America Aflame Read online

  As Americans moved westward, Clay wondered, could democracy traverse a continent as easily as it had the eastern seaboard? As with most questions in the new nation, any answer was speculation. There were simply no precedents. But a country knitted together by internal improvements—canals and railroads—and by the commerce that would flow from such connections would have greater self-interest in staying intact. Clay called his program, appropriately, the American System, a scheme designed to make and maintain a nation.

  Whigs described themselves as “sober, industrious, thrifty people.” Their ranks swelled with the awakened, for whom self-improvement and self-discipline were crucial values. The Democrats were wary of national government power and more supportive of individual liberties and states’ rights than the Whigs; they did not support federal aid for internal improvements until the 1850s. They fiercely protected the wall between church and state, while the Whigs blurred the distinction. More egalitarian, more secular, and more open to immigrants, the Democrats benefited from the advance of universal white male suffrage in the 1820s and 1830s.38

  By 1844, both parties had gotten religion. The fissures among evangelicals, the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, the slavery debates, and the settlement of the West placed religion at the forefront of American politics. Under normal circumstances, the Whigs, especially northern Whigs, would have been favored by most evangelicals. But Henry Clay, the Whig standard-bearer, was not the ideal presidential candidate for a time of evangelical agitation. Democrats seized on Clay’s reputation as a duelist, gambler, imbiber of alcohol, and habitual violator of the Sabbath. According to Democratic sources, his “debaucheries and midnight revelries” were “too disgusting to report.” The Whigs attempted to balance the ticket by nominating New Jersey’s Theodore Frelinghuysen, a devout and abstemious Methodist, for vice president. The Whigs also reminded voters of the Democrats’ close ties to Romanism. Although the Whigs could hardly portray Clay as Virtue Incarnate, they larded descriptions of their nominee with an array of religious metaphors implying that he walked with the saints, even if he was not of their number. One broadside vowed that Clay was “in form a man … [but] LOOKED A GOD” and would be “the redeemer of the country.”39

  James K. Polk, the Democratic presidential nominee, was not a religious man; his wife dragged him to church occasionally, but he never took membership. Polk’s religion was work, and his work was to complete the continental empire begun by his idol, Thomas Jefferson, and advanced by his mentor, Andrew Jackson. Supporters, in fact, called him “Young Hickory.” If the Whigs could resurrect the errant Clay as the nation’s redemptive angel, the Democrats could shape James K. Polk into a moral paragon with supra-mortal qualities.

  Democrats staged mock baptisms, anointing the faithful “in the name of Andrew JACKSON, the Father! James K. POLK, the Son!! and TEXAS, the Holy Ghost!!!”—typically followed with copious sprinklings of whiskey or hard cider. Democrats, well aware of the importance of women in bringing indifferent husbands to Christ, offered the example of Polk’s wife, the very Presbyterian Sarah Childress. They confided that Sarah served as a mentor of faith to her husband and ensured that he was “strictly a temperance man in everything—in liquor, tobacco, in eating, and in all respects.” Moreover, Polk found gambling abhorrent and was “an anti-duellist on Christian principles.” This marked one of the first occasions in American politics where the wife of a candidate became an active part of the campaign, an indication of how evangelical Protestantism helped to extend women’s influence beyond the home. Democrats hoped that Sarah Childress’s example would inspire women to evangelize their husbands to vote for James K. Polk.40

  While the Whigs and the Democrats wrapped their causes and candidates in the Shroud of Turin, the Liberty Party was the genuine article, America’s first Christian political party. Its conventions resembled revivals, and its platform stressed the sacred obligation of state and national governments to promote equality and free labor. Its spokesmen urged citizens “to vote the Liberty ticket as a religious duty.” One of its leaders recalled years later the excitement of the 1844 campaign: “The Liberty Party, unlike any other in history, was founded on moral principles—on the Bible, originating a contest not only against slavery but against atheistic politics from which Divine law was excluded.” Others called the party “intolerant and denunciatory.”41

