Thomas Hart Benton

by Theodore Roosevelt

The final removal of the Cherokees from Georgia and Alabama was brought about in 1836 by means of a treaty with those Indians. Largely through the instrumentality of Benton, and in spite of the opposition of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, this instrument was ratified in the Senate by the close vote of thirty-one to fifteen. Although new slave territory was thus acquired, the vote on the treaty was factional and not sectional, being equally divided between the Northern and the Southern States, Calhoun and six other Southern senators opposing it, chiefly from hostility to the administration. The removal of the Indians was probably a necessity; undoubtedly it worked hardship in individual instances, but on the whole it did not in the least retard the civilization of the tribe, which was fully paid for its losses; and moreover, in its new home, continued to make progress in every way until it became involved in the great civil war, and received a setback from which it has not yet recovered. These Cherokees were almost the last Indians left in any number east of the Mississippi, and their removal solved the Indian problem so far as the old states were concerned.

Later on Benton went to some trouble to disprove the common statement that we have robbed the original Indian occupants of their lands. He showed by actual statistics that up to 1840 we had paid to the Indians eighty-five millions of dollars for land purchases, which was over five times as much as the United States gave the great Napoleon for Louisiana; and about three times as much as we paid France, Spain, and Mexico together for the purchase of Louisiana, Florida, and California; while the amount of land received in return would not equal any one of these purchases, and was but a fractional part of Louisiana or California. We paid the Cherokees for their territory exactly as much as we paid the French, at the height of their power, for Louisiana; while as to the Creek and Choctaw nations, we paid each more for their lands than we paid for Louisiana and Florida combined. The dealings of the government with the Indian have often been unwise, and sometimes unjust; but they are very far indeed from being so black as is commonly represented, especially when the tremendous difficulties of the case are taken into account.

Far more important than any of these matters was the acknowledgment of the independence of Texas; and in this, as well as in the troubles with Mexico which sprang from it, slavery again played a prominent part, although not nearly so important at first as has commonly been represented. Doubtless the slave-holders worked hard to secure additional territory out of which to form new slave states; but Texas and California would have been in the end taken by us, had there not been a single slave in the Mississippi valley. The greed for the conquest of new lands which characterized the Western people had nothing whatever to do with the fact that some of them owned slaves. Long before there had been so much as the faintest foreshadowing of the importance which the slavery question was to assume, the West had been eagerly pressing on to territorial conquest, and had been chafing and fretting at the restraint put upon it, and at the limits set to its strivings by the treaties established with foreign powers. The first settlers beyond the Alleghanies, and their immediate successors, who moved down along the banks of the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee, and thence out to the Mississippi itself, were not generally slave-holders; but they were all as anxious to wrest the Mississippi valley from the control of the French as their descendants were to overrun the Spanish lands lying along the Rio Grande. In other words, slavery had very little to do with the Western aggressions on Mexican territory, however it might influence the views of Southern statesmen as to lending support to the Western schemes.

The territorial boundaries of all the great powers originally claiming the soil of the West—France, Spain, and the United States—were very ill-defined, there being no actual possession of the lands in dispute, and each power making a great showing on its own map. If the extreme views of any one were admitted, its adversary, for the time being, would have had nothing. Thus before the treaty of 1819 with Spain our nominal boundaries and those of the latter power in the West overlapped each other; and the extreme Western men persisted in saying that we had given up some of the territory which belonged to us because we had consented to adopt a middle line of division, and had not insisted upon being allowed the full extent of our claims. Benton always took this view of it, insisting that we had given up our rights by the adoption of this treaty. Many Southerners improved on this idea, and spoke of the desirability of "re-annexing" the territory we had surrendered,—endeavoring by the use of this very inappropriate word to give a color of right to their proceedings. As a matter of fact it was inevitable, as well as in the highest degree desirable for the good of humanity at large, that the American people should ultimately crowd out the Mexicans from their sparsely populated Northern provinces. But it was quite as desirable that this should not be done in the interests of slavery.

American settlers had begun to press into the outlying Spanish province of Texas before the treaty of 1819 was ratified. Their numbers went on increasing, and at first the Mexican government, having achieved independence of Spain, encouraged their incoming. But it soon saw that their presence boded danger, and forbade further immigration; without effect, however, as the settlers and adventurers came thronging in as fast as ever. The Americans had brought their slaves with them, and when the Mexican government issued a decree liberating all slaves, they refused to be bound by it; and this decree was among the reasons alleged for their revolt. It has been represented as the chief if not the sole cause of the rebellion; but in reality it was not the cause at all; it was merely one of the occasions. Long before slavery had been abolished in Mexico, and before it had become an exciting question in the United States, the infant colony of Texas, when but a few months old, had made an abortive attempt at insurrection. Any one who has ever been on the frontier, and who knows anything whatever of the domineering, masterful spirit and bitter race prejudices of the white frontiersmen, will acknowledge at once that it was out of the question that the Texans should long continue under Mexican rule; and it would have been a great misfortune if they had. It was out of the question to expect them to submit to the mastery of the weaker race, which they were supplanting. Whatever might be the pretexts alleged for revolt, the real reasons were to be found in the deeply-marked difference of race, and in the absolute unfitness of the Mexicans then to govern themselves, to say nothing of governing others. During the dozen years that the American colony in Texas formed part of Mexico, the government of the latter went through revolution after revolution,—republic, empire, and military dictatorship following one another in bewildering succession. A state of things like this in the central government, especially when the latter belonged to a race alien in blood, language, religion, and habits of life, would warrant any community in determining to shift for itself. Such would probably have been the result even on people as sober and peaceable as the Texan settlers were warlike, reckless, and overbearing.

