What Hath God Wrought (101 page)

The Democratic convention, meeting later the same month, also in Baltimore, provided much more excitement and surprise. Ex-president Van Buren controlled a majority of the delegates but not the two-thirds Democratic rules customarily required. His support turned out to be soft. Senator Robert Walker persuaded some of Van Buren’s delegates to join the South in backing reimposition of the two-thirds rule.
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Lewis Cass of Michigan, who as Jackson’s secretary of war had taken charge of Indian Removal, embraced Texas annexation and parlayed this and strident Anglophobia into a serious challenge to Van Buren. After eight ballots the two were running neck and neck. Calhoun and his followers sat in attendance, but ready to walk out and into the Tyler convention meeting across the street if they didn’t get an acceptable Democratic nominee. Despite Cass’s enthusiasm for Texas, the Calhounites wanted a real southern slaveholder. They opted for James Knox Polk of Tennessee, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, who had been angling for the second spot on Van Buren’s ticket and who had now replaced the New Yorker as Andrew Jackson’s protégé. A cabal consisting of Gideon Pillow, Benjamin Butler, and George Bancroft (who, improbably, was both an eminent historical scholar and a political wheeler-dealer) offered Polk to the convention as a way out, to prevent a Cass–Van Buren deadlock, and the delegates stampeded for him. Not having been regarded as a presidential candidate during the preceding months, Polk was the first “dark horse” candidate to win a nomination. Polk had remained technically loyal to Van Buren, and he supported an Independent Treasury. Yet on the expansion issue Polk represented, not a compromise, but an even more ambitious imperialism than Cass. After most of the tired delegates had gone home, the convention adopted a platform containing (along with the standard Democratic positions on strict construction, banking, and congressional noninterference with slavery) the following dramatic plank:

The Calhounites felt delighted with the outcome. “We have triumphed,” Francis Pickens of South Carolina gloated. “Polk is nearer to
us
than any public man who was named. He is a large Slave holder & plants cotton—
free trade
—Texas—States rights
out & out
.”
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Polk even obligingly promised to serve but one term, so Calhoun could continue to nurture his own obsessive presidential ambition.
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Robert Walker, one of the most influential southern leaders at the convention, had phrased the new plank in the Democratic platform shrewdly. To appeal to the North, it seemed to place more emphasis on Oregon than on Texas. It spoke of “re-occupation” and “re-annexation.” The terms implied that the United States once enjoyed clear title to all of Oregon and Texas but had foolishly agreed to the joint occupation of the former in 1818 and surrendered the latter altogether in the Florida treaty of 1819. Expansionist Democrats claimed Texas had been included in the Louisiana Purchase and blamed John Quincy Adams for relinquishing it to Spain. Adams responded that Monroe had instructed him to do so, and that furthermore Andrew Jackson had been consulted and had consented to the boundary then drawn. Jackson indignantly denied this, and the two ex-presidents exchanged bitter recriminations. The historical record vindicates Adams’s memory rather than Jackson’s.
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By now, Jackson had removed any cloak from his aggressive imperialism. The enfeebled hero lay terminally ill at the Hermitage, but the letters he scratched out breathed his old fire against old enemies, the British and the abolitionists who stood in his way. Since Van Buren had come out against immediate annexation, Jackson wrote off his former favorite and called upon the Democratic Party to nominate someone else.
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Although Jackson could not bring himself to admit it, his stance in 1844 aligned him with, of all people, John C. Calhoun. After the convention, Old Hickory rallied his faltering energies to endorse his Tennessee friend Polk and Texas. “Obtain it the United States must, peaceably if we can, but forcibly if we must,” Jackson instructed. Polk, proud of his nickname “Young Hickory,” took the old man’s admonition to heart.
