Life and select literary remains of Sam Houston of Texas/Chapter 18
CHAPTER XVIII.
Brief allusion has been already made to Houston's election to Congress; it is proposed now to give a connected detail. Coleridge said, "To be truly great is to be great in little things." Genius now flashes, now flickers ; but greatness does its best, and triumphs every day. Washington was " first in peace and first in war" because his balanced mind saw what was best to be done, and his appreciative spirit selected the best man for each post. Houston had shown as a soldier brilliant daring in emergency, and at the same time the steady discipline essential to camp routine. If there is any place where these united qualities, French dash and English pluck, are called unitedly into requisition, it is in the U. S. House of Representatives. Houston was to be tested in this new sphere.
Elected in 1823 from the ninth, or last formed, district of Tennessee to a seat in the U. S. House of Representatives at the First Session of the Eighteenth Congress, three special circumstances were likely to test the capacity and character of a young man of mark. These were: first, the fresh energy of the people forming a new State; second, the vital interests, affecting all the States, whose issues were to be debated and settled at that era; third, the exceptionally able statesmen now associated to meet an emergency in the House of Representatives.
At an early period, under colonial administration, the rich lands west of the Alleghany range had tempted enterprising settlers; and the region now called East Tennessee was occupied prior to 1750. The attempt to push settlements farther westward was resisted by the Indians. Fort London, built in 1757, on the Little Tennessee, was captured in 1760, and its garrison were massacred; and for forty years few settlers went into Central Tennessee. When the Atlantic colonies declared themselves independent, though too far from the seat of war to be brought into action, the settlers armed to meet the emergency; and they declared their adhesion to the struggle for independence. When the war closed, the State of North Carolina, which claimed that her boundaries extended to the Mississippi, at first agreed to cede to the United States her claim to territory west of the Alleghanies; then withdrew that assent; but finally ratified the cession in 1789, when the Federal Constitution was framed. In 1796, while Washington was yet President, Tennessee was admitted as a State into the Union, Vermont in 1791, and Kentucky in 1792 having preceded it. Unlike those two States, however, a large part of its territory was occupied by Indians in undisturbed possession; the Chickasaw tribe occupying Western Tennessee until 1819. It was in this condition of the country that young Houston had come into the territory; his boyhood being spent at the Indian agency, his youth in Indian wars, and his early manhood on the border of Indian settlements. It was amid the rush of fresh settlers, coming in from every section, and dependent on their own hands'-toil and personal enterprise for success, that Houston came to the Federal City to represent a hardy and independent yeomanry.
The spirit of the people of Tennessee at the time of Houston's election to Congress is indicated by this coincidence. Houston had been elected in a new district, September 13, 1823. At the September term of the Blount County Court the grand jury brought in a presentment against certain parties for "treating" voters with intoxicating liquors at the recent election, in which presentment this sententious statement appears: "That the custom complained of brings into offices of trust 'men who are not preferred for their virtues, and who consequently prefer not virtue.'"
It was under quite another heading that Houston's election was classed. While in the Seventeenth Congress Tennessee had but six representatives in the House, the new apportionment, which suddenly added three more Congressional districts, seemed to have had a more demoralizing influence in the old counties under the mountains than upon the new section, whose centre, at Nashville, Houston represented.
There were at this era five specially exciting questions which had agitated and were still dividing the people of the east and west, of the north and south; which questions not only awakened conflicting opinions in the different sections, but which in the same section, made up as was the population of the new States, aroused warm debate in Tennessee. These related to governmental policy; first, as to efforts to civilize the Indians; second, as to a tariff for protection of home manufactures; third, as to internal improvements; fourth, as to the restriction of slave labor as opposed to free labor; fifth, as to armed interference of European Governments in Mexico to recover political power over former colonists who had secured their independence. The heat and violence of party spirit on these varied issues were brought to a focus in the canvass for the Presidential election, which occurred in the same autumn as the election of Houston to the House of Representatives.
