Andrew Jackson (82 page)
But it would be a delicate business, and after the way Butler had mishandled the bribery business, Jackson wondered if he had the right man in Mexico City. Butler responded to the new approach with a worrisome enthusiasm. “I will succeed in uniting Texas to our country before I am done with the subject or I will forfeit my head,” Butler vowed. Jackson couldn’t tell whether Butler was indulging in hyperbole or accurately conveying his designs and determination. If the latter, the president recognized that though it might be Butler’s head, it would be America’s reputation that would be forfeited. “Keep within your instructions,” he warned Butler. “What a scamp,” he wrote to himself.
Yet the scamp understood how Jackson’s new approach might lead to the acquisition of Texas. “Should the present incumbents continue in office . . . ,” Butler said of Santa Anna’s regime, “no other mode is left us but to occupy that part of the territory lying west of the Sabine and east of the Neches (so called by the Mexicans) and to garrison Nacogdoches by the troops from Cantonment Jessup.” Nacogdoches was the most important town between the rivers, and Cantonment Jessup was the American fort just east of the Sabine. Butler pointed out that there were no Mexican troops between the rivers, as they all had been deployed farther west to deal with troubles with the American colonists. The occupation would therefore be unopposed. And with troops on the ground, the United States government would be in position to enforce a favorable settlement of the whole Texas question.
W
hile Jackson was trying to decide whether Butler was doing more harm than good as America’s acknowledged representative in Mexico, the president worked quietly with an unacknowledged agent in Texas. Three years earlier Jackson had responded harshly to Sam Houston’s drunken boast of going to conquer Texas. “I must really have thought you deranged to have believed you had so wild a scheme in contemplation,” he lectured Houston. And while the purchase of Texas remained a possibility, Jackson didn’t want any American filibusters making the Mexican government angry. But as his hopes for the peaceful acquisition of Texas diminished, he reconsidered the Houston option.
Houston still wanted to conquer Texas, although in his newfound sobriety he was more discreet about broadcasting his plans. He maintained his discretion during and after a meeting with Jackson at the Hermitage in the summer of 1832. Jackson was vacationing at home, and Houston was heading west following his latest Washington trial. Neither man recorded the conversation that took place in Jackson’s study, which suggests that it wasn’t intended for public knowledge. And indeed the denouement indicates that it was meant to be secret. Jackson apparently gave Houston five hundred dollars for the road. More valuable than the money was the cover Jackson provided. From Tennessee, Houston traveled to Arkansas, where he obtained a federal passport requesting “all the tribes of Indians, whether in amity with the United States or as yet not allied to them by treaties, to permit safely and freely to pass through their respective territories, General Sam Houston, a citizen of the United States, thirty-eight years of age, six feet, two inches in stature, brown hair and light complexion; and in case of need to give him all lawful aid and protection.” As Jackson’s Indian agent, Houston proceeded to Texas, nominally to investigate the affairs of the tribes there. “It has been my first and most important object to obtain all the information possible relative to the Pawnee and Comanche Indians,” Houston reported en route. “To reach the wild Indians at this season will be difficult, and only practicable by way of St. Antone.”
Yet Houston—and Jackson—had much more in mind than cultivating Indians. This might be a first step, but the longer project was the acquisition of Texas. The Americans in Texas had grown restive under Mexican rule following an 1830 law that prohibited legal immigration from the United States and specifically banned the introduction of slaves. On account of the political upheavals in Mexico City, the law went unenforced, stopping neither immigration nor the import of slaves. But it made outlaws of people who considered themselves blameless, made comparative respectables of people who
did
deserve blame, and weakened the political grip of Mexico on its northeasternmost province.
