Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Tallmadge’s amendment, warned Thomas W. Cobb of Georgia, was full of “effects destructive of the peace and harmony of the Union… They were kindling a fire which all the waters of the ocean could extinguish. It could be extinguished only in oceans of blood.”3 Nevertheless, the Tallmadge restrictions passed the House, 78 to 66, with representatives voting along virtually exclusively sectional North-South lines, and only the phalanx of Southern senators in the Senate (and five free-state allies) killed the amended Missouri bill there. The House sent the amendments back to the Senate again, and at that point, in March 1819, Congress adjourned and left matters hanging.

  The brief pause the intersession brought did nothing to allay the fears of onlookers. For the first time, slavery and sectionalism had reared their heads in Congress as a matter of national debate, and almost immediately Congress had divided along sectional lines. “This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror,” wrote an aging Thomas Jefferson. “I considered it at once the knell of the Union.” 4 To Jefferson’s relief, a solution quickly appeared in the form of Maine and Henry Clay. By the time Congress had settled back into Washington, another petition for admission to the Union had been received from Maine, which had been governed since colonial times as a province of Massachusetts. Henry Clay, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives, proposed to damp down the anxieties about upsetting the sectional balance in Congress by simultaneously admitting Missouri (as a slave state) and Maine (as a free state) to the Union. For the future, Clay called for the division of the Louisiana Purchase into two zones along the latitude line of 36° 30′ (the southern boundary line of Missouri), with the northern zone forever reserved for “free” settlement only and the southern zone left open to the extension of slavery. Adroitly sidestepping the partisans of both sections, Clay maneuvered the legislation through the House and greased its way through a joint House-Senate reconciliation committee to the desk of President James Monroe, who signed it on March 6, 1820. 5

  The Missouri Compromise made the reputation of Henry Clay as a national reconciler and champion of the Union, and the 36°30′ line became the mutually agreed line of settlement that was supposed to squelch the need for any further antagonistic debates over the extension of slavery. It is difficult, looking back on the Missouri Compromise, to see just what advantages slaveholders believed they had won, since the available Louisiana Purchase territory lying south of the 36°30′ line was actually fairly minimal (only one other slave state, Arkansas, would ever be organized from it). Most of the recently acquired territory lay north of 36°30′, and even then it was by no means certain in the 1820s that the Canadian border was so permanently fixed that the United States could not expand further north. Great Britain and the United States had agreed to mutually govern the Oregon territory after 1812, and the Oregon boundaries then ran as far north as Russian-owned Alaska. With the right use of bluster and bluff on the British, the limits on free settlement above 36°30 ′ could be made almost unlimited. The South’s acquiescence in the 36°30′ agreement makes sense only if it had become fairly widely assumed by 1820 that the United States would also apply some bluff, bluster, and expansion to the Spanish territory that lay south of the Louisiana Purchase boundary, in Texas.

  That some Americans were prepared to act on that assumption was clear from what was already beginning to happen in Texas. In 1820 Spain still clung tenaciously to large parts of the New World empire it had won under the conquistadors of the 1500s. But Spain’s political strength had been ebbing for 200 years, and by 1800 it was proving more and more difficult for the Spaniards to control an American dominion that still stretched from the southern cone of South America up to the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. One by one, pieces of that dominion in South America had thrown off Spanish rule and established republics based on the liberties and slogans of the American revolution of 1776. Then in 1820 the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, was challenged by an uprising among his own officers, who demanded reform and a republic. While Spanish attention was preoccupied with its own revolution, the Spanish province of Mexico took its future in its own hands and established a revolutionary monarchy under Agustín de Iturbide in 1821. Iturbide’s monarchy proved only marginally more popular than Spain’s. In 1823 Iturbide was overthrown, and the following year a republic was established. 6

