‘Sweet, Just, Boyish Masters’: the Liberal Empire of the Americans

[M.ShawPyle]

‘Sweet, Just, Boyish Masters’: the Liberal Empire of the Americans
A History in Tribute to Bernard DeVoto

1. The Fateful Year of Portent

‘In the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Thirty-Six, and of the Independence of the United States the Sixtieth….’ None is so given to pomp as the lawyer and the legislator, and the statutes and legal documents of that momentous year were invariably clad in such chronological boiler-plating. Yet there is a sense in which the sixtieth year of the American republic – the span of one man’s life in those days – was corporately the year in which the United States left infancy and came of age.

Historians of the school of Charles Beard will point to medical advances and the extension of early railways as the moving factors, but less deterministic, or more romantic, historians might well suggest that the events that began in 1836 were the result of several marriages. There were the centuries of royal marriages, dynastic alliances, and consequent revolts and confessional wars, that had culminated in the emergence of two distinct cultures in what were once the Habsburg Low Countries, the once-Spanish Netherlands: a cultural difference that in 1836 was incarnated in the emergence of the new Belgian kingdom, and in that otherwise minor event’s far-reaching effects on the European balance of power. That shift in the balance created an opportunity for the American rise whilst old Europe’s attention was elsewhere absorbed.

More immediately, 1836 was the year of destiny because a young Virginian heiress, the daughter of Martha Washington’s grandson (who had been made George Washington’s adoptive heir) had, some years before, turned down a dashing Congressman from Tennessee, rather older than she. In place of a rising star, one of Old Hickory’s westward-looking young men and most prominent lieutenants, Mary Custis had chosen instead to marry an impecunious, if impeccably-bred, fellow Virginian, an obscure West Point cadet named R. E. Lee. The rejected Sam Houston of Tennessee had gone on to wed a Tennessee belle, desert her, become a notorious drunkard living on the charity of his Indian blood-brethren, and then, in 1836, emerge from his self-made hell to lead the Republic of Texas to independence. As for what became of Mary Custis Lee’s young husband, we shall see….

More immediately still, 1836 took on the lineaments it did because of two other Tennesseean marriages in earlier years: that of Andrew Jackson to his beloved Rachel, and that of his Secretary of War, Mr Eaton, to the scandalous young widow – or ‘widow,’ as her detractors put it, with audible quotation marks – Peggy Timberlake, daughter of the landlord of the most riotous Jacksonian boarding house in the still raw and muddy capital a-building on the Potomac banks. The refusal of the Cabinet wives, led by an implacable Floride Bonneau Calhoun, wife of the Vice-President, to receive the new Mrs Secretary Eaton socially, touched Old Hickory in a sore spot, with its parallels to the calumnies his own late wife had endured. The old duellist could hardly send a challenge to ‘them D––d Society Women’ to meet him with pistols at daybreak, but he could certainly repay their cattiness by throwing the mantle of the Democratic succession over the shoulders of the socially unaffected Van Buren, leaving his former heir apparent, Calhoun of South Carolina, to shiver in the gale.

The remaking of the Democratic party, then, grew from insignificant causes, but bore ponderable results. Not least was the swing towards Northern sectional interests in what remained ostensibly the Party of the Solid South; and with that swing came a dilution of Jeffersonian ‘philosophical purity’ and an increasing willingness to engage in Internal Improvements, long a bug-bear in American politics. The tariff, also, gained in acceptance, and Van Buren, nothing if not a spoilsman to the core, saw to it that the Southern states were enmeshed in its toils willingly: subsidized industrialization in the South, sugar-coated by being cast as a national defense measure (arms, fabric for naval stores, and the like), slowly bled the region of its agrarian character.

Other unintended consequences of Old Kinderhook’s dominance of his party we shall see in due course; but one ironic result of the rise of Van Buren and the comparative eclipse of Calhoun was the diminution of Presidential influence. Having been denied the Presidency, Calhoun returned to the Senate (the legislature in Columbia being firmly in his hip pocket then as always); and with Van Buren moving to seize total control of the party machinery from the executive side, Calhoun soon found no shortage of allies in isolating the presidency as a factor in national affairs. The rule seemed to be that if Van Buren and his placemen and anointed successors were going to control the presidency for the foreseeable future – and Little Van the Magician’s dexterity in ladling out plums and spoils made that all too likely – then the Congress, in which almost every man thought himself the only fit president for the republic, would see to it that the presidency, so long as it was held by Van and his successors, should not be worth having.