But the majority of those who fought for Texan independence were not men who had already settled in that territory, but, on the contrary, were adventurers from the States, who had come to help their kinsmen and to win for themselves, by their own prowess, homes on what was then Mexican soil. It may as well be frankly admitted that the conduct of the American frontiersmen all through this contest can be justified on no possible plea of international morality or law. Still, we cannot judge them by the same standard we should apply to the dealings between highly civilized powers of approximately the same grade of virtue and intelligence. Two nations may be contemporaneous so far as mere years go, and yet, for all that, may be existing among surroundings which practically are centuries apart. The nineteenth century on the banks of the Thames, the Seine, and the Rhine, or even of the Hudson and the Potomac, was one thing; the nineteenth century in the valley of the Rio Grande was another and quite a different thing.

The conquest of Texas should properly be classed with conquests like those of the Norse sea-rovers. The virtues and faults alike of the Texans were those of a barbaric age. They were restless, brave, and eager for adventure, excitement, and plunder; they were warlike, resolute, and enterprising; they had all the marks of a young and hardy race, flushed with the pride of strength and self-confidence. On the other hand they showed again and again the barbaric vies of boastfulness, ignorance, and cruelty; and they were utterly careless of the rights of others, looking upon the possessions of all weaker races as simply their natural prey. A band of settlers entering Texas was troubled by no greater scruples of conscience than, a thousand years before, a ship-load of Knut's followers might have felt at landing in England; and when they were engaged in warfare with the Mexicans they could count with certainty upon assistance from their kinsfolk who had been left behind, and for the same reasons that had enabled Rolf's Norsemen on the sea-coast of France to rely confidently on Scandinavian help in their quarrels with their Karling over-lords. The great Texan hero, Houston, who drank hard and fought hard, who was mighty in battle and crafty in council, with his reckless, boastful courage and his thirst for changes and risks of all kinds, his propensity for private brawling, and his queerly blended impulses for good and evil, might, with very superficial alterations of character, stand as the type of an old-world Viking—plus the virtue of a deep and earnestly patriotic attachment to his whole country. Indeed his career was as picturesque and romantic as that of Harold Hardraada himself, and, to boot, was much more important in its results.

Thus the Texan struggle for independence stirred up the greatest sympathy and enthusiasm in the United States. The administration remained nominally neutral, but obviously sympathized with the Texans, permitting arms and men to be sent to their help, without hindrance, and indeed doing not a little discreditable bullying in the diplomatic dealing with Mexico, which that unfortunate community had her hands too full to resent. Still we did not commit a more flagrant breach of neutrality than, for instance, England was at the same time engaged in committing in reference to the civil wars in Spain. The victory of San Jacinto, in which Houston literally annihilated a Mexican force twice the strength of his own, virtually decided the contest; and the Senate at once passed a resolution recognizing the independence of Texas. Calhoun wished that body to go farther, and forthwith admit Texas as a state into the Union; but Benton and his colleagues were not prepared to take such a step at so early a date, although intending of course that in the end she should be admitted. There was little opposition to the recognition of Texan independence, although a few members of the lower house, headed by Adams, voted against it. While a cabinet officer, and afterwards as president, Adams had done all that he could to procure by purchase or treaty the very land which was afterwards the cause of our troubles with Mexico.

Much the longest and most elaborate speech in favor of the recognition of Texan independence was made by Benton, to whom the subject appealed very strongly. He announced emphatically that he spoke as a Western senator, voicing the feeling of the West; and he was right. The opposition to the growth of our country on its southwestern frontier was almost confined to the Northeast; the West as a whole, free states as well as slave, heartily favored the movement. The settlers of Texas had come mainly, it is true, from the slave states; but there were also many who had been born north of the Ohio. It was a matter of comment that the guns used at San Jacinto had come from Cincinnati—and so had some of those who served them.

In Benton's speech he began by pointing out the impropriety of doing what Calhoun had done in attempting to complicate the question of the recognition of Texan independence with the admission of Texas as a state. He then proceeded to claim for us a good deal more credit than we were entitled to for our efforts to preserve neutrality; drew a very true picture of the commercial bonds that united us to Mexico, and of the necessity that they should not be lightly broken; gave a spirited sketch of the course of the war hitherto, condemning without stint the horrible butcheries committed by the Mexicans, but touching gingerly on the savage revenge taken by the Americans in their turn; and ended by a eulogy of the Texans themselves, and their leaders.