by H. W. Brands
This was what he told Jackson, in terms he knew would get the old man’s attention. Houston said he still desired the annexation of Texas to the Union. A marriage of the two republics would benefit both. Unfortunately, certain persons and groups within the United States—Houston didn’t mention Adams by name, but with Jackson he didn’t have to—had caused many Texans to conclude that they weren’t wanted by the Union. Necessity, therefore, required Texas to contemplate indefinite independence. The outlook wasn’t wholly grim. With the West on its doorstep, Texas could expand the way the United States had expanded. And it could anticipate the support of European powers eager to cultivate an alternative supplier of cotton and a counterweight to American ambitions. Houston didn’t specify Britain in this letter, but Jackson had no difficulty discerning what Houston meant when he said that should Texas be rejected by the United States again, “she would seek some other friend.”
Jackson responded just as Houston guessed he would. Jackson was still bitter at Adams—“that arch enemy,” he called him—for thwarting annexation eight years earlier. He was determined not to be thwarted again. “We must regain Texas, peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must,” he told William Lewis. It was intolerable that Britain might elbow her way in where America had declined to go, on account of the scruples of such as Adams. For Jackson, the threat from Texas was the same as the threat from Florida had been: that the British would use Texas, as they had used Florida, to mount attacks on American territory. The United States might have to fight the Battle of New Orleans all over again. “Great Britain, forming a treaty with Texas . . . could have an army of 40,000 men organised and fully equipped, declare war and take possession of Memphis and Baton Rouge before we could raise and organise an army to meet them, possess herself of New Orleans, and reduce all our fortifications, and having command of the ocean, could keep the country a long time. . . . It would cost oceans of blood and millions of money to regain it.”
Houston’s letter convinced Jackson to mobilize the Democratic party behind annexation. By the early 1840s the Texas question had become linked in the minds of many American expansionists to that of Oregon. Army expeditions led by such officers as John C. Frémont, the son-in-law of Thomas Benton, had carved a trail to Oregon, and thousands of emigrants were packing their lives and goods into covered wagons and streaming across the plains and mountains to the Willamette Valley. Title to Oregon remained in doubt, with Britain and the United States sharing a joint occupancy under a treaty originally negotiated by Adams. American expansionists demanded that the doubt be erased and Oregon made exclusively American.
Jackson was among these. And, even more than most expansionists, on account of his history with Britain, he linked Oregon and Texas in his vision of America’s destiny. The twin questions of Oregon and Texas, he told Francis Blair after receiving Houston’s letter, were “all important to the security and the future peace and prosperity of our Union.” American patriots must do their duty. “I hope there are a sufficient number of pure American democrats to carry into effect the annexation of Texas and extending our laws over Oregon. No temporising policy, or all is lost.” To William Lewis, his liaison to Democrats in Congress, Jackson said, “I hope this golden moment will be seized to regain Texas, or Texas may from necessity be compelled to throw herself into the arms of Great Britain, who will endeavour to unite Oregon with Texas, which would cost us more blood and treasure to relieve us from the dilemma than we have spent in gaining our independence and our last war with Great Britain.”
Regarding Texas in particular, decisive action was crucial, as Houston’s letter had made plain. Jackson acknowledged the risks to the United States from annexation. Mexico would deem it an act of war and might call on Britain for support. But the dangers wouldn’t diminish from hesitation or delay. Texas offered a treaty. “I say, for one, ratify the treaty, and take all the consequences. . . . Houston and the people of Texas are now united in favour of annexation. The next President of Texas may not be so. British influence may reach him, and what can be now got from Texas, freely and peaceably, may evade our grasp.”
In a letter to William Lewis at this time, Jackson wrote, “I am now suffering much, and have been for several days. A severe and continued pain in my side, shortness of breath. . . . I have wrote this with great labour.”
The recuperation of his first retirement years had given way to a broad decline. The old annoyances became debilities, and new ones added to his physical and emotional cost of living. “My eyesight has failed me much,” he wrote at the end of a letter to Van Buren. “I am apt therefore to make repetitions. You will therefore please overlook them. I now write with great difficulty from that cause.” To Amos Kendall he explained, “I have been brought low with a severe attack of chills and fevers, added to my other afflictions, which has left me with a painful shortness of breath, which disables me from taking necessary exercise.” Yet he still experienced good days. “I am like a taper, which when nearly exhausted will have sometimes the appearance of going out, but will blaze up again for a time.”
More than ever he thought about Rachel, and seeing her again. He knew to a moral certainty that she was in heaven, and though he had no such confidence that he merited heaven, he worried as little about his salvation as he worried about most else. His conscience was as clear as it had always been. He wouldn’t have said this made him a saint; on the contrary, he knew he was as sinful as the next man. But he believed that God gave credit for trying, and by his own lights he had generally done what he thought was the honest and upright thing to do. He had trouble sleeping, but it was his body, not his soul, that kept him awake.
