Expansion and Conflict

LITANT

ied that such a move would be made; the Western men who had deserted Van Buren for a log-cabin leader demanded now as ever internal improvements, though their Southern allies bitterly opposed all such propositions. With counsels so divided Harrison turned readily to Henry Clay, who shaped the inaugural and filled the Cabinet with his political friends. Congress was called in extra session for the last of May, 1841, when an improvised plan of action would be offered and perha

ontrol the Administration, and undertook with the assistance of the Cabinet to bring all into a harmonious support of his "system." The law creating the Independent Treasury, for which Jackson and Van Buren had labored industriously for six years before its final passage, was promptly repealed. In place of the Independent Treasury there was to be a National Bank, but the President was reported to be hostile to such a bank unless it should be located in the District of Columbia, and the consent

to resign at once in order to isolate their chief. The advice was followed by all save Webster, who retained his post and otherwise refused to accept the dictation of the Kentucky leader. Calhoun, Henry A. Wise, William C. Rives, and other leaders of Congress applauded the President and Webster. Congress adjourned on September 13 in the worst possible humor. Excitement now ran high throughout the country. Whig meetings were held everywhere, some to denounce, some to defend the Virginian President. The congressional elections came on and the voters divided sharply. But the Democrats won, which meant that the next Congress would be deadlocked-t

, 1837. It was an affecting scene as the able and dramatic orator prayed "the most precious blessings upon the Senate," even upon Calhoun, who at the close extended his hand for the first time in several years. "Sober old Senators as well as ladies in the galleries shed tears at the scene"; yet it was known that Clay would seek the Presidency two years later. Calhoun, likewise, retired "forever" from the august legislative assembly, twelve months later, the better

y before a committee of the legislature, which was enlarged and published in book form in May, 1832. He contended that slavery was a positive good; that negroes could not live in the South except in a state of bondage; and that for the State of Virginia, at least, it was a most profitable institution. The time had passed, he contended, for men to believe or teach the fallacies of the Declaration of Independence. Society, certainly So

ly crystallized about the same dogma. Southern anti-slavery leaders emigrated to Ohio during the next few years, "leaving Ephraim joined to his idols"; and Southern men in Congress now replied with increasing earnestness to the petitions which came from Northern abolitionists. In 1837 it was decided not to receive such petitions, and John Quincy Adams was given his great theme for agitation; the United States

private life, he won the respect and friendship of the best men in the North, like the Lowells and Winthrops of Massachusetts, and of Senators Allen, Hannegan, Breese, and the Dodges of the Northwest. Devoted to the ideal of a great American Union which he had made strong at the close of the second war with England, he was willing always to yield something to the West i

nada and Florida. He secured only the latter in 1819, and that after giving up Texas. The ink was hardly dry on the parchment of the treaty of that year before leading Westerners began their campaign for the "reannexation" of Texas. Stephen Austin, who settled in Texas, and Sam Houston, who deserted his wife for a home on the distant Southwestern frontier, kept the question

rule on slavery. The Southwest gained some members, but the Northwest was growing faster. It was time for the South to act if she was to maintain her position in the country. In making up his Cabinet in the autumn of 1841, and again in filling the vacancies that occurred from time to time, the President selected men who favored expansion in the Southwest. The leaders of the Administration in the

, 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 te

een 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 Minis

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 obsolet

heastern 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

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

mise or ignoring of others. It served the useful purpose of keeping the peace between kindred peoples. The Ore

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 fol

tired 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 off

n 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 th

inctively 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

ery wide circulation. In this letter he came out boldly for the "reannexation of Texas and the reoccupation of Oregon,"-all Oregon. His rhetorical language and his defiance of England gained the public ear on both Texas and Oregon, while his shrewd suggestions of commercial expansion in the Pacific won powerful support in New York and Boston. But the greatest stroke of this publication was the apparent Southern demand for all Oregon, and before the Van Buren-Clay "self-denying ordinances" appeared, Walker was forging the union of South and West on the proposition, reannexation of Texas and reoccupation of Oregon, and maneuvering in Washington for what was later called the "bargain of the Baltimore Convention." Walker's relations with the Pennsylvania leaders gave him a strong position in that great Democratic community, and he soon secured the support of Thomas Ritchie, the master politician in Virginia. When the Democrats met, late in May

d aided greatly in the management of the campaign. A new Democratic régime-the South and West co?perating-had been founded. This second coalition aimed at Clay and the East resembled very strikingly that of 1828. And new issues had been injected into the

tariff. The old statesman, isolated though he was, thought that if the South and West could be held together the future would be secure. He took pleasure in the belief that "this is the end of Clay," who had so long troubled the national waters, while the politicians of the new coalition assured him that he would succeed Polk in 1848. Webster said little during the campaign; New England was divid

unanimity to his standard. The new Administration would represent the new Democratic party-a resolute South and an ardent West. And the President-elect, simple and dire

he younger leader of the Northwest, were agreed in these extreme demands; even Benton, the disappointed friend of Van Buren, found compensation in the proposed Pacific frontier, while a powerful group of Southerners led by Governor Gilmer, of Virginia, Robe