  The Mexican republic had a rocky history, especially since the individual Mexican states had notions of independence and autonomy not unlike some of those held by their North American neighbors. At length, in 1833, an ambitious general, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, solved the republic’s problems by overthrowing it and setting up a personal dictatorship. In the meantime, the Mexican states dealt with their internal problems pretty much by their own lights. For the state of Coahuila, which included the province of Texas, the principal problem was the sparsity of the population. From the 1820s onward, Coahuila proposed to cure that barrenness by franchising out large, vacant stretches of eastern Texas prairie to land-hungry Americans. Guided by empresarios and land brokers such as Moses and Stephen Austin, who acted as middlemen between Coahuila and potential American settlers, large colonies of Americans migrated to Texas, some 20,000 of them by the end of the decade and 30,000 by 1835. They found under the Mexican flag a land perfectly formed for raising livestock and farming—especially cotton. And cotton meant slaves. By 1830 the Anglo-Americans in Texas already had 1,000 slaves working in the rich new cotton fields of east Texas.7

  What had at first seemed like the ideal solution to the emptiness of their land soon turned sour for the Mexicans. Not only did the American colonists blithely disregard agreements that bound the colonists to convert to Roman Catholicism and adopt Spanish as the civil language, but their numbers eventually dwarfed the tiny Mexican population of Texas. Anxious that the Americans would soon attempt to set up an independent Texan government, Santa Anna attempted to seal off the Texas border with Louisiana to control further immigration. Instead, the Mexican troops, under the clumsy command of Santa Anna’s brother-in-law, provoked an uprising in Texas, and in December 1835 the enraged Texans drove Santa Anna’s men back across the Rio Grande into Coahuila.

  The resulting Texan war of independence was short but spectacular. Many of the Mexican grandees of Texas had no more love for Santa Anna’s dictatorship than the American colonists did, and the Tejanos and their Anglo neighbors declared Texas an independent republic in March 1836. The odds for the Texan republic’s survival were at first not very good. Santa Anna gathered an army of 4,000 and staged a midwinter march into Texas that threw the Texans into a panic. The small Anglo-Tejano garrison in San Antonio barricaded itself into a crumbling Catholic mission known as the Alamo and held up Santa Anna’s advance for thirteen days until a predawn Mexican attack overwhelmed the Alamo’s 183 defenders. The Alamo was not particularly significant from a military point of view (the Alamo garrison had originally been instructed to blow the place up and retreat), although Santa Anna did waste the lives of a few hundred of his men in the effort to capture the Alamo. What turned the Alamo from a military annoyance into a catastrophic misjudgment was Santa Anna’s temperamental decision to put every survivor of the Alamo garrison to death. Across east Texas, the American colonists were both terrified and outraged, and “Remember the Alamo” became an electrifying war cry. A ragtag Texan army, under an old protégé of Andrew Jackson named Sam Houston, fell back before Santa Anna’s advance, lulling the Mexicans into a false sense of certain conquest. Santa Anna unwisely divided his forces in pursuit, and on April 21, 1836, Houston and the Texan army turned and struck Santa Anna’s troops at San Jacinto, routing the Mexicans and capturing Santa Anna himself. As a condition of his release, Santa Anna signed an agreement recognizing Texan independence (an agreement he promptly repudiated when Santa Anna reached Mexico City again).

  The aim of the Texans, however, was not to remain independent but to join the United States as a new state as soon as possible. Here the trouble b
egan anew. President Martin Van Buren, a Democrat, was Andrew Jackson’s anointed successor in the presidency, and he owed a great deal to the Democratic constituencies of the Southern states. Van Buren was also a New Yorker who was less than eager to promote the expansion of slavery, much less involve the United States in a dispute over an insurgent province that was still technically the property of Mexico. It did not help that Van Buren found himself embroiled at that moment in a major economic depression, and he was not eager to annex Texas and assume responsibility for the debts the Texans had run up in financing their revolution. In fact, the depression cost Van Buren the White House in the election of 1840 and brought a Whig to the presidency for the first time in the person of William Henry Harrison. The Whigs preferred to pour the nation’s resources into developing the internal American economy rather than pick up the bills for expansionist adventures, and so Texas unwillingly remained an independent republic.