The era of Congressional Government had begun in earnest.

Technical Note: v 1.02. All settings Normal.

[Morpheus506]

Sounds interesting, I think. The font hurts my eyes though... might just be lack of sleep, you never know

[ShrineGuard]

I agree, the font has really kept me from getting more than halfway through, especially this late at night.

[M.ShawPyle]

Originally Posted by ShrineGuard

... the font has really kept me from getting more than halfway through, especially this late at night.

Easily enough remedied, though Times New Roman always looks natty on my screen settings. But ... default it is then, and a round on the house!

[Paul Drye]

Any AAR that starts with a Santayana quote other than "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" deserves notice.

[M.ShawPyle]

Originally Posted by Paul Drye

Any AAR that starts with a Santayana quote other than "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" deserves notice.

Bless you. I was waiting for someone to notice. (Greeks, the Raj, and the Americans? Who'd ha' thunk it?)

[M.ShawPyle]

The first years of the new era set much of its persistent tone: widespread corruption at home, an ad hoc economic strategy so flexible as to be almost incoherent, foreign and diplomatic sinuosity, and a commitment to expansion by fair means or foul. As M de Tocqueville was to remark in due course, the Americans managed to commit acts of breathtaking cynicism from a firm belief that they acted with the highest of motives.

Corruption at home was not merely widespread; it was positively winked at. The last survivors of the traditional ‘Democracy,’ as Southern Democrats somewhat self-servingly called their party (‘we are The Democracy’): the last of Randolph of Roanoke’s ‘Tertium Quids’: were opposed on philosophical grounds to Federal interference in law and order matters. John C. Calhoun erected a mightily buttressed and awesomely spired philosophical façade for non-interference, for ‘leaving matters to the Several and Sovereign States, suh,’ whilst actively using and benefiting from machine politics and rotten boroughs wherever his faction could reach the levers of power. Rival factions did the same, and the Van Buren wing of the Democratic Party, which remained predominant in all sections of the country, refined the art of spoilsmanship to its highest level. The occasional early economist, himself inevitably a lone voice in American thought, warned of the ‘drag’ effect such entrenched corruption had on national productivity, but he was without exception ignored.

Instead, the national government, which increasingly meant the Congress, alternated between spasms of expenditure and periods in which it did little but chant the mantra of ‘retrenchment and reform.’ Whatever national debt was incurred was soon satisfied by the now permanent ‘sinking fund,’ and any prolonged deficit resulted invariably in a reactive period of budget-cutting, repeated payings-down (the Federal treasury had a horror of wasting perfectly good income on interest), and fairly savage taxation.

The country could afford such economic sprees and their consequent economic hangovers for a number of reasons. Henry Clay, as Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, acted largely as his own Secretary of State, to Van Buren’s consternation and that of Secretary Forsyth. Under Clay’s impetus, if not guidance, Clay not being one of the world’s workers nor noted for consistent attention to detail, a diplomatic habit emerged – derided by Clay’s detractors as ‘the other “American System”’ – of licensing technologies to foreign governments in return for cash down. There was no little grumbling from those who disliked seeing the US Patent Office turned into a retail shop for the world’s intellectual property market, but so long as the United States continued to opt out of any international patent and copyright agreements, as it was to do for most of the XIXth Century, it made perfect sense for the government to profit from Yankee ingenuity wherever it could.

Less clearly recognized at the time, though very apparent with hindsight, was the manner in which sales of technology were granted or withheld, going, not always to the absolute highest bidder, but to governments whose benefit from the infusion would simultaneously act as a brake on the aspirations of rival powers. On the few occasions on which licensure was granted to another Great Power – and the United States was reckoned amongst the Powers from 1837 onwards – the decision to license was based on the probability that the licensee would cause trouble for, or preserve itself as a counterweight to, other Powers that might otherwise eclipse the United States or whose interests were inimical to theirs. Licensure became not only a source of funds, but a means of redressing the balance of power, or of crippling a rival by granting its rival an opportunity to harass them.

