Life and select literary remains of Sam Houston of Texas/Chapter 20
CHAPTER XX.
In the diary of John Quincy Adams, recently published, is this record under date of March 29, 1843; at which time, as a member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts, he, as ex-President, was opposing President Tyler's plan for the annexation of Texas to the United States. Mr. Adams says: "With the commencement of my administration I appointed Poinsett Minister to Mexico, and Mr. Clay instructed him to propose the purchase of Texas. This they declined; but two years after, the proposition was renewed." In the same diary, under date of April 18th, three weeks later, Mr. Adams records, as to an act of his administration: " Poinsett, under instruction from H. Clay, approved by me, had proposed and urged the purchase of Mexico for one million dollars." Another record states that Spain was sounded as to the purchase of Cuba, but that the Spanish Government, taking alarm, secured the remonstrance of England, and the threat of war, should forcible means be used to bring Cuba into the American Union. This revelation of what was in the mind of President Monroe when through Adams, as his Secretary of State, he announced the Monroe doctrine, or rather what was in the mind of Mr. Adams, is most suggestive as to the distinction between the statesman and the politician. It certainly prepares the student of Houston's life to judge his character for wisdom and integrity in the history of events which brought that same Texas twenty years later into the Union, with Sam Houston as its special representative in the Senate.
For eighteen years, closing with his second term in the House of Representatives, in March, 1827, Houston, becoming first Governor of Tennessee, then an exile among the Indians west of the Mississippi, and then the hero of Texas, had no other connection with the United States Government than as a delegate from the Arkansas Indians, and then as negotiator for the annexation of Texas. A complicated succession of events must have come over the affairs of the United States Government during that brief period, in order that Mr. Adams, a leading actor meanwhile in all those affairs, should be led to make this ingenuous statement of facts as to his own changed position. In order that Houston's course may be accurately viewed on his entrance into the Senate, a review of the progress of policy as to the leading measures before Congress when he was a Representative of Tennessee must be briefly traced.
During the four years of Houston in the House, from 1823 to 1827, as we have observed, the five agitating questions were the tariff, internal improvements, slavery, Indian policy, and foreign policy as to North American territory; while the Presidential election was an occasion every four years for the discussion of each and every question as it affected the several States. As observed, the tariff touched chiefly the interests of the New England manufacturing States, and of the Gulf or cotton-growing States; internal improvements were interests affecting mainly the advance of the Middle and Western States; slavery was a question of sentiment in the extreme North, and of practical life in the extreme South; while the Indian policy and foreign policy toward the English colonies on the north and the Spanish settlements at the southwest, was a question, indeed, of national sentiment, while it was vital mainly on border territory.
The intense excitement following the election of President Adams by Congress, which led to the election of President Jackson for two terms, was followed by a new era in Presidential elections. During forty-eight years, from 1799 to 1837, there had been but seven distinct administrations; the double terms of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson, and the single terms of the two Adamses. From that period, while Houston was prominent in national affairs, during twenty-four years, or half the former period, from 1837 to 1861, there were eight distinct administrations, the single terms of Presidents Van Buren, Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan, with the intervening half terms of Presidents Harrison and Tyler, of Taylor and, Fillmore; parties succeeding each other, not only each four years, but intermediate between these successive elections. Since Houston left the House in 1827 the eighteen years of his absence from the Capitol had witnessed the administration of six successive occupants of the Presidential chair.
Meanwhile, the policy as to internal improvements had become so common an interest as to be generally accepted; the removal of the Indians west of the Mississippi had quieted border agitation; the foreign relations of Canada and Mexico had little to enlist public interest; and the Missouri Compromise had, for a quarter of a century, accomplished an end of deferring conflicting issues till the occupation and annexation of new territory should revive it. As we shall see, each of these questions that had in turn been apparently settled, were only deferred; except the tariff and internal improvements. The latter of these was practically settled during Houston's connection with the House, and the latter was battled through during his absence. Each of the three remaining questions, relations to the African, Indian, and Mexican races, by the annexation of Texas and the entrance of Houston again into Congress, were to be rediscussed under new circumstances, and to be settled under new complications.
