Slavery and the American West

The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny

Michael A. Morrison

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807864326
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la guerre de Sécession

Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy. Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step--from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War--the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition.

1

John Tyler’s Hobby Territorial Expansion and Jacksonian Politics

I have said it! the thunder is flashing the lightning is crashing! already there’s an earthquake
in Dominora. Full soon will old Bello discover that his diabolical machinations
against this ineffable land must soon come to naught. Who dare not declare, that we are
not invincible? I repeat it, we are. Ha! ha! Audacious Bello must bite the dust! Hair by
Hair, we will trail his gory gray beard at the end of our spears! Ha! ha!

—Herman Melville, Mardi and a Voyage Tither

Here is a party to contend with—with only two measures—Free Trade and Texas; and this last a stolen one, for it was John Tyler’s hobby, all saddled and bridled, and ready to be mounted, when Polk stepped in and poked him from his seat, and set off for Texas on the hobby himself—not the first man by a good many who has gone to Texas on a stolen horse.

—Weekly Register and North Carolina Gazette

“The question of the annexation of Texas,” Ralph Waldo Emerson confided to his journal, “is one of those which look very differently to the centuries and to the years. It is very certain that the strong British race which have now overrun so much of this continent, must also overrun that tract, & Mexico & Oregon also, and in the course of ages be of small import by what particular occasions & methods it was done. . . . It is a measure that goes not by right nor by wisdom but by feeling.”¹ As Emerson understood, national destiny, mixed motives, controversial means, and, most important, the sheer force of expansion together gave meaning and transcendent significance to the Texas issue and the Oregon question in the latter years of John Tyler’s administration.

Tyler first introduced the question of annexation into Congress in the spring of 1844, and it swept all before it in the fall presidential campaign. The larger and more powerful question of territorial expansion subordinated though did not obliterate established issues that traditionally had divided the Whig and Democratic Parties—the Bank of the United States, a protective tariff, and internal improvements. “On a subject of such magnitude,” one group of New Englanders declared, “involving as it does the present and future glory & interest of our common country, we consider all other questions merged & party lines & the dictation of leaders obliterated.” The editor of the New Orleans Morning Herald agreed: “The subject of annexation is the all absorbing question with us and that in refference to it all former party lines will be abolished—at least to a great extent.”²

Tyler’s treaty introduced formally and permanently a new issue into the American political system: territorial expansion. More powerful symbolically than the Bank of the United States or protective tariff, Texas annexation and then Oregon embraced the ideals of liberty and personal emancipation that gave substance to the feeling of boundlessness of the 1840s. As such, territorial aggrandizement drew upon the ideological essence of both political parties. At the same time, it spoke to the fervent nationalism of the 1840s, shared in equal measure by the North and the South.³

The question of annexation had been left in abeyance since Andrew Jackson’s presidency. Jackson had hoped to acquire Texas as an “essential component of his dream of empire.” Mexican hostility, the maladroit machinations of an American diplomat, and the Texas revolution itself, however, had combined to thwart his ambition. After Texas proclaimed its independence, the threat of war with Mexico, charges of presidential complicity in the revolt, the possible growth of sectional tensions, and Jackson’s unwillingness to jeopardize Martin Van Buren’s election reinforced his growing caution. Continued agitation in and out of Texas for annexation and mounting evidence of widespread American support for expansion persuaded the Senate to recommend formal recognition of the republic on March 1, 1837. Although still wary, Jackson acceded to Congress’s initiative. Now convinced that Texas had become “an independent power,” he appointed Alcée La Branche of Louisiana as chargé to Texas two days later.⁴

There the matter stood when Martin Van Buren assumed the presidency. Van Buren, who had only reluctantly acquiesced in recognition, would go no further. Preoccupied with a depression, he believed that annexation would strain a Union seriously distracted by severe financial problems and rising agitation over slavery. Not wholly opposed to expansion, Van Buren, nevertheless, was unwilling to endanger the harmony of the Democratic Party and the passage of his economic program by making Texas annexation an administration objective.⁵

Although two presidents had rejected annexation, it was never far off the stage of public affairs. Behind the scenes, investments in Texan bonds and speculation in its lands worked to strengthen the connection between the two republics. Also, as the depression continued, flight to Texas provided some emigrants relief from the entrapment of liens and debts. “To all intents and purposes,” one southern paper observed in 1844, “Texas has been the Botany Bay of the United States for the last eight years.” As the links between the two republics drew tighter, British overtures to Texas, public and private, raised with growing urgency the question of annexation. By 1841, when John Tyler succeeded to the presidency, investments, speculation, migration, and reviving public interest again made the fate of Texas a national concern.⁶

