The American Future

by Simon Schama

  That was what Andrew Jackson, the old Democrat frontiersman from Tennessee (as he advertised himself), wanted, pushing the United States further into the transcontinental destiny that Jefferson had charted. But Jackson left office in 1837, having declined to push the annexation issue. Perhaps this was because, for all the heroics on which his reputation had been founded in the 1812 war against the British, Jackson flinched before another war on two fronts: against Britain over the northern boundary of Oregon, and against Mexico over Texas. There was, after all, no regular American army of any size, a volunteer force was an unknown quantity, the militia were a crapshoot, and the West Point officer corps were mostly engineers. The Mexican government had never accepted the separation of Texas as legitimate and had made it clear that any annexation would be taken as an act of war, so the old man held off. Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren, was still more cautious, not least because the story of Texas had now become inextricably linked with the fate of slavery in the Union. Annexation of Texas or resistance to it became a proxy rehearsal for the Civil War. Another president, John Tyler, a slaveholder, wanted to take the state to protect and enlarge slavery within the Union. For the same reason, abolitionists like the ex-president John Quincy Adams (John Adams’s son) were against it for what it would do to the United States overall.

  Enter, at this critical juncture around 1840, the real joker in the pack: imperial Britain. In London, an international antislavery convention had been addressed by no less an eminence than Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, and featured a heavy presence of America’s most fervent abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Weld. Seven years before, in 1833, Parliament had abolished slavery throughout the empire, and the Royal Navy was now enforcing the law on the slaving coast of Africa, apprehending slavers and liberating their human cargoes. All this was taken by the politicians of the American South like John C. Calhoun as a profoundly hostile act against the United States. Beneath the sanctimonious self-righteousness, the real goal of British strategy, they judged, was the sabotage of the American economy. The growth of an Atlantic republic, destined to become a competitor for the global riches and power enjoyed by Britain, had to be nipped in the bud. Statesmen like Jackson looked at the map, knew what they knew about the selectively righteous British, and felt the nip from a pincer movement, an expansive Canada to the north and a British satellite to the south.

  With the arrival of the Man in the White Hat (as he was known) in Galveston on the Gulf of Mexico in 1842, this scenario could no longer be dismissed as neurotic fantasy. Charles Elliott embodied everything that American nationalism feared and despised: Machiavellian opportunism dressed up as Victorian liberalism and polished with a patina of understated charm. After a promising career in the Royal Navy Elliott had become official Protector of Slaves on the Guinea coast. In China he had attempted to end both the Opium War and the opium trade by negotiations with imperial commissioners, a reasonable course that won him the enmity of the traders but also the possession of Hong Kong. Now he was chargé d’affaires to the Texan republic and rapidly became close with both its former and present presidents, Sam Houston and Anson Jones. Elliott’s proposal was that Britain should broker a peace directly between Mexico and the Texan republic in which the former would accept the latter’s independence, on condition of annexation to the United States being ruled out. Thus Britain could pose as peacemaker while sticking its finger in the eye of American expansionism and, doubtless, getting the usual considerations of trade and port facilities that it had exacted in South America and the China Sea. Galveston would be Hong Kong on the Gulf, and before you knew it, there would be clippers and docks, schools, limestone churches, and a decent little opera house, and vaqueros from Yorkshire would pause from branding the steers to sip a refreshing cup of tea. From the Texan side, such a deal was not altogether to be precluded, since a Mexican army of 30,000 was ready to march, while an American army was not, at least not yet, mobilized. Anson Jones heard Elliott out and extended the dalliance even in the face of most Texan Americans, who were hot for union.

  Congress was faced with a double disaster. A permanently independent Texas, guaranteed by Britain, Mexico, and possibly France as well, would turn into an American nightmare: a home for runaway slaves in which the likes of Charles Elliott could wave the flag of Christian humanitarianism, creating a refuge even more subversive than Canada because closer to the southern heartland. Worse still, it was rumored that German farmers were growing cotton on the Rio Grande without benefit of slaves so that an alternative source of the raw material might be available to British manufacturers. The economic empire of the British would have suddenly acquired a stupendous strategic extension, running all the way from southern Oregon down through the Rockies to the Santa Fe Trail and on via the Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico. Everything that Britain had lost in 1783 might be recovered sixty years later. On the British side there was a good deal of jolly hand-rubbing. Who cared about Delaware when British California was in the offing?

  From his hermitage near Nashville, the ailing Jackson saw the British threat with chilling clarity. Suddenly Elliott’s personal history—prosecutor of slave traders and China hand—all became part of a devilish British plot to seize, in all but formal title, not just the Gulf of Mexico but the American Pacific! Already, Chinese and Japanese trade and markets were seen as a long-term prize of immeasurable value. A race was on, as Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s victorious opponent for the Senate seat of Illinois, put it, “for the maritime ascendancy of these waters.” Had the frontier, the engine of American history, consumed so much time, so many lives in the move west along the Oregon Trail only to be headed off at the pass to California by the damnable old foe, Britain? A year before he died Jackson warned that to sit still in the face of British geo-economic political designs on the Texas-California territories would be to submit to an “iron hoop” locked about the neck of the American future that would “cost oceans of blood to burst asunder.”

