FEBRUARY 14, 1844, did not unfold as sixty-six-year-old Henry Clay planned. It was Valentine’s Day, no longer a sleepy saint’s day relegated to religious calendars, but fast becoming a national craze. Stationers had discovered profit in the increasingly sentimental culture of middle-class America by promoting a holiday dedicated to the novel practice of exchanging store-bought cards. Christmas presents were still considered suspect, even profane, by American Protestants in the 1840s, but among the urbane it had become a “national whim” to send engraved or printed tokens of love through the mail, more than thirty thousand in 1844 in New York City alone. Urban post offices around the country were “piled with mountains of little missives, perfumed, gilt, enameled, and folded with rare cunning … they overflow with the choicest flowers of love, poetry and sentiment.”1
Most everything fashionable in 1840s America was imported from Europe, and this whim was no exception. Initially, almost all Valentine’s Day cards were British-made. But perennially insecure Americans complained that the old empire was “defrauding” Uncle Sam “of a rightful increase in his revenue.” U.S. firms rose to the challenge: they began producing and marketing their own sentimental cards, and advertising them in newspapers. Countless shops sold these valentines in towns and cities, and peddlers brought them into rural areas. Within just a few short years American-made valentines had become ubiquitous. Nothing better demonstrated the increasing complexity and sophistication of American commerce in the 1840s, or the rise of a female-centered culture of romance and sentimentality, than did the wholesale American embrace of a commercialized Valentine’s Day. In 1844 it was being celebrated like never before. It had, according to some observers, achieved “epidemic” proportions.2
Valentine’s Day could have been made for Henry Clay. During his nearly forty years in national politics, he had been both lauded and condemned for his attention, attachment, and deference to the ladies, so much so that the number of women he had kissed had become a running joke in Washington. The trappings of organized religion left him cold, but he was renowned for his sentimentality and deep emotion. He was easily moved to tears, and when Clay wept while delivering a speech in Congress, listeners on both sides of the aisle found themselves similarly moved. As the founder of the preeminent Whig Party, a political organization devoted to the growth of American business, Henry Clay was the public face of American commerce. It was Whig legislation, conceptualized by Clay, that enabled American card producers to compete with British imports, and that financed the roads and bridges over which the thousands of valentines traveled.
In early 1844 he could lay claim to being the “most popular man in America.”3 “Prince Hal,” as his supporters warmly called him, was the nation’s most distinguished statesman, renowned for his oratory, his brilliant legal mind, his legislative prowess, and for his decades of service to the nation. He led the charge to war against Britain in 1812 and helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the conflict in 1815. His Missouri Compromise of 1820 calmed a sectional firestorm by maintaining the balance of slave and free states while also limiting the future spread of slavery to south of the Mason-Dixon line. As secretary of state under John Quincy Adams in the 1820s, he was an avid supporter of hemispheric solidarity, embracing the newly independent nations of Latin America as republican kin to the United States. And he promoted a vision for the economic development of the nation, what came to be known as his “American System,” that proved so compelling it became the platform for a new political party.
His personality was as dazzling as his résumé. There was no better conversationalist in Washington, no more charming man to meet at a party, no one more ingratiating when he wanted to be—which was always. He was a master at the fiddle and a brilliant teller of jokes. He never ceased to remind his listeners that he came from humble origins (Clay was the first national politician to refer to himself as a self-made man).4 But by the time he entered politics he carried himself, and behaved, exactly like what he was: a southern gentleman who loved parties, gambling, whiskey, and women, who was open in his affections and undeniably magnetic. His wife, Lucretia, conveniently remained home in Kentucky, where she faultlessly managed their large family and equally impressive estate, Ashland.
Henry Clay, 1844. From a daguerreotype portrait by Anthony, Edwards and Co. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (photo credit 1.1)
His excesses were in the past, youthful indiscretions that only his enemies would deign to dredge up. Now he was a mature politician, his appeal nationwide. He was the “Sage of Ashland.” Although he carried himself like a southerner, his vision of an American economy based on commerce and manufacturing was warmly embraced in the North. Despite owning scores of slaves, he professed to hate slavery.
Clay’s popularity was in no way the product of his outward appearance. His self-assurance frequently crossed into arrogance, but even Clay would admit that nature had not blessed him with beauty. The freckles, blue eyes, and white-blond hair of his youth alone would have placed him outside the era’s manly ideal, but far worse were his facial features: a cavernous mouth rimmed with thin lips, and a receding cleft chin that emphasized his very prominent nose.