He resigned his fate to God and his estate to his family. As the candle burned short, he drafted his will. Andrew Jr. would get the Hermitage and most of its slaves. Andrew’s wife, Sarah, would receive in her own name several house servants, “as a memento of her uniform attention to me and kindness on all occasions, and particularly when worn down with sickness, pain, and debility. She has been more than a daughter to me.” Andrew and Sarah’s sons, Andrew and Samuel, would each receive a slave boy for companion and life servant. Years earlier the state of Tennessee had awarded Jackson a ceremonial sword, which would go to Andrew Donelson, “with this injunction, that he fail not to use it when necessary in support and protection of our glorious Union, and for the protection of the constitutional rights of our beloved country should they be assailed by foreign enemies or domestic traitors.” He wished he could have done more for Donelson and other relatives and friends. But he was prevented by “the great change in my worldly affairs of late.” After his and Andrew’s various debts were paid, little besides the Hermitage would remain.
The health of John Quincy Adams was better than that of Jackson, though they were the same age. The more challenging climate of New England probably had something to do with the difference. Parasites and pathogens found it as unattractive as many people did, and, lacking the provisions for protection against cold that humans could devise, and missing the determination that came with the Puritan faith, they ceded the region to such homo sapiens as insisted on making it their home. Of course, Adams’s advantage over Jackson in health also had something to do with his avoidance of dueling and gun fights and his spending America’s wars in the drawing rooms of diplomacy rather than the mountains, forests, and swamps of the frontier.
Yet if Adams’s state of body was better than Jackson’s, his state of mind was worse. With each passing year he grew more convinced that the republic had taken a grave wrong turn at the end of his presidency. Quality counted for nothing in this age of democracy; popularity counted for all. If popularity had reflected honest accomplishment in the realm of public affairs, it might not have been a terrible guide to the selection of public officials. But it rarely did. It rather reflected the fortunes of war and the ability to fool ordinary people into thinking that what they wanted was what they needed. Democracy begot demagoguery, and both begot bad government.
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nbsp; These past several years the badness of democratic government had manifested itself in the rise of the slave power of the South. Like many of his generation and most of his section, Adams had expected slavery to wither and die. But it hadn’t, instead planting new roots in the territory opened by Jackson in the Southwest. And the slave power grew bolder as it broadened its base. Supporters of slavery stifled Adams and others in Congress who sought to debate it, leading Adams to ponder this new twist of democratic irony: that the very advocates of rule by the people refused to let the people speak. Yet he refused to abandon what he called “the life-and-death struggle for the right of petition,” though his enemies ridiculed him in the House, slandered him on the stump, libeled him in the press, and threatened him through the mails. “My conscience presses me on,” he told himself. “Let me but die upon the breach.”
He was hardly surprised to encounter Jackson in that breach. The general had been retired these eight years, but his influence followed Adams everywhere. Jackson’s supporters resurrected the old issues, in the old terms. They demanded that Congress rescind Jackson’s fine from New Orleans, and they excoriated all who opposed them. “When Weller moved, yesterday, the committee on the Jackson fine to rise,” Adams grumbled, “it was for the purpose of having a full, fresh morning hour to disgorge his bilious venom against the Whigs and his sycophancy to Jackson.” After Adams objected to a Jacksonian subterfuge to silence him, the leader of the Jackson forces “exploded with a volley of insolent billingsgate upon me.”
And when the Texas question reemerged, at the instance of Jackson and his followers, Adams felt the battle personally joined. The Democrats tried to make it a party issue by blaming Adams for giving away Texas in the 1819 treaty with Spain. They conspicuously called for the reannexation of Texas, the reclaiming of what had been America’s and should never have been relinquished.
Adams answered that Jackson had supported the treaty at the time and that any statements to the contrary were “bold, dashing, and utterly baseless lies.” Adams reiterated his charge that the attempt to attach Texas to the United States was part of the ever more audacious conspiracy of the slaveholders against American freedom. The opponents of slavery must awake to the danger. “Your trial is approaching. The spirit of freedom and the spirit of slavery are drawing together for the deadly conflict of arms. The annexation of Texas to this union is the blast of the trumpet for a foreign, civil, servile, and Indian war. . . . Burnish your armor, prepare for the conflict. . . . Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity!”
Those were precisely the audiences Jackson was thinking of when, against all prior expectation, including his own, he ruined the political career of Martin Van Buren. As the 1844 election approached, the Texas question became even more pressing and more divisive. Henry Clay surprised no one by announcing against annexation and by becoming the leading candidate for the Whig nomination partly by virtue of that fact. Jackson judged that Clay’s opposition gave Van Buren just the issue he needed to reclaim the presidency for the Democrats and democracy.
Van Buren himself wasn’t so sure. As a New Yorker he was far more sensitive than Jackson to the complaints of the northern antislavery forces and far less attuned to the issues of border security that had never let Jackson rest. Beyond that, his political style was everything Jackson’s wasn’t. He was a conciliator, not a polarizer; he sought common ground, rather than to scorch the earth beneath his opponents’ feet. To Van Buren it made perfect sense to issue a statement that artfully avoided committing himself on the Texas question.