  But 1844 was an election year, and James K. Polk, a small-town lawyer from Jackson’s Tennessee, was running as Old Hickory’s protégé and heir; the flag-waver of nationalist Democrats, committed to the annexation of Texas. The British gambit, which had been meant to give the American war hawks pause, had the opposite effect, injecting into the campaign and public debate a note of unprecedentedly fierce nationalist zeal, voiced even by those, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, who had no sympathy for the slave-owning South. Emerson could not have been happy that in February 1845 Congress passed a resolution admitting Texas to the Union (signed by President Tyler in the last week of his term), leaving the matter of slavery to the Texans themselves. In August 1845, local Texan conventions designed to set the seal on annexation adopted an article in their own constitution forbidding any act of emancipation without the consent of slave owners and mandating compensation to them for any losses. But, Emerson may have reasoned, that decision might still be reversed. The paramount fact was the steam-driven locomotion of American history pointing south and west right across the continent. In an overexcited speech at the Boston Mercantile Library in 1844, Emerson called on the “Young American” to embrace the “sublime and Friendly Destiny” of the nation. “The bountiful continent is ours,” Emerson proclaimed, “state on state, territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea.” If biting off half of Mexico, digesting Hispanic America into the system of Anglo-America were the way for that destiny to be accomplished, so be it. For then the slumbering sombrero despotisms of that world would be awakened by the rough kiss of industrial democracy. Roll the Conestoga wagons (3,000 were on their way west to Oregon as Emerson spoke), sound the bugles, hitch up the caboose!

  The campaign season that ended up electing President Polk and the first year of his term stirred the press into a lather of nationalist elation, in which the weighty phrase “manifest destiny” was heard for the first time. John Louis O’Sullivan, who published Whitman and Emerson, among others
, in his Democratic Review, took umbrage against British interference, intended as it was to check “the fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” He and his cowriter, the remarkable woman journalist (and Texas land speculator) Jane McManus Storm, would repeat the phrase like a mantra until it became an almost obligatory item in the democrat-nationalist repertoire. Writing in both the penny paper the New York Sun (where, at the age of thirty-nine, she became national news editor) and the Democratic Review, Storm and O’Sullivan may well have reached a readership of quarter of a million readers and in July 1845 simply ordered the opposition to Texan annexation to desist. “It is at last time for common sense to acquiesce with decent grace to the inevitable and the irrecoverable. Texas is now ours.” For O’Sullivan, the moment was all about the demographic future of America. Texas, California, and New Mexico had to be part of the United States, because the population of the nation would swell to no less than 250 million, dwarfing the decrepit empires of the Old World. And when O’Sullivan and Storm thought of that immense population they certainly did not have a “swarthy” hue in mind. The West would be white.

  But neither Storm nor O’Sullivan wished to accomplish this act of territorial incorporation through war. Although the Mexican government had broken off diplomatic relations after the American declaration of annexation, Polk had sent an emissary to Mexico City in December 1845 to propose assuming Mexican debts in return for their consenting to the annexation of Texas, and further proposed buying California and New Mexico. The advance groundwork had not been well prepared. A fiercely conservative government had just come to power in Mexico, took the purchase offer as insulting, and buried any earlier thoughts of letting Texas go. Storm suspected Polk of bad faith in that he had sent his agent knowing full well he would be spurned, thus giving the president a pretext for hostilities. Writing in the New York Sun under the byline of “Cora Montgomery” that she would use as war correspondent, she denounced the “class of politicians that are anxious to bathe the country in blood to win notoriety and office for themselves.” She and O’Sullivan wanted it both ways: maximum territorial expansion with minimum casualties. Having urged everyone forward, O’Sullivan now skidded to a halt. “We are,” he wrote in May 1846, “on the threshold of a long, troublesome, destructive and expensive war.”

  Polk and his gung-ho secretary of the treasury, the Mississippian champion of slavery Robert J. Walker, were undeterred. Affronted by the additional threat to California, the Mexicans had declared that the issue would be settled by arms, and Polk was only too happy to oblige. A call went out to “Young America” for 75,000 volunteers. Enormous numbers enlisted, especially from the southern and Appalachian states. The veteran General Zachary Taylor was ordered into territory between the Nueces River (hitherto accepted as the Texan boundary) and the Rio Grande, which the United States now claimed to be its southern frontier. There he was attacked by a Mexican force, providing Polk in his declaration of war with the justification that “American blood had been shed on American soil.” It took a young Abraham Lincoln, brave to the point of foolhardiness, to point out that as far as the Mexicans were concerned land up to the Nueces was indisputably theirs, and thus it was they, and not the United States, who could consider themselves the victims of invasion.

