Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Under these circumstances, Jackson's message to Congress in December 1836, was cool toward Texas and proposed a delay in recognition. This dismayed the Texas government, just as it must have puzzled the Mexicans, who did not understand the terrible split in opinion within the United States. Relations with Mexico were badly strained. The Mexican minister, Eduardo de Gorostiza, circulated a paper condemning Jackson for dispatching General Gaines to the Sabine. This pamphlet both broke diplomatic courtesy and angered Jackson. Gorostiza picked up his credentials and went home, but the Mexican government supported his stand. However, there was no danger of a real war with Mexico at this time; the government was in collapse, the treasury was bankrupt, and the nation was impotent. The United States had nothing to fear from Mexican anger, but this was not clearly seen in some Washington quarters.

  Hoping to break the diplomatic impasse, Houston and Stephen Austin decided to send Santa Anna to Washington. The Mexican dictator himself had come up with a long-visioned plan, by which the United States and Mexico would establish a new border, on the Rio Grande. In return for a cash payment, the United States would be free to annex Texas. This plan, which was denounced both in Mexico and the United States, had enormous merit, for both countries. It might have avoided another war. But Santa Anna had no real powers now to negotiate, which Jackson knew, and further, Jackson was in no position politically to absorb Texas. The capitals of both nations, in 1836–37, singularly lacked historical vision.

  Santa Anna arrived in Washington on January 17, 1837. He was received courteously, spent six fruitless days in discussions, and then sailed from Norfolk for Vera Cruz. Jackson offered to entertain the Mexican's offer to sell Texas provided it came through regular diplomatic channels, which was impossible, and he also tried to include California in the deal. Santa Anna departed owing some $2,000 in expenses, which the Texas government eventually reimbursed.

  On April 19, 1837, Anastasio Bustamante again became President of Mexico, assuring a new hard line. Any hope of continued negotiations died here. Santa Anna, discredited by his defeat in Texas, retired to Jalapa to await a better day.

  The Texans in Washington swallowed their frustration and tried to keep in Jackson's favor. Jackson refused to put direct pressure on Congress to recognize Texas. His term was running out, and he had little real power. But from the sidelines Jackson kept up a devious game. Earlier Stephen Austin wrote to a Washington correspondent that if the United States was not prepared to extend aid and recognition, Texas might have to look elsewhere. Jackson turned this letter over to the Congress, with a notation that further stalling might alienate Texas forever. Austin and Sam Houston were to find this argument the most effective one they had, both in securing recognition and eventual annexation. Neither Austin nor Houston had any desire to become involved with Britain, quite the opposite, but only the threat of concessions to Great Britain, and the specter of a new British colony in the middle of America, seemed to have any effect on the antiexpansionist Northeast. Houston continued the policy after Austin's death.

  A resolution to recognize Texas floundered in both the Senate and the House for months. Representative Waddy Thompson of South Carolina and Senator Robert J. Walker of Mississippi labored to pass the measure, which had been tabled as late as February 26, 1837, by a House vote of 98 to 86. The resolution was watered down, in the House version. It now merely provided money for the sending of "a diplomatic agent to Texas whenever the President of the United States may receive satisfactory evidence that Texas is an independent power and shall deem it expedient to appoint such a minister." The original words "the independent Republic of Texas" were stricken out. The measure was a wonderful example of American euphemism and political compromise, to say nothing of passing the buck.

  Even then, it passed the House only because most members either thought it would die in the Senate, or be implemented at the discretion of Martin Van Buren, who was neutral and would do nothing. Pacifying the Texas lobby with what was considered a "cheap vote," many House members lukewarm to Texas voted for it. It carried 121 to 76.

  Through some dazzling political footwork, Walker added the Texas resolution to a general civil appropriation bill before the Senate on March 2. This rider survived an attempt to knock it out, 24–24. This Senate action sent the bill to the President for signature on Friday, March 3, less than twenty-four hours before he left office. Jackson signed it.

