What Hath God Wrought (103 page)

Like the early railroads and steamboats, early telegraph lines were constructed in haste and as cheaply as possible—using “beanpoles and cornstalks,” according to the standard joke. As a result they often malfunctioned and broke down. Data collected in 1851 identified about 70 percent of their traffic as commercial in nature, such as checking credit references from distant locations or (as one telegraph operator put it) “conveying secrets of rise and fall of markets.” The wires helped validate classical economics for the Western world by making its assumption of “perfect information” among market participants more of a practical reality.
⁹¹

Unlike the telephone, invented later in the nineteenth century, the telegraph was used much more for commercial than social purposes. But telegraph wires also carried news of sports events and lotteries for the benefit of avid gamblers. Their value to the newspapers became apparent very quickly during the war against Mexico that began in 1846. When that war started, only 146 miles of telegraph lines existed, none of them south of Richmond. With construction stimulated by the hunger for war news, the wires arrived at New Orleans in 1848, connecting it with New York sooner than the railroad did. By 1850, ten thousand miles of wire had been laid in the United States.
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In economic importance, the electric telegraph bears comparison with the railroad. In combination with the railroad, it facilitated nationwide commerce and diminished transaction costs. Whereas both railroads and canals had originally been envisioned as regional (typically, joining a commercial hub with an agricultural hinterland), the electric telegraph from the outset was a long-distance medium that linked commercial centers. Being cheaper to construct than railroad tracks, the telegraph lines generally realized their economic potential more quickly. One of the most dramatic practical benefits of the electric telegraph lay in its assistance to the railroads in scheduling trains and avoiding collisions on single-track lines. Surprisingly, it took several years for the railroads to recognize this.
⁹³
In the end, the telegraph poles often paralleled railroad tracks and used the same rights-of-way.

In a broader sense, however, the spread of the electric telegraph effectively decoupled communication from transportation, sending a message from sending a physical object. The implications of this alteration in the human condition unfolded only gradually over the next several generations. But contemporaries fully realized that they stood in the presence of a far-reaching change. They valued not only the shortening of time to receive information but also the speed with which an answer could be returned; that is, conversation was possible. To call attention to its interactive potential, early demonstrations of the telegraph included long-distance chess games.
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Of all the celebrated inventions of an age that believed in progress, Morse’s telegraph impressed observers the most. They typically characterized it as “the greatest revolution of modern times.” A leading New Orleans journal commented, “Scarcely anything now will appear to be impossible.”
⁹⁵

The electric telegraph represented the first important invention based on the application of advanced scientific knowledge rather than on the know-how of skilled mechanics. The laboratory would begin to replace the machine shop as the site of technological innovation. For centuries, technological improvements had led to scientific discovery (the telescope and the microscope, for example). With the telegraph, this relationship reversed. Morse’s recruitment of several partners and his refusal to credit others whose ideas had contributed to his technology highlighted another transition. Innovation would increasingly become a collective enterprise, pooling the knowledge of experts.
⁹⁶
“Morse was only one of over fifty inventors who built some sort of an electromagnetic telegraphic device before 1840,” the historian Donald Cole has pointed out. “Morse’s telegraph prevailed because it was better built, less complicated, and less expensive than the others and because he was able to fight off the claims of his rivals.”
⁹⁷

The telegraph associated, rightly or wrongly, with Morse proved a major facilitator of American nationalism and continental ambition. Although funding for it had to come from Whig votes in Congress, Democratic publicists seized upon the significance of the telegraph for their imperial visions: John L. O’Sullivan’s
Democratic Review
rejoiced that the American empire now possessed “a vast skeleton framework of railroads, and an infinitely ramified nervous system of magnetic telegraphs” to knit it into an organic whole. A congressional committee agreed: “Doubt has been entertained by many patriotic minds how far the rapid, full, and thorough intercommunication of thought and intelligence, so necessary to the people living under a common representative republic, could be expected to take place throughout such immense bounds” as the North American continent. “That doubt can no longer exist.”
⁹⁸
James Gordon Bennett, editor of the
New York Herald,
was more militantly imperialist. “Steam and electricity, with the natural impulses of a free people, have made, and are making, this country the greatest, the most original, the most wonderful the sun ever shone upon,” his newspaper enthused. “Those who do not become part of this movement” of U.S. sovereignty across the continent “will be crushed into more impalpable powder than ever was attributed to the car of Juggernaut.”
⁹⁹
With the telegraph on America’s side, who could dare oppose the acquisition of Texas?

