by H. W. Brands
It was also the most direct route to the acquisition of Texas. For reasons of diplomacy, Jackson typically spoke not of buying Texas but of adjusting the border between the United States and Mexico, a technical-sounding process that might be more acceptable to nationalistic Mexicans than the alienation of an entire province. But his intention became clear when he described what he considered the appropriate location of the border: amid “the desert or grand prairie” southwest of the American settlements in Texas. Jackson’s grasp of Texas geography was uncertain; he didn’t know where this barren zone started or where it ended. But he probably intended a line between the Rio Grande and the Nueces, a zone that was indeed deserted—and, as far as he could tell, always would be. That was the point: Jackson wanted space between the American settlements and the Mexican settlements, a buffer guaranteed by geography. “The grand prairie . . . ,” he told Butler, “would be a boundary that would give permanent peace to the two republics.” Jackson worried less about Mexico encroaching across a border farther north and east than about Americans doing so. He knew his countrymen and how pushy they were. “The citizens of the United States will never be contented until this boundary is acquired,” he said. And he enjoined Butler to use his “best exertions” to secure it.
When Butler’s initial efforts produced nothing, Jackson’s concerns increased. “I feel great anxiety with regard to the boundary between us and Mexico,” he told Butler in August 1831. Jackson had just heard that a company of Americans was intending to settle ten thousand new colonists in Texas. Added to the Americans already there, they would create tremendous pressure on the status quo. “When these get possession and become permanently fixed, they will soon avail themselves of some pretext to throw off the Mexican authority and form an independent government of their own. This would beget great disquietude, and might eventually endanger the peace and tranquility of both countries.”
The prospect of an independent Texas initially alarmed Jackson even more than the idea of a Texas attached to Mexico. At a moment when South Carolina, a state within the Union, was causing him migraines, the last thing he needed was an independent country of Americans who wouldn’t have to pay even lip service to the Union. Constitutional questions—and his oath of office—aside, his objection to an independent Texas was of a piece with his refusal to let South Carolina secede. In each case he believed that the multiplication of autonomous political systems multiplied the chances of war and lesser troubles. Self-government within the American Union was well and good; self-government outside the Union was a potential danger.
Jackson hoped to make the Mexican government see things his way. After all, trouble in Texas would harm Mexico more than it harmed the United States. “I cannot but think that a thorough examination of the whole subject will satisfy Mexico that her true policy recommends a cession of the province,” he told Butler, who was instructed to conduct such an examination with Mexican officials. Promptness was crucial. “A revolt in Texas may close the door forever to its advantageous settlement, and may eventuate not merely in the loss of that province to Mexico with much blood and treasure, but break up the friendly understanding which is now established between this government and hers, and lead to a train of events that may obscure for a long period the sun of liberty in that quarter.”
Mexican officials resisted Jackson’s logic, not least since few stayed in office long enough for Butler’s lessons to sink in. Since independence, Mexico had been plagued with insurrections in various parts of the country and revolving-door governments in Mexico City. Even if Jackson had been able to convince a Mexican administration that Mexican national interests dictated divesting the country of Texas, such an administration couldn’t bargain away a piece of the national patrimony without signing its own political death warrant. As death warrants in Mexican politics came soon enough anyway, no foreign minister or president saw need to hasten the process.
Butler, as frustrated as Jackson, suggested monetary inducements. A six-hundred-thousand-dollar loan from Mexican capitalists currently sustained the government. “This is but a drop, and will very soon be exhausted,” Butler wrote. “And as I am confident that the experiment cannot be successfully repeated, I shall be ready to offer a supply to their necessities the moment they are found to be pressing.” He had already broached the subject with relevant officials. “I intimated a few days since to the Secretary for Foreign Affairs that if he became much pressed for money I thought ways and means could be devised for obtaining through the United States a few millions.” The secretary, Lucas Alamán, hadn’t thrown Butler out of his office, which the American took as a positive sign. “My suggestion will not be forgotten, and the first serious difficulty will no doubt send him to me for an explanation of my remark.”
Jackson liked the idea. “The intimations you so appropriately gave to the secretary of foreign affairs, of devising ‘ways and means’ should their pecuniary distresses become pressing, were happy and opportune,” he told Butler. Jackson said he had begun to seek the money. “Your private letter was submitted, confidentially, to the chairman of our committee on foreign relations.”
Butler had in mind more than a loan or grant to the Mexican government. The millions he spoke of would include something personal for those Mexican officials who helped move the Texas question along. In the summer of 1832 he thought he was making progress with Alamán, who had resigned from the cabinet but retained influence over foreign affairs. “He still directs the Department of Foreign Affairs sub rosa, and is in fact as much the minister as at any period before,” Butler explained to Jackson. The fact that he wasn’t formally in charge apparently made it easier for him to negotiate, and Butler thought they were close to a deal. The purchase price for Texas remained undetermined, but Butler suggested that any payment from the United States would “very probably be in part applied to facilitate the negotiation.” That part of the arrangement should be provided for “by a secret article.” Butler added that he would bring the treaty home himself “for the purpose of making explanations in regard to the contemplated secret article”—in other words, to explain the bribe to Congress.
