The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (62 page)

Had
Daniel Webster (or John Quincy Adams) been making foreign policy, slavery’s expansion in the New World might have been definitively halted in 1842. Instead, many southeastern enslavers were in the process of turning US foreign policy into an engine that would drive the slave South’s further growth. One was President John Tyler himself, whom Whig critics, resentful of his activity to undermine their
program, had taken to calling “His Accidency.” Tyler replaced pro–Convention of London appointees and Cabinet members—such as Webster, who resigned—with fanatically proslavery men, including the new secretary of state, Abel P. Upshur. Like Tyler, Upshur was a planter from one of the oldest counties of eastern Virginia. Although Upshur was the author of arcane constitutional writings that insisted,
like early-1830s nullifiers, on the separate sovereignty of the individual states, once inside the executive branch he showed no compunction about using centralized power to advance expansionist enslavers’ particular agenda.

Despite the fact that the Senate had the power to approve or reject treaties negotiated by the executive branch, and that the Senate’s Whig majority opposed Texas annexation,
Upshur and Tyler were determined to see slavery’s expansion resume. They began negotiations with the Texas government, and Upshur plotted a strategy that would allow the executive branch to sneak an annexation through Congress. They simply had to figure out how to present annexation as an imperative to two groups: slaveholders who feared an end to expansion; and American nationalists who feared
British interference. Southerners of both parties and the northern wing of one party would then cooperate and annex slaveholding Texas.
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While Tyler foolishly believed that annexation would convince either the Whigs or the Democratic Party to nominate him for the presidency in 1844, Upshur was actually acting on stage-managing letters from another politician—one who also wanted to use “the Texas
question” to make himself the champion and candidate of all who supported national expansion.
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This
secret director was John C. Calhoun. He owned more than one hundred slaves, as well as gold mines in Georgia and the Fort Hill labor camp in South Carolina (now the site of Clemson University), and he had once been the nationalist secretary of war under President James Monroe. Supporting antinationalist
nullification, Calhoun had spoken for the fears of declining South Carolina’s enslavers rather than to the needs of migrating entrepreneurs. But new realities had made Calhoun rethink his point of view. These included both the flood of petitions that allowed abolitionism to seep into congressional business and his now-intimate experience with the ongoing project of expanding slavery’s frontiers.
His son Andrew had driven dozens of forced migrants to a new slave labor camp in Alabama, and now he and John together were trying to bring their family fortunes successfully through the broader storm of indebtedness. Calhoun would spend the remainder of his life as the greatest slavery-expansionist in the United States, providing both the theory and the practical political maneuvers that
would allow enslavers to launch another wave of creation and destruction.

A student’s first encounter with Calhoun often comes in the form of a daguerreotype from Calhoun’s last years. Look it up: his eyes glare robotically at the student, his face set like that of an undead despot, skeletal from the tuberculosis that was killing him. The student hears about nullification, and listens to quotations
from unpublished disquisitions found in Calhoun’s papers after death. The quotations contain impossible abstractions, such as the suggestion that the United States should shift to a two-person executive, one northern president and one southern, who could each veto the other, or veto Congress, if he liked. By the time the professor ties the lecture off with language about the supposedly antimodern,
inefficient nature of the slaveholder economy, the student has received the complete image of Calhoun as, at best, “the Hector of a Troy fated to fall” (to quote abolitionist Wendell Phillips)—the champion of an inevitably-to-be-defeated southern ruling class. Calhoun ought to have known, the conventional story suggests, that the South would lose in the struggle for economic, political, and
eventually military predominance.
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Maybe so. But enslavers were very powerful. The idea that slavery would inevitably end is less incontrovertible once we recognize the dynamism of their economy. Even if they struggled in the early 1840s, enslavers knew how to revive dynamic growth—with more expansion. The theories that Calhoun was developing to justify further expansion were actually modern,
tailored to a market economy that saw economic entities as “people,” that measured people as factors of production, and whose most innovative actors
believed that entrepreneurs should be able to wield private property without restraint. In the meantime, however, he was also an adroit practical politician who was about to maneuver the nation into following his particular entrepreneurial minority’s
program. For when Upshur died in a freak February 1844 accident aboard a US naval vessel in the Potomac River, Tyler invited Calhoun to become the new secretary of state.
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Going through Upshur’s correspondence, Calhoun found a letter that Britain’s new ambassador, Richard Pakenham, had delivered. Speaking for the British government, the letter informed the Tyler administration that Her Majesty
would object to the annexation of Texas, and that Great Britain “desires, and is constantly exerting herself to procure, the general abolition of slavery throughout the world.” Sensing opportunity, Calhoun wrote a response, sending a copy of both his and Pakenham’s messages to the Senate, whose Whig majority had recently blocked a proposed treaty of annexation suggested by Tyler and Upshur. This
“Pakenham Letter” was Calhoun’s devious ploy to force both voters and politicians to choose either to support British interference or add more slave territory to the United States. After criticizing British meddling in Texas, Calhoun insisted that slavery was not only expedient, but the best thing for black people. Statistics from the 1840 federal census supposedly proved that a high proportion
of free African Americans in the North were insane, so “experience has proved” that slavery must be the proper state for people of African descent. If Britain wanted to end slavery in its own dominions, that was its problem. But Britain had no business keeping Texas out of the United States, for submission to British meddling would inflict “calamity”—freedom—on “the race which it is the avowed object
of her exertions to benefit.”
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Calhoun believed that most northern whites were nationalist and racist. And indeed, many northern Democrats were both, as well as deeply pro-annexation—such as Illinois Congressman Stephen Douglas, an ardent supporter of national expansion whose platforms usually featured extensive race-baiting. Or John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the pro-expansionist
Democratic Review
, who coined the term “Manifest Destiny” to describe what he saw as the white US citizens’ God-given right to take the remainder of North America from Indians and mixed-race Mexicans. But Calhoun’s letter was a piece of bad behavior that aggravated many other people, as well, even provoking southern Whigs to help kill Tyler’s Texas treaty when it finally came up for a Senate vote.

