by H. W. Brands
The nullification controversy had already divided the Jackson administration, alienating the president from Vice President John Calhoun, the South Carolinian who was the chief theoretician of the nullifiers; now it split the president’s Democratic Republican party, driving a wedge between the West and the South that anti-Jacksonians like Henry Clay of Kentucky aimed to exploit. And it threatened to rend the country, as southern slaveholders exploited the tariff controversy to test the limits of states’ rights against the authority of the national government.
Jackson understood the implications of the nullification contest, which was why he adopted his uncompromising stand against South Carolina’s attempt to prevent the enforcement of federal laws. “Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent their execution deceived you,” he warned the citizens of that state. “They could not have been deceived themselves. They know that a forcible opposition could alone prevent the execution of the laws, and they know that such opposition must be repelled. Their object is disunion. But be not deceived by names. Disunion by armed force is treason.” And treason could never be ignored or forgiven. “On your unhappy State will inevitably fall all the evils of the conflict you force upon the Government of your country. It can not accede to the mad project of disunion, of which you would be the first victims.”
To lend emphasis to his words, and to demonstrate that a passion for the Union was not simply an executive conceit, the president urged Congress to approve a Force Bill explicitly empowering him to ensure the enforcement of federal laws in South Carolina. The Force Bill provoked another angry debate in the Senate, with Calhoun—having been dropped from the Jackson reelection ticket in favor of Martin Van Buren of New York, and once more a senator—denouncing it as a declaration of war against his native state. But the bill passed overwhelmingly, giving Jackson a crucial victory.
Yet Jackson was artful as well as forceful, and even as he stood firm on the principle of an indissoluble Union, he gave ground on the tariff. A new measure reduced the 1828 schedule, leaving the South Carolinians room for a face-saving retreat. Though some in the Palmetto State still spluttered, most accepted this way out, and the crisis passed. Jackson accepted the victory, even as he recognized that it wasn’t permanent. States’ rights would remain the rallying cry for losers in the legislature until the question of national-versus-state sovereignty was finally settled. “The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery, question,” he predicted.
Amid the fight for the Force Bill, Jackson received a letter from a supporter at Natchitoches. “I have with much pride and inexpressible satisfaction seen your messages and proclamations touching the Nullifiers of the South and their ‘peaceable remedies,’ ” the writer declared. “God grant that you may save the Union! It does seem to me that it is reserved for you, and you alone, to render millions so great a blessing.”
Jackson was naturally gratified at this support, especially coming at such a critical moment. But he received dozens of such letters every day (and many taking the opposite view). What made this letter stand out were its comments on another subject, and the signature at the bottom.
Having been as far as Bexar in the Province of Texas, where I had an interview with the Comanche Indians, I am in possession of some information that will doubtless be interesting to you, and may be calculated to forward your views, if you should entertain any, touching the acquisition of Texas by the Government of the United States. That such a measure is desirable by nineteen twentieths of the population of the Province, I can not doubt. 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. The people of Texas are determined to separate from Coahuila, and unless Mexico is soon restored to order and the Constitution revived and reenacted, the Province of Texas will remain separate from the confederacy of Mexico. 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 to all intents and purposes. Her want of money taken in connexion with the course which Texas must and will adopt, will render a transfer of Texas inevitable to some power, and if the United States does not press for it, England will most assuredly obtain it by some means. . . .
I have traveled near five hundred miles across Texas, and am now enabled to judge pretty correctly of the soil and the resources of the country, and I have no hesitancy in pronouncing it the finest country to its extent upon the globe. . . . There can be no doubt that the country east of the River Grand of the North [the Rio Grande] would sustain a population of ten millions of souls. My opinion is that Texas will by her members in convention by the 1st April declare all that country as Texas proper, and form a state constitution. I expect to be present at the convention, and will apprise you of the course adopted, so soon as its members have taken a final action. . . .
I hear all voices commend your course [regarding nullification] even in Texas, where is felt the liveliest interest for the preservation of the Republic.