V

John Tyler and James Polk agreed that the presidential election must be interpreted as a mandate for Texas, notwithstanding all the other factors that had entered into the result, and the plain truth that the two candidates opposed to annexation had slightly outpolled the one who favored it. Tyler felt a certain understandable resentment that Polk should have stolen his annexation issue and won with it. He was not willing, therefore, to stand aside and let Polk reap the glory of annexing Texas. The lame duck session of Congress that began in December 1844 offered the outgoing president a final chance to achieve his rightful place in the history books. Tyler seized it.

The Constitution provides that “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union.” The friends of annexation argued that through the exercise of this power, Texas could be admitted to statehood without a treaty, even though it remained a foreign country. Such an act of Congress would require only a simple majority in each house, a much more attainable goal than the two-thirds of the Senate needed to ratify a treaty. Accordingly, the annexationists set about passage of a congressional resolution that would make Texas a state of the Union despite the failure of Tyler’s treaty. Resorting to this approach had been the idea of Jackson himself, and the Democrats, under president-elect Polk’s leadership, made it a party measure.
¹⁰⁰
The substantial Democratic majority in the House of Representatives passed Texas admission handily. Passage in the Senate, with its narrow Whig majority, posed a task more difficult but not insurmountable.

Thomas Hart Benton had opposed Tyler’s Texas treaty as a Van Buren loyalist. By now, Van Buren had lost, an expansionist Democrat had won, Jackson was supporting annexation ever more strongly, and the Missouri senator was feeling a lot of heat from his constituents. He needed to come around to support Texas. Various concessions provided an excuse for Benton and the other Van Burenites in the Senate to switch from opposition to approval of annexation. The federal government did not assume the Texas national debt, keeping the Lone Star bondholders waiting to be sure of repayment. (Later, Uncle Sam took over the responsibility for paying off the speculators as part of the Compromise of 1850.) Texas also kept what remained of its public lands after the huge grants that Spain, Mexico, and the Lone Star Republic had all made over the years. Texas received admission as a state, not a territory, with the proviso that it might later be subdivided into as many as five states. This provision, never implemented, horrified northern Whigs. Finally, the resolution stipulated that the president could exercise executive discretion, and either act upon it to admit Texas forthwith or negotiate further with Texas (and Mexico) to resolve the still-undefined boundary between them. Polk encouraged Benton and other former Van Burenites to believe he intended to return to the negotiating table; this seemed to reassure five of them in voting for the resolution.

The annexation resolution passed the Democratic-controlled House, 120 to 98. It squeaked through the Senate, 27 to 25. All Democratic senators followed their party’s pro-Texas line, but three out of the fifteen southern Whigs put section ahead of party and voted for annexation. The way in which Tyler and Calhoun achieved their objective by a simple majority of each House, even though the treaty of annexation had been defeated in the Senate, infuriated John Quincy Adams; he thought it reduced the Constitution to “a menstruous [
sic!
] rag.”
¹⁰¹

Strangely enough, no one in Congress seems to have expected that Tyler would go ahead and implement the annexation resolution during the waning days of his presidency rather than leave it to Polk. But Secretary of State Calhoun felt even more eager to consummate the marriage with Texas than Tyler. On March 1, 1845, Tyler signed the joint resolution and gave his new wife, Julia Gardiner Tyler, the golden pen he had used. Wealthy, energetic, and publicity-conscious, she had lobbied hard for Texas and deserved to share in their exultation. He dispatched an envoy to offer the Texans immediate annexation without any further international negotiations. Not that it really mattered: Polk would have done the same, and he confirmed Tyler’s action. The Van Burenites had been tricked.
¹⁰²

