Lone Star Nation (23 page)

Manuel de Mier y Terán couldn't decide which was more discouraging: the revolt of the Texans or the revolt of Santa Anna. Not that he had to choose, for during that unsettled season they appeared to be woven of a single red thread of insurgency. But for a soldier who had devoted two decades of his life to establishing Mexican independence and defending its integrity, the trend of events was deeply disturbing.

In a world that was changing by the day, Terán often felt he was the only one keeping the faith. “I am not engaged in this fight on behalf of the ministers,” he wrote at a critical moment for the centralists, “but on behalf of constitutional government. Neither did I enter it to be able to name government officials when it is over, but rather to put down rebellion in the territory under my command. I have worked and will work to that end.” And what did he get for holding fast? The enmity of almost everyone. “I have come to be, as you will see, the target of the revolution,” he told his brother.

From the village of Padilla, Terán wrote to Lucas Alamán, the government official to whom he was closest, lamenting the sad condition to which their country had fallen. “A great and respectable Mexican nation, a nation of which we have dreamed and for which we have labored so long, can never emerge from the many disasters which have overtaken it. We have allowed ourselves to be deceived by the ambitions of selfish groups; and now we are about to lose the northern provinces.”

Terán saw no way back from the precipice. “What is to become of Texas?” he asked—once, and again, and again in this letter. And each answer only varied the theme of loss and blame. “How could we expect to hold Texas when we do not even agree among ourselves? It is a gloomy state of affairs. If we could work together, we would advance. As it is, we are lost.”

Terán sought solace in an early love, his study of nature. “This morning dawned diaphanous, radiant, beautiful,” he wrote on July 2. “The sky was blue; the trees green; the birds were bursting with joy; the river crystalline; the flowers yellow, making drops of dew shine in their calyces. Everything pulsed with life; everything gave evident signs that the breath of God had reached nature. In contrast to these, the village of Padilla is alone and apathetic, with its houses in ruin and its thick ashen adobe walls.” Terán felt himself condemned to the ashes of this earth, though his spirit longed for that higher, better realm. “My soul is burdened with weariness. I am an unhappy man, and unhappy people should not live on earth. I have studied this situation for five years”—since receiving responsibility for Texas—“and today I know nothing, nothing, for man is very despicable and small, and—let us put an end to these reflections, for they almost drive me mad. The revolution is about to break forth, and Texas is lost.”

It was more than a man could bear. “Immortality! God! The soul! What does all this mean? Well, then, I believe in it all, but why does man not have the right to put aside his misery and his pains? Why should he be eternally chained to an existence which is unpleasant to him? And this spirit which inspires, which fills my mind with ideas—where will it go? Let us see, now: the spirit is uncomfortable, it commands me to set it free, and it is necessary to obey. Here is the end of human glory and the termination of ambition.” Again Terán asked, “What is to become of Texas?” And now he knew the answer: “What God wills.”

The next morning—in another diaphanous dawn, with blue sky and green trees and singing birds and dew on the yellow flowers—Terán stood beside the ashen walls of the church of San Antonio de Padilla. Placing the handle of his sword against one of the adobe bricks and the tip against his heart, he fell forward and took his life.

C h a p t e r   9

A Conspiracy of Volunteers

A
bout the time the triumphant Santa Anna was entering Mexico City in early 1833, Andrew Jackson faced a revolt in his own country that, if currently less violent than the one Santa Anna headed, threatened gross bloodshed before long. The revolt centered in South Carolina, where opponents of a federal tariff approved in 1828 had been trying to prevent its collection. Citing such precedents as the American resistance to the Stamp Act of 1765, which started the chain of events leading to the American Revolution, and the opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which helped drive John Adams and the Federalists from power, the South Carolinians developed a doctrine of “nullification,” by which states might prevent enforcement of federal laws they found to be unconstitutional. Jackson had no personal investment in the “tariff of abominations,” as its opponents called the measure passed during John Quincy Adams's last year in office, and as a westerner and a political heir of Thomas Jefferson, he was thought to be a states' rights man. But he was also president of the United States, and he took most seriously the threat that nullification posed to the Union. The logic of nullification pointed to secession, a prospect some of the nullifiers openly brandished.

The nullification struggle prompted an outpouring of rhetoric in the Senate, where Robert Hayne of South Carolina embraced nullification and secession as prerogatives of the states. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts answered Hayne in a speech that entered the annals of American oratory and ended with a ringing defense of the Union: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”

The debate continued at a Jefferson's Birthday dinner, an annual event for the party that included both the president and nearly all the nullifiers. The regular highlight of the evening was the series of toasts, the dozens of short speeches on topics of current interest. Robert Hayne cited the glorious resistance of Jefferson and the state of Virginia to the Alien and Sedition Acts, and concluded, “The Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States!”

All eyes and ears turned to Jackson, and strained to catch the president's response. Jackson was no orator, and his voice lacked the full-throated power of the Haynes and Websters of the day, but when he spoke the force of his will came through unmistakably. “Our Union,” he declared:
“It must be preserved!”

The president's statement produced an uproar at the dinner and shudders around the country. A showdown with the nullifiers loomed. Several days later, a congressman from South Carolina visited the White House. The president was polite, as always, but utterly determined. When the visitor asked if Jackson had any message for the citizens of South Carolina—who by now knew all about Jackson's toast—the president replied, “Yes, I have. Please give my compliments to my friends in your state, and say to them that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.”

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, and 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.