Permit me to tender you my sincere felicitations and most earnest solicitude for your health and happiness, and your future glory, connected with the prosperity of the Union.
Sam Houston
Jackson wasn’t exactly surprised to receive this letter, having been in touch with Houston on the subject of Texas for some time. But so erratic had Houston’s behavior been during the previous few years that hardly anything he could have done would have surprised the old general.
With every other Tennesseean and many outside the state, Jackson had been shocked at Houston’s ignominious flight from Nashville in 1829. As president, Jackson had no lack of informants to apprise him of Houston’s progress—or regress—into the wilds of Arkansas and the haze of alcoholic oblivion. Houston initially drank to drown his hurt and shame, but at some point the drinking took on a life of its own. In one instance he and a fellow traveler encountered a third man, whom they engaged in a drinking contest that involved sacrificing their worldly cares to the god Bacchus—that is, throwing their clothing, item by item, on a campfire—with toasts following each burnt offering. The ceremony ended with the three in a naked stupor.
In the late spring of 1829 Jackson received a letter from Houston filled with self-pity, wounded pride, and boozy loquacity. Declaring himself “the most unhappy man now living,” Houston told Jackson: “I can not brook the idea of your supposing me capable of an act that would not adorn, rather than blot, the escutcheon of human nature!” Houston had heard that his enemies were spreading falsehoods about him and his treatment of Eliza. “I do not directly understand the extent of the information, or its character, but I suppose it was intended to complete my ruin, in irremediable devastation of character!” Without more precise knowledge, Houston couldn’t rebut the charges directly, but he appealed to his mentor and commander to recall the bravery and honor of better days. “You, sir, have witnessed my conduct from boyhood through life. You saw me draw my first sword from its scabbard. You saw me breast the forefront of battle, and you saw me encounter successive dangers, with cheeks unblanched, and with nerves which had no ague in them. You have seen my private and my official acts; to these I refer you.” The fugitive required all the help he could get, for the world was against him. “I am to be hunted down! . . . an exile from my home and my country, a houseless unsheltered wanderer among the Indians.” But he would not yield to enemy or misfortune. “I am myself, and will remain the proud and honest man! I will love my country and my friends. You, General, will ever possess my warmest love and most profound veneration! In return I ask nothing—I would have nothing, within your power to give me! I am satisfied with nature’s gifts. They will supply nature’s wants!!”
Houston closed this letter by explaining that he was heading off to live with the Cherokees, a
nd that if the president wished to write he could reach him in care of the Cherokee Agency in Arkansas. After two months of hunting buffalo and smaller game, traveling among the Cherokees and other tribes of the territory, and drinking whatever alcohol he could lay hands on, Houston fell ill with the fever and shakes of malaria (perhaps combined with delirium tremens). “I am very feeble from a long spell of fever, which lasted me some 38 days and had well nigh closed the scene of all my mortal cares,” he wrote Jackson as the illness was easing. By then he had decided to settle down in a wigwam—Wigwam Neosho, he called it—not far from the Arkansas River. The wigwam doubled as a trading post, which Houston operated with a woman who comforted him in his affliction and became his common-law wife. Diana Rogers—also known as Tiana—was the daughter of John Rogers, a Cherokee headman who was part Scot, and his Cherokee wife; Houston had known her as a girl during his days with Oolooteka—John Jolly—in Tennessee. Like Houston, Diana had been married, but in her case her spouse was actually, and not just figuratively, dead. Said to be tall and attractive, she saw something in Houston his bingeing and self-pity hid from others, and she took upon herself the responsibility of running the trading post in his absences and hauling him home after his drunks. That he was technically still married to Eliza apparently bothered neither her nor the neighbors.
For many months Houston drifted in and out of his fog. The Cherokees, who to their dismay knew quite a bit about alcoholism, were put off by Houston’s heavy drinking; many of them derisively dropped his name Raven in favor of Big Drunk. Houston ran afoul of the local U.S. military commander for illegally importing liquor for resale; the charge was set aside when Houston explained, convincingly, that the nine barrels of whiskey, gin, rum, cognac, and wine were for his personal consumption.