Ultimately,
the letter’s open insistence that the expansion of slavery was a good thing put each major party’s frontrunner to the test—and then
destroyed their candidacies. Democratic frontrunner Martin Van Buren released a public letter that backed away from annexation—killing his chances of winning southern support for one more presidential run. Henry Clay, the clear leader among the potential Whig candidates,
released a similar document. The Whigs had already made anti-annexation their party line, so Clay easily collected their nomination, but he had laid up trouble for the fall.
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The Democratic convention, however, played out along the fracture lines Calhoun had struck. Pro-annexation forces—some southern, some expansionist northerners who followed Douglas and read O’Sullivan—seized control of the
rules committee and changed the process to require a two-thirds majority for nominating a presidential candidate. Once the balloting began, Van Buren could not convince enough southern delegates to get his vote to the required two-thirds. The convention settled on James K. Polk, Tennessee protégé of Andrew Jackson, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, and indebted owner of dozens of
slaves and several Mississippi labor camps. An alleged moderate who had stood by the party through the panic years, he seemed to be the second-best choice for all factions. Polk promised not only to add Texas to the Union, but also to demand most of what is today British Columbia in his negotiations with the British over the Oregon Territory’s border with Canada.
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After the Democrats wrote double
expansion into their platform, the South, plus northern expansionists, faced off against northerners who opposed annexation. The Democrats pummeled Clay with his anti-annexation letter. He faced a relentless series of attacks, like the one launched by Mississippi Senator Robert Walker—he of the
Groves v. Slaughter
advocacy of the idea that enslavers could repudiate what they owed. Walker, who
owned lots of Texas land, wrote a pamphlet aimed at the northern market claiming that the expansion of US authority into Texas would actually
reduce
the scope and life span of slavery—the old diffusion trick again. Walker presented a very different argument in a South-marketed pamphlet called
The South in Danger
, which depicted Clay as the tool of antislavery northern Whigs.
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When the election
was held, Polk lost some of the non-cotton southern states, plus—by a mere 133 votes—his home state of Tennessee. But he made a clean sweep of the cotton states, many of the states north of the Ohio and west of the Appalachians, and the highly populous states of Virginia and Pennsylvania. The antislavery Liberty Party probably tipped the New York election to Polk by taking votes from Clay. Although
Polk led Clay by only 1.5 percent in the total national popular vote, his expansionism won
enough key states to give him a substantial electoral-college majority of 170 to Clay’s 105.
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Calhoun’s ingenious strategy of maximizing the confrontation with Britain and asserting the racist case for slavery as a positive good had split the Whig Party in half, producing victory for a southern expansionist.
Even before the election, land prices in Texas, anticipating Polk’s victory, had begun to rise. National financial markets, meanwhile, anticipated that the federal government would annex Texas and pay off the Lone Star Republic’s bonds at full face value once Polk took office. Tyler, however, did not want to leave the credit for Polk, so when the lame-duck Congress gathered in December 1844,
he told it that the American people had recorded a mandate for expansion. Annexation-by-treaty had failed, so Tyler suggested a fine-print measure called a “joint resolution” that would require a simple majority in each house. The constitutionality was suspect, but (surprisingly) Tyler and Calhoun did not bring up their usual strict-interpretation principles. In January 1845, the House passed a
resolution admitting Texas—and accepting its bonds, its slavery, and its more than 300,000 square miles, which were to be divided into as many as four (slave) states. One of the crucial switch votes that put annexation over the top in the Senate was that of Ohio’s Benjamin Tappan. Though his brothers were Lewis and Arthur Tappan, abolitionism’s wealthiest supporters, Benjamin had major Texas bondholdings.
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The outgoing president, refusing to wait for Polk, immediately signed annexation into law. Thus in the last two years of Tyler’s accidental term, enslavers committed the momentum of the federal government and the Democrats’ core constituencies (even though Tyler was ostensibly a Whig) to a specific vector of national expansion. This vector, by the realities of geography, would inevitably privilege
territorial growth on the southern side of the Missouri Compromise line.

Now the administration was in the hands of James K. Polk. As a product of the Jackson–Van Buren machine, Polk remembered Calhoun as a troublesome character and left him out of the new Cabinet. But the new president still constructed an expansion policy almost identical to what anyone dedicated to the expansion of slavery
would have implemented. He quickly compromised with London on the northwestern border, agreeing to split the Oregon country more or less equally along the forty-ninth parallel to the Pacific. Although many southern Democrats celebrated the deal, the 54°40'-or-fight northern Democrats thought they had been promised something else: “Is it treachery? Is it bad faith?” wrote one to another. At the same
time,
Polk pushed aggressively on the southwestern border for expansion beyond Texas. Mexico was weak, and Texas was only the first of its distant provinces to be lopped off. The vast region of Alta California, stretching from the north end of the Baja California peninsula to an incompletely determined line somewhere north of the bay of San Francisco, was almost as hard to govern, and already,
American settlers were infiltrating. Polk also had designs on disputed territory west of Texas’s traditional border on the Nueces River. In the early autumn of 1845, he sent Louisiana politician John Slidell to Mexico City with an offer: give us the disputed territory, and sell us New Mexico and California for a total of $28 million. He also sent General Zachary Taylor and his troops across the Nueces
into territory claimed by Mexico on the east bank of the Rio Grande. They spent the winter with their guns pointed across the river at Matamoros.
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