Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (35 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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Following the defeat of the Whig program in the Congress, Henry Clay retired from the Senate and devoted himself altogether to organizing the Whigs, who now suffered the discomfort of having a president elected as a Whig who was seeking the Democratic nomination for reelection. Clay’s retirement address on March 31, 1842, was one of the Senate’s great emotional occasions. His successor as Whig leader in the Senate, John J. Crittenden, said it “was something like the soul’s quitting the body.”
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Clay and Calhoun embraced in silence, and Clay left the Senate chamber, to which he had been first elected 36 years before. Jackson thought it was the end of Clay, politically: “The old coon is really and substantially dead, skinned and buried.”
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No, he was not, fortunately for the United States.
Webster’s principal achievement in this term (the first of two) as secretary of state was to return to one of the principal objectives of such esteemed former architects of American diplomacy as John Jay and John Quincy Adams, and put relations with Great Britain on a thoroughly normal and current basis. This was facilitated by the departure from office of the Jackson entourage in Washington, and of Lord Melbourne and his brother-in-law, Lord Palmerston, in London and their replacement by the more amenable Sir Robert Peel. Lord Ashburton was sent as a special minister by Peel to the United States, which now had 18 million people, a population slightly larger than Great Britain’s, and whatever its internecine contradictions, now an important country that had to be taken seriously. The discussions were conducted in a very cordial and businesslike atmosphere, and of the 12,000 square miles in the disputed Aroostook area between Maine and New Brunswick, 7,000 were signed over to the U.S. This was a little less than it would have gained from the mediation of the king of the Netherlands in 1831, which the Senate had rejected by one vote in 1832. The entire border was clarified through to west of the Great Lakes, and various further agreements were made re extradition, navigation rights on shared rivers, and the joint suppression of the slave trade on the west coast of Africa (slavery had been abolished in the entire British Empire 10 years before), and the British made a very cautious quasi-apology for two incidents in the aftermath of the Mackenzie rebellion in Upper Canada (Ontario), in 1837. What became known as the Webster-Ashburton Treaty was ratified easily in the Senate, and Webster retired as secretary of state, and was followed by Upshur, the navy secretary. Upshur suffered the unique misfortune of being killed in February 1844, the only secretary of state to die violently, when on a cruise to demonstrate an immense naval gun on a steam-powered warship, the gun exploded. The cruise and test-firing were designed to impress and frighten the Mexicans, with whom relations had worsened. In the circumstances it did not succeed in that objective. Upshur was replaced by Calhoun, as Tyler was desperately cobbling a reconciliation with the southern Democrats, to reposition himself there and in the far-fetched hope of gaining the Democratic presidential nomination, since Clay clearly had a lock on the Whigs. (The Whig Party had expelled Tyler from membership anyway.) As Congress had repealed the Independent Treasury Act, this meant that throughout Tyler’s term the handling of the government’s money was at the exclusive discretion of the secretary of the Treasury.
The Oregon boundary would soon arise as a new hobgoblin in Anglo-American relations, as the area between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean from the 42nd to the 54th parallels had been under joint management by the two countries since 1818, and after the U.S. had treatied out Spain (1819) and Russia (1824). From (J.Q.) Adams on, the Americans had offered to saw it off at the 49th parallel, but the British wanted the Columbia River basin and access to Puget Sound. This impasse festered and became a national political issue at the approach of the 1844 election.
And the Texas question would not remain quiet for long. The northern political leadership regarded the settlements and revolutions and scheming with Mexico of the Americans in Texas as a plot to extend slavery within the United States through petitions for admission to the Union as a state. Rebuffed under Houston’s successor as president of Texas, one Mirabeau Lamar, Texas exchanged embassies with France, the Netherlands, and Belgium (a state invented by Palmerston to keep Antwerp out of the hands of France or a Germanic power), and with Great Britain, from 1838 to 1840. Houston returned to office in December 1841, and the Mexicans ineffectually invaded Texas in 1842, but the British and French intervened diplomatically to mediate an end to that conflict. Britain and France both wanted Texas as an independent country, to restrain the growth of the United States. Ironically, the North became alarmed at the idea of a European satellite on the country’s southern border just as the South became alarmed at reports that the British were going to try to bribe the Texans into the abolition of slavery in the young republic. Sam Houston had pressed exactly the right buttons to shift opinion in Washington toward annexation of Texas, an astute management of U.S. political opinion.
