Expansion and Conflict

by William Edward Dodd

Nearly all the West favored this Southern proposition; but an equally important matter to them was the occupation of Oregon. In Ohio, Michigan, and northern Illinois there was some indifference as to Texas, but none on the subject of Oregon. The vast region stretching from the forty-second parallel of north latitude to Alaska, and embracing an empire in itself, was held jointly with England, whose fur traders had actually occupied the country on the northern side of the Columbia River. England desired to hold the promising region. Under the agreement of 1818, renewed in 1828, either country was to give one year's notice of a purpose to abandon joint control, and, should the relation with England be dissolved, the stronger party would doubtless obtain the better part of the territory. The people of the Northwest under radical leadership soon learned to demand all Oregon; English fur interests understood the situation well, and they pressed their Government to seize all the territory along the Pacific to the Bay of California. And English relations with Mexico were such that Lower California was apt to be added to Oregon in case of a break with the United States.

In the East there had been reason for increasing irritation between the two Governments. British public opinion had been distinctly unfriendly since the Canadian insurrection of 1837-38, when so many Americans gave assistance to the insurgents. And this unfriendliness was fed by the ill-concealed desire of the people of the West for the annexation of Canada to the United States. When the American ship Caroline, which had been assisting the Canadian insurrectionists, was seized and destroyed by the English on Lake Erie, an American citizen was killed. This was amicably arranged; but in 1840 a certain Alexander McLeod, then in New York, avowed that he had killed the American and was promptly seized by the state authorities and put on trial for his life. McLeod now claimed that he had done the deed in obedience to orders, and the British Minister came to his assistance. Officers of the American State Department took the same view, but they were helpless, and for a time it seemed that one of the States would put to death as a murderer a man whom both England and the United States recognized to be innocent. War seemed imminent, but as so often happens in Anglo-Saxon procedure, a way out of the legal impasse was found in a fictitious alibi, and McLeod was acquitted.

When Sir Robert Peel became the head of the English Government in 1841 he sent, as Minister to Washington, Lord Ashburton, one of the Baring Brothers who had had such large business relations with many of the States and with the old National Bank. Ashburton and Webster were personal friends, and they were likely to find a solution to other important and pressing problems engaging the attention of both countries. One of these disputes had to do with the suppression of the nefarious African slave trade, which still flourished in spite of the most stringent of laws, national and international. The difficulty lay in the enforcement of law. The South did not regard slavery as an unmixed evil, and hence Southern Presidents had not been overzealous of invoking the severe law against the slave trade. England stood ready to enforce her laws, but then the traders would raise the American flag. This necessitated the exercise of the obsolete right of search of suspected vessels, if anything was to be done. But the people of the United States resented the exercise of the right, and Northern statesmen were also loath to allow this. To obviate all difficulty the two Governments agreed in 1842 to maintain a joint naval patrol of the African coast. The South was not quite pleased, and a great many people of the West were displeased that Webster had yielded the right of search in disguise, as it was thought.

At the same time a matter of larger importance to the North, the settlement of the long-disputed boundary between Maine and Nova Scotia, was pending. Since 1838 there had been quarrels and actual encounters along the northeastern boundary, which had won the name of “the Aroostook War.” Both Maine and the National Congress had appropriated money to maintain American rights on the border, and here again there was reason to fear war. Webster and Ashburton took up the problem and by mutual concessions came to a fair but very unpopular agreement. They also settled outstanding disputes concerning the long boundary between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains.

But the question of dividing Oregon was left untouched even by these friendly diplomats. Nor could they do more than discuss the critical Creole trouble, which just now came to complicate the relations of both peoples, evidently desirous of avoiding war. The Creole was a vessel engaged in the domestic slave trade. In 1841 this ship, bound for New Orleans, was seized by the slaves on board, who killed its crew and carried it into the port of Nassau. The local courts punished some of the negroes as murderers and set the others free. Speaking for the American Government, Webster demanded of England an apology and compensation for the slaves. Ashburton defended his country stoutly and refused satisfaction. Again public opinion, at least Southern opinion, was greatly excited, but nothing was done about the Creole case until 1853, when it was submitted to arbitration, and compensation was allowed the owners of the slaves.