On his good days he could still make himself useful. Living with the Cherokees and traveling among the various tribes inhabiting the trans-Mississippi region, he became an apostle of peace between rival tribes and between the Indians and whites. To Secretary of War John Eaton he wrote regarding a conflict between the Osages and the Pawnees, in which each side had taken many prisoners, who thereby became an obstacle to ending the struggle. Houston urged Eaton to act as broker in a prisoner exchange. “Peace would cost a mere trifle to our Government,” Houston said, “when compared to the advantages which must result from it!” After a band of Cherokees, angry at their tribe’s treatment by the government and by nearby whites, threatened to go to war over the protests of John Jolly and other Cherokee leaders, Houston implored them not to, warning that they would simply bring down the greater wrath of the government and open the tribe to further depredations. When the U.S. Army, in a fit of cost cutting, considered closing a military post in the middle of the Indian territory, Houston assailed the measure as shortsighted and foolish. “I will predict, in the event of a removal of the U.S. troops from this post,” he wrote the local commandant, “that in less than twelve months from the date thereof there will be waged a war the most sanguinary and savage that has raged within my recollection. Embers are covered, but whenever they are exposed, you will see the flame spread through five nations.”
For his efforts on their behalf, the Cherokees made Houston a citizen of their nation, and sent him east as their envoy to the U.S. government. In Washington, Jackson received him graciously but dubiously. Houston reported how the Cherokees were being cheated by the agents supplying them beef under the terms of a treaty with the federal government; in persuading the War Department to fire the agents, he made himself the target of the agents’ friends in the administration and in Congress.
Houston’s visit to the East rekindled his interest in the larger world, reminding him, among other things, of how much more capable he was than many who held positions of public preferment. Traveling through Tennessee en route back west, he surveyed the political landscape and sized up Billy Carroll, the man who had succeeded him at the top of the state’s politics. “My honest belief is that if I would again return to Tennessee I would beat him for governor,” Houston confided to a friend. But the memories of Nashville and Eliza were too painful, especially when Carroll’s allies revived them around the state as a way of warning Houston off. He halfheartedly defended himself against the renewed attacks, but, discovering that this merely afforded the slanders longer life, he finally threw up his hands in exasperation and posted a notice in Nashville’s leading newspaper: “Know all men by these presents that I, Sam Houston, ‘late Governor of the State of Tennessee,’ do hereby declare to all scoundrels whomsoever, that they are authorized to accuse, defame, calumniate, slander, vilify, and libel me to any extent.”
Convinced that he couldn’t return to Tennessee, Houston sought a new arena for his abilities. Texas had been on his mind since the 1820s, when he had invested in the colonizing efforts of Robert Leftwich. Upon fleeing Nashville amid the ruin of his marriage and his former life, he was reported to have boasted, drunkenly no doubt, that he would “conquer Mexico or Texas, and be worth two millions in two years.” Subsequently he was said to have sought support for an expedition against Texas, perhaps manned by his Cherokee friends.
Yet for three years Houston’s Texas vision was nothing more than talk. To be sure, the talk alone was enough to cause Jackson to warn Houston against filibustering. Jackson was trying to negotiate the purchase of Texas from Mexico; discussions weren’t going well, but Jackson understood that anything that smacked of extra-diplomatic pressure would make them go worse. “It has been communicated to me that you had the illegal enterprise in view of conquering Texas, that you had declared that you would, in less than two years, be emperor of that country by conquest,” the president wrote Houston. “I must really have thought you deranged to have believed you had so wild a scheme in contemplation, and particularly when it was communicated that the physical force to be employed was the Cherokee Indians. Indeed, my dear sir, I cannot believe you have any such chimerical visionary scheme in view. Your pledge of honor to the contrary is a sufficient guarantee that you will never engage in any enterprise injurious to your country that would tarnish your fame.”
