavery. The slave question pervaded the national debate on almost every question before Congress, including the momentous one regarding the fate of Texas, then a part of Mexico.
Led by Stephen F. Austin (1793–1836), Americans settled the area at the invitation of Mexican authorities. President Jackson, and Adams before him, offered to buy Texas from Mexico, but were turned down. By 1830, more than 20,000 white Americans had been drawn to the fertile, cotton-growing plains, bringing with them some 2,000 slaves. They soon outnumbered the Mexicans in the territory, and in 1834, Austin asked the authorities in Mexico City to allow Texas to separate from Mexico as a prelude to statehood. Besides the obvious reason that these Americans wanted to remain American, an overriding cause for their request was Mexico’s prohibition of slavery. Austin was arrested and jailed. By 1836, President Santa Anna of Mexico announced a unified constitution for all Mexican territories, including Texas.
The Americans in Texas decided to secede. With an army of 6,000 men, Santa Anna marched against what he viewed as the treasonous Texans. With a force of 3,000, Santa Anna approached San Antonio, held by 187 men under the command of Colonel William B. Travis. The defenders took a defensive stand behind the walls of a mission called the Alamo. For ten days, in a now-legendary stand, the small group fended off Santa Anna’s massed troops, inflicting tremendous casualties on the Mexicans. But the numbers were insurmountably in the Mexicans’ favor. As the Mexican bands played the “Degüello,” literally “throat-cutting,” artillery breached the walls of the Alamo, and Travis’s band was overrun. The American defenders who survived the final onslaught were then apparently executed. All of the Americans’ corpses were soaked in oil and then set on fire. Among the dead was Jim Bowie, a Louisiana slave trader who became best known for the infamous long knife he carried on his belt, and Davy Crockett (1786–1836), the professional backwoodsman, congressman, and veteran of Andrew Jackson’s Creek War. Only three Americans came out of the Alamo alive: a soldier’s wife named Susanna Dickenson, her fifteen-month-old baby, and Travis’s slave Joe. They were freed by Santa Anna and went by foot to warn Sam Houston (1793–1863), commander of the Texas army, of the fate that awaited them if they continued to resist.
A second slaughter, in which hundreds of Texans were slain by Santa Anna’s troops at the town of Goliad, stoked the flames higher. Santa Anna pressed the small Texan army that remained under Houston until the forces met at San Jacinto in April 1836. With “Remember the Alamo!” as their rallying cry, the vastly outnumbered Texans swept into the lines of the Mexicans, who had been granted a siesta by the self-assured Santa Anna. The battle was over in eighteen minutes. With the loss of nine men, the Texans killed hundreds of Mexicans, captured hundreds more, including Santa Anna, and sent the bulk of the Mexican army into a confused retreat across the Rio Grande.
The Texans immediately ratified their constitution, and Houston, who nearly died from gangrene after the San Jacinto battle, was made president of the new republic. They then petitioned for annexation into the United States. Jackson did nothing until his last day in office, when he recognized Texan independence. Van Buren also hesitated. Both men feared war with Mexico, but more seriously, the admission of Texas added fuel to the burning slave debate. The southern states wanted another slave territory. The North saw the annexation of Texas as breaching the balance that had been reached in the Missouri Compromise (under which slave state Arkansas and free state Michigan had been admitted as the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth states). For the next nine years, the Texas question simmered, further dividing North and South over slavery, and pushing relations with Mexico to the brink of war.
Must Read:
Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis
by William C. Davis.
The annexing of Texas was a symptom of a larger frenzy that was sweeping through America like a nineteenth-century version of Lotto fever. In 1845, this fervor was christened. In an expansionist magazine, the
United States Magazine and Democratic Review
, journalist John L. O’Sullivan wrote of “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
O’Sullivan’s phrase, quickly adopted by other publications and politicians, neatly expressed a vision that sounded almost like a religious mission. Behind this vision was some ideological saber rattling, but the greatest motivator was greed, the obsessive desire for Americans to control the entire continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. As each successive generation of Americans had pressed the fringes of civilization a little farther, this idea took on the passion of a sacred quest. The rapid westward movement of large groups of settlers was spurred by the development of the famous trails to the West. The Santa Fe Trail linked Independence, Missouri, with the Old Spanish Trail to Los Angeles. The Oregon Trail, mapped by trappers and missionaries, went northwest to the Oregon Territory. The Mormon Trail, first traveled in 1847, initially took the religious group and then other settlers from Illinois to Salt Lake City. And in the Southwest, the Oxbow Route, from Missouri west to California, carried mail under a federal contract.
The fact that California, with its great ports, was still part of Mexico, and that England still laid claim to Oregon, only heightened the aggressiveness of the American desire to control all of it.
Why did the Mormons move west?
While the majority of nineteenth-century Americans believed that God’s plan was to send them west, others in America were finding other religious paths. The early part of the century saw an extraordinary period of spiritual reawakening that produced such groups as the Shakers, founded in New York in 1774 by an Englishwoman called Mother Ann Lee. They flourished for some years, but eventually died out when their policy of celibacy became self-induced extinction. Other “spiritual” movements of this period included the utopian communities of Oneida, where, in contrast to the Shakers, promiscuity was encouraged, and Brook Farm, the retreat of the New England Transcendentalists.