  Poor William Henry Harrison died in 1841, only one month after his inauguration as president, and the Whig Party suddenly found itself saddled with John Tyler, Harrison’s vice president, as the country’s chief executive. Although Tyler was nominally a Whig, he soon found himself at odds with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, the real chiefs of the Whig Party, and two men who were sure that they deserved the presidency more than the man people sneered at with the sobriquet “His Accidency.” Every bill that Clay and a Whig Congress wrote for the pet projects of the Whigs—internal improvements, protectionist tariffs, a new Bank of the United States—was vetoed by Tyler, and eventually all the Whigs in the Cabinet resigned. Shunned by the Whigs, Tyler tried to assemble his own independent political power base, and as a Virginian and a slaveholder, he was not shy about bidding for Southern support. As bait to his fellow Southerners, Tyler and his new secretary of state, Abel Upshur, negotiated an annexation treaty for Texas and tried to turn Texas annexation into a campaign issue that Tyler could ride back into the White House in 1844 as a “Southern candidate.” Texas, as Upshur told one of John Calhoun’s political allies, is “the only matter, that will take sufficient hold of the South and rally it on a Southern candidate and weaken Clay and Van Buren.”8

  Tyler succeeded in making Texas an issue, but not himself president. The Democrats snubbed the unhappy Tyler and ran one of Andrew Jackson’s old lieutenants, James Knox Polk of Tennessee, for the presidency in 1844. The Whigs had no time at all for Tyler and put up Henry Clay instead, hoping to feed on fears that an annexation of Texas would provoke war with Mexico. Clay undercut his own candidacy by conceding to Southern Whigs that he might be willing to accept the annexation of Texas if could be done “without dishonor, without war, with the common consent of the Union.” What Clay gained among the Southern Whigs he promptly lost among the Northern ones, and Polk squeezed into the White House after winning Pennsylvania and New York with majorities of only 7,000 votes.9

  There was no question about James Knox Polk’s plans for Texas—Polk was an outright annexationist, and even hoped to edge the British out of Oregon—and so before his inauguration the disheartened Whigs gave up the fight and allowed a joint congressional resolution to adopt the Texas annexation treaty in December 1844. The Mexican government did not back down in the face of Polk’s determination to have Texas, withdrawing its ambassador from Washington in protest. Sensing trouble (and not finding trouble with Mexico all that unwelcome), President Polk sent Brigadier General Zachary Taylor to the Texas border with 1,500 United States soldiers in July 1845. Ten months later, there was a bloody clash between Mexican and American troops over a disputed border area, and Polk used the clash as an excuse for rallying Congress to declare war on Mexico on May 13, 1846.

  The Mexican War was, compared to the Alamo and San Jacinto battles, a relatively unglamorous affair. The American forces were divided into four small field armies under John Ellis Wool, Zachary Taylor, Stephen Kearny, and Alexander Doniphan for the invasion of Mexican territory. Taylor (alongside Wool) won a major victory over Santa Anna at Buena Vista and occupied most of northern Mexico. Kearny plunged into New Mexico and chased Mexican forces from Santa Fe, then moved on into southern California, where scattered colonies of American settlers helped him overthrow the Mexican provincial government. The greatest laurels were won by Major General Winfield Scott, who led a daring invasion column from Mexico’s Gulf coast inland to Mexico City, which fell to Scott on September 13, 1847. No less a military authority than the victor of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington, had predicted at the outset that “Scott is lost. He has been carried away by his successes! He can’t take the city, and he can’t fall back upon his base!” But when Scott indeed captured Mexico City, the Iron Duke generously reversed himself: “His campaign was unsurpassed in military annals. He is the greatest living soldier.”10

  The following February, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, with Mexico grudgingly surrendering to the United States the territory that is now New Mexico, California, and parts of Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. As if to illustrate that fortune favors the bold (or at least the unscrupulous), no sooner was California an American possession than one James Marshall discovered gold in a streambed near Sacramento, thus setting off the mighty California gold rush and stampeding thousands of American settlers into the newly acquired territories.

