In terms of national government, all this was catastrophic, because each of the alignments was purely regional. There were no Republicans in the South. There were almost no pro-slavery Democrats in the North. Workable, equitable government demanded sectional alliances and regional compromises, and these became impossible. The angry statement of the Southern delegate, "We are for principles, damn the party!" showed that effective American politics had disappeared. The preachings of Seward and others about "irreconcilable conflict" and "higher laws" showed that the North was not entirely free of guilt. The Civil War was hardly spawned in innocence, because neither morality nor the American Constitution could ever be a substitute for practical politics.
The propaganda that eventually made the American internal conflict seem a struggle between an aristocratic tradition and a burgeoning social democracy throughout the English-speaking world obscured the fact that Texas, at least, was a complete political democracy. The planters' influence was more social than political; the planters could not vote or control the volatile 400,000 whites. Insecurity and radicalism pervaded the white farmers far more than it touched the men in plantation houses; in one sense, the "poor whites" betrayed the very system they now gathered noisily to defend. When the South rose, two thousand Texan planters were submerged by the genuine Southern version of democracy.
In Texas, as everywhere, approaching disaster was heralded by the collapse of the old political parties. Texas had naturally been fervently Democratic, since annexation was a Jacksonian policy. However, the Party as such had never been efficiently organized. In the early 1850s it still revolved around a pro-Houston and an anti-Houston group, as in the Republic years. Sam Houston, meanwhile, was returned regularly to the U.S. Senate. The top men of the state, Governor Elisha Pease and Senator Thomas Jefferson Rusk, were basically Unionist; the old Carolina poison of nullification had never reached this far west.
The political issues of the day centered around such matters as public schools and, above all, the defense of the Indian frontier. Every governor was criticized for not doing enough; and the Congressional delegations' battle with the Union was in securing garrison troops. The Democratic Party was more a party of personalities than issues; state-wide conventions had never been held. In the absence of any real dissent on major issues, small caucuses could decide on candidates or make decisions affecting government.
But the Southern complex, fueled by Calhoun and carried by steady immigration, spread rapidly throughout the state. The old families along the Brazos, who had once deserted American citizenship, were oddly enough completely American-oriented; Southernism as a creed or mystique had not yet arisen in the 1830s. Because of geography, these people, like Houston, had been and stayed Jacksonian Democrats, though their instincts might be more readily termed Whiggish. In a normal progression, however, the one-time "radical" Jacksonians gradually became the conservative structure in the state.
Meanwhile Sam Houston, the loyal old Jacksonian, had outlived his old national Party. Like Tom Benton of Missouri, he was falling out of date. Houston kept the viewpoint of the 1830s and 1840s: the mystique of a great American nation, based more on the concept of blood and soil than transcendental ideas, which would expand the English-speaking race from sea to sea and be in a position to defy the world. He did not hate the Europe of culture and tyranny from which the American race had sprung; he rather despised it and feared its material power. All Westerners born in the 18th century, and who had fought Indians in the 1812 war, detested the British nation, with reasonable grounds. Houston also mistrusted the French, who threw out brilliant concepts of democracy but could not seem to found a stable democratic regime at home. Like Andrew Jackson, Houston had been born in humble circumstances but reached the political heights; he was conservative, but he never liked the arrogance of the Atlantic seaboard, North or South. He did think of Northerners as nothing but Americans, bred to the same language, laws, and concepts of government as the American South; he never considered the North, as a whole, bent on destroying either the South or the Constitution. He seems never to have fallen into the pit that swallowed his own people: the equation of Negro slavery with the American way of life. Like Jackson again, he seems to have privately regarded the importation of Africans into America as the greatest potential curse that ever befell his country—not so much on moral grounds, but because the intrusion threatened his whole dream of a great American Republic. Houston was a craggy, piercing-eyed old warrior, westward-looking, true to his friends, hard on his enemies, but with a large streak of purposeful pragmatism and magnanimity. He had seen to it that Santa Anna was protected and gotten safely back to Mexico via the United States, when a lesser and shorter-visioned man would have punished him, as the public clamor demanded. Houston had hated Henry Clay as much as any Jacksonian during the partisan wars, but he lived to praise Clay when he understood the Kentuckian was a loyal American and sincere. Indians, at the Horseshoe Bend, had put an arrow in Houston's leg, and bullets in his arm and shoulder, almost killing him and invaliding him out of the regular service. Yet no western political figure in America fought harder to preserve to the Indians some legal rights. He had won the Presidency of Texas on horseback at San Jacinto, yet no Texas leader tried more sincerely to end the war with Mexico. Hard, brave, stubborn, proud, and canny, Houston was an intensely ethical and honorable man.