Jackson wanted to know how serious the disaffection of the Americans had grown. Houston told him. “Nineteen twentieths of the population,” he said, wanted the United States to acquire Texas. “They are now without laws to govern or protect them. Mexico is involved in civil war. The Federal Constitution has never been in operation. The Government is essentially despotic and must be so for years to come. The rulers have not honesty, and the people have not intelligence.” Texas was halfway to independence from Mexico, Houston said. “She has already beaten and expelled all the troops of Mexico from her soil, nor will she permit them to return. She can defend herself against the whole power of Mexico, for really Mexico is powerless and penniless.” Mexico would lose Texas, to one country or another. “If the United States does not press for it, England will most assuredly obtain it by some means.” Houston knew that the mere mention of a British interest in Texas would arrest Jackson’s attention. But allowing for the unlikely possibility that that didn’t suffice, Houston expatiated on the charms of the province. “I have travelled near five hundred miles across Texas . . . and I have no hesitancy in pronouncing it the finest country to its extent upon the globe. . . . The greater portion of it is richer and more healthy, in my opinion, than West Tennessee. There can be no doubt but the country east of the River Grand of the North”—the Rio Grande—“would sustain a population of ten millions of souls.”
I
f Houston believed everything he told Jackson about Texas, he was deluding himself. There was indeed unrest among the Americans in Texas, but sentiment for transfer to the United States was not nearly as overwhelming as he suggested. A substantial number of Texans, including Stephen Austin and his early colonists, wanted merely a separate state government for Texas within the Mexican federation. Yet that wasn’t what Houston wanted, so he left it unsaid. In any case, what he had learned about Mexican politics during his short time in the country caused him to conclude that the Mexican government would not accept statehood for Texas. Its refusal rendered full separation nearly inevitable.
Events made Houston appear a prophet. Santa Anna, for reasons having little to do with Texas, gathered more and more power to himself in Mexico City, alarming republicans throughout Mexico and especially advocates of states’ rights. The latter objected, to the point of rebellion in such provinces as Zacatecas. Santa Anna responded by crushing the rebellion in Zacatecas with brutality sufficient to send shudders north to Texas, as it was intended to. But rather than intimidate the Texans it prompted a growing number of them to believe that their only security lay beyond the reach of Santa Anna, which was to say, beyond the authority of Mexico. By the autumn of 1835 Texans were forming into militias and drilling. As they drilled they talked more openly than ever of independence.
Amid the news of these developments Jackson received a curious letter from Houston and six other Texans. The seven identified themselves as a “committee of vigilance and safety for the department of Nacogdoches.” Houston had told the others about Jackson’s claim of American sovereignty to the Neches—in other words, that Nacogdoches was on what Jackson considered to be American soil—and the committee accordingly felt obliged to alert the American president to reports that a large band of Creek Indians (“not less than five thousand”) were preparing to occupy the disputed zone. The Texans reminded Jackson that a treaty between the United States and Mexico allowed each country to prevent the unauthorized movement of Indians along the mutual border, and they implored the president to take action on behalf of themselves and their neighbors, “a sparse and comparatively defenceless population unprotected from the evils which were so tragically manifested on the frontiers of Georgia and Alabama, evils which can only be remedied by the skill and generalship of a Jackson.” Houston and the committee went on to say, quite pointedly, that they expected no protection from the government of Mexico. “The unhappy distractions of this government have been such as to command the attention of the president”—Santa Anna—“to the interior condition of the country.”
The odd thing about this letter was that there was little evidence that any Creek incursion was under way or even contemplated, and certainly not of the size Houston and the others alleged. Nor did any such incursion ever take place. The letter seems to have had a different purpose: to remind Jackson of the troubles in Texas, to inform him that Mexican troops were nowhere near, and to signal that the Americans in Texas looked eagerly to Washington for protection.
T
he Houston letter complemented intelligence Jackson was receiving from Anthony Butler in Mexico City. “You have heard of the revolt in Texas, where it is said there has been some skirmishing between the Mexican troops and the Texas riflemen, always resulting in favor of the latter,” Butler wrote in November 1835. “The course pursued by the people of Texas has greatly exasperated General Santa Anna as we hear, and he vows to chastise the insolence of these borderers even if he goes in person to do so.”
