by H. W. Brands
Jackson wanted to know how serious the disaffection of the Americans had grown. Houston told him. “Nineteen twentieths of the population,” he said, wanted the United States to acquire Texas. “They are now without laws to govern or protect them. Mexico is involved in civil war. The Federal Constitution has never been in operation. The Government is essentially despotic and must be so for years to come. The rulers have not honesty, and the people have not intelligence.” Texas was halfway to independence from Mexico, Houston said. “She has already beaten and expelled all the troops of Mexico from her soil, nor will she permit them to return. She can defend herself against the whole power of Mexico, for really Mexico is powerless and penniless.” Mexico would lose Texas, to one country or another. “If the United States does not press for it, England will most assuredly obtain it by some means.” Houston knew that the mere mention of a British interest in Texas would arrest Jackson’s attention. But allowing for the unlikely possibility that that didn’t suffice, Houston expatiated on the charms of the province. “I have travelled near five hundred miles across Texas . . . and I have no hesitancy in pronouncing it the finest country to its extent upon the globe. . . . The greater portion of it is richer and more healthy, in my opinion, than West Tennessee. There can be no doubt but the country east of the River Grand of the North”—the Rio Grande—“would sustain a population of ten millions of souls.”
If Houston believed everything he told Jackson about Texas, he was deluding himself. There was indeed unrest among the Americans in Texas, but sentiment for transfer to the United States was not nearly as overwhelming as he suggested. A substantial number of Texans, including Stephen Austin and his early colonists, wanted merely a separate state government for Texas within the Mexican federation. Yet that wasn’t what Houston wanted, so he left it unsaid. In any case, what he had learned about Mexican politics during his short time in the country caused him to conclude that the Mexican government would not accept statehood for Texas. Its refusal rendered full separation nearly inevitable.
Events made Houston appear a prophet. Santa Anna, for reasons having little to do with Texas, gathered more and more power to himself in Mexico City, alarming republicans throughout Mexico and especially advocates of states’ rights. The latter objected, to the point of rebellion in such provinces as Zacatecas. Santa Anna responded by crushing the rebellion in Zacatecas with brutality sufficient to send shudders north to Texas, as it was intended to. But rather than intimidate the Texans it prompted a growing number of them to believe that their only security lay beyond the reach of Santa Anna, which was to say, beyond the authority of Mexico. By the autumn of 1835 Texans were forming into militias and drilling. As they drilled they talked more openly than ever of independence.
Amid the news of these developments Jackson received a curious letter from Houston and six other Texans. The seven identified themselves as a “committee of vigilance and safety for the department of Nacogdoches.” Houston had told the others about Jackson’s claim of American sovereignty to the Neches—in other words, that Nacogdoches was on what Jackson considered to be American soil—and the committee accordingly felt obliged to alert the American president to reports that a large band of Creek Indians (“not less than five thousand”) were preparing to occupy the disputed zone. The Texans reminded Jackson that a treaty between the United States and Mexico allowed each country to prevent the unauthorized movement of Indians along the mutual border, and they implored the president to take action on behalf of themselves and their neighbors, “a sparse and comparatively defenceless population unprotected from the evils which were so tragically manifested on the frontiers of Georgia and Alabama, evils which can only be remedied by the skill and generalship of a Jackson.” Houston and the committee went on to say, quite pointedly, that they expected no protection from the government of Mexico. “The unhappy distractions of this government have been such as to command the attention of the president”—Santa Anna—“to the interior condition of the country.”
The odd thing about this letter was that there was little evidence that any Creek incursion was under way or even contemplated, and certainly not of the size Houston and the others alleged. Nor did any such incursion ever take place. The letter seems to have had a different purpose: to remind Jackson of the troubles in Texas, to inform him that Mexican troops were nowhere near, and to signal that the Americans in Texas looked eagerly to Washington for protection.
The Houston letter complemented intelligence Jackson was receiving from Anthony Butler in Mexico City. “You have heard of the revolt in Texas, where it is said there has been some skirmishing between the Mexican troops and the Texas riflemen, always resulting in favor of the latter,” Butler wrote in November 1835. “The course pursued by the people of Texas has greatly exasperated General Santa Anna as we hear, and he vows to chastise the insolence of these borderers even if he goes in person to do so.”
By the time Jackson received Butler’s letter the revolt in Texas had escalated. The rebels captured San Antonio, the seat of Mexican authority in Texas, and drove Mexican military forces south across the Rio Grande. The news created a sensation in Mexico City. “This country is in a perfect tempest of passion in consequence of the revolt in Texas,” Butler wrote in December. “General Santa Anna is perfectly furious.” Santa Anna blamed the Texans, but he also blamed the United States, “who he has identified with the revolt, charging our Government and people with promoting and supporting that revolt with sinister views, with the view toward acquiring the territory.” The general vowed armed resistance against this perceived American attack. “He has sworn that not an inch of the territory shall be separated from Mexico, that the United States shall never occupy one foot of the land west of the Sabine.” In fact, he swore much more than that. “I understand that General Jackson sets up a claim to pass the Sabine, and that in running the division line hopes to acquire the country as far as the Neches,” he said. “I mean to run that line at the mouth of my cannon, and after the line is established, if the nation will only give me the means, only afford me the necessary supply of money, I will march to the capital. I will lay Washington City in ashes.”