The question "battled through" during Houston's separation from Congress, as intimated, was the tariff. As already noted, Daniel Webster, who in the history of the American Union will, from the force of succeeding events, be regarded the exponent of a tariff for protection rather than for revenue, was really, at the commencement and to the close of his career, the student of a revenue system which should promote commerce rather than manufactures; inviting, instead of excluding, the purchase of foreign products, and seeking, by a careful observation of the effect of a high or low tariff, to so adjust the amount of revenue levied on foreign goods as to promote at the same time the wish of the people who bought, and of the Treasury whose chief supply must come from that revenue. No man, in the history of the American Union, brought more careful observation of facts, and more sagacious adaptation of legislation to this end, than did Mr. Webster; and that this was his ruling aim his whole course in Congress indicates. Having pursued with success this aim in the House, from 1823 to 1827, he consented to come into the Senate, where he was prominent from 1827 to 1841. In 1828, though from expediency personally advocating a different course, he gave his adhesion to the high protective tariff which bore unfavorably on the interests of the cotton-growing States. Elected in 1828 as President, aside from this issue, Jackson was understood to be opposed to the measures fixed under the administration of President Adams. Submitting for two or three years to its depressing influence on her productive industry, South Carolina called a convention of her citizens, whose representatives, recurring to the injurious requirement before acted upon, that the State should be taxed to pay for internal improvements in whose benefits she had no share, now urged more strongly the prostration of her industries, which the high tariff for the protection of Northern manufacturers had produced. In November, 1832, just after the vote which was to make Jackson President for a second term, the Convention of South Carolina passed the ordinance of "Nullification," so called from these declarations:—That the existing ordinance of Congress as to the tariff is "null and void, and no law, nor binding on this State, its officers, or its citizens"; and farther declaring that no "duties on imports "were to be "paid within the State after Feb. I, 1833"; adding, that any effort on the part of the Federal Government to enforce such collection would "justify the State in no longer regarding herself a member of the Union." The report of this action led President Jackson to give orders to the revenue officers which should prepare them for action should occasion arise. At the opening of Congress, Dec, 1832, he announced his purpose to issue a proclamation, declaring the resistance to a collection of the revenue at the ports of any State to be treason to the United States Government; which proclamation soon appeared. Through the efforts of Mr. Clay, a compromise measure modifying the tariff was carried through Congress, and the danger of armed hostility was avoided. It is due to history, and to an impartial estimate of the course of Sam Houston as Senator from Texas, to state these facts: Gen. Jackson in his Cabinet, as well as in private, declared as his belief that the movement for separation from the Union, debated by Mr. Webster and Hayne in 1830, with such ability in the Senate, precipitated in the calling and action of the Convention of November, 1832, was not a suggestion either of the statesmen or of the people of South Carolina; but that it was the project of interested political leaders, inflaming public sentiment for their own personal schemes of ambition. President Jackson believed and declared that the real end sought was that of Genet, in seeking in 1793 to form a Western French Republic, uniting Louisiana, along the Mississippi Valley, to Canada; an end again attributed to Aaron Burr, in seeking to form a Spanish and French empire, in which the Floridas, Louisiana, and Mexico, in 1806; and, though a Carolinian by birth, he went so far as to utter privately the prediction that, having failed of its end in 1832 on the issue of the tariff, the slavery issue would be resorted to by the same spirit of dissatisfied political ambition to secure a separate confederacy of the Gulf States. This prediction, known to Houston, was certainly, in him, a deep and the ruling conviction, while the duty which guided Jackson, in 1832, seemed to him duty in 1860.
The proposition for the annexation of Texas, privately and publicly discussed under the administration of President Tyler, had awakened throughout the country a controversy whose consideration belongs rather to the history of Texas than of Houston; the Washington who as "first in war " had already proved himself "first in peace " in the new and independent Republic. All the exciting questions, before partially settled, became unsettled. When, at last, in March, 1845, just at the close of President Tyler's term, Texas was proffered terms of proposed union, among the objections of the opposers, that of the increase of slave territory was prominent. On this Webster planted himself; and during the debate uttered that memorable foreboding, framed in the words of the Hebrew prophet (Hos. vii. 9), as to the premature old age of Ephraim, as the representative of the divided kingdom of Israel; exclaiming, as he pictured what he regarded the weakness of the American Union—" Yea, gray hairs are here and there upon her, and she knoweth it not." Yet more, the annexation brought new Indian tribes bordering on Texas, before a virtual part of the constituency of the Mexican States, into a relation new to them, as wards of the Anglo-Saxon Republic. Most of all, difficulties before existing with the Mexican Government were magnified by Texan annexation; so that the flames of open hostility broke out.
For an entire year before Houston entered the United States Senate virtual annexation, under President Polk, had existed. As a Representative from Tennessee, entering the House in 1824, one year later than Houston, Mr. Polk, among the most decided of opponents of internal improvements, of a protective tariff, and of restriction of slave territory, had been elected specially as an advocate of Texan annexation in its bearings on the questions then dividing political parties. The issue of extended slave territory was settled for a time when Texas was annexed; but it lived in memory, and would come up again in discussion when other issues, resulting from annexation, arose. The new Indian relations, since they were local, affecting chiefly the people of the new State, and calling for the intervention only of the regular army, awakened very limited popular interest. The vital issue was a threatened war with Mexico, which called forth discussion throughout all the States, since volunteers, as well as regular troops, were demanded to meet the exigency. At this juncture Gen. Z. Taylor, who proved to be successor to Mr. Polk in the Presidency, and who since 1812 had risen in esteem as a soldier and commander on the western and southern frontier, especially in Indian wars, was in Arkansas. On-the 28th May, 1845, he had received instructions from the War Department, then presided over by Gov. Wm. L. Marcy, "that Texas would shortly accede to the terms of annexation," and was ordered to collect and dispose the troops in the Southwest, so as to be in readiness to protect the border from " foreign invasion and Indian incursions." In March, 1846, he was ordered to advance to the Rio Grande, which river was claimed as the border line between the State of Texas and Mexican territory. When ordered by the Mexican General Ampudia to retire beyond the Nueces, a river running to the Gulf some fifty to one hundred miles farther north, the succession of hostilities began which formed the opening stage of the Mexican war. It was during that same month of March that Houston took his seat in the United States Senate.