Lone Star Nation (24 page)

On his good days he could still make himself useful. Living with the Cherokees and traveling among the various tribes inhabiting the trans-Mississippi region, he became an apostle of peace between rival tribes and between the Indians and whites. To Secretary of War John Eaton he wrote regarding a conflict between the Osages and the Pawnees, in which each side had taken many prisoners, who thereby became an obstacle to ending the struggle. Houston urged Eaton to act as broker in a prisoner exchange. “Peace would cost a mere trifle to our Government,” Houston said, “when compared to the advantages which must result from it!” After a band of Cherokees, angry at their tribe's treatment by the government and by nearby whites, threatened to go to war over the protests of John Jolly and other Cherokee leaders, Houston implored them not to, warning that they would simply bring down the greater wrath of the government and open the tribe to further depredations. When the U.S. Army, in a fit of cost cutting, considered closing a military post in the middle of the Indian territory, Houston assailed the measure as shortsighted and foolish. “I will predict, in the event of a removal of the U.S. troops from this post,” he wrote the local commandant, “that in less than twelve months from the date thereof there will be waged a war the most sanguinary and savage that has raged within my recollection. Embers are covered, but whenever they are exposed, you will see the flame spread through five nations.”

For his efforts on their behalf, the Cherokees made Houston a citizen of their nation, and sent him east as their envoy to the U.S. government. In Washington, Jackson received him graciously but dubiously. Houston reported how the Cherokees were being cheated by the agents supplying them beef under the terms of a treaty with the federal government; in persuading the War Department to fire the agents, he made himself the target of the agents' friends in the administration and in Congress.

Houston's visit to the East rekindled his interest in the larger world, reminding him, among other things, of how much more capable he was than many who held positions of public preferment. Traveling through Tennessee en route back west, he surveyed the political landscape and sized up Billy Carroll, the man who had succeeded him at the top of the state's politics. “My honest belief is that if I would again return to Tennessee I would beat him for governor,” Houston confided to a friend. But the memories of Nashville and Eliza were too painful, especially when Carroll's allies revived them around the state as a way of warning Houston off. He halfheartedly defended himself against the renewed attacks, but, discovering that this merely afforded the slanders longer life, he finally threw up his hands in exasperation and posted a notice in Nashville's leading newspaper: “Know all men by these presents that I, Sam Houston, ‘late Governor of the State of Tennessee,' do hereby declare to all
scoundrels whomsoever
, that they are authorized to accuse, defame, calumniate, slander, vilify, and libel me to any extent.”

Convinced that he couldn't return to Tennessee, Houston sought a new arena for his abilities. Texas had been on his mind since the 1820s, when he had invested in the colonizing efforts of Robert Leftwich. Upon fleeing Nashville amid the ruin of his marriage and his former life, he was reported to have boasted, drunkenly no doubt, that he would “conquer Mexico or Texas, and be worth two millions in two years.” Subsequently he was said to have sought support for an expedition against Texas, perhaps manned by his Cherokee friends.

Yet for three years Houston's Texas vision was nothing more than talk. To be sure, the talk alone was enough to cause Jackson to warn Houston against filibustering. Jackson was trying to negotiate the purchase of Texas from Mexico; discussions weren't going well, but Jackson understood that anything that smacked of extra-diplomatic pressure would make them go worse. “It has been communicated to me that you had the illegal enterprise in view of conquering Texas, that you had declared that you would, in less than two years, be emperor of that country by conquest,” the president wrote Houston. “I must really have thought you deranged to have believed you had so wild a scheme in contemplation, and particularly when it was communicated that the physical force to be employed was the Cherokee Indians. Indeed, my dear sir, I cannot believe you have any such chimerical visionary scheme in view. Your pledge of honor to the contrary is a sufficient guarantee that you will never engage in any enterprise injurious to your country that would tarnish your fame.”

Houston, suitably chastened, gave the required pledge and put Texas temporarily out of his mind. But despite two years of trying, Jackson made no progress toward the purchase of Texas. The president gradually discovered what every president through James Polk would learn: that no Mexican government could even consider selling Texas without jeopardizing its own existence. From the American perspective this appeared irrational: Mexico had made nothing of Texas so far and showed little promise of doing better in the future. The United States was offering gold for what was causing Mexico only grief. But Mexicans—following the lead of Manuel de Mier y Terán—wrapped Texas in the context of their revolution; to relinquish Texas would be to admit that the revolution had failed. No Mexican government was willing to make that admission.

In any event, during the latter part of his first term, Jackson began to consider alternative means of acquiring Texas. Houston's ambitions had clearly revived, and he was champing for action in a larger field than Indian affairs. Indeed, his champing had grown embarrassingly public. On a return visit by Houston to Washington, William Stanberry, an anti-Jackson congressman from Ohio, had mischievously impugned Houston's honor as a way of attacking the president. Houston sent Stanberry a note preparatory to issuing a formal challenge; after Stanberry refused to receive the note, Houston assaulted him with a cane (appropriately fashioned of hickory) on Pennsylvania Avenue. Stanberry responded to the blows by producing a pistol, which he aimed at Houston's chest and tried to fire. But the flint spark failed to ignite the powder, and the misfire additionally enraged Houston, who delivered several more blows about Stanberry's head and shoulders before finishing with one aimed below the belt that—in the decorous testimony of an eyewitness—“struck him elsewhere.”