  No one ever accused Abraham Lincoln of running after popularity. For many of the young soldiers, from the new immigrants of Massachusetts to Kentucky farmers, the battles were their own proving ground as well as a triumphant demonstration of the racial superiority of Anglo-America over the “mongrel” breed of the Mexicans. Their technology-driven society manufactured the guns which, at the battle of Palo Alto on the Texan chaparral, could outload and outshoot the Mexicans by three to one. The outcome, the thunderers back at home insisted, was inevitable, a contest of unequal races. Whiteness, Protestantism, and superior technology were all interconnected even though no one could give a coherent explanation as to how.

  The converse, though, Americans thought, was self-evident. The Mexicans were bound to lose, wrote James Gordon Bennett in the New York Herald, because of the “imbecility and degradation” of their people due to “the amalgamation of races.” But what was good for the war might yet prove bad for the peace. When Mexico City surrendered to General Winfield Scott, and his officers and men took a good look around at what and whom they had conquered, the popularization of the idea that the “mongrel” mestizo race had succumbed to the racially superior army from the north generated an especially ugly debate between territorial maximalists who thought History beckoned the United States to swallow the entirety of Mexico, and the racial purists who saw this as inviting the infection of miscegenation into the pure body of Anglo-America. It was all very well for troops to amuse themselves in cantinas with black-eyed senoritas in their beguiling décolletage (about which soldiers wrote with the compulsive mock-prurience of the guiltily aroused). It was quite another to expose white America to the Mexican lasciviousness that would be its undoing. Sex and priesthood played darkly (often in the same sentence) on American minds. Lieutenant Ralph Kirkham, who was with Scott’s army in Mexico City, wrote to his wife in New England: “I suppose there is no nation on earth where there is so much wickedness and vice of all kinds…instances are common of men selling their wives and daughters. The clergy, generally, are very immoral and ready to stoop to the very lowest acts of villainy and wickedness.” So although there was an influential body of opinion, both in Congress and the press, in favor of annexing the entirety of Mexico, the guardians of race, for whom America was Anglo-Saxon or nothing, warned of dire cultural consequences. John C. Calhoun, the most militant defender of the rights of the slave states, was adamant in his opposition to all-Mexico annexation. Latin America’s sorry condition, he thought (not entirely accurately), was precisely its peculiar habit of “placing these coloured men on an equality with the white race.” Why would the United States import such an error into its own social constitution? “Ours, sir, is the government of the white race.”

  Then there were the political consequences to be considered, given that the peace treaty conferred the same rights, including the right to vote, on any Tejanos opting to remain in the newest territories of the Union. An old ranger encountered by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (the man who with the Englishman Calvert Vaux would create New York’s Central Park) during a “saddlebag” reporting trip to Texas in 1854 for the New York Daily Times spoke for many: “Mexico! What the hell do we want of it? It isn’t worth a cuss. The people are as bigoted and ignorant as the devil’s children. They haven’t even the capacities of my black boy…You go any further into Mexico with surveyors’ chains, you’ll get Mexicans along with your territory and a damned lot of ’em too. What are you going to do with ’em? You can’t drive ’em out because there ain’t nowhere to drive ’em. No sir, there they’ve got to stay and it’ll be fifty years before you can outvote them.” Polk might almost have been listening to the ranger. When peace terms were imposed on Mexico, more or less at gunpoint, lopping away half its territory, he made sure it was the half with the least Mexicans in it.

  Voices were raised in dissent at this spectacular increase in American land, a stretch of territory that took in not only California, New Mexico and what would be Arizona, but also large areas of Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and Wyoming. They were precious few, but the penetration of their fury went beyond the poverty of their numbers. Lincoln’s sarcasm at the transparent hypocrisy by which the United States had made its casus belli was matched by the smoke going up from beside the placid banks of Walden Pond. “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today?” asked Henry David Thoreau. “I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it…when…a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to milit
ary law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionise. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country overrun is not our own but ours is the invading army.”

  As has often been said, at the time when Hispanic America became Anglo-America, Mexicans did not cross borders; the borders crossed them. The question, after the war, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, setting the southern boundary of the United States at the Rio Grande, was whether or not those who had been Mexican and were now American would be treated with all the rights of citizenship formally promised them. But even before the treaty was ratified there were ominous indicators. Article X, which protected older Mexican land titles, was stricken from the treaty by the United States Senate lest it put in question the later claims of Anglo-Americans made during the period of the Texan republic. To pacify Mexican anxieties, Secretary of State James Buchanan told his counterparts that if there were valid titles they would always be upheld in American courts. To revive ancient and specious claims against settlers who bought property, said Buchanan, would be “an act of wanton cruelty.” Nonetheless those former Mexicans who remained in the ceded territories—and there were tens of thousands of them—were promised “all the rights of citizens of the United States.”

  What ensued of course was grimly predictable: the force of conquest imposed on a helpless people; the same that had occurred during the Texas republic only more so: evictions, dispossessions, physical intimidation, lynchings. Mexican cartmen were attacked by gangs of masked armed men who meant to ensure that Anglos would have a monopoly of the local carrying trade. When the numbers of those killed in the “cartman wars” rose to seventy-five, the Mexican Embassy in Washington made a formal protest and the secretary of state wrote a stiff letter to Governor Pease of Texas about the “violations of rights guaranteed under the law” and urging “energetic measures to punish the aggressors.”