The Fabric of America (32 page)

Their revolt against the dictatorial rule of General Antonio de Santa Anna was not just about democracy but about slavery. In 1829 the government of Vicente Guerrero had fulfilled the promise made in Mexico's Declaration of Independence and declared all slaves to be free. Mexico's loose confederate structure enabled the slave-owning Americans in Texas to ignore the ban at first. Then Santa Anna reformed the constitution so that power was centralized in Mexico City and in 1833 issued a decree banning further immigration of American settlers to Texas, while requiring slaves there to be set free. Thus the siege of the Alamo and Sam Houston's defeat of Santa Anna in 1836 were triggered by the need to defend not just Texans' liberty but their property in people.

The independent republic of Texas stretched as far north as modern Wyoming, an immense territory two thirds the size of the Louisiana Purchase. When the proposal to include this gigantic, slave-owning state within the frontier of the United States began to be considered seriously in the 1840s, it presented an immediate challenge to the delicate balance of the Missouri Compromise.

The risks might have been thought too great but for the remarkable change in the south's attitude toward slavery as a system. In reaction to the Missouri Compromise, southern leaders began to identify the institution with the south's way of life, while religious figures such as the Reverend Richard Furman of the South Carolina Baptists offered the defense that even the early apostles had deemed slavery “lawful and right.” By 1830, the end of the south's lingering embarrassment was signaled by a speech from Calhoun praising slavery as “a great political institution, essential to the peace and existence of one-half this Union.”

The change was driven by the sheer scale of the slave economy growing up in the new states of the deep south. It simply defied apology. Although the economic depression caused by Jacksonian economics reduced output briefly, the value of cotton exports bounced back to reach more than $120 million a year by the 1850s—about 54 percent of the total of all exports— creating a financial bonanza that stretched far beyond the deep south. Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina grew rich supplying slaves for the
cotton fields farther south. Philadelphia, New York, and Boston profited from financing the slave economy, and the cotton factories of England earned fortunes for their owners.

The one economic obstacle to the continuation of the “peculiar institution” came from the very success that had driven the price of a slave to $750 in 1845 and would soon send it above $1,000. Yet the rise in value only reinforced slavery's unchallengeable position. The south's three million slaves represented a $2.75 billion investment—more than ten times the total capital invested in northern manufacture. To question the morality of such a gigantic property was, as Mississippi's declaration of secession would later put it, “to strike a blow at commerce and civilization.”

Even to an antislavery visitor, the sight of a Louisiana cotton plantation was impressive. “The fields are as level and regular as gardens,” wrote Timothy Flint. “They sometimes contain three or four thousand acres in
one
field; and I have seen from
a dozen to twenty
ploughs, all making their straight furrows through a field a mile in depth, with a regularity which, it would be supposed, could be obtained only by a line.”

At the dawn of the industrial era, such plantations could easily be compared to large-scale factory production. Southern spokesmen made the comparison with increasing frequency to present their system as one of relative humanity. Unlike the system of hired labor that overworked some and left the old and weak to starve, wrote William J. Grayson in
The Hireling and the Slave
, “Slavery makes all work, and it insures homes, food, and clothing for all. It permits no idleness, and it provides for sickness, infancy and old age…There is no such thing with slavery as a laborer for whom nobody cares or provides.”

This growing confidence in slavery as an acceptable institution, as well as a source of profits, helped persuade the majority of southern politicians in the 1840s that the frontier of the United States should be extended again to annex the independent republic of Texas. Mexico's announcement that it would regard annexation as a hostile act was positively welcomed as an excuse to enclose still more territory within the American frontier.

Urgency was added to the situation by Britain's decision to recognize Texas as an independent state, and to push for abolition of slavery within its frontiers. According to an alarmist report from Ashbel Smith, Texas's representative to Britain, the plan was to create a free-labor zone in Texas, “a
refuge for runaway slaves from the United States, and eventually a negro nation…to be more or less, according to circumstances, under the protection of the British Government.”

The tipping point came with the popularity of James Polk's expansionist program in the presidential election of 1844, calling for the annexation of Texas and the seizure of the Oregon Country. Deciding that the risk of war with Mexico was worth taking, President John Tyler and his secretary of state, John Calhoun, introduced legislation to annex Texas. To reduce opposition from the north, Texas agreed to relinquish all territory north of 36 degrees 30 minutes. With the addition of this new territory, the U.S. frontier would be pushed almost one thousand miles farther west from the Sabine River to the Rio Grande. This was what Andrew Jackson called “extending the area of freedom.”

The tragedy of John Quincy Adams's life was that he lived to see his dream come true. The thin confederation of Atlantic states of his childhood had more than doubled its size while he was still in his prime. He himself then extended it across the continent to the Pacific, and by 1848, the year of his death, the frontier enclosed Oregon and California, Texas and New Mexico, and everything in between. What made this tragic was the gap between his dreams of what the United States stood for and the reality of its power being used to further the ends of slave owners. Freedom had expanded, but slavery had spread with it step by step, and he had connived the deal. In his diary he agonized about his role in which, as his grandson Henry Adams observed in a memoir written toward the end of the century, the great statesman had become “a tool of the slave oligarchy (especially about Florida).”