  The country was not ready for a major Christian political party, especially one with a partisan anti-slavery agenda. But after polling a paltry 7,000 votes in the 1840 presidential election, the Liberty Party won 62,300 votes in 1844 and peeled off enough disaffected Whigs in New York and Michigan to swing those states and the election to Polk. For increasing numbers of northern voters—but not yet a critical mass—the two major parties offered no purity on moral issues, especially on slavery. The Democrats and the Whigs invoked faith in campaigns but ignored it in governance. On the campaign trail, the whiskey flowed as freely as quotes from Scripture. The Liberty Party offered a salutary alternative to such hypocrisy.

  The slavery issue, which provoked the denominational schisms, loomed over the 1844 election campaign for an even more salient reason: the proposed annexation by the United States of the Texas Republic, the Holy Ghost of the Democratic trinity. By 1844, the annexation of Texas seemed to many Americans like a natural progression of the country’s territorial expansion, the God-inspired sweep of ideals and citizens across a continent. Those who led the revolt of the Texas province from the Mexican government in 1836 were former Americans, so annexation would complete the crusade to restore to them the blessings of democratic government and Protestant Christianity.42

  Few Americans clamored for the annexation of Texas initially. The onset of a severe economic downturn in 1837 that lasted into the early 1840s focused Americans’ attention on matters closer to home. The penny presses and pulp paperbacks regaled their growing audiences with tales of the Far West, not Texas. Besides, the Mexican government had never recognized Texas independence. The Mexicans had made it clear that they would perceive any move on the part of the United States to annex this province as an act of war. President Andrew Jackson, not one to shrink from a fight, nevertheless muttered a few platitudes about self-determination and let Texas alone, as did his successor, Martin Van Buren.

  In the meantime, Texas president Sam Houston, like a boy hopping up and down at his school desk for attention, openly entertained proposals from Mexico and Great Britain. Mexico intimated that Texas could enjoy the status of a free state within a loose Mexican confederation. Rumors circulated that the British had promised to protect the independence of Texas in exchange for the compensated abolition of slavery, a plausible deal given Sam Houston’s indifference to the institution. Houston did not seriously entertain the Mexican offer, and, although a British official visited Texas with such a scheme in mind, neither the British government nor Houston discussed it formally.

  Houston was much less interested in striking dubious deals with foreign governments than in raising the profile of the annexation issue in Washington. The Whigs had always been cool to annexation. They worried about the expansion of the country beyond the means to govern it, and they worried about the probability of a war with Mexico. The big Whig, President John Tyler, was not really much of a Whig at all. Placed on the ticket as the vice presidential candidate in 1840 as a sop to southerners whose major attraction to Whig philosophy was that Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren were Democrats, Tyler suddenly found himself president when William Henry Harrison succumbed to the rigors of the job after only one month in office. Tyler, a thin, sour-faced Virginian, was genial enough to intimates and held the usual graces one associates with the Old Dominion. The fact that Tyler was an accidental president bothered him not in the least, and he proceeded to chart his own course, much to the dismay of mainstream Whigs.

  As a nationalist, Tyler worried about Sam Houston’s dalliances with the Mexicans and especially with the British. So he sent Abel P. Upshur,
his secretary of state, to sound out Houston about a possible annexation treaty in October 1843. However, while Upshur was inspecting a navy vessel, one of its prize guns blew up, destroying a good deal of the ship and Upshur as well. Tyler compounded the accident by appointing John C. Calhoun as his new secretary of state. Calhoun was brilliant, but he was not a diplomat. With a face and ideology seemingly chiseled from rock, Calhoun had the appearance of an Old Testament prophet who should not be messed with. Like Tyler, more a Whig by convenience than by conviction, Calhoun had some specific ideas about how the United States should handle the annexation issue.

