Expansion and Conflict

by William Edward Dodd

THE MILITANT SOUTH

William Henry Harrison and the Whig party came to power in 1841 without a program. The men who had driven Martin Van Buren from office in 1840 were in as much doubt what to do for the country as the Jackson men had been in 1829. Clay had said during the campaign that he might restore the United States Bank, and he had said he might not do so; the Eastern Whigs had declared for a higher tariff in 1842, when the compromise of 1833 would expire, while the Southern Whigs had denied that such a move would be made; the Western men who had deserted Van Buren for a log-cabin leader demanded now as ever internal improvements, though their Southern allies bitterly opposed all such propositions. With counsels so divided Harrison turned readily to Henry Clay, who shaped the inaugural and filled the Cabinet with his political friends. Congress was called in extra session for the last of May, 1841, when an improvised plan of action would be offered and perhaps enacted into law. The main items were to be a new National Bank, a higher tariff, and the distribution among the States of the proceeds of the public land sales. This would enable States to construct their own public improvements and at the same time avoid a rupture between Southern and Western Whigs. Thus the chief items of the old Clay and Adams “American System” was to be reënacted by a Congress whose majority was none too large and more than heterogeneous in character.

But before the national legislature met, the President had died and John Tyler had become the head of the Administration. Virginia politics were at that time and long after dominated by a state banking system, and both Virginia and the lower South opposed all forms of tariff protection. The new President had been nominated by the Whigs in spite of his political views, and only in the hope that he might carry his State, in which they had been disappointed. Clay thought, however, that he could control the Administration, and undertook with the assistance of the Cabinet to bring all into a harmonious support of his “system.” The law creating the Independent Treasury, for which Jackson and Van Buren had labored industriously for six years before its final passage, was promptly repealed. In place of the Independent Treasury there was to be a National Bank, but the President was reported to be hostile to such a bank unless it should be located in the District of Columbia, and the consent of the States should be made necessary before branches could be established anywhere. Aware of Tyler's scruples on this and other measures, Clay marshaled his followers in both houses, held his friends in the Cabinet in his firm grasp, and was reported to have declared: “Tyler dares not resist me; I will drive him before me.” Tyler was not the man to be driven, and meanwhile Calhoun, Benton, and their friends were rallying around him in the hope of breaking down once again the program of Clay.

A bank law was passed. On the 16th of August it was vetoed, and there ensued another party break very much like that which Calhoun led in 1831. Many Southern Whigs supported the President; Eastern Whigs burned Tyler in effigy as “the traitor.” A second bank bill was passed only to meet another veto; and the Clay scheme for the distribution of the proceeds of the land sales, on which he had set his heart, was so mutilated by amendments that it could not serve the purpose of its friends. Anger and denunciation were the order of the day in Washington. Clay called a conference of the members of Tyler's Cabinet early in September, and advised all to resign at once in order to isolate their chief. The advice was followed by all save Webster, who retained his post and otherwise refused to accept the dictation of the Kentucky leader. Calhoun, Henry A. Wise, William C. Rives, and other leaders of Congress applauded the President and Webster. Congress adjourned on September 13 in the worst possible humor. Excitement now ran high throughout the country. Whig meetings were held everywhere, some to denounce, some to defend the Virginian President. The congressional elections came on and the voters divided sharply. But the Democrats won, which meant that the next Congress would be deadlocked—the Senate Whig, and the House Democratic. Under these circumstances Tyler gathered about him a Cabinet to his own liking and planned a forward step in the national policy. At the regular session of Congress a protective tariff law which restored many of the high duties of 1832 was enacted. Tyler gave his assent, perhaps in the hope of holding his New England friends like Webster. In view of the fact that the next Congress would be at least half anti-tariff, this move on the part of the Whigs was resented in the South, where leaders like Robert Barnwell Rhett still spoke openly of secession in case the old protectionist policy should be resumed.

The lines were being drawn for the next presidential race. Clay came back to Congress in December, 1841, deeply resentful toward the President and displeased at Webster. Having carried through Congress the tariff bill already mentioned, he rose on March 31 to offer “the last motion I shall ever make in this body,” and to read his farewell address after the manner of his great antagonist Jackson, who had sent to Congress a similar message on his retirement in March, 1837. It was an affecting scene as the able and dramatic orator prayed “the most precious blessings upon the Senate,” even upon Calhoun, who at the close extended his hand for the first time in several years. “Sober old Senators as well as ladies in the galleries shed tears at the scene”; yet it was known that Clay would seek the Presidency two years later. Calhoun, likewise, retired “forever” from the august legislative assembly, twelve months later, the better to lay his plans for the Democratic nomination in 1844. Though the South was not ready to unite in support of its greatest statesman, its leaders were ready to adopt his views and carry out his policy. The South, with its cotton, tobacco, and sugar plantations yielding their increasing annual returns, was preparing for another effort at getting control of the National Government. And changes of sentiment as well as economic development favored her in the struggle.