From the earliest settlement of the country opinion was divided as to the possibility of inspiring the roving Indian tribes with a love for civilized life, so that the two races, the red and the white, might dwell together in quiet side by side. The religious spirit, seen to be effective in the efforts of John Eliot in Massachusetts, of William Penn in Pennsylvania, of James Edward Oglethorpe and of the Wesleys in Georgia, maintained this doctrine: that the Indians, like the red races who peopled India and China, might be won over to the habits of industry and culture found among the people of Mexico held in subjection a century earlier by the Spaniards; as had been tested also by Jesuit missionaries already in the French provinces. On the other hand, as Bancroft has traced, the spirit of secular appropriation brought the white race into constant competition with the Indians in every experiment at agriculture; the superior race could not amalgamate or live in society with the inferior; some in Massachusetts, as well as in Virginia, favored the enslaving or extirpation of the Indian tribes on the precedent of the Israelites among the tribes of Canaan; and the result proved that constant war on the border and constant forcible removal of the Indians westward was "the law" that would rule. No man in the United States was better prepared by his wide experience to judge wisely on this question than Houston, and no more magnanimous spirit had ever been shown than Houston had exhibited, first in his intercourse as an agent's clerk, then as a soldier, then again as an army agent among them. His long apprenticeship among the Chickasaws in Western Tennessee before his enlistment as a soldier under Jackson, and his detail as a lieutenant after the war to serve as military agent among the Seminoles of Georgia, were reminiscences always fresh and fragrant in his after-life; and no man more than Houston appreciated the virtues of the Indian character which were to be fostered, and their vices which were to be forcibly restrained. This was the earliest question before the American people, and it will be one of the last to call forth balanced judgment and modified action. At the period of Houston's entrance into the House of Representatives there were two fields for the practical application of these principles. In the West the Indian tribes had consented to removal to their new territory west of the Mississippi, but two causes still created difficulty; first, disputes among the Indian tribes themselves as to their several allotments and as to mutual encroachments of the tribes on the border territory of other tribes; second, encroachments of white settlers on the territory ceded to the tribes west of the Mississippi, especially in Arkansas Territory. The main difficulty was in the Gulf States and territory, especially in Georgia and Florida. There the humane efforts of young Houston, commended by Jackson as his military commander, were fresh in memory; but yet fresher was the subsequent military campaign of Jackson, when he not only drove the Seminoles from Georgia into Florida, then a Spanish possession, but pursued them even to the capture of St. Augustine, leaving thus a work of mingled efforts at forcible suppression and at treaty stipulation, for future administrations to complete. In this work the counsel of Houston became of special value.
The relation of the several States and of the people of the United States to the African race was the second question to be met. Their ready admission by the policy of the mother country into all the colonies except those of Pennsylvania and Georgia, the check put upon that introduction when, after the war of Independence, the New England States emancipated their slaves, and were filled with European laborers in their place, when Virginia ceded all her territory north of the Ohio and westward to the Mississippi to the Union, to be occupied only by free white settlers, and when the Federal Constitution forbid further importation after twenty-one years—this mixed and conflicting system of admission and exclusion had reached its crisis and apparent settlement in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. At the adoption of the Constitution there was a virtual balance of the slave-holding and non-slave-holding interests in the Senate which represented the States; since, while there were among the thirteen original States only six that were decidedly slave-holding States, two or three others had passed no formal acts of emancipation. The admission subsequently of new States, as of Vermont in 1791 and of Kentucky in 1792, of Tennessee in 1796 and of Ohio in 1802, of Louisiana in 1812 and of Indiana in 1816, of Mississippi in 1817 and of Illinois in 1818, of Alabama in 1819 and of Maine in 1820, seemed to indicate that these two interests were, in the conservative branch of the Government, to remain balanced. When, however, in 1817, Missouri applied for admission a new question arose. As a part of the French purchase of 1803, which included all the territory west of the Mississippi, from Louisiana northward, it seemed natural that African slavery, already introduced, should continue. On the other hand, the fact that it lay north of the mouth of the Ohio, fixed by Virginia as the limit of slave-holding States, and that it was bordering all along the Mississippi on Illinois, which was entitled to come into the Union as a free State, thus counterpoising Mississippi, just admitted as a slave State—these facts had led to a discussion which lasted for four years. At the first application for admission, during the session of 1818-19, an enabling act was to be provided by Congress. In this enabling act the House of Representatives provided that the new State should come into the Union as nonslave-holding; but, as the Senate dissented, no action could be taken. When the application was presented next session, that of 1819-20, after long debate both Houses of Congress concurred in Mr. Clay's compromise, that Missouri, where slavery already existed, should be admitted into the Union as a slave-holding State, but that after that period all States north of the parallel of 36° 30° north latitude, or the southern boundary line of the new State should be non-slave-holding States. This arrangement seemed likely to meet and adjust the difficulty. When, however, the State Constitution, framed under this enabling act, was found, at the reassembling of Congress in 1820-21, to embody a provision requiring the Legislature of the new State to pass laws "to prevent free negroes and mulattoes from coming to and settling in the State," a new and more exciting debate followed; which debate lasted through the short winter session that ushered in President Monroe to a second term of office, March 4, 1821. For, though since that period other States formed further north and in that same territory, have acted upon that same provision,— as the State of Wisconsin, admitted in 1848,—its embodiment in the Constitution of Missouri, brought into the Union under such circumstances, awakened strenuous opposition. At that time the idea of free labor had not taken shape as implying the prohibition of a competition between white and colored laborers; and the provision seemed in conflict with the admission of free as opposed to slave labor in the new State. Both Houses of Congress agreed in requiring the expunging of this provision from the Constitution submitted; the people of Missouri yielded; and, as authorized, the President, in view of the action of the State Convention called June 24th, declared by proclamation Aug. 10, 1821, that the State of Missouri was admitted to the Union and entitled to representation in the next Congress. It Avas just two years after this crisis that Houston came into Congress; where as representative from Tennessee for four years, and as Senator from Texas for fourteen years, he was destined to take such a course as was not the privilege or honor of any previous or subsequent American statesman.