Calhoun’s strategy for gaining Texas had triumphed. His short-term goal in identifying Texas with slavery had been to make sure that Van Buren would have to oppose Texas and thus be denied the Democratic nomination. His longer-term goals, the election of a proslavery president and the annexation of Texas, had also been achieved. The identification of Texas with slavery won over first the southern Democrats, then (through the mechanism of party loyalty) most Northern Democrats, and finally a handful of southern Whigs provided the crucial margin.
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After four frustrating years, John Tyler left office feeling good. The first lady threw a huge party attended by three thousand at the White House, and the outgoing president laughed as he quipped, “They cannot say
now
that I am a President
without a party
.”
¹⁰⁴
As Tyler and Calhoun intended, the annexation of Texas reassured slaveowners about the security of their distinctive form of investment and its potential for further expansion. Within twelve months of the Lone Star Republic’s acceptance of annexation, the price of prime field hands on the New Orleans slave market rose 21 percent. It would continue to rise through the 1850s. And the arrival of the telegraph wires at New Orleans in 1848 integrated the cotton bales and slave pens of that city all the more effectively into the flourishing international pricing network for southern staple crops and the commodified human beings who produced them.
¹⁰⁵

The fourth of March 1845: Rain fell on the inaugural parade along Pennsylvania Avenue, and when the new president arrived at the Capitol to deliver his address and take the oath of office from Chief Justice Taney, he looked out upon a sea of umbrellas. Despite the unfavorable elements, James Knox Polk made himself heard, as he would for the next four years. The speech was characteristic of the man. It rehearsed Democratic Party orthodoxies, perhaps traceable to Polk’s family background in the rustic simplicity and Old School Calvinism of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Abolitionism and a national bank he roundly condemned in the speech.

When Jimmy Polk had been eleven, his parents moved for better economic opportunities to Middle Tennessee, where his father became a successful land speculator. The son hence grew up in a prominent and prosperous family. He too identified the acquisition of land with wealth and power, on a national as well as individual scale. Ambitious and hardworking, he graduated first in his class at the University of North Carolina and became a lawyer. Soon he went into politics, as a devoted follower of Andrew Jackson. Speaking for the producers of agricultural staples, he argued for free trade. During the Bank War, he made himself the Jackson administration’s most effective congressional ally. At forty-nine the youngest president so far, Polk nevertheless had accumulated considerable leadership experience as governor of Tennessee and Speaker of the national House of Representatives. He had also recently demonstrated consummate political skills: by gaining the confidence of both the Jackson and Calhoun wings of the Democratic Party, by securing that party’s nomination at the last moment, and by winning a hard-fought, close election.

Yet people found James Polk a narrow man with a dull personality, for he focused on the interests of his country and his personal advancement, caring nothing for the delights of literature, nature, or society. Even as president he made few public appearances. John Quincy Adams, a former professor of rhetoric, gave Polk low marks as a speaker; he found “no wit,” “no gracefulness of delivery,” “no elegance of language,” “no felicitous impromptus.”
¹
In choosing a wife, Polk had asked Jackson’s opinion; Old Hickory recommended the wealthy and intelligent Sarah Childress, and his follower acted on the nomination. Very much a political person too, Sarah told James she would marry him if he won a seat in the state legislature. She then became her husband’s only confidante, sharing in his career goals and giving him valuable advice. The childless couple focused on James’s political advancement. A staunch Presbyterian, Sarah banned dancing and card-playing in the White House but not wine, and supervised the installation of up-to-date gaslights. Meanwhile, the Polks carefully developed the cotton plantation they owned in northern Mississippi, to which they planned to retire. As president, James bought nineteen slaves for this plantation, keeping the purchases a secret because they contradicted his public image as the master of only a few inherited family retainers. The people he bought were teenagers whom his acquisition separated from their parents.
²