  Then, he drafted a message to the Senate. He wrote he now deemed it proper and expedient to acknowledge the independence of Texas, and he nominated Alcée La Branche of Louisiana to be chargé d'affaires to Texas. Jackson finished this message late on the evening of March 3. Thus, not with a flourish but with neat footwork, was history made.

  Jackson requested the Texan agents to come to the White House, for "the pleasure of a glass of wine." At midnight, the President of the United States raised his glass: "Gentlemen, the Republic of Texas." The Texans, William Wharton and Memucan Hunt, drank to that. Jackson had another toast: "The President of the Republic of Texas."

  Jackson was a frontiersman; he never forgot a friend. It is perhaps significant and revealing that President Jackson, "King Andrew," spent his last hours in office talking about Texas, and reminiscing about one of "his boys, who had beaten it back and made good." Jackson capped his career in the White House by recognizing Texas. Banks and gentry and current ideology might come and go, nullifiers and abolitionists and all their accursed quarreling kind fade into dust—the land was wide and went on forever, and Jackson's America was still pointed toward the western sea.

  The news of U.S. recognition caused celebrations throughout Texas, but it left Sam Houston with all his enormous problems intact. The first, and most pressing, was not the still-existent state of war with Mexico but the Texas standing army, now completely composed of a horde of ill-fed and intractable American volunteers. The army had rejected Mirabeau Lamar; when Lamar resigned his commission to become Vice-President, the army chose Felix Huston as its chief. Huston was a military adventurer of the old filibuster stripe. To get rid of him, Sam Houston appointed a capable new officer, Albert Sidney Johnston, to the supreme command. Felix Huston not only refused to go, but he seriously wounded Johnston in a trumped-up duel. Then, Huston went to Columbia to lobby in the Texas Congress for his bright new plan: a march on Matamoros, Mexico.

  Now, Sam Houston was aided by American experience and tradition. He solved his army problem the same way George Washington did, two generations before. While Huston was away, the President furloughed the army with the exception of some 600 men. He could not discharge it, because he could not meet the arrears in pay. But he gave all the men a furlough, and never bothered to call them back. This may have exposed Texas to Mexican danger, but it effectively got rid of the threat of military dictatorship, as Huston's clamoring army faded away.

  The Lone Star State was sovereign, but Houston found it $1,250,000 in debt. The financial figures for the revolution may have seemed more those of a corporate business than an emerging nation, but the money trouble was serious. Houston was able to feed his rump army now only by personally signing government notes. Henry Smith, the Texas Secretary of the Treasury, was in an incredible position: he could not perform his duties because he had no official stationery, and there was no money in the Treasury to buy any. Most local officials were being paid in kind, and the proliferation of offices required now by a new national government strained the resources of twenty-three counties beyond endurance. The fact that many officers served out of patriotism, without pay, has sometimes been overlooked.

  Houston, with the vote for annexation of September 1836, considered his mandate called for him to damp the war with Mexico, avoid Indian trouble on the frontier, and try to get Texas into the United States. These aims, and his finances, required him to follow a quiet, conservative policy.

  Texas formally claimed the Rio Grande as its southern boundary in 1836, and this meant no hope of a settlement with Mexico. Historically, the Mexican
counterclaim of the Nueces as the Texas boundary was correct; the Nueces, not the Rio Grande, had been the boundary between the province of Texas and the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, formerly Nuevo Santander. No Anglo-Texans lived south of the Nueces, but for that matter, only a few Mexicans lived north of the Rio Grande. The land was empty. The only real merit to the Texans' claim was that the Rio Grande was a much better defined boundary than the tiny Nueces, which looped up into Comanche country northwest of Béxar and dribbled out, but despite that, they held it vehemently and were not likely to give it up. Many intelligent Mexicans saw that Anglo-Texas was now an undigestible nut, and gone forever, but the claim for the Rio Bravo put national honor to new strains.

  Mexico refused to recognize Texan independence, and a formal state of war went on, although for some years there was no fighting. This state of war held back Texan settlement at Goliad and Refugio, and even San Antonio remained outside the normal Anglo-Texan sphere. Texas ruled the settlement at San Antonio, but few Anglo-Texans lived there. There was only a tiny garrison, and now and then a Texas magistrate arrived.

