Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  2. THE LOG CABIN AND HARD CIDER ELECTION

  The Whigs held their first nominating convention at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in December 1839. Though Clay was the logical choice, his support of a protective tariff alienated many natural supporters. Clay led initially, but the convention renominated General William Henry Harrison, the now 68-year-old hero of the Indian wars and the War of 1812. Harrison did not have a long record on policy and was acceptable to all the jostling factions under the Whig umbrella. John Tyler, a nullificationist who had broken with Jackson over the veto of the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States, and had resigned as senator from Virginia rather than follow the instructions of the Virginia legislature to vote for Benton’s bill to expunge the censure of Jackson, was chosen for vice president. He was a slaveholder and his views on most issues diverged sharply from those of his running mate and most of the delegates at the convention, and he would soon illustrate the dangers of using the vice presidential nomination exclusively for ticket-balancing.

  Van Buren was renominated by the Democrats on a straight Jacksonian platform—support of slavery and opposition to a national bank. There was much opposition to Richard Johnson, partly because of his flamboyant miscegenation and adultery, and no one was chosen for vice president; Van Buren left it to the states to put up whomever they wished, a unique confession of electoral weakness by an incumbent president seeking reelection. The election quickly turned into a sophisticated political public relations job by the Whigs, touting Harrison as a war hero and simple man of the people and the frontier, born in a log cabin, whose favorite beverage was cider. It was the Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign, under the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” Policies were entirely avoided, apart from the Whigs unloading denigration on Van Buren as the author of the tenacious economic recession. Van Buren was falsely portrayed as a snobbish aristocrat living in “the palace” at the taxpayers’ expense.

  Beyond that, it was all parades, slogans, banners, placards, campaign buttons, and other innovations, and was the most substantively vapid presidential campaign in the country’s history up to that time. Harrison won by 1.275 million votes to 1.129 million for Van Buren, about 53 percent to 47 and 234 electoral votes to 60. Van Buren had not been an important president. He was an interesting and capable machine politician in New York, and a wheeler-dealer on an international scale. Charming and astute, he was an unprincipled fox completely preoccupied with getting, rather than filling, an office, the exact opposite to John Quincy Adams. Van Buren did not vanish from the scene, and retained great popularity and influence among the Democrats, whose cause he had so long and ably advanced. The 1840 vote was the first presidential election since 1796 that had not been won by some sort of Democrat (two terms each for Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson, and one for Adams, then a National Republican, i.e. non-Jackson Democrat).

  Harrison had a fairly strong cabinet, with Daniel Webster at State (after Clay declined to take the post again), the capable John Bell in the War Department, and John J. Crittenden of Kentucky as attorney general. Most except Webster were Clay loyalists. Harrison has been rather misrepresented as a bumpkin. He was an able and intellectually curious man. Unfortunately, he put a wide range of ideas into his loquacious inaugural address, contracted a cold that escalated gradually into pneumonia, and died after only a month in office, on April 4, 1841. He was a considerable man and might have made a capable president. At 68, he was the oldest man elected to the office up to Ronald Reagan 140 years later. Unfortunately, the Whigs now paid the price for being such a broad church. The new president, John Tyler, the last Virginia slaveholder to hold the office, did a competent job rebutting suggestions that since he had not been elected president, he did not have the right to the full powers of the office. But he was an anti-Jackson Democrat, and so, especially as an accidental occupant of the White House, had virtually no support in the Congress or the country. It was only a month after inauguration day and no one had voted for him as president. Squeezed between Clay and the Jacksonites, he would try, without success, to attract a following.

  In June, Clay introduced in the Senate a series of resolutions that amounted to the Whig program: a national bank, revenue-producing tariff protection, and the distribution of the proceeds of sales of public lands. In 1841 the Congress passed two bills setting up a new national bank, within the District of Columbia, but Tyler, who had broken with Jackson over the bank, vetoed both bills because they required states specifically to dissent, rather than specifically to adhere—absurdly narrow grounds to dispose of such hard-fought legislation. All of Tyler’s cabinet resigned in protest at the president’s vetoes, except Webster. He too retired in May 1843, to be replaced by Abel P. Upshur, the navy secretary.

  3. THE TYLER PRESIDENCY

  Never far from the surface, the ubiquitous slavery issue became prominent again in the Amistad case, in which slaves on a Spanish slave galley mutinied and were taken by an American warship to New London, Connecticut, where their status was litigated. John Quincy Adams successfully argued for their freedom at the Supreme Court of the United States. A further maritime controversy arose in March 1842, when an American brig, the Creole, sailed from Hampton Roads, Virginia, and the slaves mutinied, killed a white sailor, and forced the crew to steer the ship to Nassau, Bahamas. The British freed all the slaves except those who were directly responsible for the murder, who were charged and detained. Secretary Webster demanded the return of the slaves as the property of U.S. citizens. The British ignored the demand, which was eventually settled for the payment of $110,000, 13 years later. It showed the strains on the country when a man who did not approve of slavery, Daniel Webster, felt it his official duty to write belligerent notes to Britain for the return of self-liberated slaves. Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio offered a series of astringent anti-slavery resolutions that caused the southerners and their allies in the Jackson settlement (whereby, like Webster, the North loyally supported the right of the South to retain slavery) to pass a vote of censure against Giddings. He resigned his Ohio district and was reelected with a heavy majority in a special election, demonstrating with startling clarity where northern opinion was, whatever arrangements their leaders were making to overlook the strains slavery caused within the country.