At home, Congress acquiesced, for its own reasons, in the agenda of internal improvements that the Van Buren Administration intended to use as a spoils program. Significantly, the first territory to be granted statehood in the period was the only remaining territory in the South, Florida, and the first railroad chartered by a Federal grant was in the Savannah Low Country of Georgia. The government’s placing of orders for what a later age would call ‘dual use’ technology and materials, beginning with a cement plant in the Commonwealth of Virginia, was part of an overarching plan to draw the agrarian South into a Hamiltonian system of national industrialization, one that would unify Northern and Southern elites in a capitalist brotherhood and decrease Southern sectionalism. Southern sectionalists, including proto-secessionists, joined in the program for their own motives: if ever a sectional conflict arose, they intended to be no less possessed of the sinews of war than was the North. Van Buren’s Northern wing of the party was not unaware of the reasons for the South’s complaisant reaction, and quietly saw to it that the heaviest troops, infantry and artillery, in the expanding United States Army were recruited from Yankeedom, leaving to the Southerners the prestige – and lighter firepower – of mounted arms. The doctrines of von Clausewitz had found ready acceptance with the War Department by late 1836, and the experience of Texas in achieving its independence appeared to bear out the virtues of organization and drill over Bonapartist, Jominian élan.

The Speaker of the House, James K. Polk of Tennessee, had his eye on Texas from the beginning. It was a portent of things to come.

Expansion was a keynote of the period, and would remain so, involving immigration, internal migration, and the natural increase of the native population. Medical advances, mostly resulting from Scots-trained, Edinburgh-educated physicians and medical professors in Philadelphia, improved public health and the rate of population increase markedly, and were a boon to the expanding soldiery on land. This synergized with the adoption of Clausewitzian theory in the Army, though the Navy remained wedded to the Nelsonian, Jonesian beau ideal of the Heroic Naval Leader. This was of little moment at the time, however, as the course of empire was regarded as fixed upon the North American continent, and it was the dragoon and the musketman on whom the United States intended to rely in achieving their manifest destiny.

In pursuit of that destiny, the United States steered a rather complicated course through the shoals of the Texians’s revolution. Texas in revolt was, by and large, winked at and quietly encouraged; Texas getting above itself, not least when its revolutionary diplomats behaved undiplomatically, was slapped down firmly. The objective of the United States was to see a Texas independent of Mexico, but not so strong that it would stand on its own. Detaching the Texan lands from Mexico without war and then annexing the rump state without expenditure was what the expansionists had in mind.

As a result, 1837, which saw the creation of a paper mill in Massachusetts, new steel production in Pennsylvania, a fertilizer factory’s being built in Louisiana, an orgy of railway building in the Northeast and the coastal South, and a new culture of professionalism in the Army, was most celebrated for the ambivalent victory achieved by the Texas rebels, whose formal independence was almost indistinguishable from a defeat, and for whom the price of that independence had included abandoning any presence more material than a mere claim at law to South and West Texas.

This result was eminently satisfactory to the United States, and the next decade would be devoted, in no small part, to four goals: industrialization (and as a result, diminished sectionalism) at home, African colonization (as a means to another end), the creation of an Army capable of cracking Mexico like an egg, and securing and maintaining an Anglo-American alliance, an ‘Anglosphere,’ against which no other Powers could hope to stand and into the orbit of which, as satellites, France and her dependencies, at least, would inexorably be drawn.

There was hardly a cloud on the horizon … save that a handful of New England Transcendentalists had also turned their eyes to Texas and the Southwest, and had begun to mutter darkly about the national conspiracy to extend the Slave Power. Street-corner agitators such as William Lloyd Garrison could be safely ignored. Men of standing, such as Wendell Phillips and Orestes Brownson, however, had to be treated cautiously.

[Legacy010]

it really does hurt your eyes...oh god... getting dizzy... (*Thud*)...

Lights...dimming...
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[Prufrock451]

*sniff sniff*

I detect the scent of a fellow historian! Or at least someone equally obsessed with history.

