Lone Star (65 page)

The states' rights movement was one more of hysteria than logic, because ironically, the Constitution was the planter-slaveowners' greatest prop. While Lincoln's statement that the nation could not continue forever as a house divided—that either the slave states or the free states would enforce their concept of legality on the other—was essentially true, the Constitution still gave the slaveowners enormous room to fight. The Dred Scott decision stands as a case in point. It was impossible for the organic, 19th-century American law to ignore property rights; the law had been building an intricate maze of support for property rights for more than a generation. The planters were actually in a position in which, with enough senators in Washington to block significant political change for years to come, they could sit back and watch the Abolitionists become psychotic.

Abolition, then, was impractical both from economic and psychological reasons in Texas. But the great dilemma of the nation was that black subordination was not morally supportable, and both North and South grew increasingly psychotic over the issue. The South defended slavery as coequal with the American law and way of life, while the North stubbornly refused to reward "sin." This infusion of moral stands and principles into national politics was hardly invigorating; it was disastrous. It made political compromise, the cement of the nation, impossible, and it destroyed the single, necessary unifying force, the national political parties. Two newer, aggressive political groups sprouted from the mouldering remains of the two former national parties, the Constitutional or Calhoun Democrats of the South, and the Republicans of the North. Both split off significant groups from the older Whigs, who disappeared. The influential planter class in the South, which had been largely Whig, deserted to the Democrats and briefly captured that Party. The Whig Eastern financial and business interests swelled Republicanism. Because of the spread of railroads above the Ohio, linking the Western farmers with the industrial East, and the slavery question, the Democrats increasingly lost the Middle West. And the Democrats, with the rise of the Constitutional Party in the South, finally splintered into not two, but three groups.

In terms of national government, all this was catastrophic, because each of the alignments was purely regional. There were no Republicans in the South. There were almost no pro-slavery Democrats in the North. Workable, equitable government demanded sectional alliances and regional compromises, and these became impossible. The angry statement of the Southern delegate, "We are for principles, damn the party!" showed that effective American politics had disappeared. The preachings of Seward and others about "irreconcilable conflict" and "higher laws" showed that the North was not entirely free of guilt. The Civil War was hardly spawned in innocence, because neither morality nor the American Constitution could ever be a substitute for practical politics.

The propaganda that eventually made the American internal conflict seem a struggle between an aristocratic tradition and a burgeoning social democracy throughout the English-speaking world obscured the fact that Texas, at least, was a complete political democracy. The planters' influence was more social than political; the planters could not vote or control the volatile 400,000 whites. Insecurity and radicalism pervaded the white farmers far more than it touched the men in plantation houses; in one sense, the "poor whites" betrayed the very system they now gathered noisily to defend. When the South rose, two thousand Texan planters were submerged by the genuine Southern version of democracy.

In Texas, as everywhere, approaching disaster was heralded by the collapse of the old political parties. Texas had naturally been fervently Democratic, since annexation was a Jacksonian policy. However, the Party as such had never been efficiently organized. In the early 1850s it still revolved around a pro-Houston and an anti-Houston group, as in the Republic years. Sam Houston, meanwhile, was returned regularly to the U.S. Senate. The top men of the state, Governor Elisha Pease and Senator Thomas Jefferson Rusk, were basically Unionist; the old Carolina poison of nullification had never reached this far west.

The political issues of the day centered around such matters as public schools and, above all, the defense of the Indian frontier. Every governor was criticized for not doing enough; and the Congressional delegations' battle with the Union was in securing garrison troops. The Democratic Party was more a party of personalities than issues; state-wide conventions had never been held. In the absence of any real dissent on major issues, small caucuses could decide on candidates or make decisions affecting government.

But the Southern complex, fueled by Calhoun and carried by steady immigration, spread rapidly throughout the state. The old families along the Brazos, who had once deserted American citizenship, were oddly enough completely American-oriented; Southernism as a creed or mystique had not yet arisen in the 1830s. Because of geography, these people, like Houston, had been and stayed Jacksonian Democrats, though their instincts might be more readily termed Whiggish. In a normal progression, however, the one-time "radical" Jacksonians gradually became the conservative structure in the state.

Meanwhile Sam Houston, the loyal old Jacksonian, had outlived his old national Party. Like Tom Benton of Missouri, he was falling out of date. Houston kept the viewpoint of the 1830s and 1840s: the mystique of a great American nation, based more on the concept of blood and soil than transcendental ideas, which would expand the English-speaking race from sea to sea and be in a position to defy the world. He did not hate the Europe of culture and tyranny from which the American race had sprung; he rather despised it and feared its material power. All Westerners born in the 18th century, and who had fought Indians in the 1812 war, detested the British nation, with reasonable grounds. Houston also mistrusted the French, who threw out brilliant concepts of democracy but could not seem to found a stable democratic regime at home. Like Andrew Jackson, Houston had been born in humble circumstances but reached the political heights; he was conservative, but he never liked the arrogance of the Atlantic seaboard, North or South. He did think of Northerners as nothing but Americans, bred to the same language, laws, and concepts of government as the American South; he never considered the North, as a whole, bent on destroying either the South or the Constitution. He seems never to have fallen into the pit that swallowed his own people: the equation of Negro slavery with the American way of life. Like Jackson again, he seems to have privately regarded the importation of Africans into America as the greatest potential curse that ever befell his country—not so much on moral grounds, but because the intrusion threatened his whole dream of a great American Republic. Houston was a craggy, piercing-eyed old warrior, westward-looking, true to his friends, hard on his enemies, but with a large streak of purposeful pragmatism and magnanimity. He had seen to it that Santa Anna was protected and gotten safely back to Mexico via the United States, when a lesser and shorter-visioned man would have punished him, as the public clamor demanded. Houston had hated Henry Clay as much as any Jacksonian during the partisan wars, but he lived to praise Clay when he understood the Kentuckian was a loyal American and sincere. Indians, at the Horseshoe Bend, had put an arrow in Houston's leg, and bullets in his arm and shoulder, almost killing him and invaliding him out of the regular service. Yet no western political figure in America fought harder to preserve to the Indians some legal rights. He had won the Presidency of Texas on horseback at San Jacinto, yet no Texas leader tried more sincerely to end the war with Mexico. Hard, brave, stubborn, proud, and canny, Houston was an intensely ethical and honorable man.