By the time Jackson received Butler’s letter the revolt in Texas had escalated. The rebels captured San Antonio, the seat of Mexican authority in Texas, and drove Mexican military forces south across the Rio Grande. The news created a sensation in Mexico City. “This country is in a perfect tempest of passion in consequence of the revolt in Texas,” Butler wrote in December. “General Santa Anna is perfectly furious.” Santa Anna blamed the Texans, but he also blamed the United States, “who he has identified with the revolt, charging our Government and people with promoting and supporting that revolt with sinister views, with the view toward acquiring the territory.” The general vowed armed resistance against this perceived American attack. “He has sworn that not an inch of the territory shall be separated from Mexico, that the United States shall never occupy one foot of the land west of the Sabine.” In fact, he swore much more than that. “I understand that General Jackson sets up a claim to pass the Sabine, and that in running the division line hopes to acquire the country as far as the Neches,” he said. “I mean to run that line at the mouth of my cannon, and after the line is established, if the nation will only give me the means, only afford me the necessary supply of money, I will march to the capital. I will lay Washington City in ashes.”
Jackson’s initial response to Santa Anna’s threat went unrecorded, although it can well be imagined. Yet as his outrage subsided, he recognized something he hadn’t till now: that the United States would be involved in the revolutionary events in Texas whether he wished it or not. Santa Anna was already blaming the United States, and there was no reason to expect him to change his mind, even if Jackson maintained strict neutrality.
In fact Jackson did maintain strict neutrality, in the formal sense. During the first months of 1836 the Texans sent agents to the United States to recruit money and volunteers in support of their cause. The Mexican minister in Washington complained that this represented illegal interference in the internal affairs of Mexico. Jackson’s State Department answered that it did no such thing. The American government carefully avoided taking sides in the Texas troubles. What American citizens did on their own was another matter. Federal law prohibited the launching of war from American soil, and this law was being conscientiously enforced. But if Americans wanted to travel to Texas, that was their business. What they did in Texas was Mexico’s business.
Yet the administration prepared to intervene. In March 1836 the Texans lost one large force at San Antonio when Santa Anna’s army overran the Alamo, and another at Goliad when nearly four hundred Texan prisoners were executed. The twin debacles triggered a flood of refugees ahead of Santa Anna, who had determined to solve his Texas problem by driving all the Americans across the Sabine. Sam Houston by now had been named commanding general of the Texas army—largely on the strength of his service under Jackson—but that army was greatly outnumbered by the Mexicans, and it and Houston were retreating almost as fast as the refugees.
At the Sabine, observing the approach of the refugees and Houston’s army, was General Edmund Gaines, Jackson’s old comrade from the Seminole War and currently commander of American military forces in the southwestern district. Gaines recalled the lesson he had learned from Jackson in Florida, that borders are best defended on their far side, in the territory of the enemy, and as the fighting in Texas approached the American border he prepared to mount a forward defense. Noting the “sanguinary manner in which the Mexican forces seem disposed to carry on the war,” Gaines told Lewis Cass, the secretary of war, “I take leave to suggest whether it may or may not become necessary,
in our own defence
, to speak to the contending belligerents in a language not to be misunderstood—a language requiring
force
.” Gaines proposed raising an army of eight to twelve thousand men from among the citizens of Louisiana and neighboring states. With this he would repulse the Mexicans and likely settle the Texas question definitively.
Cass consulted with Jackson before responding. “It is not the wish of the President to take advantage of present circumstances, and thereby obtain possession of any portion of the Mexican territory,” the war secretary wrote. “Still, however, the neutral duties, as well as the neutral rights, of the United States will justify the Government in taking all necessary measures to prevent a violation of their territory.” Cass, speaking for Jackson, authorized Gaines to assume “such position, on either side of the imaginary boundary line, as may be best for your defensive operations.” Gaines was explicitly authorized to advance to Nacogdoches, “which is within the limits of the United States, as claimed by this Government.”