I'll be following this one with keen interest. Hurrah for the Union!

[Kedryn]

I love the way this one reads. Just like a history book.

[M.ShawPyle]

Originally Posted by Prufrock451

*sniff sniff*

I detect the scent of a fellow historian! Or at least someone equally obsessed with history.

I'll be following this one with keen interest. Hurrah for the Union!

Or at least the smell of napalm in the morning. And yes, you do indeed detect that characteristic fragrance of the historian. I am delighted to have piqued your interest.

[M.ShawPyle]

Originally Posted by Kedryn

I love the way this one reads. Just like a history book.

Thank you. That is precisely what I was gunning for.

[M.ShawPyle]

The ensuing years of Van Buren’s ascendancy saw the European Powers preoccupied with their own colonial affairs, and with their own internal rivalries, not a few of which consisted of squabbling over the leavings of the Ottoman Empire despite the Sick Man of Europe’s not being yet decently dead. With the eyes of the world turned elsewhere, the Americas were left largely to their own devices.

The United States were nothing loath to take advantage of Europe’s self-absorption.

A classic sample of the American bent for combining psalm-singing piety with power politics could be found in the half-inadvertent colonization of parts of the Namib strand and its hinterland, from Walvis Bay inland to Grootfontein, by traders and missionaries. To the administration in Washington, and still more to the Congress, this instance of Doing the Lord’s Work Amongst the Benighted was cause for hallelujahs when the territorial claims thus acquired could be, and soon were, sold off to Her Majesty’s Government for a healthy amount of specie and increased diplomatic influence at the Court of St James’s. The precedent thus set would be increasingly resorted to as the years went on.

At home, driven by mechanization and seminal improvements in the handling and processing of raw materials, what Mr Jefferson had once envisioned as a republic of self-sufficient farmers, innately virtuous and tied to the land, exporters only of raw goods and liberty, was becoming a commercial and industrial power, increasingly engaged in the manufacture of finished goods. The looms thrummed, the early harvesters toiled in the fields like rough beasts made of iron, and in place of raw cotton and timber the United States began to ship bolts of cloth and stacks of chairs and tables from their busy quays.

And on the waterfront, as in the counting-house and at the factory and in the small, dusty crossroads market towns and county seats adorned with naively pompous courthouses, a casual and cozy corruption remained entrenched. Mr Jefferson’s heirs had not even Mr Jefferson’s ambivalence over private and public hypocrisies: politics was a full contact sport in the brawling and boisterous young republic, and the public man who was not for sale was the man who had already been bought. The grant of universal manhood suffrage in this period was a ploy, at once cynical and innocently principled, that – as calculated – attracted increased immigration without in any way affecting the day to day workings of politics. Indeed, had the legislation ever seriously threatened actually to make a difference to the politics of the day, it would never, of course, have been passed.

This paradox was easily enough explained. The principles of Federalism ensured that extending to all adult white men, free men, the right to vote in Federal elections, without regard to property qualifications, could and did emanate only from the States. That both major parties, the Whigs and ‘the Democracy,’ could and did agree on the proposal, and had the power to direct their state by state party machinery to get the appropriate legislation through the statehouses, was itself testament enough to the meaninglessness of the right thus extended. Both parties were vast systems of spoils and influence, and the small farmer’s ballot was hardly a threat to the Lords Proprietors, ward heelers, and bosses of either.

Moreover, the electoral college system and the indirect election of senators were more than sufficient, as devices, to ensure that popular sentiment and the popular vote needed never be translated into action or policy unless it was convenient to do so.

The House, admittedly, was liable to be affected in its composition by the expansion of the franchise, and in a system that increasingly saw power located in the legislative branch, this might in theory have amounted to giving more power to the common people; but whoever was elected to the House of Representatives soon enough learnt that the power to get anything at all done, there, was dependent upon toeing the line. The new congressman who failed to obey the whips, to integrate his district into the party patronage system, and to adhere strenuously to the whims of the Speaker, the floor leaders, and the committee chairmen, was going to find it impossible to bring home the bacon – or, rather, the pork. And in a country that now paid only lip service, North and South and West alike, to the old strictures against pork-barrel projects and ‘internal improvements,’ a congressman who could not secure plums for his district was a congressman marked for defeat at the next election.