In Virginia the reforms of 1829 had been inadequate. The slavery problem was still a burning question, and the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831, in which a few slaves rose against their masters and killed many men, women, and children, forced a reconsideration. Again the difficult problem was declared insoluble. Thomas R. Dew, a professor of political science in William and Mary College, gave the deciding counsel in elaborate testimony before a committee of the legislature, which was enlarged and published in book form in May, 1832. He contended that slavery was a positive good; that negroes could not live in the South except in a state of bondage; and that for the State of Virginia, at least, it was a most profitable institution. The time had passed, he contended, for men to believe or teach the fallacies of the Declaration of Independence. Society, certainly Southern society, was taking on a stratified form in which all men had their definite places; and the North, too, was fast drifting in the same direction, because of the influence of their growing industries, in which it was essential that some should be masters of great plants and direct the labor of thousands of people. Few books ever influenced Southern life so much as did this little word of clear reasoning and convincing statistics.

A year later Calhoun was offering the same arguments in the United States Senate; South Carolina had already come in a practical way to the same conclusion. North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana accepted the teaching that slavery was a beneficent social arrangement. In Kentucky and Tennessee, where James G. Birney and John Rankin had long worked for gradual emancipation, sentiment rapidly crystallized about the same dogma. Southern anti-slavery leaders emigrated to Ohio during the next few years, “leaving Ephraim joined to his idols”; and Southern men in Congress now replied with increasing earnestness to the petitions which came from Northern abolitionists. In 1837 it was decided not to receive such petitions, and John Quincy Adams was given his great theme for agitation; the United States mails were also closed to abolitionist literature intended for Southern distribution. The representatives of the great region which stretched from Baltimore to New Orleans and extended from the coast to the mountains, united almost to a man in defense of “the institutions of the South,” and he who offered argument or example to the contrary was then unwelcome and later compelled to hold his tongue or emigrate.

Calhoun now became the undisputed leader of the plantation interests of the South, and few men were better fitted for the great commission. A keen and able debater and an enthusiastic Southerner, a combination in himself of the up-country ideals and the low-country purposes, he had become the idol of South Carolina. Conciliatory in manner and pure in all his public and private life, he won the respect and friendship of the best men in the North, like the Lowells and Winthrops of Massachusetts, and of Senators Allen, Hannegan, Breese, and the Dodges of the Northwest. Devoted to the ideal of a great American Union which he had made strong at the close of the second war with England, he was willing always to yield something to the West if only his “one institution” be left alone. Badly treated by Jackson and Van Buren, he had yet forgiven and joined hands with them both in 1840, in the hope that the power of Clay and his Eastern allies might be broken. In Congress and out he was the leader of the South as that section began to gird her loins for the fight over tariff, slavery, and expansion in 1840-44.

While the South was coming to one opinion on the great question of slavery, the West had been reviving her old ambitions and claims for more lands. So long as there was plenty of free lands and wide wildernesses, the Westerner felt that the American Republic was a free country; but when these began to fail he imagined himself hemmed in and stifled. In 1812 he had demanded Canada and Florida. He secured only the latter in 1819, and that after giving up Texas. The ink was hardly dry on the parchment of the treaty of that year before leading Westerners began their campaign for the “reannexation” of Texas. Stephen Austin, who settled in Texas, and Sam Houston, who deserted his wife for a home on the distant Southwestern frontier, kept the question alive. Thousands of Southerners and Westerners poured into the new cotton region between 1828 and 1836, and in the latter year they fought with the Mexicans the battle of San Jacinto, which gave Texas her freedom. A new American Republic with a pro-slavery constitution was speedily organized. Though Van Buren evaded the issue, Calhoun and the South urged immediate annexation.

There was thus a Southern call to the isolated President in 1842 to take up the Texas problem. Moreover, Virginia under the apportionment of 1841 lost five Representatives in the National House; South Carolina's number fell from nine to seven. North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia barely held their own. The older South was distinctly losing in the national race, despite the three-fifths rule on slavery. The Southwest gained some members, but the Northwest was growing faster. It was time for the South to act if she was to maintain her position in the country. In making up his Cabinet in the autumn of 1841, and again in filling the vacancies that occurred from time to time, the President selected men who favored expansion in the Southwest. The leaders of the Administration in the House of Representatives were ex-Governor Gilmer and Henry A. Wise, of Virginia, and the spokesmen of the South generally joined these in demanding the immediate annexation of Texas as a Southern measure. Calhoun, though not speaking so often, was the real leader of this cause in the Senate, and he constantly urged upon his friends the necessity of this acquisition as a distinct aid to his section.