  White settlers, after 1836, were rapidly spreading up the Brazos and Colorado, and a steady stream of immigration was demolishing the wilderness across the northern part of the country. This movement was impinging on the settled Texas Indians: the remnants of the Caddoans, now a border tribe, the Wichitas, Tonkawas, and the Cherokees, Kickapoos, and others who had been pushed into Texas by being driven out of the United States. The Cherokees, a powerful tribe, were particularly restless and frightened. They had been pushed all the way from the mountains of Carolina and Tennessee, and now they, a forest and mountain people, were up against the Great Plains with nowhere to go. Whites were chopping the woods down and building cabins on the edges of their last refuge; Mexican agents went among them, talking war against the hated Americans. Houston was worried about this imminent Indian war. He submitted a bill that would have guaranteed the Cherokees title to their Texas lands. The Texas Congress angrily rejected it, but Houston, keeping state forces out of Indian country, was able to avert a serious war. The Kickapoos, aided by some Mexicans, took the warpath in the summer of 1838 under a Mexican agent, Vicente Córdova. Tom Rusk stamped this rebellion out with a force of hastily raised volunteers, while the Cherokees held aloof. The Cherokees' self-restraint did them no good; although they were a remarkably peaceful and civilized tribe of Amerinds, in Texans' minds they were merely marauding red men, standing in the way of rightful, Anglo-American progress. Houston, who had lived among Cherokees, wanted to protect them, but rather sadly, he knew the Indians' days were numbered. All he could do was hold off bloodshed so long as he was President.

  Despite Houston's innate conservatism, the government went further and further in debt. Houston was forced to spend some $2,000,000, and revenues in no way matched this. Texas's only productive tax was a tariff, ranging from 1 percent on bread and flour to 50 percent on luxuries like silk. Such levies as tonnage fees, the poll tax, business taxes, and license or land fees raised only small amounts; the direct property tax was virtually uncollectable. Texans did not like taxes. Even much of the taxes or fees collected were returned as audited drafts or canceled claims against the government, so Henry Smith's Treasury stayed bare. The only substantial money that arrived was a loan of $457,380 from the Bank of the United States in Pennsylvania; efforts to borrow the $5,000,000 Houston needed were fruitless. In the end, Houston did what every government in such a situation did, although everyone knew the solution's inherent folly. The Government of Texas in 1837 started printing paper money, in the form of promissory notes. At first, these notes held their value very well, but with the second issue, in 1838, they depreciated to about seventy cents on the dollar.

  Besides keeping the war with Mexico damped and the Indians quiet, Houston's foreign policy was to continue to seek annexation by the United States. Memucan Hunt, Minister to Washington, was ordered to press the matter, and on August 4, 1837, Hunt formally approached the government of the United States. Forsyth, still Secretary of State, made it clear he felt treaty obligations with Mexico, by which Texas had been forever renounced, prevented any such act. Still, a bill was introduced in Congress in early 1838. The matter was brought to a boil, while Van Buren, lacking both Jackson's powers and skills, seemed to hope it would go away. John Quincy Adams made himself Texas's foremost villain, by speaking against annexation every morning session of Congress from June 16 to July 7, 1838. Congress finally adjourned without action. Houston, now realizing that the honor of Texas as a sovereign nation was at stake, ordered Dr. Anson Jones, Hunt's successor, formally to withdraw the petitition of annexation. This was done, ratified by the Texas Congress, and the matter died. This rejection meanwhile built an increasingly powerful anti-American party in Texas, now headed by Mirabeau B. Lamar.

  Lamar began to talk of Texas building its own empire in the West, if need be, in enmity and opposition to the United States. There were discussions among ambitious, burning-eyed men along the Brazos. If the United States was going to let the slavery question halt it at the Sabine, then the far Pacific might fall to another, more vigorous American Republic rising in the West. Sam Houston despised this talk. But under the constitution he could not succeed himself, nor could he find any Texas politician of sufficient stature to oppose Lamar. Houston's choice to succeed himself in the election of 1838 was Peter Grayson, but Grayson committed suicide before election day. Lamar ran on a platform of Texan greatness and future glory. He was elected President almost unanimously and carried the Congress along with him.