  Following the defeat of the Whig program in the Congress, Henry Clay retired from the Senate and devoted himself altogether to organizing the Whigs, who now suffered the discomfort of having a president elected as a Whig who was seeking the Democratic nomination for reelection. Clay’s retirement address on March 31, 1842, was one of the Senate’s great emotional occasions. His successor as Whig leader in the Senate, John J. Crittenden, said it “was something like the soul’s quitting the body.”78 Clay and Calhoun embraced in silence, and Clay left the Senate chamber, to which he had been first elected 36 years before. Jackson thought it was the end of Clay, politically: “The old coon is really and substantially dead, skinned and buried.”79 No, he was not, fortunately for the United States.

  Webster’s principal achievement in this term (the first of two) as secretary of state was to return to one of the principal objectives of such esteemed former architects of American diplomacy as John Jay and John Quincy Adams, and put relations with Great Britain on a thoroughly normal and current basis. This was facilitated by the departure from office of the Jackson entourage in Washington, and of Lord Melbourne and his brother-in-law, Lord Palmerston, in London and their replacement by the more amenable Sir Robert Peel. Lord Ashburton was sent as a special minister by Peel to the United States, which now had 18 million people, a population slightly larger than Great Britain’s, and whatever its internecine contradictions, now an important country that had to be taken seriously. The discussions were conducted in a very cordial and businesslike atmosphere, and of the 12,000 square miles in the disputed Aroostook area between Maine and New Brunswick, 7,000 were signed over to the U.S. This was a little less than it would have gained from the mediation of
the king of the Netherlands in 1831, which the Senate had rejected by one vote in 1832. The entire border was clarified through to west of the Great Lakes, and various further agreements were made re extradition, navigation rights on shared rivers, and the joint suppression of the slave trade on the west coast of Africa (slavery had been abolished in the entire British Empire 10 years before), and the British made a very cautious quasi-apology for two incidents in the aftermath of the Mackenzie rebellion in Upper Canada (Ontario), in 1837. What became known as the Webster-Ashburton Treaty was ratified easily in the Senate, and Webster retired as secretary of state, and was followed by Upshur, the navy secretary. Upshur suffered the unique misfortune of being killed in February 1844, the only secretary of state to die violently, when on a cruise to demonstrate an immense naval gun on a steam-powered warship, the gun exploded. The cruise and test-firing were designed to impress and frighten the Mexicans, with whom relations had worsened. In the circumstances it did not succeed in that objective. Upshur was replaced by Calhoun, as Tyler was desperately cobbling a reconciliation with the southern Democrats, to reposition himself there and in the far-fetched hope of gaining the Democratic presidential nomination, since Clay clearly had a lock on the Whigs. (The Whig Party had expelled Tyler from membership anyway.) As Congress had repealed the Independent Treasury Act, this meant that throughout Tyler’s term the handling of the government’s money was at the exclusive discretion of the secretary of the Treasury.

  The Oregon boundary would soon arise as a new hobgoblin in Anglo-American relations, as the area between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean from the 42nd to the 54th parallels had been under joint management by the two countries since 1818, and after the U.S. had treatied out Spain (1819) and Russia (1824). From (J.Q.) Adams on, the Americans had offered to saw it off at the 49th parallel, but the British wanted the Columbia River basin and access to Puget Sound. This impasse festered and became a national political issue at the approach of the 1844 election.

  And the Texas question would not remain quiet for long. The northern political leadership regarded the settlements and revolutions and scheming with Mexico of the Americans in Texas as a plot to extend slavery within the United States through petitions for admission to the Union as a state. Rebuffed under Houston’s successor as president of Texas, one Mirabeau Lamar, Texas exchanged embassies with France, the Netherlands, and Belgium (a state invented by Palmerston to keep Antwerp out of the hands of France or a Germanic power), and with Great Britain, from 1838 to 1840. Houston returned to office in December 1841, and the Mexicans ineffectually invaded Texas in 1842, but the British and French intervened diplomatically to mediate an end to that conflict. Britain and France both wanted Texas as an independent country, to restrain the growth of the United States. Ironically, the North became alarmed at the idea of a European satellite on the country’s southern border just as the South became alarmed at reports that the British were going to try to bribe the Texans into the abolition of slavery in the young republic. Sam Houston had pressed exactly the right buttons to shift opinion in Washington toward annexation of Texas, an astute management of U.S. political opinion.