The deathless Santa Anna, who had lost a leg fighting a French incursion at Veracruz in 1838, and had given his leg a full state military burial, informed the U.S. in August 1843 that any attempt at annexation would be regarded as a declaration of war on Mexico. This was not a frightening prospect, but Houston had to tread warily, as British awareness that he was again seeking annexation could cause the withdrawal of their patronage and leave him with no cards to play opposite Washington or Mexico, to gain entry to the Union. Upshur assured Houston that over two-thirds of the Senate would approve incorporation of Texas in the Union, in April 1844. Houston and Upshur’s successor, Calhoun, signed a treaty of annexation under which the United States would assure the defense of Texas while the treaty was being ratified. Tyler recommended annexation to the Senate, and mentioned the abolitionist danger posed by British influence in Mexico, a concern amplified by Calhoun’s rebuke to the British minister in Washington, defending slavery. This stoked up northern concerns that it was a slaveholders’ plot after all, and the treaty that had been signed in April was rejected decisively (indicating the shifting balance of domestic opinion on the slavery issue, and the increasing strength of the North in Congress) in June. Tyler’s effort to annex Texas by joint resolution of the houses of the Congress, simple majorities rather than the two-thirds majority required in a Senate treaty ratification, was not brought to a vote before the Congress adjourned, leaving the matter in flux heading into the 1844 election. The British, in their effort to keep Texas out of the U.S., did succeed in securing Mexican recognition of Texan independence in May 1845, but they had been bypassed by events. The approaching conflict was every bit as absurd as the run-up to the last war on American frontiers 33 years before. This was where the Texas and Oregon issues stood as they were brought to the front burner for the election of a new president (as no party would own up to Tyler).
4. THE 1844 ELECTION
 
Coming into the 1844 election campaign, it was generally assumed that Van Buren had a lock on the Democratic nomination, and Clay on that of the Whigs. Despite his long loyalty to Jackson, Van Buren was suspected in the South of being opposed to the annexation of Texas and hostile to slavery. Southern party leaders obtained a letter from Jackson, published in a Richmond newspaper, supporting the annexation of Texas.
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It was generally believed that in a much-publicized visit of Van Buren to Clay at his home at Ashland, near Lexington, Kentucky, in May 1842, Van Buren had agreed with Clay that Texas would be kept out of the next election campaign. This would have proved impossible even without Jackson’s intervention, but the extreme delicacy of the issue again illustrated the extent to which slavery inflamed American public life. Very little could be done in many policy areas without rattling the sensibilities of northerners nauseated by the ownership of people and the untrammeled ability to exploit, overwork, whip, violate, and kill them; and the southerners’ revulsion at what they regarded as hypocrisy and hysteria in attacking a regime recognized in the Constitution, practiced ultimately by 12 of the country’s presidents, and based on the decency of southern gentlemen not to abuse their live property, any more than they would domestic or farm animals, and on what was presumed to be a racial inferiority of Negroes.
Clay had less to lose, as the Whigs were unlikely to gain much support in the South, but Van Buren risked splitting his party along straight regional lines. This was the inherent risk in the Jackson strategy: if spirits overheated over slavery, issues could endlessly be presented that could make cooperation impossible. More and more finesse and ingenuity would be required to avoid such a trap. On April 27, 1844, Van Buren and Clay published letters in different newspapers opposing annexation. Van Buren wrote that admitting Texas as a state would incite an unjustifiable war with Mexico, an argument that was a matter of indifference in the North and that deeply offended the South as the spuriously explained desertion that it was. Specifically, it forfeited the support of Jackson, still the party kingmaker at 77, who stated that the nominee should be a pro-annexationist southwesterner. It is inexplicable how Van Buren could have erred so badly. He should have supported annexation and finessed the slavery issue, if necessary by some stratagem such as admitting Texas as two states, one slave and one free. Opposing admission to a large and rich adjacent area settled by Americans in an expansionist America shouting itself hoarse with variations on its exalted and exceptional destiny was a suicidal misjudgment. Van Buren had to wave the flag and exalt nationalism over concerns about slavery. The Red Fox of Kinderhook had uncharacteristically blundered into a deadly trap.