  It was at this point that the old balancing game of threats and assurances began again.

  The Missouri Compromise had settled what to do with the half of the far West that the United States had owned in 1820; the South had been anxious to resolve the question then, because in 1820 most of the old Louisiana Purchase looked like it was going to fall into the hands of free-state settlers. Now, in 1848, the Mexican War had brought the United States the other half of the far West—the southern half, running in a clear straight line from Louisiana to the southern California coast—and this time it appeared that these new territories would surely develop into slave states. In fact, there was no reason to assume that the United States might not want to keep pecking away at Mexico, or at the Spanish-held island of Cuba or even Central America, and obtain still more territory, which would obviously come under the wing of the old slave states. Robert Toombs of Georgia boldly warned Congress, “in the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people… thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half the states of this Confederacy, I am for disunion.”11

  What Toombs did not reckon with was the feeling of many Americans that the Mexican War had been something less than a source of national pride. In Congress, Southern Whigs such as Alexander Stephens of Georgia repeatedly assailed Polk’s war as “an aspersion and reproach.”

  The principle of waging war against a neighboring people to compel them to sell their country, is not only dishonorable, but disgraceful and infamous. What, shall it be said that American honor aims at nothing higher than land—than the ground on which we tread?… I have heard of nations whose honor could be satisfied with gold—that glittering dust, which is so precious in the eyes, of some—but never did I expect to live to see the day when the Executive of this country should announce that our honor was such a loathsome, beastly thing, that it could not be satisfied with any achievements in arms, however brilliant and glorious, but must feed on earth—gross, vile, dirt!—and require even a prostrate foe to be robbed of mountain rocks and desert plains!12

  Even in the army, young lieutenants out of West Point such as Ulysses Simpson Grant acknowledged that “the Mexican War was a political war,” and nearly 7,000 American soldiers (of the 115,000 mustered into service) actually deserted.13

  The most unpopular aspect of the war was the realization that slavery stood to gain a political windfall from it. To the disappointment of Northerners, Polk had negotiated a fairly timid treaty with Great Britain, which surrendered most of the bolder American claims to northern territory and put what amounted to
a geographical cap on northern expansion; but Polk had grabbed nearly 1.5 million square miles of Mexican territory to the south, with no certainty that slaveholders might not go on from there to destabilize other Latin American republics, transplant slavery there, and claim them for admission to the Union. As it was, the size of just the newly acquired western lands offered enough material to create so many new states below the 36°30′ line that slaveholders might at last acquire a decisive numerical advantage in the Senate, if not the House as well. With that prospect before him, Frederick Douglass denounced the war as “this slaveholding crusade” from which “no one expects any thing honorable or decent… touching human rights.” Lieutenant Grant could hardly avoid the conclusion that everything from the Texas annexation onward had been “a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.” John Pendleton Kennedy, an angry Whig who had lost his congressional seat over the Texas annexation, was convinced that “at the bottom of this scheme” was “an ultimate purpose to form a new Confederacy, of which it shall be a prominent feature that no free State shall come into the League.”14

  As early as August 1846, four basic political agendas took shape for dealing with the Mexican Cession (the territory in the far West surrendered by Mexico). The first of these was proposed on August 8, 1846, when President Polk, admitting publicly for the first time that “a cession of territory” by Mexico was a possible result of the war, asked the House to approve $2 million in negotiating funds. A first-term Democratic representative from Pennsylvania named David Wilmot rose to move an amendment to the appropriations bill that added a deadly proviso: “As an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico… neither slavery not involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime.”15