Now, in the Senate Houston was as valiant as when he had led the forlorn hope against the Mexican army. And because of his deep-seated Unionist bias, his words and stands were to be prophetic. Tragically, this was prophecy his own constituents could never understand. Houston, fighting for what he believed, cut his own political throat, in the politicians' phrase.
In 1848, he voted for the entrance of Oregon as free territory, standing against the senators from the South. He refused to sign Calhoun's manifesto on "aggression by the free states," exciting irate comment throughout Texas. He debated vehemently against the Kansas-Nebraska bill of 1853, which in effect abrogated the old Missouri Compromise. Stephen Douglas's political plan to allay his own Democrats in the South through the concept of "territorial sovereignty" on the question of slavery was enthusiastically supported by the Calhoun Democrats; it was belatedly backed by the Democratic Administration. It opened Kansas, where slavery had been forever barred, as slave territory if the inhabitants so agreed. Although it was instigated by an Illinoisan, as part of a political move to re-create a national Democratic consensus, it devolved into a Southern attack upon the status quo, and as such Houston fought it. It was the first of a series of hideous Southern political errors.
Houston felt that the 1820 Compromise held the nation together, and that even if Kansas opted for slavery, which he considered unlikely, the South would be damaged. Houston, who was born in Virginia, matured in Tennessee, and risen to glory in Texas, again and again attacked the concept of a narrow sectionalism in politics. The South did not have the power to mount its own party, and Houston argued that Southern sectionalism must beget an answering Northern response. He was correct. The Kansas-Nebraska bill, pushed through Congress, resulted in "bleeding Kansas," excited the Abolitionists, who had been declining, to new frenzies, and in the end, the concept of "territorial, or squatter sovereignty" did not unite but split the Democrats, costing Douglas the White House.
As Lincoln shrewdly saw, the Douglas policy of live and let live toward the South could not include an approval of slavery. But the Calhoun partisans would settle for nothing less. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was symbolic; compromise was dead.
When Sam Houston, loyal to the end, voted against the bill, the Texas legislature let it be known he would not be returned to the Senate. Houston was openly described as a "traitor to the South."
Houston also split the Democrats of his home state. Two factions emerged, pro-Houston men, or "Jacksonians," and a newer, radical faction, the "Calhoun Democrats," who soon styled themselves the Constitutional Democrats.
It soon became evident tha
t the Jacksonians were in the great minority, and Unionist sentiment in Texas was losing its political base. The Whigs were gone.
Houston flirted with the American, or Know-Nothing, Party, which entered Texas explosively in 1854. Some historians criticized this, but the move had an obvious base. His own Democrats were purging him. The whole party structure in the United States was in confusion and flux. And the Know-Nothings, though they were an antiforeign, anti-Catholic movement originating in the East, were essentially Unionist. They wanted to keep political America "Anglo-Saxon," but they also wanted to keep it whole.