If Jackson hadn’t long since included him within his circle of friendship, he would have damned Van Buren’s waffling for cowardice. As it was, he shook his head at his protégé’s folly. “If Mr. Van Buren had come out in favour of annexation, he would have been elected almost by acclamation,” Jackson told Blair. But Van Buren hadn’t, thereby risking what Jackson considered double damage to the country: first by letting Texas get away and second by giving Clay and the Whigs a chance to win. Jackson had spoken in public only rarely since leaving the White House, and then chiefly on innocuous matters of uncontested patriotism. But Van Buren’s failure to make the cause of Texas his and the party’s own compelled Jackson to break his silence. In a letter to the Nashville Union he contended that Texas was vital to the future of democracy. “If Texas be not speedily admitted into our confederacy, she must and will be inevitably driven into alliances and commercial regulations with the European powers, of a character highly injurious and probably hostile to this country. What would then be our condition? New Orleans and the whole valley of the Mississippi would be endangered.” Texas was now as vital as New Orleans had been thirty years earlier. “She is the key to our safety in the South and the West. She offers this key to us on fair and honorable terms. Let us take it and lock the door against future danger.”
Jackson’s letter proved devastating to Van Buren. The New Yorker’s rivals in the Democratic party took advantage of his difference with Jackson on Texas to create opportunities for themselves. Most successful was James K. Polk, a former congressman and Tennessee governor, an ardent Jacksonian, and an equally ardent annexationist. Polk added “dark horse” to the lexicon of American politics by bolting from the pack of candidates and seizing the nomination at the Democratic convention in Baltimore. And he made the annexation of Texas—and of Oregon as well—the central theme of his campaign.
Jackson got the news of the nomination from Andrew Donelson. “The dark sky of yesterday has been succeeded by the brightest day democracy has witnessed since your election,” Donelson told Jackson.
Jackson agreed, and looked forward to the general election with confidence. “The Texan question has destroyed Clay in the South and West,” he said. “Texas must and will be ours.”
So it proved. Clay carried the Northeast and a handful of states elsewhere, but Polk dominated the South and West and won the election handily.
Jackson was relieved and gratified. “Polk and Dallas are elected and the republic is safe,” he declared.
Jackson and most other observers assumed that the annexation of Texas awaited the inauguration of Polk. But Tyler, with little else to claim for his presidency, decided to lay claim to Texas. The antislavery minority in the Senate still prevented annexation of Texas by treaty, so Polk sought the alternative of a joint resolution of the House and Senate.
His decision to do so gave Adams an unexpected last chance to prevent what he considered a political, diplomatic, and moral disaster. No one could gag him now, with the Texas question fairly before the House. Adams could read the election returns as well as anyone, and he could see that expansion was in the blood of the American people. On this account he pointed to his own record as secretary of state to show that he had nothing against expansion per se. He endorsed the acquisition of Oregon, even if it bruised British feelings. But Texas, he said, was different. To take Texas would be to make slavery the essence of American expansion, not merely a side effect. It would trigger a war with Mexico, and it might well lead to a war between the American North and the American South.
But so long had Adams been railing against slavery that the House hardly heard him, and the country still less. The Jackson forces had won the election, and Jackson now won this last battle. The Texas resolution carried both houses.
Adams hadn’t been so discouraged since the day of Jackson’s inauguration, and for much the same reason. “The Union is sinking into a military monarchy,” he muttered. “The prospect is deathlike.”
For twenty years Jackson and Adams had bracketed American opinion regarding the most important political development of their era, the emergence of democracy. And at the end of that time they remained as divided over its meaning as they had been at the start. Adams believed that ordinary Americans weren’t fit to govern themselves, that left to their own ignorance they would choose military heroes and demagogues who told them what they wanted to hear while leading them where they had no business goin
g. Their choice of Jackson for president was an early sign of the collapse of the republic, their seizure of Texas the most recent. More evidence doubtless would follow, culminating in a conflict that set one section against the other and utterly undid the handiwork of the Founders. Wherever George Washington’s deistic soul resided these days, it must be weeping for his country.
Jackson believed just the opposite. Democracy wasn’t a perversion of the republican promise but its perfection, or at least a large step toward perfection. The point of republicanism was to make government responsible to the people who lived under its laws. Whatever diminished responsibility was monarchy or aristocracy, and if the American Revolution had been about anything, it was about throwing off those twin incubi of despotism. Democracy made mistakes; Jackson didn’t deny that. But its mistakes were the honest and correctable mistakes of human misjudgment, not the interested, entrenched mistakes of selfish elites. Did the people know what was best for them? Not always. But they knew better than anyone else knew for them. God alone was perfect, and He ruled in heaven. Below, the people ruled, if imperfectly.
The question of Jackson’s day—as of every day since—was, who was right? Adams or Jackson? In 1845 it was difficult to tell. Adams saw slavery as the acid test of American politics, and he perceived the acid eating through the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and everything Americans held, or ought to hold, dear. He saw section replacing nation in the affections of the people, and civil war the near-certain result. The prospect was deathlike indeed.