Unfortunately for Jackson and Butler, the revolving door of Mexican politics kept turning. In the autumn of 1832 Alamán fled the capital with the rest of the regime. The new man of the hour was Santa Anna, who after repulsing the Spanish reconquest could immediately have made himself president of the country but preferred to let the other aspirants beat themselves senseless till he could ride in and save the day. He did so in October 1832 at Puebla, where his followers routed government troops and opened the path to Mexico City. Santa Anna entered the capital in triumph at the beginning of 1833, commencing his rule in Mexico about the time Jackson was starting his second term in the United States. Perhaps not surprisingly, given their common backgrounds as soldiers, Jackson initially thought Santa Anna’s accession would mark a turn for Mexico’s better. Soldiers were natural patriots, he assumed. As things happened, change came slower than Jackson anticipated, but he didn’t give up. “I still hope that General Santa Anna’s patriotism and good fortune may succeed in tranquilising that unhappy country,” Jackson told Butler, “giving it peace, a true republican government, not executed by the bayonet but by the wholesome administration of just and equal laws.”
Butler, on the ground in Mexico City, was less sanguine. The new regime might have restored order to Mexico, but it evidently hadn’t ended the corruption of Mexican politics. Yet this might work to America’s advantage regarding Texas, he conjectured. Butler reported “a very singular conversation” with an official he declined to name—lest his letter fall into the wrong hands—but who “is one of the most shrewd and intelligent men in the country, holds at the present time a high official station, and has much influence with the President General Santa Anna.” This individual told Butler that the Texas question might be reopened under the right conditions. “There is one man who must be brought over to us in this affair, without whom we can do no
thing; with him on our side, every thing.” The official didn’t identify Santa Anna by name, and neither did Butler, but he was the only one in Mexico City who fit the description. The official went on: “Have you command of money?” Butler said he had. “There will be a large sum necessary,” the official said. “Half a million or upwards. This man, so important for us to gain, must have himself two hundred or three hundred thousand dollars. There are others among whom it may become necessary to distribute three or four hundred thousand more. Can you command that sum?” Butler nodded. “Assure me of the object,” he said, “and the money shall not fail.”
Jackson read Butler’s letter with what he described as “astonishment.” Till now much of the correspondence between Jackson and Butler had been sent in cipher, but Butler, for reasons known only to himself, had sent this letter unciphered. Jackson could hardly believe that Butler had been so foolish as to relate such sensitive information in a form any postal clerk or security official could read. The president also feared that Butler was being set up. “My dear sir,” he replied, “be careful lest these ‘shrewd fellows’ may draw you into imputations of attempting to bribe these officers.” But Jackson was even more upset that Butler’s letter intimated that he—the president of the United States—was willing to bribe the Mexican government. “Nothing could be farther from my intention,” Jackson wrote, in deliberately unciphered text.
Perhaps Jackson was sincere. Perhaps he really hadn’t intended to corrupt the Mexican government. Maybe Butler read too much into the president’s approval of his suggestions for easing the burdens of Mexico’s debt. On the other hand, just before receiving Butler’s latest from Mexico City, Jackson had written the envoy, “Provided you keep within your instructions and obtain the cession, it is not for your consideration whether the government of Mexico applies the money to the purchase of men or to pay their public debt.”
Obviously Jackson didn’t want to be compromised by any public allegation of bribery, which would tarnish his reputation and perhaps spoil a Texas deal. “I admonish you to give these shrewd fellows no room to charge you with tampering with their officers to obtain the cession through corruption,” he sternly instructed Butler. By now Jackson had settled on five million dollars as his ceiling price for Texas. Butler was authorized to offer that. Jackson repeated that what the Mexicans did with the money was their own business. “We are not interested in her distribution of the consideration.” But he added a crucial proviso. “We are deeply interested that this treaty of cession should be obtained without any just imputation of corruption on our part.”
Butler thought Jackson was naive in rejecting bribery. “What you advise of being cautious . . . proves how little you know of Mexican character,” he wrote, with the bluntness Jackson had professed to admire. “I can assure you, sir, that bribery is not only common and familiar in all ranks and classes, but familiarly and freely spoken of.” If Jackson wanted Texas peacefully, there was only one way. “Resort must be had to bribery—or by presents, if the term is more appropriate.”
Still Jackson refused. He didn’t want to be associated with bribery in any fashion. It would make him and the United States government look bad, and it would complicate various other diplomatic dealings. During the same period Jackson was seeking to acquire Texas, he was trying to settle a long-standing dispute with France regarding debts left over from the Napoleonic wars. France had agreed to pay but was maddeningly tardy in doing so. Jackson was casting the issue as a matter of American honor. “Ask nothing but what is right and permit nothing that is wrong,” he instructed Edward Livingston, who handled the negotiation in Paris. The squabble ended amicably but not before Jackson threatened to seize French ships and asked Congress for money to expand the navy. Being caught bribing Mexican officials would, needless to say, undermine the honor Jackson made such a show of upholding.