No, rather than the principle of the thing, better than posturing as a tribune of the people, it was better, was it not, to play the game, to go along, to operate within the system. Two years was far too short a time to accomplish anything in Washington City. The only prospect for achieving influence and the power to do any good at all was to be a good soldier, work one’s way up on the seniority system, obey the whips, suffer the early years at the bottom rungs of the most obscure committees, and eventually thus to become a serious player in the halls of Congress. Why, damn it, it was actually one’s duty to one’s constituents to do so. Thus congressmen persuaded themselves to fall into line (for what congressman has ever believed himself to be less than indispensable?); thus the spoils system and the party machinery, in the very guise of extending the franchise and thus the power to the less wealthy, secured their stranglehold on the smallest wards and brought the remotest country courthouses firmly into their sway.

Very rarely, in the first few decades of the American rise, would an outsider force his way into the citadel: only the rare man with a popular base of support, as a frontiersman or a war hero, had any hope of doing so. And if, once there, he succeeded at all in leapfrogging the placemen and the timeservers, in achieving rank and power, he found himself coopted into the self-same system, now as its chief, ladling out patronage as the only means of controlling and managing the congressional or executive herd.

What was concealed amongst the profitable, politically snug buds and blossoms of the increase in immigration was, however, the thorn of nativism. Sooner or later, the Whigs and the Democrats were going to prick their fingers on it, as unassimilated and inassimilable minorities began increasingly to arrive in the ports of the East and the Gulf Coast.

For the present, though, America seemed more unified than ever, its sectional passions drawn off by the westward expansion. For Christmas in 1838, the crescent power found in its stocking a proposal from President Sam Houston of Texas for the admission of that tatterdemalion republic as a state of the Union, without any intervening territorial period. With Mr Polk sitting as Speaker of the House, Mr Webster controlling the Senate Committee on Finance, Mr Clay chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Thomas Hart Benton running the Military Affairs Committee from his capacious hip pocket and booming for a fight, and Mr Calhoun unopposed, it hardly mattered what President Van Buren, or the former president now sitting in Congress, John Quincy Adams, thought. A Joint Treaty was duly executed, and the deployment of regular troops to forward positions on the US - Mexico border signed and sealed it.

By 1840, the Texas republic was a joint stock company in the process of merger and acquisition, and the United States were its guarantor and parent corporation. The United Kingdom, in turn, was securely in the American camp, militarily allied to its former rebel colonies and committed to the American cause regardless of the Franco-Spanish guaranties to Mexico. This balance of forces, coupled with a thus-far still warm relationship between the United States and France, suggested that, even should Mexico do more than protest the annexation of Texas, France might well wash her hands of the business. It was a suggestion that Washington City found too comforting to analyze.

In 1840, Little Van secured his second term, meaningless though the presidential bauble increasingly was, and Mr Clay prepared to take over the Senate Finance Committee, which in some ways now was the government, from Mr Webster, after which Mr Calhoun was slated to follow Mr Clay in their cozy rotation. The US Army continued its expansion, now armed with muzzle-loaded riflery, dosed with quinine, and dowered with prophylaxes against malaria. Units continued to deploy along the border with Mexico, and the slavery agitation that Texas’s annexation had exacerbated, degenerated largely into mere brawls and fisticuffs.

By the end of January, 1841, Texas was a state of the Union, Mexico was embroiled along with the Central American Union in the jungles of rebellious Honduras, and the pro-slavery and pro-expansionist factions in both major parties were firmly in the saddle. There seemed to be no obstacles to America’s swift and unceasing ascent.

[M.ShawPyle]

The pace of change continued to increase, exponentially, each new advance driving the nation still faster forward, accelerating its progress … and the dislocations and deracination attendant upon that progress. Each new loom and packing plant forced the pace. Men then living had known in their earliest youths the attempts to build canals along the Potomac, and to connect the James and the Kanawha; they had marveled at the opening of the Erie Canal. Now the railroads stretched their ruler-straight lines, straight and undeviating as the roads of Roman imperium, across obstacles the Romans would have quailed before: the C&O, the Norfolk & Western, the RF&P, the New York Central, the New York & Erie, the Winchester & Potomac, and a score of others. The railbeds were of gravel all compound, but the ties and rails truly were laid over the past and old folkways; the railroads, flush with government largesse and subsidized by the US Mails, smugly corrupt and corrupting, carried in each swaying car of every train-consist, the unintended consequences of an unforeseen future.