  There were no true political parties in Texas, but the old division between the conservative planters, the Peace party, and the more warlike radicals, the War party, continued. Houston had selected his cabinet to bridge the split, with Austin, a conservative, as Secretary of State, and Smith, a radical, his Secretary of the Treasury. But Austin died in December 1836, worn out at the age of forty-three. This left Houston supported by almost no one of stature. The planter group in Texas was far less interested in national politics, on the whole, than the adventurous lawyers pouring in from the United States. The radical, or expansionist group, increased daily.

  Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was inaugurated as President of Texas in December 1838. In his first speech, he revealed a new policy: no more of Houston's pennypinching and conservative caution, no more of Houston's wheedling after the United States. Lamar inherited a basically unstable situation: increasingly restive Indians on the edges of Anglo-Texas, a smolderingly hostile Mexico that refused to end hostilities to the south. Houston had let these problems hang fire, trying to avoid further bloodshed with Mexico and making promises to the Indians he could not keep. His assumption and hope was that when Texas fulfilled its destiny as he saw it and became part of the United States, Washington, not the straggling, bankrupt Republic between the Brazos and the Colorado, would deal with the Indians and Mexico.

  In contrast, Lamar considered his own programs much more realistic. They were, in simplest terms, based on the idea that Texas had to fend for itself. He felt that the Mexican government should be given a full chance to negotiate a boundary and a peace with Texas, and if it did not, then the Mexicans should be brought to their senses by knocking them to their knees. The Indians Lamar considered merely trespassing vermin on Texas soil. Because of his outright hostility to Indians, Lamar has been often harshly regarded by American historians. But Lamar invented nothing—the notion that Indians were tenants at will, without inherent title to American soil, and that white men might dispossess them without formal legal action was already imbedded in American thought and practice. They were policies that already had acquired the legitimacy of two hundred years. Lamar, with the full agreement of his Secretary of War, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Indian commissioner, Bonnell, merely enunciated them without hypocrisy.

  It had been established again and again in American history that the government had no powers to prevent white encroachment on Indian lands, and if t
he Indians resisted, the government owed the settlers protection. Sam

  Houston was one of the few great Americans who tried, not to give the Amerinds a reservation or treaty lands, but a legal title to their soil under Anglo-Saxon common law.

  The attitudes of the majority of Texans, who violently opposed this, were essentially no different from the attitudes of the men who earlier conquered Massachusetts. Many of the people who denounced Mirabeau Lamar stood on ground where the bones of their forefathers' Indian victims had long moldered; only time had given that conquest its legitimacy.

  "If peace can be obtained only by the sword, let the sword do its work," Lamar stated in his inaugural address, to thunderous applause. It was an American philosophy that neither began nor ended with Texas's President Lamar.

  Lamar advocated pressure against the Mexicans, war against the Indians, and, sometimes overlooked because it was not implemented, a policy of education and development within the state. Lamar did not look to Washington, and if his programs were impossibly ambitious, he caught a part of every Texan's heart.

  Here, in the third year of the Republic, Texas history took its essential 19th-century pattern, and it also began to fragment. It could no longer be followed as a steady stream. The pattern of immigration into and consolidation of Anglo-Texas continued, but meanwhile, Anglo-Texas began to expand along a genuine frontier of war, against the Indian west and against the Mexican south. Virtually all Texan historians have seen Texas history in terms of a long, three-cornered conflict. The folkloric historians, such as Walter Prescott Webb, have seen this most clearly of all: Anglo-Texas, marching out of its mild, rich-soil Brazos bottoms and southern, watered forests, was at continual war with a hostile civilization in the savannahs of the south; in savage conflict with the most formidable Amerinds Americans had yet faced; finally, though not least, locked in an endless struggle against a rough and arid and blazing land such as no Anglo-American had tried to settle before. Each mile toward the Rio Grande, each step up the endless rocky plateaus, Texans left their blood, bones, and blasted dreams.