As to the tariff, the old question of duties on imports as a ready and effectual method of collecting taxes for the support of the Federal Government, had up to 1823 not been specially compromised and complicated as part of a system for promoting home manufactures by placing a heavy duty on manufactured goods brought into the country from European countries, especially from England. Nor, again, was the importation of the States, then as now, restricted to a few all-absorbing centers, such as New York now is; for imports came into all the Southern as well as Northern ports, from Portland, Me., to Charleston, S. C.; and even into the ports on the Gulf. The New England States, it is true, were the chief manufacturing States; but as the raw material, especially wool and cotton, used in the factory, was purchased from the woolbreeding and cotton-growing sections, their manufacturing interests were greatly overbalanced by their commercial interests; the interference with which, caused the prospect of a war with Great Britain, and led to the call of the Hartford Convention, December 15, 1814. The main moving interest which led to that convention, as any careful student of its records, and of Dr. T. D. Woolsey's admirable analysis, must perceive, is that which is made last to appear; in the suggestion that the Constitution be so amended as to provide: "that Congress should lay no embargo on vessels belonging to citizens of the United States, for more than sixty days; nor, except by vote of two-thirds, interdict commercial intercourse between the United States and foreign nations." The return of Daniel Webster to Congress in 1823, and his retention there during the very four years spent by Houston, was significant of a transition era which culminated eight years later in South Carolina nullification acts. Sent from Massachusetts to the special session of Congress met in May, 1813, as an opposer of the war with Great Britain, he made that maiden speech, on June loth, which brought out his leadership on questions of international law. Remaining till the close of the war, to accomplish the great end of a return to specie payments and of a national banking system which should overcome the commercial losses of a purely State bank currency, Webster retired from public office, to devote himself to private business. Though urged to take a place in the Senate, he declined; when in 1823, he, by preference, entered the House, as the branch of the Government where bills providing revenue must originate. There he showed such a knowledge of the import trade, and such a mastery of the consequences of laying duties for revenue on various articles, that he was able to give shape to the tariff, so as to promote at once the ends of commerce and of revenue. It was not until he entered the Senate, in 1827, that this mastery of the tariff system was turned to the promotion of manufacturing as distinct from commercial interests. All this part of legislation was of course new to young Houston, as he sat for the same four years in the same body with Webster. His course showed that he was both an apt and a discriminating learner.
It was naturally at a late period that the United States Government turned its attention to internal improvements as a part of its necessary and legitimate province. The improvement as well as the defence of the ports on the Atlantic coast, doubtless limited the views of many at the adoption of the Constitution. The duty of laying out military and postal roads necessarily involved the construction of roads for the transportation of inter-State commercial products. When at last the Mississippi River, as well as the line of northern lakes, became as much as inland roads, highways for commerce, it was time that the partial system—in a double sense of that term—become both a general and an equable system. Houston came into Congress just at the time when such a system was to be considered and inaugurated. While Tennessee had her special claims as a sharer in this general provision, it was for other States that the legislation first called for was to be made; and Houston's mind from the first embraced at once the whole country in which, as a soldier during the second war, he served, from the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, to the swamps of Florida.