Now, in the Senate Houston was as valiant as when he had led the forlorn hope against the Mexican army. And because of his deep-seated Unionist bias, his words and stands were to be prophetic. Tragically, this was prophecy his own constituents could never understand. Houston, fighting for what he believed, cut his own political throat, in the politicians' phrase.

In 1848, he voted for the entrance of Oregon as free territory, standing against the senators from the South. He refused to sign Calhoun's manifesto on "aggression by the free states," exciting irate comment throughout Texas. He debated vehemently against the Kansas-Nebraska bill of 1853, which in effect abrogated the old Missouri Compromise. Stephen Douglas's political plan to allay his own Democrats in the South through the concept of "territorial sovereignty" on the question of slavery was enthusiastically supported by the Calhoun Democrats; it was belatedly backed by the Democratic Administration. It opened Kansas, where slavery had been forever barred, as slave territory if the inhabitants so agreed. Although it was instigated by an Illinoisan, as part of a political move to re-create a national Democratic consensus, it devolved into a Southern attack upon the status quo, and as such Houston fought it. It was the first of a series of hideous Southern political errors.

Houston felt that the 1820 Compromise held the nation together, and that even if Kansas opted for slavery, which he considered unlikely, the South would be damaged. Houston, who was born in Virginia, matured in Tennessee, and risen to glory in Texas, again and again attacked the concept of a narrow sectionalism in politics. The South did not have the power to mount its own party, and Houston argued that Southern sectionalism must beget an answering Northern response. He was correct. The Kansas-Nebraska bill, pushed through Congress, resulted in "bleeding Kansas," excited the Abolitionists, who had been declining, to new frenzies, and in the end, the concept of "territorial, or squatter sovereignty" did not unite but split the Democrats, costing Douglas the White House.

As Lincoln shrewdly saw, the Douglas policy of live and let live toward the South could not include an approval of slavery. But the Calhoun partisans would settle for nothing less. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was symbolic; compromise was dead.

When Sam Houston, loyal to the end, voted against the bill, the Texas legislature let it be known he would not be returned to the Senate. Houston was openly described as a "traitor to the South."

Houston also split the Democrats of his home state. Two factions emerged, pro-Houston men, or "Jacksonians," and a newer, radical faction, the "Calhoun Democrats," who soon styled themselves the Constitutional Democrats.

It soon became evident that the Jacksonians were in the great minority, and Unionist sentiment in Texas was losing its political base. The Whigs were gone.

Houston flirted with the American, or Know-Nothing, Party, which entered Texas explosively in 1854. Some historians criticized this, but the move had an obvious base. His own Democrats were purging him. The whole party structure in the United States was in confusion and flux. And the Know-Nothings, though they were an antiforeign, anti-Catholic movement originating in the East, were essentially Unionist. They wanted to keep political America "Anglo-Saxon," but they also wanted to keep it whole.

An air of unreality surrounds the entire Know-Nothing phenomenon in Texas. The group undoubtedly fed on the destruction of the Whigs and on the underlying unease gripping the country as a whole. There were almost no Catholics in Texas, and the foreign, heavily Catholic elements that existed, Germans and Mexicans, were politically inert. There never were any potato-famine Irish, such as triggered the Know-Nothings in the East. The Party really had little to sink its teeth in, in Texas. Yet it aroused great excitement and attracted a considerable number of prominent men.

The Know-Nothings resembled a cross between a secret society and a fraternal order more than a mass political party. They had a "Grand President," were run in an authoritarian manner, and formed "committees of vigilance" in many communities. They did not hold conventions, but secret conclaves. Houston expressed sympathy and approval with all this, and the Party elected the mayor of Galveston, twenty-five state legislators, including five state senators, and swept in a whole city slate, in of all places, predominantly foreign and Catholic San Antonio.

This last probably signified that contact with an alien group made more for estrangement than understanding.

Then, as quickly as they formed, the Know-Nothings faded. Afterward, many supporters admitted they were not quite sure why they joined, attributing it to the uneasiness of the times.

But the phenomenon had one visible result: it frightened the Democrats into organization. In 1856 and 1857 the Party held state-wide conventions for the first time, in which almost every county was represented. And at the 1857 convention, the Calhoun Democrats emerged in complete control. Sam Houston was purged, although the term was not then used.

With no hope of being reelected to the Senate by the Calhoun legislature, Houston appealed to the people; he ran for governor against the Democratic nominee, a wealthy, states' rightist planter named Hardin Runnels. He lost, badly, the first time Texans had repudiated Sam Houston at the polls.

Now, though matters had been slow in coming to a boil, they began to fulminate. The Democrats took up the "Calhoun" attack. The legislature authorized the governor to send delegates to a "Southern convention" if one were held. The state Democratic chairman, Marshall, lobbied for resumption of the importation of African slaves. The party convention resolved that Cuba should be annexed, as a slave state. There was a great deal of radical demagoguery on all sides.

In 1859, Houston, now past his sixty-fifth year, determined to appeal to the people once again. His platform was clear: he supported slavery, he supported the Constitution, but he pledged allegiance to the Union, come what may. It was not a popular platform, but Houston could not believe that the Texans were prepared to forsake the greater nation he had done so much to build.