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Mississippi’s Robert Walker presented the case on behalf of Texas annexation for northern audiences. Walker may have composed this remarkable statement originally at John Tyler’s request, but Polk’s campaign used it most effectively. Walker had grown up in Pennsylvania and understood the mentality of the average northern Democrat well. He argued for Texas annexation primarily on economic grounds. Taking a leaf out of Henry Clay’s book, he pointed out that Texas would enlarge the home market for American products. He also made the old Jeffersonian argument that expansion would “diffuse” the slave population into the West and make emancipation more likely in the Upper South. Looking still farther into the future, Walker predicted that when the inefficient labor of slaves had finally exhausted the soil of the Southwest, the blacks, no longer profitable to their masters, would at last be freed. Then Texas would provide a convenient conduit for the mass migration of the freedpeople into Latin America, where they would find a congenial multiracial society. Were Texas not to be annexed, he warned, emancipated slaves would probably flock northward, depressing wages and burdening northern states with their pauperism, insanity, and crime. Playing as it did on working-class fears, Walker’s pamphlet, despite the perversity of its argument that Texas annexation would help get rid of slavery, had a plausible ring for northern white racists looking for reasons to believe that annexation would help the United States as a whole and not just the South. The Polk campaign distributed thousands of copies of it.
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All this left poor John Tyler with no distinctive campaign issue. His candidacy had forced southern Democrats to endorse Texas or watch their supporters flock over to him. Now, from the point of view of Democratic imperialists, his campaign had served its purpose. For him to stay in the race any longer would merely divide the expansionist vote. Flattering words from Jackson, together with assurances that his followers could rejoin the Democratic Party and not be excluded from patronage, smoothed the way for Tyler to withdraw his candidacy on August 20 and endorse Polk.
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While unsuccessful, Tyler’s long presidential campaign, of which his Texas treaty formed an integral part, had a huge impact on American history.

The election of 1844 pitted two resolute, sharply defined, and closely matched party antagonists against each other. A majority of voters, perhaps a large majority, identified strongly with one party or the other and were not really open to persuasion. In the struggle to win over the undecided minority, the question of territorial expansion quickly dominated the campaign. Even without Texas or Oregon, the United States was larger than any European country except Russia. Democratic newspapers nevertheless portrayed national security as endangered by British interest in Texas. To this argument Henry Clay responded on behalf of the Whigs in his Raleigh Letter of April 17. He warned that annexation of Texas would bring war with Mexico, inflame sectional conflict within the United States, and encourage an insatiable lust for more and more land, a “spirit of universal dominion.” Better the United States should cultivate friendship with both Canada (whose independence from Britain Clay foresaw) and an independent Texas.
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Debate over territorial expansion was by no means confined to its impact on the slavery issue, but extended to its implications for the whole future of America. Whigs preferred for the United States to concentrate its energies internally, on economic development, education, and social reform. Democrats, however, professed to find the trends in American domestic development ominous. “Our population has become comparatively dense; our new lands are exhausted,” complained Orestes Brownson’s Democratic
Quarterly Review
. “We are separating more and more, capital and labor, and have the beginnings of a constantly increasing operative class, unknown to our fathers, doomed always to be dependent on employment by the class who represent the capital of the country, for the means of subsistence.”
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Westward expansion, Democrats argued, would provide a safety valve and preserve America as a land of opportunity for white men. To Whigs, westward expansion seemed a recipe for continuing an undue reliance on agriculture and an inefficiently thin dispersion of population, perpetuating America’s neocolonial dependence on foreign manufactures and capital.
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At first the Whigs felt confident of victory. James K. Polk (who had recently run for governor of Tennessee and lost) seemed too minor a figure to challenge the well-known Harry of the West. “Who’s Polk?” Whig gatherings shouted in derision. But they changed their minds quickly as Polk mended his fences with the Van Buren loyalists, and the Texas issue displayed its effectiveness with the voting public. By July 27, Clay felt that his opposition to Texas annexation was hurting him so much in the South that he needed to publish a clarification. He declared that he “should be glad to see” Texas annexed—provided it could be accomplished “without dishonor, without war, with the common consent of the Union, and upon just and fair terms.”
