Andrew Jackson (83 page)

Houston and the Texans knew of Gaines’s movements and disposition. Texas agents met with the American general and discussed how he might help their cause. Gaines committed himself—and the United States—to nothing specific on behalf of the Texans, but he conveyed the strong impression of readiness to fight. “He will maintain the honor of his country and punish the aggressor, be him whom he may,” wrote Sam Carson, the secretary of state of the recently declared Texas republic, after a meeting with Gaines.

Houston kept his own counsel during the retreat across Texas, but his prior history and his contemporary actions suggest that he hoped to lure Santa Anna into a trap. Santa Anna claimed Texas to the Sabine, Jackson claimed Louisiana to the Neches, and Gaines was prepared to defend the region in between. If Houston could lure Santa Anna across the Neches, Gaines and his American army would pounce on the Mexicans. Jackson’s hands would be clean, as American forces would be defending American soil, or what Jackson was pleased to call American soil. And it was impossible to imagine that any such conflict would end without Jackson and Houston getting what they both had wanted for years: the transfer of Texas to the United States.

Things didn’t work out that way. Houston’s men, who weren’t in on his plans, refused to continue retreating. They demanded to avenge their fallen comrades and, at a critical junction of a road east turned
toward
Santa Anna rather than away. Houston had never managed to instill the kind of discipline that made Jackson famous (and infamous), and he had no choice but to accept that in the Texan army decisions flowed not from the top down but from the bottom up. Days later the Texans met Santa Anna and a small advance contingent of the Mexican army and won a stunning victory at San Jacinto. Santa Anna, captured after the battle, agreed to give the Texans their freedom, and Houston became a hero sooner than he expected.

J
ohn Quincy Adams didn’t quite accuse Jackson of fomenting the revolution in Texas, but he came close. By the end of Jackson’s second term there was almost nothing Adams thought Jackson incapable of. The president had ruined republicanism by pandering to the mobs. He had ravaged the economy by destroying the Bank of the United States. He had sullied Harvard by accepting an honorary degree. And now he was threatening personal liberty and affronting the American conscience by acting as the agent of the slave conspiracy that was subverting the American government.

This last charge against Jackson was something novel. And it signaled not that Jackson had changed but that America had changed. Views on slavery continued to evolve. With the triumph of democracy came a growing intolerance for those forms of inequality that remained from former days, of which the most obvious was slavery. By now the North was essentially free of slaves (the exceptions being a few elderly survivors in states that had emancipated gradually, by outlawing the acquisition of
new
slaves). This made it easy for northerners to indulge their consciences. Abolitionism, once the province of cranks and Quakers, became almost unremarkable.

Predictably, the South grew defensive. Spokesmen emerged to describe slavery not as a necessary evil—the standard interpretation of eighteenth-century slaveholders—but as a positive good, the bedrock of southern society. John Calhoun told the Senate that “a mysterious Providence” had brought the white and black races together in the American South, with the former to be masters and the latter slaves. “The very existence of the South,” Calhoun continued, “depends upon the existing relations being kept up, and every scheme which might be introduced, having for its object an alteration in the condition of the negro, is pregnant with danger and ruin.” In the House slaveholders and their allies, claiming a constitutional right to property in persons, led a movement to keep antislavery petitions from even being heard.

Adams resented the “gag rule,” as it was called, and battled against it. He resented everything about the hardening of the southern position on slavery. Like his father—and most of the generation of the Founders—he had long assumed that slavery would fade and eventually disappear. That it didn’t, but instead fastened itself on the American republic more tightly than ever, and had the gall to claim the Constitution as its guarantee of perpetual life, simply struck Adams as another sordid aspect of the country’s descent into democracy.

The war in Texas was the latest crime of the slaveholding conspiracy, Adams believed. And Jackson was the arch-conspirator. “It is said that one of the earliest acts of this administration was a proposal, made at a time when there was already much ill humor in Mexico against the United States, that she should cede to the United States a very large portion of her territory,” Adams told the House. “A device better calculated to produce jealousy, suspicion, ill will, and hatred could not have been contrived. . . . This overture, offensive in itself, was made precisely at the time when a swarm of colonists from these United States were covering the Mexican border with land-jobbing, and with slaves, introduced in defiance of Mexican laws, by which slavery had been abolished throughout that republic.” The war in Texas was not a war for independence but “a war for the re-establishment of slavery where it was abolished, . . . a war between slavery and emancipation.” Adams knew of the movements of Gaines along the Texas border, and he suspected that Jackson had put the general up to the kind of things Jackson himself had done in Florida. Speaking to the president and his partners in crime, Adams warned, “You are now rushing into war—into a war of conquest, commenced by aggression on your part, and for the re-establishment of slavery where it has been abolished. . . . In that war, sir, the banners of freedom will be the banners of Mexico; and your banners, I blush to speak the word, will be the banners of slavery.” Nor would that contest culminate the evil. The “inevitable consequence” of the war with Mexico would be a civil war in America, “the last great conflict . . . between slavery and emancipation.”

H
ouston’s victory at San Jacinto spared Jackson the decision of whether to intervene in the Texas revolution. Jackson was just as happy not to get involved directly in the war, although he couldn’t resist offering Houston advice. “I have seen a report that General Santa Anna was to be brought before a military court, to be tried and shot,” he wrote his old lieutenant.