  The deathless Santa Anna, who had lost a leg fighting a French incursion at Veracruz in 1838, and had given his leg a full state military burial, informed the U.S. in August 1843 that any attempt at annexation would be regarded as a declaration of war on Mexico. This was not a frightening prospect, but Houston had to tread warily, as British awareness that he was again seeking annexation could cause the withdrawal of their patronage and leave him with no cards to play opposite Washington or Mexico, to gain entry to the Union. Upshur assured Houston that over two-thirds of the Senate would approve incorporation of Texas in the Union, in April 1844. Houston and Upshur’s successor, Calhoun, signed a treaty of annexation under which the United States would assure the defense of Texas while the treaty was being ratified. Tyler recommended annexation to the Senate, and mentioned the abolitionist danger posed by British influence in Mexico, a concern amplified by Calhoun’s rebuke to the British minister in Washington, defending slavery. This stoked up northern concerns that it was a slaveholders’ plot after all, and the treaty that had been signed in April was rejected decisively (indicating the shifting balance of domestic opinion on the slavery issue, and the increasing strength of the North in Congress) in June. Tyler’s effort to annex Texas by joint resolution of the houses of the Congress, simple majorities rather than the two-thirds majority required in a Senate treaty ratification, was not brought to a vote before the Congress adjourned, leaving the matter in flux heading into the 1844 election. The British, in their effort to keep Texas out of the U.S., did succeed in securing Mexican recognition of Texan independence in May 1845, but they had been bypassed by events. The approaching conflict was every bit as absurd as the run-up to the last war on American frontiers 33 years before. This was where the Texas and Oregon issues stood as they were brought to the front burner for the election of a new president (as no party would own up to Tyler).

  4. THE 1844 ELECTION

  Coming into the 1844 election campaign, it was generally assumed that Van Buren had a lock on the Democratic nomination, and Clay on that of the Whigs. Despite his long loyalty to Jackson, Van Buren was suspected in the South of being opposed to the annexation of Texas and hostile to slavery. Southern party leaders obtained a letter from Jackson, published in a Richmond newspaper, supporting the annexation of Texas.80 It was generally believed that in a much-publicized visit of Van Buren to Clay at his home at Ashland, near Lexington, Kentucky, in May 1842, Van Buren had agreed with Clay that Texas would be kept out of the next election campaign. This would have proved impossible even without Jackson’s intervention, but the extreme delicacy of the issue again illustrated the extent to which slavery inflamed American public life. Very little could be done in many policy areas without rattling the sensibilities of northerners nauseated by the ownership of people and the untrammeled ability to exploit, overwork, whip, violate, and kill them; and the southerners’ revulsion at what they regarded as hypocrisy and hysteria in attacking a regime recognized in the Constitution, practiced ultimately by 12 of the country’s presidents, and based on the decency of southern gentlemen not to abuse their live property, any more than they would domestic or farm animals, and on what was presumed to be a racial inferiority of Negroes.

  Clay had less to lose, as the Whigs were unlikely to gain much support in the South, but Van Buren risked splitting his party along straight regional lines. This was the inherent risk in the Jackson strategy: if spirits overheated over slavery, issues could endlessly be presented that could make cooperation impossible. More and more finesse and ingenuity would be required to avoid such a trap. On April 27, 1844, Van Buren and Clay published letters in different newspapers opposing annexation. Van Buren wrote that admitting Texas as a state would incite an unjustifiable war with Mexico, an argument that was a matter of indifference in the North and that deeply offended the South as the spuriously explained desertion that it was. Specifically, it forfeited the support of Jackson, still the party kingmaker at 77, who stated that the nominee should be a pro-annexationist southwesterner. It is inexplicable how Van Buren could have erred so badly. He should have supported annexation and finessed the slavery issue, if necessary by some stratagem such as admitting Texas as two states, one slave and one free. Opposing admission to a large and rich adjacent area settled by Americans in an expansionist America shouting itself hoarse with variations on its exalted and exceptional destiny was a suicidal misjudgment. Van Buren had to wave the flag and exalt nationalism over concerns about slavery. The Red Fox of Kinderhook had uncharacteristically blundered into a deadly trap.

  Clay was just as clumsy but had less at stake. He claimed that such a move without Mexican agreement would lead to war. (This was a prospect that did not concern a single visible or audible person in the country after all they had seen of the peg-legged “Napoleon of the West”; no American conceived of the milita
ry rout of Mexico as a serious challenge—they weren’t like the British and the Canadians.) He said it would be “dangerous to the integrity of the Union,” which was partly true, but it would not be as dangerous as rejecting the request for annexation. And he said the majority of Americans didn’t approve such a step, which was not true, as long as the question was not posed as an extension of slavery. Three days after the letters were published, Clay was unanimously nominated for president by the Whigs at Baltimore (where most nominating conventions took place until the rise of Chicago 15 years later). Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey was chosen for vice president. Clay then started to skate around the issue by publishing further letters saying that he was not opposed to the annexation of Texas but felt that the passions of the anti-abolitionists made it a danger, and then that he was in fact an annexationist, as long as that could be effected peacefully and honorably, etc., and finally that the issue of slavery should be kept out of the discussion, as if that were in the slightest possible. Clay managed the issue more suavely than Van Buren, who faced it more squarely but squandered whatever credit he might have achieved for doing so by recourse to the mealy mouthed humbug about avoiding war with Mexico.