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il the larger tobacco area of the Piedmont region extended from Petersburg, Virginia, to Greensboro, North Carolina, and from the falls of the rivers to the slopes of the Blue Ridge. Instead of running away from their slaves, as John Randolph had feared Southern gentlemen would be compelled to do, the tobacco planters found their business increasingly prosperous as the great cotton area south of them opened larger markets for their crops and higher pr

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es in a few years and learned to imitate the life of the old southern manor houses. Forests were cleared away in winter by the sturdy hands of slaves, and new fields were opened to cotton culture each spring to supply the places of those that had been rapidly worn down by unscientific methods of agriculture. The cabins which made the homes of well-to-do men in the Jeffersonia

carriage houses completed the outfit. Where hundreds of bales of cotton and thousands of barrels of corn were grown annually, there would be driving or saddle horses for the master's family and many Kentucky mules for the work of the fields; and a plantation took on the appearance of a busy colony in a new country. Sixty to a hundred negroes were regarded as the best labor unit for profitable agriculture. Of these there would be a few house servants trained in all the intricacies of patriarchal hospitality and courtesy. The carriage driver and keeper of the stables, sometimes clad in the extra di

es of the old régime. From local magistrate to chief executive the Southern community was governed by the owners of slaves, and the great men whom they chose to speak for the South in Congress or to advise the President and his Cabinet or to sit upon the benches of the federal courts were invariably masters of plantations, trained from early youth to the exercise of authority and accustomed to receive the homage of their neighbors. It was a mighty social and economic organization which had grown up in and spread over the richer lands of South and West, as far as the borders of Mexico and the valleys of the

ghbors and became a son-in-law of a privileged family; if a preacher rose to fame doubting or even condemning the institutions of the South, he was apt to find a way to change his views and to become a part of the system before he reached his mature years. The articulate South was, therefore, in economic and social life a unit in 1845, and this unit was the strongest group in the country as a whole. Its demand

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ve opportunity to the more ambitious to rise in the social and economic scale. The sons of small farmers and landless men in the old South had built the cotton kingdom of the lower South, and were now drawing aristocratic Virginia and the Carolinas into a close union with the new region. The widening of the area

lves and families. The long trains of quaint, covered tobacco wagons which wound their way over rough roads from the mountains to the black belt carried whiskey or other up-country products to the plantations; the droves of mules, cattle, or hogs which poured into the Carolinas and the Gulf region from East Tennessee and Kentucky were bonds of attraction between

d, indeed. They earned a few dollars a year at odd jobs, raised a few hogs or at most a bale or two of cotton, and lived in cabins little better than those occupied by the negroes. Their children were numerous, without educational advantages, and accustomed to the poor and meager cultural life of an outcast class. Their outlook was no better than that of their parents. Barefoot, half-clad, yet alert and agile, hating negroes and fearing the masters, the

unty, and the magistrates who made up the courts of the people exercised a kindly patriarchal authority over their "inferiors," the dependent whites. There were few occupants of jails or penitentiaries; poorhouses were often tenantless, and asylums for the insane were not numerous or crowded. Beggars and tramps were unknown. Judged by the facts of life the system of slavery and large proprietors was not so bad as it appe

reer. But before 1830 a change was taking place. The stout Presbyterianism of the up-country forced the retirement of one of the professors of the University of Virginia, in its earlier years, and it compelled the resignation of President Cooper of the University of South Carolina, in 1836, because of his denial of the inspiration of the Pentateuch. The Pr

nstitution," and finally without offense became slave-owners themselves. The clergy's stern rebukes of fashion, of dancing, and of "the wearing of fine raiment" ceased or lost its effect. Presbyterians had long believed in an educated ministry, and when they forced their influence into political life, they were already friendly to the dominant ideas of the South. Now the Baptists and Methodists built colleges for the training of young ministers, and preaching in their simple churche

scopal Church, South, was organized at Louisville the following year. The Presbyterians and Episcopalians had become so completely reconciled to the aristocratic life which slavery connoted that they sustained no serious breach in their ranks. In the North as well as in the South they accepted slavery. A notable result of these breaks in the Baptist and Methodist churches was the rapid increase of membership of both in the South. Within a period of ten years the Southern Baptists were as powerful as the American Baptists had been in 1844. The same is true of the Methodists, and what happened in the South was paralleled in the North. Pro-slave

ion with definite ideas and purposes. The plantation owners were in full command; the older and small-farmer element was falling into line behind their pro-slavery leaders; the social and religious life had become orthodox and stratified; and the clergy, who now preached acc

GRAPHI

pondence of John A. Quitman (1860), supply abundant material showing the temper and purposes of the different parts of the South in 1840. U. B. Phillips's The Plantation and Frontier (1909) is an excellent source-book for the period, and the Adams Memoir, Clay Correspondence (Colton), Calhoun Correspondence (Jameson), and Mrs. A. M. Coleman's The Life of John J