Thus the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 was a settlement of some threatening difficulties and a tacit compromise or ignoring of others. It served the useful purpose of keeping the peace between kindred peoples. The Oregon and Texas questions were left open, and these were assuming more dangerous forms with the passage of time.

This served to direct attention to the Pacific Coast and even the Far East, where New England merchants and shipowners had long driven a profitable trade. President Tyler sent Commodore Jones to the Pacific to protect American interests; he proposed to send a commissioner to China in the hope of aiding American commerce there, and he began to consult members of Congress about the possibility of obtaining Texas, California, and Oregon all in treaties with Mexico and England. He offered to send Webster to London to conduct the negotiations, and at his instance John Quincy Adams wrote Edward Everett, the American Minister to England, that he might resign and go to China to do pioneer work for New England interests. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty was to be followed by a greater one, securing to the United States the coveted expansion southwest, west, and northwest. Thus Calhoun and his extreme Southerners, Benton and his ardent imperialist followers, and the radical Northwest were all to be satisfied at a single stroke of state, and Webster, the New Englander, was to be the happy instrument and perhaps become President in consequence.

Everett refused to resign, and Webster had promised his Whig friends to leave the State Department. Tyler did not despair; when the great New Englander retired in 1842, like Clay, to private life, he invited Hugh S. Legaré, of Charleston, to the vacant place. A year later Abel P. Upshur succeeded to the office. All the while the President was seeking to guide the Administration into other channels than the old ones of tariff, bank, and internal improvements.

The Texan envoys to Washington repeatedly urged unofficially the annexation of their country, which had fallen into a state of semi-bankruptcy, and whose governor, Sam Houston, was making overtures for English protection as an alternative to failure to get a favorable hearing in Washington. Southern States petitioned for annexation, while Middle Westerners met in a convention at Cincinnati in August, 1843, and demanded the immediate seizure of Texas and prompt occupation of Oregon. Thousands of emigrants left Missouri during the summer of 1843 for the Columbia Valley, under the encouragement of Senator Benton and for the purpose of holding the country against English fur traders or more permanent settlers. Under all this pressure the Administration let it be known in Congress that at least Texas would be annexed. Upshur reopened negotiations with the Texan envoy in Washington. Immediately John Quincy Adams protested, declaring the “Confederacy” to be dissolved in case Tyler's “nefarious” scheme should be consummated; but the President continued to press the Texan negotiations.

When the treaty with the new republic was about concluded, Upshur was accidentally killed by the explosion of a gun on the ship Princeton. Calhoun, whose ardent candidacy for the Democratic nomination had failed, was called to the State Department to take up the unfinished work. Meanwhile the campaigns of the two great parties were already far advanced. Clay was the acknowledged candidate of the Whigs, and Van Buren had obtained the pledged support of two thirds of the delegations to the next Democratic Convention, which was to meet in Baltimore in May, 1844. Instinctively dreading new issues, Van Buren arranged a visit to Jackson in the early spring, and on his return he called on Clay at Lexington, Kentucky, where it seems to have been agreed that the two candidates should eventually eliminate the Texas proposition from the platforms of the two great parties. On April 20, when Clay was in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Van Buren was at his home at Lindenwald, New York, public letters were given out by both leaders. Both advised against discussing the one thing everybody was discussing. The simultaneous appearance of these formal statements, each advising the same thing, caused a national sensation. Men thought that the two candidates had agreed beforehand what the people should not do. In Virginia, South Carolina, and Mississippi, where Texas feeling ran high, Democratic opinion could not be restrained, and meetings were called to reconsider the instructions of their delegations to the Baltimore Convention; nor were the Southern Whigs less anxious about the outcome, though the party as a whole acquiesced in Clay's wish that Texas should be eliminated from their forthcoming platform.