In his inaugural address, the incoming president remained just as ambiguous on the tariff as he had during his campaign—occasional ambiguity being a political art James Polk understood particularly well. Then the new incumbent turned to what interested him most, his vision of continental expansion. Echoing the arguments of Robert Walker, he gave a ringing endorsement to the annexation of Texas, regardless of its impact on the slavery question. Wherever Americans chose to settle, Polk declared, the federal government should extend its protection over them, a principle he applied to both Texas and Oregon. He repeated the assertion of the Democratic platform: “Our title to the country of Oregon is clear and unquestionable.” This bald affirmation went down well with those under the umbrellas, but when the text arrived across the Atlantic, it made a bad impression. “We consider we [too] have rights in this Oregon territory which are clear and unquestionable,” Prime Minister Peel responded in the House of Commons. No one at the time remarked that the incoming president had left out the words “the whole of” in restating his party’s Oregon platform, but their omission may have been a straw in the wind.
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To James Knox Polk, the imperial destiny of the United States manifested itself plainly enough. But it would be the press, not a presidential oration, that fixed the term “manifest destiny” for the American public. In the summer of 1845, one of America’s most popular magazines, New York’s Jacksonian
Democratic Review
, addressed the Texas issue. Annexation still awaited ratification by a popular vote of the Texans; in the United States, public opinion remained bitterly divided. Nevertheless, the
Review
argued, “It is time now for opposition to the annexation of Texas to cease.” The integration of Texas into the Union represented “the fulfilment [
sic
] of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
⁴
The article, like many in nineteenth-century journalism, appeared unsigned, but historians have long believed it must have been written by the zealous partisan editor of the
Democratic Review
, John L. O’Sullivan. Recently, however, it has been argued that the ardent expansionist Jane Storm, a professional political journalist who wrote frequently for that and other periodicals, anonymously or under the gender-neutral pseudonym C. Montgomery, wrote the essay.
⁵
Whoever invented it, the phrase “manifest destiny” passed into the American language, an illustration of the power of the press to capture the popular imagination with a slogan in an age of communications revolution.

“Manifest destiny” served as both a label and a justification for policies that might otherwise have simply been called American expansionism or imperialism. The assumption of white supremacy permeated these policies. It never occurred to U.S. policymakers to take seriously the claims of nonwhite or racially mixed societies to territorial integrity. Antebellum Americans did not shrink from calling their continental domain an “empire.” Thomas Jefferson looked forward to creating an “empire for liberty” that would include Cuba and Canada. In this empire he expected white family farming to have room to expand for generations to come, and the economic basis for Jefferson’s ideal republic would be preserved against historical degeneration. Old Hickory himself drew a connection between America’s democracy and imperial expansion—“extending the area for freedom,” as he put it.
⁶
The “Young Hickory” asserted that expansion actually guaranteed American national existence. “As our boundaries have been enlarged and our agricultural population has been spread over a large surface,” the Union of the states has been strengthened. “If our present population were confined to the comparatively narrow limits of the original thirteen states,” the incoming president warned, American institutions might be “in greater danger of overthrow.” Recognizing the key role of the press in building support for territorial expansion, Polk replaced Francis Blair’s
Washington Globe
, which had served Jackson and Van Buren, with a new administration newspaper, the
Washington Union
, edited by Thomas Ritchie, a more enthusiastic imperialist.
⁷

National aspirations to empire could fit comfortably alongside certain conceptions of American millennialism. As the South Carolina poet William Gilmore Simms wrote in 1846:

 

We do but follow out our destiny,

As did the ancient Israelite—and strive,

Unconscious that we work at His knee

By whom alone we triumph as we live.
⁸

 

If America had a divine mission to perform, to be a beacon of freedom and prepare the way for a messianic age, then perhaps increasing its extent and power would bring blessings to the whole world. “A higher than any earthly power,” declared Robert Walker, propagandist for Texas whom Polk would appoint secretary of the Treasury, “still guards and directs our destiny, impels us onward, and has selected our great and happy country as a model and ultimate centre of attraction for the all nations of the world.”
⁹
When George Bancroft, the greatest American historian of his day and an enthusiastic Jacksonian Democrat, published the first volume of his
History of the United States of America
in 1834, it appeared with this motto on the cover: “Westward the star of empire takes its way.” Bancroft’s history portrayed his country fulfilling a providential destiny as an example of human liberty. His epigraph makes an appropriate title for this chapter.
¹⁰