The acquisition of Texas had been a gamble, implicating war with Mexico and upsetting the balance between the slave states and the free: that had been expected, anticipated, calculated. What had not been foreseen by the men in Washington City, gathered in their marble temples that rose from a welter of mud, was that the Mexican population would not largely embrace the ineffable privilege of becoming Americans. Revolt smoldered in the brush and the brasada, fomented by the Mexican government, and tied down US troops month after weary month. The debatable lands of the Nueces Strip and the Trans-Pecos sent their bandit bands and rustlers – as Washington City and Austin saw it – nightly into Anglo Texas, and even had the United States yet moved their border southward to the Rio Grande del Norte, making good on Texas’s claims, there was little guarantee that the brushfire rebellion would end. From the Mexican perspective, the raids were redress, justice, taking back ‘Grandmother’s cattle’ from what had been, before the coming of the gringo thieves, ‘Grandmother’s lands.’

Congressional and executive insularity, and ignorance of facts on the ground, did not stop there, by any means. 1838 had seen, not only Texas’s adhesion to the Union, consummated by treaty in 1841, but also the administration’s unlikely acquiescence in John Marshall’s judgment against the State of Georgia and in favor of the Cherokee Nation: part of the price exacted from an unwilling Andrew Jackson by the Van Buren wing of the party. It had been, for once, a case of the morally right action’s coinciding with the politically expedient choice, but it had left deep resentments in its wake, in what became the fiefdom of Calhoun and his allies and successors. By the 1840s, the Van Buren camp’s lack of a viable Southern strategy, part of the still-accumulating consequences of that un-Jacksonian decision, had begun to distort its policies. The Democracy and the Whigs alike were beginning to coalesce around new leaders and new policies. And without overmuch consideration, indeed partly as what seemed at the time the course of wisdom in balancing the admission of Texas and Florida with new free states, the administrations of the 1840s secured at last the granting of statehood to solidly conservative Iowa and Colorado, and eventually to Wyoming as well. But such measures as these would be the spoils of a war not yet fought.

Such fresh air as there was in Congress, and thus in the government at all, came from its newer figures, men who attained, who demanded as by right, positions of leadership, based, not on long service in the party trenches, but rather upon their personal mystique. Foremost amongst these was Sam Houston, now one of Texas’s senators, whose patent remedy for any fit of sectionalism or spell of secessionism was the healthy distraction of a war of conquest in Mexico, to the greater glory of the Union – and of himself. He regarded himself, not without reason, as being as much Old Hickory’s natural successor as was Mr Speaker Polk, and far more so than ever was Van Buren. But John Caldwell Calhoun had taken up the mantle of Jefferson, and still more of John Randolph, many years before, and he intended to hand on that mantle to a successor of his own: the Jackson-Calhoun feud was not going to pass from the scene when Senator Calhoun himself did so. This fundamental division in the majority party, coupled with such disparate minor causes as lingering resentment over the Cherokee lands case, racial divisiveness in Texas, Florida’s selection of David Yulee, in 1845, as the first Jewish Senator, and the immigrants who came to turn the lathes of the fire-new factories, began slowly but perceptibly to encourage new movements: anti-‘popery,’ anti-Masonic conspiracy theories, anti-immigrationism, and nativist agitation. The Know-Nothings were in gestation now in the womb of American party politics.