An air of unreality surrounds the entire Know-Nothing phenomenon in Texas. The group undoubtedly fed on the destruction of the Whigs and on the underlying unease gripping the country as a whole. There were almost no Catholics in Texas, and the foreign, heavily Catholic elements that existed, Germans and Mexicans, were politically inert. There never were any potato-famine Irish, such as triggered the Know-Nothings in the East. The Party really had little to sink its teeth in, in Texas. Yet it aroused great excitement and attracted a considerable number of prominent men.
The Know-Nothings resembled a cross between a secret society and a fraternal order more than a mass political party. They had a "Grand President," were run in an authoritarian manner, and formed "committees of vigilance" in many communities. They did not hold conventions, but secret conclaves. Houston expressed sympathy and approval with all this, and the Party elected the mayor of Galveston, twenty-five state legislators, including five state senators, and swept in a whole city slate, in of all places, predominantly foreign and Catholic San Antonio.
This last probably signified that contact with an alien group made more for estrangement than understanding.
Then, as quickly as they formed, the Know-Nothings faded. Afterward, many supporters admitted they were not quite sure why they joined, attributing it to the uneasiness of the times.
But the phenomenon had one visible result: it frightened the Democrats into organization. In 1856 and 1857 the Party held state-wide conventions for the first time, in which almost every county was represented. And at the 1857 convention, the Calhoun Democrats emerged in complete control. Sam Houston was purged, although the term was not then used.
With no hope of being reelected to the Senate by the Calhoun legislature, Houston appealed to the people; he ran for governor against the Democratic nominee, a wealthy, states' rightist planter named Hardin Runnels. He lost, badly, the first time Texans had repudiated Sam Houston at the polls.
Now, though matters had been slow in coming to a boil, they began to fulminate. The Democrats took up the "Calhoun" attack. The legislature authorized the governor to send delegates to a "Southern convention" if one were held. The state Democratic chairman, Marshall, lobbied for resumption of the importation of African slaves. The party convention resolved that Cuba should be annexed, as a slave state. There was a great deal of radical demagoguery on all sides.
In 1859, Houston, now past his sixty-fifth year, determined to appeal to the people once again. His platform was clear: he supported slavery, he supported the Constitution, but he pledged allegiance to the Union, come what may. It was not a popular platform, but Houston could not believe that the Texans were prepared to forsake the greater nation he had done so much to build.
Houston was hardly ignorant either of sentiment or conditions. He had been governor of an important state, and President of an independent country. He had spent years in Washington, mixing with Americans of all kinds. He was certain the continued sectionalism of the South, and what he considered Calhoun's treasonous activities, would arouse their own Frankenstein in the North, because Northerners were basically the same kind of people; they could neither be threatened successfully nor overawed. But he possessed a perspective few Texans saw. And his contention that a Southern secession could not be successful, nor alliances made with European powers against the North, was simply not believed. Houston knew, and said, that before Britain would help the South, the South would first have to make some pledges toward ending slavery. Parochial in knowledge as well as vision, the radical lawyers he argued with did not believe it; the South did not realize how isolated it had become.
Houston was determined to build a Unionist base Texans could rally around. He felt that secession, already openly proposed by radical politicians, was rebellion against the nation—precisely as did Robert E. Lee. But Houston, like Lee, was one of a small group of men, holding to their own concepts of honor, helpless against a tide they deplored. In the summer of 1859, however, the cause did not yet seem hopeless.
Running as an independent against the organized majority party—in fact, the only party—Houston got significant support. This contest had unusual facets. Houston was opposed by the entire political structure, but not by the older power structure of the state. He had a majority of the planters on his side. He had former Governor Pease and many former Whigs, such as J. W. Throckmorton and B. H. Epperson. A significantly high percentage of substantial men agreed with his stand, but these were men of property, rarely politicians or professionals of the kind increasingly noticeable in the South.
Houston staged a famous, rip-roaring campaign. Knowing he could never win on his platform alone, he traveled Texas in a buggy. He wore an old linen duster; on hot days, when he worked up a sweat, he orated without his shirt. He slept in great plantation houses and farmers' dog-run shacks. Everywhere he went, his dust raised cheers. But they were for Houston the hero, Houston the man.