Houston, suitably chastened, gave the required pledge and put Texas temporarily out of his mind. But despite two years of trying, Jackson made no progress toward the purchase of Texas. The president gradually discovered what every president through James Polk would learn: that no Mexican government could even consider selling Texas without jeopardizing its own existence. From the American perspective this appeared irrational: Mexico had made nothing of Texas so far and showed little promise of doing better in the future. The United States was offering gold for what was causing Mexico only grief. But Mexicans—following the lead of Manuel de Mier y Terán—wrapped Texas in the context of their revolution; to relinquish Texas would be to admit that the revolution had failed. No Mexican government was willing to make that admission.
In any event, during the latter part of his first term, Jackson began to consider alternative means of acquiring Texas. Houston’s ambitions had clearly revived, and he was champing for action in a larger field than Indian affairs. Indeed, his champing had grown embarrassingly public. On a return visit by Houston to Washington, William Stanberry, an anti-Jackson congressman from Ohio, had mischievously impugned Houston’s honor as a way of attacking the president. Houston sent Stanberry a note preparatory to issuing a formal challenge; after Stanberry refused to receive the note, Houston assaulted him with a cane (appropriately fashioned of hickory) on Pennsylvania Avenue. Stanberry responded to the blows by producing a pistol, which he aimed at Houston’s chest and tried to fire. But the flint spark failed to ignite the powder, and the misfire additionally enraged Houston, who delivered several more blows about Stanberry’s head and shoulders before finishing with one aimed below the belt that—in the decorous testimony of an eyewitness—“struck him elsewhere.”
Now it was Stanberry’s turn to feel aggrieved. The congressman brought charges against Houston in the House of Representatives, which vo
ted to arrest the former member from Tennessee for breaching the rule that held members of Congress free from liability for words spoken on the legislative floor. The trial became a sensation, with Houston, although represented by Francis Scott Key (author of “The Star-Spangled Banner”), carrying the burden of his own defense. By Houston’s later recollection, Jackson called him to the White House and declared angrily, “It’s not you they are after, Sam; those thieves, those infernal bank thieves, they wish to injure your old commander.” Giving him some money to buy a new suit of clothes for the trial, Jackson continued, “When you make your defense, tell those infernal bank thieves, who talk about privileges, that when an American citizen is insulted by one of them, he also has some privileges.” (Jackson had “bank thieves” on the brain at this time, for he was engaged in a bitter struggle to disincorporate the Bank of the United States, which he considered an illegitimate bastion of moneyed privilege.)
Preparing his case till far into the night before the trial opened, Houston drank even more than he was recently used to. He summoned a bellboy and told the lad to wake a barber and send him in. “When he came I told him to bring me a cup of coffee at sunrise and his shaving traps,” Houston later recalled. “Opening a drawer, I said, do you see this purse of gold and this pistol? If the coffee does not stick when I drink it”—that is, if it failed to wake and sober him—“take the pistol and shoot me, and the gold is yours.” The coffee stuck, however, and Houston made an impassioned defense of his conduct. He couldn’t well deny that he had attacked Stanberry, so he pled extenuating circumstances, starting with the egregious insult to his honor and including Stanberry’s refusal to meet him in a manly duel. Houston cited precedents, legal and political; he quoted poetry (“I seek no sympathies nor need/The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree/I planted; they have torn me, and I bleed”); he drew upon the wisdom of the ancients; he reminded his auditors of his honorable service under the flag of his country. “So long as that flag shall bear aloft its glittering stars,” he concluded (in imagery perhaps influenced by Key), “bearing them amidst the din of battle and waving them triumphantly above the storms of the ocean, so long, I trust, shall the rights of American citizens be preserved safe and unimpaired, and transmitted as a sacred legacy from one generation to another, till discord shall wreck the spheres—the grand march of time shall cease—and not one fragment of all creation be left to chafe on the bosom of eternity’s waves.”