For the moment, however, the Great Triumvirate still ran the country. Anti-immigrant mobs and Brahmin Transcendentalists, abolitionists and fire-eaters, banditos, border ruffians, and dirt farmers, were beneath their lofty gaze. In the space of a few months in 1842, without any but the briefest reference to Martin Van Buren, they settled the Caroline Affair and the Aroostook War and further cemented the Anglo-American military alliance. In 1844, Mr Calhoun took over the State Department, which the hapless, lame-duck Van Buren did not dare deny him, and undertook an extensive review of American policy towards Mexico and the insurgents whom she supported in Texas. Whatever secret diplomacy and thrice-secret threats and cajolements he resorted to, the result was clear: by the end of that year, and Calhoun’s decision to return to the Senate, the revolts in Texas were at an end. In 1845, Mr Webster in his turn had processed his stately way into the Cabinet as Secretary of State, and capped his first years there by negotiating the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Webster’s stint as Secretary of State resulted from the third of the Triumvirs’s having preceded ‘the godlike Daniel’ to the executive side in March of 1845, as the Whig victory of 1844 relieved Mr Clay of ever again having to chose between being right, as he not infrequently had been, and being president, which he now indisputably was. President Clay’s bipartisan choice of Mr Webster as Mr Calhoun’s successor was a clear indication that he, at least, expected the presidency to take on its former heft and power, now that he occupied the office, and that he was unwilling to leave both of his fellow triumvirs at large in the Senate Chamber, whence they could continue the course of Congressional policy dominance. Divide and conquer is a hoary tactic, but an effective one.

Mr Clay’s place as the Southern exponent of Unionism in the Senate was taken by Senator Houston. Mr Calhoun, at the snap of whose fingers a vacancy appeared with the resignation of Senator Huger, resumed his Senate seat and his role as the proponent of Southern dominance within the Union, backed by the ever-present threats of nullification, interposition, and – if necessary – secession. And Mr Webster’s over-large boots were occupied, though hardly filled, by an amiable machine Democrat from the Granite Hills of New Hampshire, a hack who had almost resigned some years before rather than sweat out the slow rise of spoilsmanship. Webster’s successor sang the Websterian lyric of Union and compromise without the Websterian music: he was Franklin Pierce, the Bibulus to Calhoun’s Caesar, whose Unionist lip-service, unlike Webster’s real devotion, was always subservient to his willingness to compromise what Webster would never have yielded.

The rise of Sam Houston to Henry Clay’s place in the Second Triumvirate refocused, as if refocusing were needed, the attention of the Clay Administration and the Congress alike, upon Mexico. The Whig victory in 1844 had relieved the Democracy of an impediment to the bipartisan plans for relieving Mexico of more territory: the settlement of the Oregon Question, as a prerequisite to turning the country’s full attentions south- and westwards, was now the Whigs’s problem, and they were less boxed in by any sloganeering about ‘54' 40" or Fight.’ In any case, no one doubted that, if any man could sell the country on a compromise over Oregon, that man was Henry Clay. On January 4, 1846, Mr Secretary Webster presented President Clay with a coup that put the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of the preceding year in the shade: an Oregon Treaty settling the border at the 49th Parallel.

Between the date of the Oregon Treaty and the beginning of the bumper harvest of ’46, the United States accepted the largesse of an English nobleman’s bastard in the form of the Smithsonian Institution, saw an infusion of Treasury funds through the escheat of a childless Hudson Valley patroon’s estate (Mr Webster remarked to Mr Clay that no such windfalls could be expected from the Southern aristocracy, as Southerners tended to create the most ramified and deathless of kinships), and, in September, secured a new military alliance with Her Majesty’s Government. A stern warning to Mexico regarding its revanchism, expansionism, and colonial adventuring was furiously rejected by the Mexican government, as it was intended to be, and renewed raids and revolts in the Texas Hill Country and the Edwards Plateau prepared the public mind to resentment of Mexican interference in Texas.

The stage was set.

[Kedryn]

Can't wait to see how this war goes.

[EnderV]

Hey, do we get any more of this? I really liked the "history book" approach
V.

[Dan Cook]

Posting some screenshots would help too.

[pkdickian]

very nice work and fun to read, although not always clear. i have always loved devoto's work (as you obviously have too).

[stnylan]

Interesting, especially since I have just started looking into President Jackson (more accurately, I bought the book months ago, I recently finally started to read it).

I especially like the image of Calhoun. Nice to see him get somewhere.

[M.ShawPyle]

My apologies for the lacuna. I had the flu, and it turned into one of those damned sinus infections.

We'll resume shortly. Perhaps, God and a decent host willing, with screenshots.