Antebellum Americans typically linked the history of political liberty with Protestantism. Accordingly, it was possible to argue that the expansion of the United States would secure the continent for liberty and Protestantism, and save it from Catholic Mexico, whose “cruel, ambitious, and licentious priesthood,” according to Robert Walker, stood ever “ready to establish the inquisition.” Despite the support Catholic voters gave the Democratic Party, anti-Catholicism was featured alongside claims of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority in the rhetoric of Jacksonian expansionists like Walker.
¹¹

Support for the pursuit of a “manifest destiny” came from a number of groups in American society. Western land speculators, railroad promoters, and small farmers eager for a chance to start over had obvious interests in westward expansion. Many northern workingmen saw westward expansion as guaranteeing economic opportunity and high wages; the penny press in the big cities encouraged such attitudes and celebrated American imperialism. The
New York Morning News
, edited, like the
Democratic Review
, by John L. O’Sullivan, cast westward expansion as an example of the participatory democracy of free settlers:

But the
Morning News
did not tell the whole story. It postulated a vacant continent, ignoring the prior claims of Native Americans and Mexicans. What is more, often those advocating national expansion also advocated the extension of slavery. Debate over the wisdom and morality of national expansion provoked renewed debate over the future of slavery. Expansion in one direction or another could be supported or opposed as strengthening one section at the expense of the other. Most powerfully, party politics influenced the discussion. Jackson’s followers wanted to continue Jefferson’s policy of extending a predominantly agrarian America across the continent. Expansionism served the Democratic Party’s political interests. The pursuit of the nation’s “manifest destiny” could mute conflict between native and immigrant workingmen and under favorable circumstances bridge sectional divisions, since it appealed in the Old Northwest as well as the South.

Nevertheless, American imperialism did not represent an American consensus; it provoked bitter dissent within the national polity. The Whig Party conceived of American development more in terms of qualitative economic improvement than quantitative expansion of territory. As Henry Clay wrote to a fellow Kentuckian, “It is much more important that we unite, harmonize, and improve what we have than attempt to acquire more.” The historian Christopher Clark has distinguished between the two partisan goals by saying the Democrats pursued America’s “extensive” development and the Whigs its “intensive” development.
¹³
Whigs believed in America’s postmillennial role too, but interpreted it differently. They saw America’s moral mission as one of democratic example rather than one of conquest. William Ellery Channing expressed a Whig view of America’s empire in a famous open letter to Clay opposing the annexation of Texas: “The United States ought to provide its less fortunate sister republics with support, [and] assume the role of a sublime moral empire, with a mission to diffuse freedom by manifesting its fruits, not to plunder, crush, and destroy.”
¹⁴

Although the Whigs resisted territorial expansion through conquest, they practiced what we might consider economic and cultural imperialism through expanding trade and Christian missions. Daniel Webster, during his tenure at the State Department, put Whig principles of foreign policy into practice, not only by resolving tensions with Britain but also by extending U.S. commercial opportunities in the Pacific. New England whaling vessels had long made use of the Hawaiian Islands (then called the Sandwich Islands) as a supply base en route to the Bering Sea. Although Hawaii remained an independent native monarchy, Yankee sugar merchants and Protestant missionaries also exerted considerable influence. These American interests became alarmed when France intervened in the islands to protect Catholics, simultaneously obtaining trade concessions. Responding to their concerns, Webster persuaded the president to extend the Monroe Doctrine’s opposition to European interference to include Hawaii. This statement, made in December 1842, became known as the Tyler Doctrine; it preserved U.S. economic primacy in the Sandwich Islands. When an overly zealous Royal Navy admiral annexed Hawaii to the British Empire the following spring, London disavowed his action without even waiting to receive an American protest; by the end of 1843 both Britain and France had promised to respect Hawaiian independence.
¹⁵