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Obviously these conditions could not be met at the time of his writing, and indeed to list them was to restate his current objections to annexation. Nevertheless this statement disheartened some of Clay’s antislavery northern supporters, while doing him little good in the South. (Van Buren had hedged his own anti-Texas stand with a similar provision for possible future annexation under changed circumstances.)

Polk had to resort to some fudging of his own position on the tariff. In a heavily publicized statement to Pennsylvania industrial workers, he declared that although he believed in a tariff for revenue only, he had no objection to “reasonable incidental protection to our home industry.” Meanwhile, the Democratic nominee secretly assured southerners that he would reduce the tariff that had been raised in 1842. This behavior has been aptly characterized as “duplicitous,” but it neutralized what should have been the appeal of the American System in Pennsylvania and played a key role in Polk’s narrow victory there.
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In the South, despite the popularity of Texas, the Whig Party retained an appeal to voters in places wanting economic development and to producers of products like sugar and hemp that needed tariff protection. Townsmen and large planters continued to vote Whig because they needed a sound currency and banking system and took a dim view of the repudiation of state bonds. The extension of plantation agriculture into Texas, while it bid up the value of slaves, also had a downside from the planters’ point of view: It lowered the value of their land and opened up more competition in cotton production. On the other hand, middle-sized and small cotton producers, whether slaveholders or yeomen, found westward expansion appealing because they saw in it their own best chance for upward economic mobility. Texas annexation, pitched as providing both economic opportunity and security for white supremacy, won over most uncommitted southerners, especially young first-time voters, enabling Polk to run better in the South than Van Buren had done four years earlier. Clay carried only five slave states, all in the Upper South, whereas Harrison had won eight, including Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia.
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In the North the greater ethnic diversity of the electorate manifested itself in strong patterns of voting along cultural and religious lines. In many areas hard times had largely passed by the fall of 1844, so economic issues no longer seemed so urgent as they had in 1840, and ethnocultural divisions became all the more important. Territorial expansion raised moral questions involving slavery and America’s role in the world, questions that different religious and cultural communities answered differently. Overall, Clay’s opposition to Texas annexation helped him in most of the free states, though Polk’s linkage of Texas to all of Oregon excited enthusiasm in what we now call the Midwest. The evangelical reformers rallied around Frelinghuysen as the Whig convention had intended, but his presence on the ticket also made things easier for Democratic campaign workers in Catholic neighborhoods. Relations between Catholics and Protestants had deteriorated in many places following increased Catholic immigration, Irish, German, and French-Canadian. In Philadelphia two waves of rioting, in May and July 1844, pitted the Irish Catholic and native Protestant working classes against each other and left at least twenty dead. When it came time to vote, Philadelphia Catholics went solidly for Polk. The Whigs struck a deal with the local nativist leaders but found that the Protestant workingmen, misled by Democratic claims to favor tariff protection, still cast a few votes for Polk. Although Clay won Philadelphia, it was not by a large enough margin to carry Pennsylvania.
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The outcome of the election hung in the balance as states voted throughout the first twelve days of November. The electoral college scored Polk 170 to Clay’s 105, but this masked the closeness of the popular vote. Polk’s plurality of 38,000 out of 2,700,000 votes cast gave him 49.5 percent to Clay’s 48.1. The abolitionist James G. Birney, candidate of the Liberty Party, polled 62,000 votes, 2.3 percent of the total. While a small percentage, it affected the outcome; Birney took enough anti-annexation votes away from Clay to cost him New York and Michigan. If New York had gone the other way, Clay would have won the election. Massive Democratic electoral frauds also tipped the scales. In New York they voted large numbers of ineligible (noncitizen) immigrants. In the last analysis, Young Hickory may well have owed his victory less to his stand on Texas, so popular in the Deep South, than to the growing Catholic immigrant vote and the inability of Whigs like Seward to make a dent in it.
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