Now it was Stanberry's turn to feel aggrieved. The congressman brought charges against Houston in the House of Representatives, which voted to arrest the former member from Tennessee for breaching the rule that held members of Congress free from liability for words spoken on the legislative floor. The trial became a sensation, with Houston, although represented by Francis Scott Key (author of “The Star-Spangled Banner”), carrying the burden of his own defense. By Houston's later recollection, Jackson called him to the White House and declared angrily, “It's not you they are after, Sam; those thieves, those infernal bank thieves, they wish to injure your old commander.” Giving him some money to buy a new suit of clothes for the trial, Jackson continued, “When you make your defense, tell those infernal bank thieves, who talk about privileges, that when an American citizen is insulted by one of them, he also has some privileges.” (Jackson had “bank thieves” on the brain at this time, for he was engaged in a bitter struggle to disincorporate the Bank of the United States, which he considered an illegitimate bastion of moneyed privilege.)

Preparing his case till far into the night before the trial opened, Houston drank even more than he was recently used to. He summoned a bellboy and told the lad to wake a barber and send him in. “When he came I told him to bring me a cup of coffee at sunrise and his shaving traps,” Houston later recalled. “Opening a drawer, I said, do you see this purse of gold and this pistol? If the coffee does not stick when I drink it”—that is, if it failed to wake and sober him—“take the pistol and shoot me, and the gold is yours.” The coffee stuck, however, and Houston made an impassioned defense of his conduct. He couldn't well deny that he had attacked Stanberry, so he pled extenuating circumstances, starting with the egregious insult to his honor and including Stanberry's refusal to meet him in a manly duel. Houston cited precedents, legal and political; he quoted poetry (“I seek no sympathies nor need/The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree/I planted; they have torn me, and I bleed”); he drew upon the wisdom of the ancients; he reminded his auditors of his honorable service under the flag of his country. “So long as that flag shall bear aloft its glittering stars,” he concluded (in imagery perhaps influenced by Key), “bearing them amidst the din of battle and waving them triumphantly above the storms of the ocean, so long, I trust, shall the rights of American citizens be preserved safe and unimpaired, and transmitted as a sacred legacy from one generation to another, till discord shall wreck the spheres—the grand march of time shall cease—and not one fragment of all creation be left to chafe on the bosom of eternity's waves.”

Houston's performance won over the gallery. Junius Brutus Booth, a leading actor of the day (and the father of John Wilkes Booth), rushed up to Houston at the close of his speech, pumped his hand, and declaimed: “Houston, take my laurels!” Yet for all its power, the speech had no effect on the outcome of the trial. The House judged the accused guilty of a breach of its privileges and sentenced him to a reprimand by the speaker, which was duly delivered.

Despite this victory, Stanberry remained dissatisfied, and he brought criminal charges against Houston. Another trial took place; again Houston was convicted, this time of assault. He was fined five hundred dollars.

Twice the loser, Houston nonetheless felt vindicated in the court of honor. “I was dying out, and had they taken me before a justice of the peace and fined me ten dollars, it would have killed me,” he said afterward. “But they gave me a national tribunal for a theatre, and that set me up again.”

In setting Houston up again, his enemies—and Jackson's—prepared him for Texas. While in the East, Houston made the acquaintance of James Prentiss, a speculator who controlled tens of thousands of acres in the Leftwich grant. More precisely, he controlled the acres on paper; he offered to bring Houston in as a partner in exchange for a money payment and Houston's commitment to travel to Texas to make the paper claim good. He would finance Houston's journey and pay other expenses. If Houston succeeded, both men would become rich.

The prospect fired Houston's imagination. “So soon as matters can be arranged, I will set out for the
land of promise,
” he wrote Prentiss in May 1832. Houston's twin trials in Washington delayed things, as did problems Prentiss encountered in funding Houston's trip. Houston grew impatient at the delays. “It is important that I should be off to Texas!” he wrote in June.

The news from Texas compounded Houston's impatience, even as it revealed that there was more to his project than redeeming land scrip. After passage of the law of April 6, 1830, the chances of Prentiss, Houston, or anyone else winning legal control of land under the terms of the Leftwich grant were vanishingly slim. What was required was some extralegal maneuver—a filibuster, for example. Presumably, an independent or American-affiliated Texas would be more likely to honor the Leftwich claims, but even if it didn't, the leaders of a successful filibuster would doubtless have other ways of compensating themselves.

The existence of ulterior motives was clear in Houston's correspondence with Prentiss. “The land which I bought, to be candid with you, has claimed not much solicitude of me,” he wrote. Yet the land wasn't insignificant. Houston intended to sell some of it en route to Texas in order to raise money for expenses, but he wouldn't liquidate it all. “It might be well to have enough with me to form a pretext, when I get there, for moving about.” Prentiss responded by noting that the reports from Texas—of the uprising against the Mexican government—boded well for Houston's mission. “The more conflict, the more I am convinced of the expediency and practicability of our plans,” he said. Some weeks later, Prentiss urged Houston to make haste west. “The field is now open for a great work in Texas—and you must go and help reap the harvest.”

Houston left Washington about the end of July and traveled west via Tennessee. The closer he got to Texas, the more excited he became. “I have seen several friends here lately from Texas,” he wrote Prentiss from Nashville, “and all represent it as the most prosperous state, and say it is a lovely region! Thousands would flock there from this country, if the government were settled, but will not venture without it!” Apparently Houston had made contact with people in Texas, or at least they had caught wind of his coming. “Several persons have said to me that I was looked for, and earnestly wished for, by the citizens of Texas,” he told Prentiss.

Houston might have avoided Tennessee on his way to Texas; the state still held painful memories for him. But Andrew Jackson was summering at the Hermitage, and he wanted to speak to Houston before the younger man left the country. What the two said is unknown, as it wasn't written down and there were no witnesses—which was the point of the personal, private interview. But apparently Jackson gave Houston five hundred dollars to finance the journey—an essential sum, as Prentiss had run into cash-flow problems and hadn't fulfilled his front end of the deal. More important, the president gave Houston his blessing for a project that was ambitious and almost certainly illegal—under Mexican and perhaps American law.