The latest question to arise, that of resistance to the planting of monarchical governments through European influence, on the North American Continent, was nevertheless an old issue; though under Monroe it took the form of a declared policy. When the Colonies declared themselves independent, the resistance to European supremacy began; but it was an afterthought which framed the Federal Republic, distinct from the aristocratic governments of Spain in Mexico and Florida, of France in Louisiana, and of England in Canada. When, however, the States formed out of the ceded French and Spanish territory, acquired in 1803 and 1819, came into the Union, it was essential that, under the Federal Constitution, they should be Republican. When, again, Mexico, in 1821, after a struggle of years, became independent of Spain, and when the next year, 1822, it adopted a Republican Constitution, the action of European monarchies adverse to the Republic, which would, if recognized as legitimate, have justified alike European intervention to overthrow the United States Government, brought about a crisis which compelled for self-preservation the enunciation of the Monroe doctrine. In July, 1822, led by France under the restored Bourbon rule, representatives of several continental powers, met at Verona, Italy, determined to unite in aiding Spain to recover her power in Mexico. Inasmuch as England's sway in Canada, once a French possession, was threatened, Mr. Canning, then Secretary of Foreign Affairs, privately invited the President of the United States to join England in resisting this French movement. President Monroe consulted ex-President Jefferson; and in his Message to Congress, December, 1823, he advised that the following two declarations should be adopted as the foreign policy of the United States in meeting European interposition to regain lost rule in America: "The first principle appears in this clause, 'That we should consider any attempt to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety'; a principle which, now that it includes Central and South America, was too broadly stated to become in subsequent time a rule for general action; though in the special case of intervention threatened at the time, it had enough of purpose to secure its end. The second principle announced expressed also more than was intended, since it was in violation of the very principle of the right of foreign colonization, which has governed all nations in all ages, and on which rests the foundation of the American Republic. It was in these words: 'That the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power.' " Since the extreme utterances of Mr. Webster, shortly after Houston's entrance into Congress, and Houston's position as to Mexico subsequent to Texan independence and annexation had their origin and seeming propriety in these declarations, their consideration becomes vital at the opening of Houston's national career.
The controlling question which agitated public sentiment and gave intensity to debate in Congress at this era, was the course taken in the Presidential election. The entire history of previous elections, even when Washington, the leader in the war for "national independence," was a candidate the second time, showed how the ambition for place and power can blind men to self-respect, and make them incapable of self-control. The election of the first Adams, and then of Jefferson, had brought out a spirit of rancor that threatened for a time violence and anarchy. Madison's election was on issues that involved sectional interests connected with the war for "national equality"—an issue as vital as that of "national independence." The two terms of President Monroe, from 1817 to 1825, characterized then and since as "the era of good feeling," was, in spite of the agitation of the Missouri Compromise, a triumph of the spirit of conciliation. When, however, during 1823-4, four Presidential candidates were in the field; when, because of the divided vote the people failed to elect, and politicians were free to employ their arts; when by the management of men supposed to have their personal ambition, John Quincy Adams, supported by a small section of the country, was elected by Congress over Gen. Andrew Jackson, the popular favorite, who had received much the larger vote from the people, a new experience was to be met, and a storm of indignation at what seemed to be the deceit of political aspirants in thwarting the wishes of the people. The House of Representatives became at this time a school to its young members; and Houston would have been a dull scholar if he had learned nothing to serve as a guide in his eventful future.
While Congress, with such hinging questions before it, was the school to train its younger members, among the older was gathered such a galaxy as never before or since has met together; and these were to be Houston's teachers. The veteran in the House was John Randolph, of Virginia, who first came into the House in 1799, where he had proved a star of rare brilliance for more than a score of years, and where his declining health in his last years of service could not check his youthful fire when roused by some crisis. Next in point of time came Henry Clay, who had been in the Senate as early as 1806; while in the House he had lately gained his great triumph in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and was now, in 1823, Speaker. Another veteran was Edward Livingston, one of the brilliant lights of New York in youth, then one of the earliest and ablest in shaping the new foreign State of Louisiana. Among the men of about the same age with Houston were Webster, of Massachusetts, already mentioned; W. C. Rives, of Virginia, afterward Senator; W. P. Maugma, of North Carolina, afterward Senator; George McDuffie, of South Carolina, afterward Senator; C. A. Wickliffe, of Kentucky, afterward Postmaster-General; Elisha Whittlesey, of Ohio, afterward First Auditor of the Treasury; and John McLean, afterward Postmaster-General, and also Judge of the Supreme Court. In the Senate, the veteran of veterans was Nathaniel Macon, of North Carolina, in the House and Senate from 1791 to 1828, thirty-seven years; who for his firm integrity Jefferson styled "the last of the Romans"; whom John Randolph, mentioning him in his speech, declared to be "the wisest man " he had ever met. Among the younger Senators were R. M. Johnson, of Kentucky; R. G. Hayne, of South Carolina; Thos. H. Benton, of Missouri; M. Van Buren with the veteran Rufus King, of New York; Levi Woodbury, of New Hampshire; Wm. H. Harrison, of Ohio; and Andrew Jackson, of Tennessee; the three among whom were to attain the Presidency. Into the Nineteenth Congress there came, in 1825, as members of the House, Edward Everett, of Massachusetts, and James K. Polk, of Tennessee; and into the Senate, J. M. Berrien, of Georgia, and Levi Woodbury, of New Hampshire. Young Houston had thus a circle of training teachers worthy of him, every one of whom came afterward to admire his brilliant career.