In Tyler, supporters of Texas found an expansionist of the first rank. In 1832 he had maintained that the destiny of America was to expand to the Pacific, “walking on the waves of the mighty deep . . . overturning the strong places of despotism, and restoring man to his lost rights.” As president, Tyler noted with approval continued immigration into the Pacific Northwest. He urged Congress to extend the laws of the United States to that distant region to protect Americans there and to give “a wider and more extensive spread to the principles of civil and religious liberty.” In the progress of time, he later predicted, “the inestimable principles of civil liberty will be enjoyed by millions yet unborn and the great benefits of our government be extended to now distant and uninhabited regions.”⁷

Expanding the area of freedom was not the only string in Tyler’s bow, however. He was eager to open, penetrate, and enlarge American markets overseas and to compete with Great Britain for commercial empire. As early as June 1842, for example, John Quincy Adams reported that Tyler had “his eye fixed upon China, and would avail himself of any favorable opportunity to commence a negotiation with the [Chinese] empire.” The Treaty of Wanghia of 1844, which provided for freer trade between the two countries, nearly put the president “in an ecstasy.” This treaty, he later claimed, not only expanded American markets in China but was the “nest egg” for opening trade with Japan. Tyler also sent agents to the Sandwich Islands to protect commercial interests there, and he pushed unsuccessfully for freer trade between the United States and the German Zollverein.⁸

Evidence suggests that the president committed himself to Texas annexation in the earliest days of his presidency. After Tyler’s veto of a third bill to recharter the Bank of the United States, he broke with Clay and was banished from the Whig Party. By the late fall of 1841, Tyler looked to Texas as a means to restore lost prestige and popularity. Without a party and having only a “corporal’s guard” in Congress, “his Accidency” had to introduce into the political order a new element that would appeal to, rather than divide, Whigs and Democrats; speak to the problems of a lingering depression; and direct attention away from his embarrassment with Henry Clay. Texas, it seemed, was the answer to his prayers. After years of maneuvering, the Texas government and the administration signed a treaty of annexation in early April 1844. Tyler sent it along to the Senate later that month.⁹

In an atmosphere charged with political ambition and ideological conviction, the Senate deliberated the merits of Tyler’s treaty and territorial expansion generally in a series of highly charged speeches. Expansion west appealed especially to Democrats North and South, who looked to an ever-enlarging frontier to preserve and maintain individual liberty. Most immediately, the addition of Texas to the Union promised to extend the area of freedom by spreading American institutions farther into the Southwest. At a deeper level, however, Democrats believed that western expansion was a necessary and practical requisite of individual freedom and republican government. Personal liberty, they would say, was incompatible with overcrowding, exhausted lands, and wage slavery. Compression engendered extremes of wealth and poverty and would bring on “those evils so prevalent in other countries.” Pent up, seduced by effete refinements or hedged in by the prerogatives of others, “man . . . becomes enervated and predisposed to be enslaved by vicious habits or dependent from circumstances.”¹⁰ Individual liberty, they concluded, was a function of an expansive republic.

Democrats believed that agriculturists, by their nature and circumstances, were less given to the headlong pursuit of private interests at the expense of the public good. They looked to independent yeomen “as the great and perennial fountain of that Republican Spirit which is to maintain and perpetuate our free institutions.” The party’s enthusiasm for the acquisition of new territory, cheap western land prices, and preemption rights spoke to a political agenda, first articulated by Thomas Jefferson, that fused territorial aggrandizement and settlement with agrarian egalitarianism into an ever-expanding empire of republican liberty. The principles of cohesion that bound Americans together and made possible the Union were the love of “liberty itself for its own reward” and the guarantee of personal autonomy by a limited government. “Distance and climate can have no influence on this bond,” the Democratic Review alleged; “it is wholly independent of them.”¹¹

Concentration, land exhaustion, wage slavery, and entrapment were, in the view of Democrats, the deepest and darkest threats to personal autonomy and republican government. Dangers to liberty seemed especially acute in a nation slowly emerging from the serious and dislocating depression produced by the Panic of 1837. The lingering effects of economic stagnation and a decline in frontier settlement could have been hardly more significant in the Texas debate. “Our population has become comparatively dense; our new lands are exhausted,” one reviewer noted. “We are separating more and more, capital and labor, and have the beginnings of a constantly increasing operative class, unknown to our fathers, doomed always to be dependent on employment by the class who represent the capital of the country, for the means of subsistence.” Personal autonomy and true freedom, then, depended on “the creation of land owners not land lords. . . . [with] ownership in himself and not a master.” George Bancroft, an ardent supporter of Texas annexation, concluded that every enlargement of the Union had made concentration and entrapment more difficult and, as a result, had strengthened, not weakened, the Union.¹²