For almost twenty years following his defeat by Andrew Jackson in 1828, Adams represented Massachusetts in Congress, and there, at least partly to expiate the aid he had given the pro-slavery forces, he became the spokesman, and often sole representative in the House, of the antislavery movement.

“He never rebelled,” Henry Adams said disparagingly, “until the slave oligarchy contemptuously cut his throat.” Yet when he did rebel, he proved unshakable in the face of overwhelming, bitter hostility and a long campaign even to keep slavery from being mentioned in Congress. He began by presenting petitions that called for the immediate freeing of slaves in the District of Columbia, where the Congress had direct responsibility. But when pro-slavery representatives introduced the infamous “gag rules” to ban any discussion of slavery on the grounds that it stirred up insurrectionary ideas among slaves, Adams made stubborn and skillful use of House rules to have the subject talked about on every possible occasion. When his opponents tried to censure him, he used his right of self-defense to filibuster for two weeks about the iniquities of slavery and promised to talk another week until they withdrew the censure motion. Adams, said a Virginia congressman, was “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of southern slavery that ever existed.”

John Quincy Adams in 1847, by Mathew Brady

What made his stance so unpopular was that by common consent most people who disliked slavery felt it right to censor themselves for fear of agitating the slaves. Southern leaders blamed each of the uprisings, planned or actual, of Gabriel in 1800, Denmark Vesey in 1822, and Nat Turner in 1831
on the resentment stirred up by criticism of the system or the propaganda of abolitionists, as though left to themselves slaves would gladly accept the paternalist care of their owners. To insulate slaves against infection from the north, the states' legislation against teaching them to read was rigorously enforced. By implication, the few outright abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison were deemed to be plotting the murder of whites. “Are abolitionists doing the work of God?” demanded South Carolina's James Hammond. “No! God is not there. It is the work of Satan.”

The furious hostility of the south to any breath of censure silenced many more. Adams routinely received death threats, Harriet Martineau, a pioneering English sociologist who toured the United States in the late 1830s, was told: “They would hang me: they would cut my tongue out, and cast it on a dunghill; and so forth.” Elijah Lovejoy, an antislavery Illinois newspaperman, was in fact lynched, and in St. Louis, Missouri, Francis McIntosh, a free black, was burned alive merely for being suspected of abolitionist sympathies.

The threat of financial loss silenced others. “There are millions upon millions of dollars due from Southerners to the merchants and mechanics of this city,” a New York businessman warned one antislaver, “the payment of which would be jeopardized by any rupture between the North and the South.” Even to discuss something as upsetting as slavery was regarded as rude. “Every liberty, personal and social,” Martineau wrote, “was sacrificed in the attempt to enforce silence on that one sore subject.”

Against that background, Adams's solitary courage stood out. His opposition to the annexation of Texas was equally fierce and unforgiving. With freezing accuracy he predicted that the advocates of annexation wanted more than Texas, they wanted war with Mexico.

“What will be your
cause
in such a war?” he demanded harshly in Congress. “Aggression, conquest, and 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.”

Annexation did make conflict with Mexico inevitable. As a young lieutenant in the U.S. army, Ulysses S. Grant saw at first hand how a dispute over Texas's border with Mexico was manufactured by American commanders into a skirmish with Mexican forces in which eleven American lives
were lost. Looking back at the incident in his sixties, Grant stated squarely, “The occupation, separation and annexation [of Texas] were a conspiracy, to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.”

The brilliant bloodless Tennessean, James Polk, brought about the annexation, created the cause of war, and thereby enclosed almost half of Mexico within the U.S. frontier. In his 1844 presidential campaign he promised to acquire California and Oregon, to reduce tariffs, and create an independent Treasury. His success in achieving all four goals reflects his formidable ability, unmatched by any other antebellum president except Jackson, to weld the southern-dominated arms of federal power, judiciary, and legislature into an instrument of the executive. Polk's administration became, in Adams's acrid phrase, “a military monarchy.”

The Mexican-American War ended in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, just before Adams's death. Its cost to the United States, beyond $15 million in compensation for war damage, was the destruction of the Missouri Compromise and the closer approach of Civil War, and, as the twenty-first century has revealed, the creation of a frontier that challenges the values of the United States. The questions posed by Polk's imperial legacy do not go away.

Against Polk's formidable war machine, Adams had found one unexpected ally. The more extreme of Polk's supporters wanted a victorious United States to annex all of Mexico and push its frontiers as far south as the Nicaraguan border. To John Calhoun, the high priest of slavery, this presented an unacceptable risk. “We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race,” he told the Senate. “To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind, of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.”

Like so many of Calhoun's pronouncements, this was an entirely logical deduction, but one based on the premise that the guarantees afforded to property and to individual freedom by the Constitution applied only to white males. So long as that concept of liberty as an exclusive privilege prevailed, it was possible to believe that other races stood at a lower, less free level, and that African-Americans in particular were destined for no better
fate than to be the property of free white males. Up to eighty thousand Mexicans were brought within the new frontier—“We didn't cross the border,” their descendants would say more than a century later, “the border crossed us”—creating another group somewhere below the whites. “Nothing can be more unfounded and false,” Calhoun stated flatly, “than the opinion that all men are born free and equal; inequality is indispensable to progress.”