Jackson’s initial response to Santa Anna’s threat went unrecorded, although it can well be imagined. Yet as his outrage subsided, he recognized something he hadn’t till now: that the United States would be involved in the revolutionary events in Texas whether he wished it or not. Santa Anna was already blaming the United States, and there was no reason to expect him to change his mind, even if Jackson maintained strict neutrality.
In fact Jackson did maintain strict neutrality, in the formal sense. During the first months of 1836 the Texans sent agents to the United States to recruit money and volunteers in support of their cause. The Mexican minister in Washington complained that this represented illegal interference in the internal affairs of Mexico. Jackson’s State Department answered that it did no such thing. The American government carefully avoided taking sides in the Texas troubles. What American citizens did on their own was another matter. Federal law prohibited the launching of war from American soil, and this law was being conscientiously enforced. But if Americans wanted to travel to Texas, that was their business. What they did in Texas was Mexico’s business.
Yet the administration prepared to intervene. In March 1836 the Texans lost one large force at San Antonio when Santa Anna’s army overran the Alamo, and another at Goliad when nearly four hundred Texan prisoners were executed. The twin debacles triggered a flood of refugees ahead of Santa Anna, who had determined to solve his Texas problem by driving all the Americans across the Sabine. Sam Houston by now had been named commanding general of the Texas army—largely on the strength of his service under Jackson—but that army was greatly outnumbered by the Mexicans, and it and Houston were retreating almost as fast as the refugees.
At the Sabine, observing the approach of the refugees and Houston’s army, was General Edmund Gaines, Jackson’s old comrade from the Seminole
War and currently commander of American military forces in the southwestern district. Gaines recalled the lesson he had learned from Jackson in Florida, that borders are best defended on their far side, in the territory of the enemy, and as the fighting in Texas approached the American border he prepared to mount a forward defense. Noting the “sanguinary manner in which the Mexican forces seem disposed to carry on the war,” Gaines told Lewis Cass, the secretary of war, “I take leave to suggest whether it may or may not become necessary, in our own defence, to speak to the contending belligerents in a language not to be misunderstood—a language requiring force.” Gaines proposed raising an army of eight to twelve thousand men from among the citizens of Louisiana and neighboring states. With this he would repulse the Mexicans and likely settle the Texas question definitively.
Cass consulted with Jackson before responding. “It is not the wish of the President to take advantage of present circumstances, and thereby obtain possession of any portion of the Mexican territory,” the war secretary wrote. “Still, however, the neutral duties, as well as the neutral rights, of the United States will justify the Government in taking all necessary measures to prevent a violation of their territory.” Cass, speaking for Jackson, authorized Gaines to assume “such position, on either side of the imaginary boundary line, as may be best for your defensive operations.” Gaines was explicitly authorized to advance to Nacogdoches, “which is within the limits of the United States, as claimed by this Government.”
Houston and the Texans knew of Gaines’s movements and disposition. Texas agents met with the American general and discussed how he might help their cause. Gaines committed himself—and the United States—to nothing specific on behalf of the Texans, but he conveyed the strong impression of readiness to fight. “He will maintain the honor of his country and punish the aggressor, be him whom he may,” wrote Sam Carson, the secretary of state of the recently declared Texas republic, after a meeting with Gaines.
Houston kept his own counsel during the retreat across Texas, but his prior history and his contemporary actions suggest that he hoped to lure Santa Anna into a trap. Santa Anna claimed Texas to the Sabine, Jackson claimed Louisiana to the Neches, and Gaines was prepared to defend the region in between. If Houston could lure Santa Anna across the Neches, Gaines and his American army would pounce on the Mexicans. Jackson’s hands would be clean, as American forces would be defending American soil, or what Jackson was pleased to call American soil. And it was impossible to imagine that any such conflict would end without Jackson and Houston getting what they both had wanted for years: the transfer of Texas to the United States.
Things didn’t work out that way. Houston’s men, who weren’t in on his plans, refused to continue retreating. They demanded to avenge their fallen comrades and, at a critical junction of a road east turned toward Santa Anna rather than away. Houston had never managed to instill the kind of discipline that made Jackson famous (and infamous), and he had no choice but to accept that in the Texan army decisions flowed not from the top down but from the bottom up. Days later the Texans met Santa Anna and a small advance contingent of the Mexican army and won a stunning victory at San Jacinto. Santa Anna, captured after the battle, agreed to give the Texans their freedom, and Houston became a hero sooner than he expected.
John Quincy Adams didn’t quite accuse Jackson of fomenting the revolution in Texas, but he came close. By the end of Jackson’s second term there was almost nothing Adams thought Jackson incapable of. The president had ruined republicanism by pandering to the mobs. He had ravaged the economy by destroying the Bank of the United States. He had sullied Harvard by accepting an honorary degree. And now he was threatening personal liberty and affronting the American conscience by acting as the agent of the slave conspiracy that was subverting the American government.