In this context, the annexation of Texas and the addition of thousands of square miles of territory to the Union addressed the single most important prerequisite of republican freedom. One supporter of Tyler’s treaty argued that personal dignity and happiness were dependent more on the cheapness and fertility of land, of which Texas had an abundance, than on any other circumstance. “With this there can be no slavery; and without it, there can be no freedom,” he maintained. “Dependent upon no one for employment . . . the industrious Farmer . . . feels that he is a freeman. He owes no tribute, and knows no servility. . . . Why do people emigrate to new and fertile regions, if not for this very purpose?” Gauging the effect of annexation on a depressed economy, another ventured that the impact of cheap territory in the West “would be to invite a large number of individuals who had settled in the eastern cities, who were half-starved and dependent on those who employed them, to go to the West, where with little funds, they could secure a small farm on which to subsist and . . . get rid of that feeling of dependence which made them slaves.” Closing the circle, another predicted that if the United States annexed Texas, “many a poor man that has been a renter for half a life time will be able to become a land holder very soon. . . . To all such the annexation of Texas is a measure of vital importance.”¹³

Casting their nets widely, proponents of annexation broadened the appeal of Texas to attract manufacturers, merchants, and those engaged in the carrying trade. Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire contended that expansion was neither a western, southern, nor party question but one that affected Americans everywhere. Texas would open to agriculture more fertile soils and congenial climates. It would furnish wider home markets for manufacturers, new articles for commerce, and additional rivers and bays for the free navigation of western steamers. Indeed, expansionists linked Texas to broad commercial expansion that looked beyond, though it did not exclude, domestic consumers. Some believed Texas the first essential link to the Pacific and, consequently, Asian commerce. If this were to occur, commerce of the Far East and the islands of the Pacific would then meet that of the Mississippi Valley. This junction, annexationists claimed, “would revolutionize the commercial world and make the Mississippi the corner of trade.” Considered in all its ramifications for agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce, the ratification of Tyler’s treaty, a southern editor observed, “would be an epoch in American history, second only to the adoption of the Federal Constitution by the states.”¹⁴

If personal autonomy and national economic growth were the functions of territorial aggrandizement, the federate nature of the American Union at once embodied the ideal of republican freedom and made possible the widest expansion. “There is no instance on record of equal rights and privileges extending throughout a land, however large, which did not secure it against internal disruption,” Tyler’s Daily Madisonian declared. William Wilkins, Tyler’s secretary of war, maintained that the perpetuation of a federated Union and the diminution of the threat of consolidation and concentration of federal power were consequences of the nation’s expansion. “In a confederation of great extent,” he observed, “threats of disunion . . . carry no threats of alarm, and can never instill in the most traitorous bosom any hopes of success. . . . The bonds of connexion have strengthened with the increase of territory.” Instructed by James Madison’s Federalist Number 10, Wilkins and other annexationists such as New York congressman Chesselden Ellis believed that expansion “augments the power against which the spirit of disunion must contend whenever it awakes. It multiplies counteracting interests and lessens the danger of its influence.” Sidney Breese of Illinois took this argument to its logical conclusion. He concluded in his support of annexation that “if the action of Congress is confined to its proper functions, and each state permitted to exercise its own undoubted powers, no reasonable bounds can be assigned to the proper extension of this confederacy.”¹⁵

Opponents argued that the addition of Texas to an already expansive republic would produce unbearable sectional strains on the bonds of Union. The Madisonian replied that separation was not a consequence of growth but of inequality. The more extensive our system of confederated states, James Buchanan maintained, “the greater will be the strength and security of the Union because the more dependent will the several parts be upon the whole, and the whole upon the several parts.” In a like vein, a pro-Texas meeting in Fauquier County, Virginia, concluded that bringing Texas into the Union, “with her markets, and immense accessions to commerce, agriculture and navigation—binding our people together by the ties of common interest,” would enhance the nation’s representative and federated system of government and diminish any untoward centrifugal tendencies.¹⁶

Democrats, then, placed Texas in the context of a familiar past unfolding into a certain future. Continuing emigration west, they argued, “produces that life and that energy which animates the American mind, and which literally makes us so extraordinary a race of people.” Since growth was the sine qua non of an exceptionalist American character, the annexation of Texas was both desirable and inevitable. Buchanan thus viewed annexation not as an end but as an episode of a longer historical process. The United States’s destiny, he said, was to inherit North America. “For this reason it is, that the Almighty has implanted in the very nature of our people that spirit of progress, and that desire to roam abroad and seek new homes and new fields of enterprise, which characterizes them above all other nations. . . . This spirit cannot be repressed.” With decidedly less enthusiasm, an Illinois Whig declare...