  For Calhoun, annexation made sense only as a measure to save slavery from destruction. History and prevailing wisdom dictated that the institution, like a vampire, required periodic infusions of fresh blood—territory—to survive. Cotton cultivation depleted the soil. The abundance of fertile land lulled planters into a security that abjured principles of conservation. The slave population, which, despite the closure of the overseas slave trade, increased twofold during the first half of the nineteenth century, would soon overrun the white population. Too many slaves on too little land raised security concerns and could ruin the value of a planter’s investment, eventually destroying the institution itself.

  From Calhoun’s political standpoint, the South had already lost the national population competition by the early 1840s. Representatives from nonslaveholding states easily outnumbered those where slavery yet existed. The Senate was the South’s last bastion of influence in the federal legislature. Regardless of population, each state sent two senators to Washington. It did not take a clairvoyant to see that the migration westward to the Pacific Coast would, eventually, result in an avalanche of free states that would make the South forever beholden, a slave if you will, to the power and whims of the free states.

  Calhoun drafted an annexation treaty and laid it before the Senate in April 1844 with a cover letter urging passage because British abolitionists were poised to abolish slavery in Texas. That no such plot existed was beside the point. The association of slavery and annexation effectively doomed the measure, even among southerners who wondered why the slavery issue even entered the picture when an argument for annexation in the name of manifest destiny might have drawn a majority of the votes. But Calhoun hoped to educate Congress that annexation was a matter both of national patriotism—the British threat—and of southern equality within the Union, a cause to which he dedicated his life. Calhoun was no disunionist. What he worked for was a Union of equals. He raised the fundamental issue of a democratic society: how to protect the rights of a minority in a political system predicated on majority rule.43

  Although Calhoun lost the vote, he gained an election issue. Northern vilification of Calhoun, the Tyler administration, and the South itself irritated southerners, especially in the Lower South, where slaveholding was more prevalent. If equality was a great principle of the Union, then why were northerners hell-bent on relegating the South to a permanent minority? All white southerners understood the implications of dependence, a term synonymous with slavery in the national lexicon.

  The Democratic Party platform cannily linked Texas with Oregon (where the British and Americans held conflicting claims), rendering the acquisition of both a matter of national security and honor rather than sectional greed. Polk, despite his southern origins, perceived Texas as a way station on the road to his ultimate goal of a Pacific empire, not as a safety valve for excess slaves. The Whigs chose party loyalty over Texas, recognizing that advocacy for annexation would split the party irrevocably. Northern Whigs perceived annexation fever as a symptom of a larger disease, a conspiracy among slave states to undermine basic American ideals. Henry Clay focused on promoting his American System, fearing that agitation of the slavery issue threatened his beloved Union. But Texas and Oregon had gotten the patriotic juices flowing, and voters perceived Clay as soft on the foreign menaces and as hostile to the interests of slaveholders. He lost every Lower South state, barely broke even in the border states, and faltered in the North, where Polk and the Democrats convinced voters that the party wanted Oregon and California as badly as it longed for Texas.

  John Tyler interpreted Polk’s victory as a mandate for annexation. Three days from the end of his presidency, on March 1, 1845, Tyler signed the Texas annexation bill after it passed both the House and the Senate by narrow party-line votes. The Lone Star Republic entered the Union as a slave state. When Polk took office on March 4, he confronted two pressing issues: Mexico had made it clear that annexation meant war, and the British were girding for battle if Polk attempted to make good on his pledge to throw them out of Oregon. Destiny would not wait.

  CHAPTER 2

  EMPIRE

  EMIGRANTS STREAMING TOWARD OREGON and California and settlers already established in Texas believed themselves agents of destiny. The British, Mexicans, and Indians who inhabited or claimed all or parts of these lands felt differently. President Polk hoped that a combination of negotiation, compensation, and the incessant flow of migrating Americans would convince these parties to withdraw gracefully. A well-placed threat was not out of order either.

