President Martin Van Buren, the ‘Old Kinderhook’
The new President of the United States was a short, wiry man from the Dutch-settled Hudson River towns of upper New York state. Despite his grandfatherly and somewhat bumbling appearance, he was extremely intelligent and politically cunning, and the loss of the election in 1836 had only sharpened his desire to avoid unnecessary controversies. The stalwarts of the Democratic Party might thirst to overthrow every vestige of the Clay administration but Van Buren understood quite well what would and would not be possible of achievement. Even without the commanding presence of Henry Clay the Senate remained a bastion of opposition, and so Van Buren adopted from the beginning an attitude of mildness and conciliation as concealment for his movements.
Undoing the tariff compromise would break what many Americans regarded as a sacred compact, so Van Buren was content to allow the tariff to begin its slow decline as planned. The Bank of the United States was likewise untouchable, at least so long as the present economic boom continued. Any movement to grant statehood to Haiti on the basis of a constitution approving slavery would open a divisive question with no certainty of victory. Best then to accept the Clay compromise as a ‘fait accomplis’ and wait patiently for better odds in the future. Sale prices for western lands could be adjusted downward somewhat with the concurrence of the Whigs of western states, and the budget surplus derived from tariff and land sales could be directed more to the national debt than to internal improvements. It was in foreign affairs that the Van Buren administration made its first real departure from the Clay years. Scarcely had the inaugural festivities died away than rumors began to circulate of a secret treaty of alliance with Texas, negotiated by the new Secretary of State, James Buchanan. Before the year was out the existence of such a treaty had been confirmed, and much of the popular enthusiasm for the new administration cooled. “It would be very well to obtain Texas,” said an Ohio newspaper, “but war with Mexico seems a high price to pay for a people who could not win freedom on their own.”
Regardless of the gradual dwindling of government funds for internal improvements the American economy continued to grow at a fast and steady pace, with notable expansion of domestic heavy industries such as ironworks and shipyards. Tennessee and Kentucky poured forth immense quantities of whiskey and bourbon, New Jersey expanded its canned food industries shipyards and Philadelphia hosted a bevy of craft shops producing furniture by industrial methods. The railroad network was still made up of small, local railroads, none operating more than a few hundred miles of track, but the number of miles of new track laid down each year rapidly increased. By the end of 1841 it was possible to travel by railroad, riverboat and canal from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio on the Great Lakes in less than two weeks and for one-tenth of the previous cost. Freight and passenger traffic boomed and immigration to the west redoubled. Southern interests milked the last of the internal improvements funds even as they voted to end them. Local shortline railroads blossomed in South Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky. Farther north the booming city of Chicago threw out bands of steel across the prairies of Illinois, linking itself to Galena in the northwest and the Ohio River in the south.
The Democrats were opposed to any expansion of the regular army and to any large appropriation for the military academy at West Point, but they did vote large sums for the improvement and expansion of the various state militias. More controversial was the War Department’s decision to proceed with the arming and training of Creole brigades on Hispaniola. These units, soon expanded to three in number, were intended to function as a combination police force and militia, freeing up Taylor’s regulars to depart the malarial lowlands. Southern protests against the arming of black troops were muted by the sickness and death that struck down the filibustering men of 1840 and by the failure of the General Chase to put down the revolts of the previous year.
1843 proved a watershed year for the Van Buren administration. The appointment of Daniel Webster as commissioner to settle the festering Aroostook controversy in northern Maine was widely hailed by both parties. The applause came from those who appreciated that the new boundary was probably as fair a compromise as either power could have hoped, and also from Democrats who were glad to see him out of the Senate even if only for a little while. Callous political motivations aside, offering the commission to Webster showed that Van Buren could rise above party calculations and was able to work cordially with members of the opposition.
On the heels of Webster’s triumph came news of atrocities in Madagascar. The firestorm of controversy surrounding the proposed punitive expedition entirely undid the good feelings of only a month before and plunged the parties into the bitterest conflict since Jackson’s war on the national bank.
The island of Madagascar lies off the south-eastern tip of Africa. In area it is larger than California, but the swamps and jungles of the coastal lowlands and the rugged mountains of the interior combined to largely prevent European settlement. Despite the remote location and a scarcity of natural resources, missionaries had been welcomed to the island by King Radama. Unfortunately he died prematurely in 1828 and his wife, Queen Ranavalona, seized the throne and sharply reversed his pro-Western practices. Among her new measures were the repudiation of a treaty with Great Britain, legalization of the slave trade and a return to old, tribal methods of governance and justice. Foreigners were to be persecuted and expelled. Christianity, she declared, was to be abolished on the island, and to that end she set about exiling or killing missionaries and converts alike.
Under the guise of establishing a trading post, a group of missionaries from Boston began conducting Christian services and accepting converts. In the summer of 1843 (January in the southern hemisphere) the Queen’s loyal followers of the Merina tribe descended on the trading post. Dozens of native Christians were killed along with at least a dozen Americans including women and children, chained in pits into which cauldrons of steaming water were slowly tipped, boiling the hapless prisoners alive.
The news of these atrocities at first united Whig and Democrat in demand for a punitive expedition but conflicting views as to the makeup of such an expedition quickly divided the government and the public. Conservative Whigs, fearing a re-enactment of Quitman and Taylor’s actions in Hispaniola, favored a purely naval expedition. But majorities in both houses were with the President: a full military expedition must be mounted to de-throne the ‘Mad Monarch of Madagascar’.
The naval portion of the expedition included the ships of the line ‘Ohio’ and ‘North Carolina’ in company with two frigates, a brig and two scores of transports. For operations inland, brevet Brigadier Generals Van Wirt and Stover would deploy the three Creole brigades from Hispaniola. It was thought that these troops would be better inured to the heat, humidity and to the jungle diseases. Whigs in the upper southern border states could console themselves in the knowledge that only black troops were being risked.
The expedition arrived off the island of Madagascar in November of 1843. Seizing the offshore city of Nosy Be as an anchorage and advanced base, the three Creole brigades launched a triple invasion up and down the west coast and inland from Toamasina on the east. The armies of Queen Ranavalona were numerous and the Merina tribesmen were ferocious fighters but the Creoles were equipped with Springfield rifled-muskets and 12-pounder artillery pieces and fitted by thorough training to be proficient in their use. Midway through 1844, Generals Stover and Van Wirt had established effective control over the island, recovering the bodies of the Queen and her son Radama when Antananarivo fell.
As combat operations drew to a close and the election campaigns of 1844 began to heat up it was soon apparent that Madagascar would be as divisive an issue as Haiti. There was no acceptable claimant to the throne. The island had been a haven for pirates and slave-traders for centuries. And far up in the mountains of the interior there was a treasure in the form of great stands of ebony, rosewood and other fine woods. As with Hispaniola it seemed impossible to simply sail away and leave the island people to their fate. To remain however meant embracing a sort of colonial empire for which the United States seemed entirely unsuited in temperament and character.
Madagascar’s prominence in the newspapers prompted a new fashion in fine furniture crafted from its native woods, and also a lively public discussion of what to do with the island. As a territory where slavery was legal, Madagascar would nicely balance Hispaniola, the Democrats argued. America had neither right nor interest in lands half-way around the globe, Whigs countered, nor any need for more slaves. Besides, America – the result of a successful colonial revolt - was itself the best argument against such unbridled colonization! And so, divided once more by the acquisition of foreign real-estate, the people of the United States went to the polls to vote.