Clay was just as clumsy but had less at stake. He claimed that such a move without Mexican agreement would lead to war. (This was a prospect that did not concern a single visible or audible person in the country after all they had seen of the peg-legged “Napoleon of the West”; no American conceived of the military rout of Mexico as a serious challenge—they weren’t like the British and the Canadians.) He said it would be “dangerous to the integrity of the Union,” which was partly true, but it would not be as dangerous as rejecting the request for annexation. And he said the majority of Americans didn’t approve such a step, which was not true, as long as the question was not posed as an extension of slavery. Three days after the letters were published, Clay was unanimously nominated for president by the Whigs at Baltimore (where most nominating conventions took place until the rise of Chicago 15 years later). Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey was chosen for vice president. Clay then started to skate around the issue by publishing further letters saying that he was not opposed to the annexation of Texas but felt that the passions of the anti-abolitionists made it a danger, and then that he was in fact an annexationist, as long as that could be effected peacefully and honorably, etc., and finally that the issue of slavery should be kept out of the discussion, as if that were in the slightest possible. Clay managed the issue more suavely than Van Buren, who faced it more squarely but squandered whatever credit he might have achieved for doing so by recourse to the mealy mouthed humbug about avoiding war with Mexico.
The Democrats also met at Baltimore, starting on May 27, and Van Buren led on the first ballot, but the requirement for a two-thirds approval of the nominees (which continued in that party until 1936) soon ensured that he could not be chosen, such was the antagonism to him in the South. The eminent historian George Bancroft proposed the 48-year-old former Speaker of the House of Representatives and governor of Tennessee (though twice subsequently defeated seeking that office), James Knox Polk. His name was placed in nomination for the eighth ballot and he was selected on the ninth. Silas Wright, an anti-slavery Van Burenite from New York, was nominated for vice president (the flip-side of what the Whigs had done in 1839 by nominating the pro-slavery nullificationist Tyler to run with the stronger Unionist, Harrison). Wright was invited by telegraph and declined by the same new medium, and instead ran successfully for governor of New York. George M. Dallas, a Pennsylvania “doughface” (malleable northern respecter of what was known as the southern slave power), was selected. Tyler assembled his loyalist Democrats on the same day at Baltimore and they nominated him for reelection, but when it became clear that he did not have appreciable support, he withdrew in August, becoming the first of a string of six consecutive presidents not to run for a second term, and the third of a string of 14 out of 16 between Jackson and McKinley not to achieve a second consecutive term (three died in their first terms).
It had become a very difficult office in a severely divided country. Polk represented the annexation of Texas as a patriotic expansion that was already basically committed, and hewed to the Jackson line: slavery would continue where it was part of the culture but not inconvenience those where it was not, and the nation’s rightful growth must not be throttled or deterred because of unfounded fears. Clay continued to represent himself as pro-annexationist on conditions that were vaguely formulated but could not possibly be met.
Polk became the first dark-horse president in the country’s history, and won by a hair’s breadth, 1.34 million votes to 1.3 million for Clay and 62,000 for the anti-slavery Liberty candidate, James G. Birney, or 49.7 percent to 48.3 percent to 2 percent. Birney polled almost 16,000 votes in New York state, where Polk won over Clay by only 5,000. The abolitionists had put the Jacksonian pro-slavery candidate in the White House. For all the support Clay won in the South, he would have been better off to say he was pro-annexation but anti-slavery, or at least for deferring until a later date the issue of whether there would be slavery in Texas. The slavery debate was becoming more desperately serious so quickly that even the country’s most agile politicians could not adjust to it. If Van Buren had shown a little imagination over Texas, he would have been nominated. Once Polk was nominated, if Clay had shown a little more agile footwork, he would have been elected. The electoral vote was 170 to 105. If Clay had had 6,000 more votes in New York, or just taken 3,000 from Polk, he would have won. In the extreme winter of his presidency, three days before Polk’s inauguration on March 4, 1845, Tyler annexed Texas by resolution of both houses of Congress, already ratified by the legislature and the voters of Texas. Tyler had been a scheming and indifferent president, who made a difficult position worse by his many-sided duplicity. As an ex-president, he would dishonor himself by serving in the provisional congress, and being elected to the permanent congress, of the Confederate States in 1861, just before his death in 1862, aged 71.

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