Nothing now could tarnish the character of Texas more than such an act at this late period. It was good policy as well as humanity that spared him. It has given you possession of Goliad and the Alamo without blood or loss of the strength of your army. His person is still of much consequence to you. He is the pride of the Mexican soldiers and the favorite of the priesthood, and whilst he is in your power the priests will not furnish the supplies necessary for another campaign, nor will the regular soldiers
voluntarily
march when their reentering Texas may endanger or cost their favorite general his life. Therefore preserve his life and the character you have won, and let not his blood be shed unless it becomes necessary by an imperative act of just retaliation for Mexican massacres hereafter. This is what I think true wisdom and humanity dictates.

Houston must have wondered at the striking difference between this Jackson and the general who had executed Arbuthnot and Ambrister for far less than Santa Anna had done to the Texans. Maybe he reflected that the difference was the difference between a theater commander and the commander in chief. Maybe he concluded that his old leader had simply mellowed after all these years. In any event, Houston himself had decided within moments of his capture that Santa Anna was worth more to Texas alive than dead.

Houston intended to employ Santa Anna in a diplomatic effort to end the Texas war. The Mexican government remained unreconciled to Texas independence, having deposed Santa Anna in absentia and rejected the promises he had given the Texans in exchange for his life. Houston by this time was the elected president of the Texas republic, and his first task was to terminate the war on the basis of Texas independence. He and Stephen Austin, now the Texas secretary of state, drafted a letter to Jackson, ostensibly written by Santa Anna. The letter proposed that Santa Anna and Jackson work out a deal to guarantee the future of Texas. “Let us establish mutual relations, to the end that your nation and the Mexican may strengthen their friendly ties, and both engage amicably in giving existence and stability to a people that wish to figure in the political world, in which they will succeed, within a few years, with the protection of the two nations.”

Jackson was skeptical. Whether or not he recognized the words as Houston’s and Austin’s, Jackson had to doubt Santa Anna’s sincerity, as the man remained a prisoner of the Texans and rightly feared for his life. More to the point, Santa Anna no longer represented anyone besides himself. Maybe Mexico’s soldiers still loved him, but the men in charge of Mexico’s government wanted nothing to do with him. And it was these men with whom Jackson as American president had to deal. “Until the existing Government of Mexico ask our friendly offices between the contending parties, Mexico and Texas,” Jackson replied, “we cannot interfere.”

If Houston was surprised at Jackson’s coolness, he shouldn’t have been. Jackson had been prepared to fight if Santa Anna brought the Texas war to the American border, but he saw no reason to get tangled in a conflict the Texans had already won, at least for the present. Jackson could tell that a final resolution of the Texas question would require a settlement between the United States and Mexico. Mexico wasn’t Spain, which could be ejected from Florida (and North America) once and for all. Mexico would always be the neighbor of the United States, regardless of where the border between the two countries eventually fell. And there was one other thing: Jackson was beginning to look farther than Texas for America’s western boundary. He was eyeing California, which together with Texas would round out the American Southwest nicely. Forcing the Texas issue would make acquiring California more difficult.

Yet Houston was persistent. He sent Santa Anna to Washington, hoping that what he and Santa Anna hadn’t been able to accomplish by mail Santa Anna might manage in person. Jackson consented to an interview, which turned out to be one of the oddest diplomatic sessions of the era. In Jackson’s White House bedroom, the embodiment of American democracy discussed the fate of rebel Texas with the erstwhile Mexican caudillo. Jackson still insisted that any arrangement regarding Texas be made through official channels. Yet, realizing that official channels had a way of changing course in Mexico and that Santa Anna, currently deposed, might find his way back to power upon his return to Mexico City, the American president suggested that the Mexican government might wish to settle the Texas affair as part of a package including California. Jackson mentioned $3.5 million as an appropriate price.

Santa Anna seemed receptive, the more so when Jackson offered him transport home. An American frigate carried the defeated general to Veracruz, where he disappeared, for the time being, into the swirl of Mexican politics.

J
ackson had been an old man when he entered the White House, and he was a very old man as he prepared to leave it almost eight years later. At the dying end of his seventh decade, his body bore the tracks of all those years: the smallpox scars and the crease in his skull from the Revolutionary War, the bullet wounds from his duels and shooting scrapes, the gaunt frame and hollow cheeks from a lifetime battling intestinal parasites, the sallow complexion from an equally protracted contest with malaria. His heart no longer ached as badly as it had during the first year after Rachel’s death, but his spirit still sagged under the conviction that he’d never know joy till they met again, in his own death. He was relieved to relinquish power, especially to one he trusted as much as he did Martin Van Buren. It didn’t strike him as odd that he, the champion of the people’s right to choose their leaders, should essentially appoint his own successor. Of course he had long since come to believe that he spoke for the people, and there was no denying that Van Buren was popular, at least among the Jackson loyalists. They nominated Van Buren unanimously at their Baltimore convention, partly because he was as charming as ever but mostly because he promised to carry on in the tradition of Old Hickory—“to tread generally in the footsteps of President Jackson, happy if I shall be able to perfect the work he has so gloriously begun.”