Besides, he wasn’t sure bribery would work. What would keep the Mexicans from taking the money and refusing to turn over Texas? What recourse would the American government have? Or if the United States bribed one Mexican administration into relinquishing Texas, what was to prevent that regime from being overthrown—perhaps on account of the bribery—and its successor from disavowing the deal? The United States would be out the money, embarrassed, and required to start all over again.
But if bribery wouldn’t work, other methods might. According to the 1819 treaty between the United States and Spain, the eastern boundary of Texas was the Sabine River. Jackson couldn’t get Mexico to redefine the treaty, so he sought to redefine the river. Two streams empty into Sabine Lake, which in turn feeds the Gulf of Mexico. Ordinary usage called the eastern river the Sabine and the western river the Neches. Yet there was some confusion on the subject, not least since sabinas (cypress trees) were more common along the Neches than along the Sabine. This gave Jackson a pretext for calling the Neches the western branch of the Sabine and declaring it the true boundary between the United States and Mexico. The claim was flimsy in the extreme. Had the question been submitted to a neutral arbiter, Jackson’s interpretation would have been dismissed with derision. But Jackson didn’t intend to submit the question to an arbiter. Rather he intended to use the Neches claim as a device for intimidating Mexico and loosening its grip on Texas as a whole. “Begin at the Gulf of Mexico, run up the west branch of the Sabine, and continue up the west side of its west fork,” he wrote Butler by way of summarizing his negotiating stance. From this first step, others would follow.
But it would be a delicate business, and after the way Butler had mishandled the bribery business, Jackson wondered if he had the right man in Mexico City. Butler responded to the new approach with a worrisome enthusiasm. “I will succeed in uniting Texas to our country before I am done with the subject or I will forfeit my head,” Butler vowed. Jackson couldn’t tell whether Butler was indulging in hyperbole or accurately conveying his designs and determination. If the latter, the president recognized that though it might be Butler’s head, it would be America’s reputation that would be forfeited. “Keep within your instructions,” he warned Butler. “What a scamp,” he wrote to himself.
Yet the scamp understood how Jackson’s new approach might lead to the acquisition of Texas. “Should the present incumbents continue in office . . . ,” Butler said of Santa Anna’s regime, “no other mode is left us but to occupy that part of the territory lying west of the Sabine and east of the Neches (so called by the Mexicans) and to garrison Nacogdoches by the troops from Cantonment Jessup.” Nacogdoches was the most important town between the rivers, and Cantonment Jessup was the American fort just east of the Sabine. Butler pointed out that there were no Mexican troops between the rivers, as they all had been deployed farther west to deal with troubles with the American colonists. The occupation would therefore be unopposed. And with troops on the ground, the United States government would be in position to enforce a favorable settlement of the whole Texas question.
While Jackson was trying to decide whether Butler was doing more harm than good as America’s acknowledged representative in Mexico, the president worked quietly with an unacknowledged agent in Texas. Three years earlier Jackson had responded harshly to Sam Houston’s drunken boast of going to conquer Texas. “I must really have thought you deranged to have believed you had so wild a scheme in contemplation,” he lectured Houston. And while the purchase of Texas remained a possibility, Jackson didn’t want any American filibusters making the Mexican government angry. But as his hopes for the peaceful acquisition of Texas diminished, he reconsidered the Houston option.
Houston still wanted to conquer Texas, although in his newfound sobriety he was more discreet about broadcasting his plans. He maintained his discretion during and after a meeting with Jackson at the Hermitage in the summer of 1832. Jackson was vacationing at home, and Houston was heading west following his latest Washington trial. Neither man recorded the conversation that took place in Jackson’s study, which suggests that it wasn’t intended for public knowledg
e. And indeed the denouement indicates that it was meant to be secret. Jackson apparently gave Houston five hundred dollars for the road. More valuable than the money was the cover Jackson provided. From Tennessee, Houston traveled to Arkansas, where he obtained a federal passport requesting “all the tribes of Indians, whether in amity with the United States or as yet not allied to them by treaties, to permit safely and freely to pass through their respective territories, General Sam Houston, a citizen of the United States, thirty-eight years of age, six feet, two inches in stature, brown hair and light complexion; and in case of need to give him all lawful aid and protection.” As Jackson’s Indian agent, Houston proceeded to Texas, nominally to investigate the affairs of the tribes there. “It has been my first and most important object to obtain all the information possible relative to the Pawnee and Comanche Indians,” Houston reported en route. “To reach the wild Indians at this season will be difficult, and only practicable by way of St. Antone.”
Yet Houston—and Jackson—had much more in mind than cultivating Indians. This might be a first step, but the longer project was the acquisition of Texas. The Americans in Texas had grown restive under Mexican rule following an 1830 law that prohibited legal immigration from the United States and specifically banned the introduction of slaves. On account of the political upheavals in Mexico City, the law went unenforced, stopping neither immigration nor the import of slaves. But it made outlaws of people who considered themselves blameless, made comparative respectables of people who did deserve blame, and weakened the political grip of Mexico on its northeasternmost province.