This last charge against Jackson was something novel. And it signaled not that Jackson had changed but that America had changed. Views on slavery continued to evolve. With the triumph of democracy came a growing intolerance for those forms of inequality that remained from former days, of which the most obvious was slavery. By now the North was essentially free of slaves (the exceptions being a few elderly survivors in states that had emancipated gradually, by outlawing the acquisition of new slaves). This made it easy for northerners to indulge their consciences. Abolitionism, once the province of cranks and Quakers, became almost unremarkable.
Predictably, the South grew defensive. Spokesmen emerged to describe slavery not as a necessary evil—the standard interpretation of eighteenth-century slaveholders—but as a positive good, the bedrock of southern society. John Calhoun told the Senate that “a mysterious Providence” had brought the white and black races together in the American South, with the former to be masters and the latter slaves. “The very existence of the South,” Calhoun continued, “depends upon the existing relations being kept up, and every scheme which might be introduced, having for its object an alteration in the condition of the negro, is pregnant with danger and ruin.” In the House slaveholders and their allies, claiming a constitutional right to property in persons, led a movement to keep antislavery petitions from even being heard.
Adams resented the “gag rule,” as it was called, and battled against it. He resented everything about the hardening of the southern position on slavery. Like his father—and most of the generation of the Founders—he had long assumed that slavery would fade and eventually disappear. That it didn’t, but instead fastened itself on the American republic more tightly than ever, and had the gall to claim the Constitution as its guarantee of perpetual life, simply struck Adams as another sordid aspect of the country’s descent into democracy.
The war in Texas was the latest crime of the slaveholding conspiracy, Adams believed. And Jackson was the arch-conspirator. “It is said that one of the earliest acts of this administration was a proposal, made at a time when there was already much ill humor in Mexico against the United States, that she should cede to the United States a very large portion of her territory,” Adams told the House. “A device better calculated to produce jealousy, suspicion, ill will, and hatred could not have been contrived. . . . This overture, offensive in itself, was made precisely at the time when a swarm of colonists from these United States were covering the Mexican border with land-jobbing, and with slaves, introduced in defiance of Mexican laws, by which slavery had been abolished throughout that republic.” The war in Texas was not a war for independence but “a war for the re-establishment of slavery where it was abolished, . . . a war between slavery and emancipation.” Adams knew of the movements of Gaines along the Texas border, and he suspected that Jackson had put the general up to the kind of things Jackson himself had done in Florida. Speaking to the president and his partners in crime, Adams warned, “You are now rushing into war—into a war of conquest, commenced by aggression on your part, and for the re-establishment of slavery where it has been abolished. . . . In that war, sir, the banners of freedom will be the banners of Mexico; and your banners, I blush to speak the word, will be the banners of slavery.” Nor would that contest culminate the evil. The “inevitable consequence” of the war with Mexico would be a civil war in America, “the last great conflict . . . between slavery and emancipation.”
Houston’s victory at San Jacinto spared Jackson the decision of whether to intervene in the Texas revolution. Jackson was just as happy not to get involved directly in the war, although he couldn’t resist offering Houston advice. “I have seen a report that General Santa Anna was to be brought before a military court, to be tried and shot,” he wrote his old lieutenant.
Nothing now could tarnish the character of Texas more than such an act at this late period. It was good policy as well as humanity that spared him. It has given you possession of Goliad and the Alamo without blood or loss of the strength of your army. His person is still of much consequence to you. He is the pride of the Mexican soldiers and the favorite of the priesthood, and whilst he is in your power the priest
s will not furnish the supplies necessary for another campaign, nor will the regular soldiers voluntarily march when their reentering Texas may endanger or cost their favorite general his life. Therefore preserve his life and the character you have won, and let not his blood be shed unless it becomes necessary by an imperative act of just retaliation for Mexican massacres hereafter. This is what I think true wisdom and humanity dictates.
Houston must have wondered at the striking difference between this Jackson and the general who had executed Arbuthnot and Ambrister for far less than Santa Anna had done to the Texans. Maybe he reflected that the difference was the difference between a theater commander and the commander in chief. Maybe he concluded that his old leader had simply mellowed after all these years. In any event, Houston himself had decided within moments of his capture that Santa Anna was worth more to Texas alive than dead.
Houston intended to employ Santa Anna in a diplomatic effort to end the Texas war. The Mexican government remained unreconciled to Texas independence, having deposed Santa Anna in absentia and rejected the promises he had given the Texans in exchange for his life. Houston by this time was the elected president of the Texas republic, and his first task was to terminate the war on the basis of Texas independence. He and Stephen Austin, now the Texas secretary of state, drafted a letter to Jackson, ostensibly written by Santa Anna. The letter proposed that Santa Anna and Jackson work out a deal to guarantee the future of Texas. “Let us establish mutual relations, to the end that your nation and the Mexican may strengthen their friendly ties, and both engage amicably in giving existence and stability to a people that wish to figure in the political world, in which they will succeed, within a few years, with the protection of the two nations.”