  The British blinked first. The facts on the ground—the daily arrival of American settlers—moved them to offer Oregon to the United States up to the 49th parallel. Polk rejected the deal outright. In his first message to Congress in December 1845, what today we call the State of the Union Address, Polk gave the British a geography lesson as to why the Oregon territory belonged to the United States all the way up to the 54th parallel. “Oregon is part of the North American Continent, to which, it is confidently affirmed, the title of the United States is the best now in existence.… The British proposition of compromise … can never for a moment be entertained by the United States.”1

  As crowds gathered around railroad depots in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York to see the message transmitted almost instantaneously by a remarkable new invention, the telegraph, a murmur and then a hurrah burst forth: “Jackson is alive again!” Back in March, when Andrew Jackson was still clinging to his first life, he had advised his protégé not to mind the British; they would protest giving up all of Oregon “to alarm us … and give strength to the traitors in our country.… England with all her boast dare not go to war.”2

  Steadfast against the British, Polk turned a sharp eye toward the Mexicans. In June, he ordered the United States Army under General Zachary Taylor to take up a position south of the Nueces River. The Mexicans considered the Nueces their northern boundary; the Americans and Texans claimed the Rio Grande, much further south, as the correct border. Sending General Taylor into disputed territory was obviously a provocation. The president felt a show of force would convince Mexicans of the rectitude of American geography. The Mexicans, however, were unimpressed and refused to hear what the president’s minister, John Slidell, had to offer in the way of settlement. Slidell left Mexico in a snit, reporting to Polk, “Be assured that nothing is to be done with these people until they have been chastised.” Mexicans, he said, were “ignorant Indians, debased by three centuries of worse than colonial vassalage … a semi-barbarous people.”3

  Zachary Taylor was a good soldier and expert farmer, owning a large plantation in Louisiana populated by over two hundred slaves. He had given a daughter to a young, well-connected Mississippi planter by the name of Jefferson Davis, but the daughter died shortly after the marriage, and the general never forgave his former son-in-law. Taylor’s dual career as a farmer and a soldier spoke volumes about the regular army, only seven thousand strong scattered among various western outposts. Their major role to date had been moving Indians to barren lands and, occasionally, shooting them when they resisted. But politicians, not soldiers, make war.

  Taylor hardly looked the part of a commander; he appeared as if he had just exited a cotton press and was only awaiting twine to be shipped to some textile mill up north. Squat, with a face that had more ridges than most mountain ranges, he rarely wore anything
that would indicate his rank. One of his lieutenants, Ulysses S. Grant, hardly a fashion plate himself, commented, “In dress he was possibly too plain.” More important to Grant, though, Taylor “was known to every soldier in his army, and was respected by all.”4

  The Mexicans and the British were part of the same problem, according to Polk. The British had negotiated with Sam Houston, president of Texas, trying to lure the Lone Star Republic away from the United States. Now the Mexicans were conspiring to give the British a stronger foothold in California. To counter that purported threat, the president, in October 1845, ordered United States Consul Thomas Larkin at Monterey, California, to take advantage of any unrest. Unrest conveniently materialized in the person of Captain John C. Frémont, who had explored the West on behalf of the U.S. Army. He now commanded a band of about sixty army irregulars; no one knew for certain if they were officially American soldiers or an assortment of mountain men looking for work and adventure. They rode into California supposedly scouting for better trails into that territory.

  The movements in California and Texas (or Mexico, depending on one’s perspective) received close attention in Mexico City. General Mariano Paredes, riding a wave of anti-American sentiment, led a group of army officers into the capital and deposed President Joaquín Herrera after firing a few perfunctory shots and coaxing the priests to ring the church bells. Paredes held the same view of Americans that many in the United States held of Mexicans: they were stupid and cowardly.

  On January 13, 1846, Secretary of War William Marcy sent the following message to General Taylor at Corpus Christi: “Sir: I am directed by the President to instruct you to advance and occupy, with the troops under your command, positions on or near the east bank of the Rio del Norte [Rio Grande].… You will not act merely on the defensive.” Taylor dutifully broke camp and moved to the Rio Grande, but the last sentence of Marcy’s order puzzled him.5