Runnels, running for reelection, had handicaps. He had nothing of Houston's mystique or personal popularity. He had neglected the Indian frontier, or so the western farmers believed. And his states' rights position had alienated most of the influential planter class; they felt he was moving much too fast. Still, it was something of a miracle when Houston won, by 9,000 votes. But it was a mandate for the hero, not for his Union precepts.
What now happened to Houston in office was part of a deepening national tragedy, which no man could any longer control. John Brown raided Harper's Ferry on October 16, 1859. Brown was most probably insane; his act was irrational by any test. With thirteen white men and five Negroes, he launched a movement to lead a mass insurrection and arm the Southern slaves, and to create an Abolitionist republic on the ruins of the plantation South.
The first step was to capture the U.S. Arsenal and rifle works at Harper's Ferry, in Virginia. Brown set out from Maryland, where he had been for some months, gathering funds and creating a base of operations. Harper's Ferry fell; the mayor was killed, and one Negro freedman. But as Lincoln said, "It was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed." No one, white or black, joined Brown, although he forcibly enlisted a few blacks. He was put down easily, his men killed or driven off, and captured by a detachment of Marines, under Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown was given a public trial in Virginia, and duly hanged for murder and other assorted crimes.
This was a small event. But it seems to have created a terrible crisis of ends and means in the North, particularly among an articulate, intellectual group in the East. John Brown, at his trial, threw up a facile, self-serving line of argument that was accepted at face value by some, because if they could not quite condone Brown's murders, they hated slavery more. While generally political figures of all parties considered Brown criminally insane, if not legally insane, and there were massive anti-Brown rallies in Boston and New York, there was an amazing reaction from what could only be considered the moral and cultural elite of the North of that time. This took the line that Brown might have been "insane," but his acts and intentions should be excused on the grounds that the compelling motive was "divine." Horace Greeley wrote the Harper's Ferry raid was "the work of a madman," but he had not "one reproachful word." Ralph Waldo Emerson described Brown as a "saint." Henry Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Longfellow, Bryant, and Lowell, the whole Northern pantheon, with the exception of Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne
, took the position Brown was an "angel of light," and not Brown, but the society that hanged him was mad. The late, falling-leaf intellectuality of New England in the 19th century seems to have become infused with a newer, strikingly intolerant puritanism. Thoreau bitterly condemned both the public and the greater folk wisdom of Whitman for not agreeing. Thoreau as much as anyone pointed up one difference that had emerged between the American East and the American Southwest. Thoreau was willing to go to jail rather than support a war against Mexico for the ultimate control of the continent, in the long-term interests of the United States. But he was not pacifist: he was also willing to shed American blood in furtherance of his own ideology. Never far from the moral question of slavery was a deep and growing hatred of the American planter class in the industrial North, probably based in a revived puritanism, an almost Roundhead fervor. Garrison said bluntly, "Every slaveholder has forfeited his right to live." The planter had become an enemy class; although slavery was indefensible intellectually and morally, still something new and vicious had been injected into American public attitudes. The imperishable greatness of Abraham Lincoln, in this period and afterward, rests partly on the fact that he never succumbed to this malaise. He recognized slavery as a dangerous problem no amount of moral frenzy would solve; he was prepared to damage slavery if he could, but not if he had to damage the nation in the process. He considered slavery morally wrong, but that it could not "excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason." Lincoln was prepared to stand by the law, either as a private citizen or President, even when he thought the law in error; he made this very plain privately, in his 1860 campaign and afterward. It was a distinction the South understood too late.
The misunderstanding was understandable, however, because Lincoln, for whatever reason, made no real attempt to refute Seward and the other Republican fanatics who preached irreconcilable conflict. All Black Republicans were linked with their loudest spokesmen; Lincoln took on the same radical image.
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