But Clay made the best of what he had. Tall and thin, with delicate hands, he was graceful in his demeanor and careful in his dress. The real draw was his sparkling wit and great desire to please. “No portrait ever did him justice”; neither painting nor daguerreotype could capture his easy and winning smile or his ability to connect almost instantly with a new acquaintance. “His appearance upon the whole was not at first prepossessing,” one visitor to his house noted, “but when you heard him converse, you felt you were under the influence of a great and good man.”5
His popularity among women was legendary. They flocked around him when he appeared in public, treasured mementos of his visits, and purchased reproductions of his likeness. They cheered his elections and promoted his causes. It was generally acknowledged that “if the Ladies … could vote, the election of Mr. Clay would be carried by acclamation!” They continued to find him irresistible well into his middle age, when his receding hairline did nothing to diminish his remarkable wit and courtesy. As his closest female friend, Alabama socialite Octavia LeVert, explained, Clay had “a heroism of heart, a chivalry of deportment, a deference of demeanor,” all of which were “irresistible talismans over the mind of the gentler sex.”6
Nor were women alone in succumbing to Clay’s charms. There was a “winning fascination in his manners that will suffer none to be his enemies who associate with him,” wrote one congressman. “When I look upon his manly and bold countenance, and meet his frank and eloquent eye, I feel an emotion little short of enthusiasm in his cause.” Clay easily disarmed wary strangers; even lifelong opponents of his legislation found the legislator difficult to dislike in person. His political antagonist, South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, believed Clay was “a bad man, an imposter, a creator of wicked schemes.” But after decades of political battles between the two, Calhoun concluded, “I wouldn’t speak to him, but, by God! I love him.”7
Henry Clay was an American original, glamorous and magnetic to a fault, but far from perfect. He was spoiled by a lifetime of acclaim (he first entered the Senate at the tender and unconstitutional age of twenty-nine), and even his friends admitted he could be a prima donna. His wit could be biting, and he was easily bored. Impulsive and ardent, he too often spoke before thinking, made promises he couldn’t keep, and later came to regret his decisions. His ambivalence about slavery led many voters on both sides of the question to discount him as opportunistic. As a young man he passionately argued that Kentucky should end slavery through a plan of gradual emancipation similar to those being adopted by the mid-Atlantic states. When that plan was rejected he devoted himself to the cause of colonization, believing it possible to end slavery by colonizing freed slaves in Africa. But forty years later his wealth derived in large part from the unpaid labor of fifty men, women, and children whom he owned. His enemies called him a demagogue, but not to his face. Like other southern gentleman, Clay kept a set of dueling pistols and had put them to use more than once. But these excesses were also in the past, the dueling pistols now just for show.
By all measures February 14, 1844, should have been a blissful Valentine’s Day for Henry Clay, “full of glorious recollections—and pregnant with never ending happiness,” as it was for so many others. But this was not to be. In place of a scented, embossed, cherub-decorated paper heart, Henry Clay received intelligence that day that put a damper on his hopes and shook him to the bone.8
Clay was near the end of a two-month stay in his favorite city, New Orleans, when the local paper broke the news. He was lodging in the elegant and urbane home of Dr. William Mercer, on Carondelet Street, close to the hotels and business establishments where he spent his days winning over the wealthy men of the city with his brilliant economic plans, and evenings flattering their wives and sisters. The fun ended when he picked up the paper on February 14. Clay was flabbergasted, unwilling to believe the news, but also afraid it was true: reportedly President John Tyler had secretly negotiated a treaty to annex the Republic of Texas and was at that very moment lining up supporters for the bill in the Senate. Surely the great Henry Clay, who until two years before had been the senior senator from Kentucky and who was currently preparing for his third presidential run, should have known about a matter of such monumental importance both to the nation and to his status as a power broker in Washington. How could he be so out of the loop? “Address me instantly,” he demanded of his friend and Senate successor, John Crittenden. “If it be true, I shall regret extremely that I have had no hint of it.”9
True it was. In the winter of 1843–44, Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur had nearly drafted a treaty with the Lone Star Republic and had employed his masterly lobbying abilities to persuade a majority of U.S. senators to secretly pledge their support for it. By late January Upshur felt confident enough of the passage of the treaty to assure Texas leaders that forty of America’s fifty-two senators were committed to Texas’s annexation. With two-thirds of the Senate lined up, annexation was all but ensured.
This was a startling turn of events, both for Henry Clay and for the nation. Clay’s insider status was legendary. America’s first congressional power broker, Clay became the Speaker of the House of Representatives on his first day as a congressman in 1811, and made the speakership second only to the presidency in its power. As Speaker, Clay offered patronage, controlled legislation and desirable committee appointments, and even decided who became president in the contested election of 1824, favoring Adams over Andrew Jackson despite the fact that Old Hickory had received more electoral and popular votes. The following decades became known as the Age of Jackson, but they could just as surely be called the Age of Clay, for Clay was as much a force of nature in American politics as his archfoe. The difference, of course, was that Andrew Jackson had won two presidential elections, while Henry Clay had twice lost.
In 1844 Henry Clay was consumed with the notion that his time, at long last, had come. Dozens of important men had accrued debts to him over his many years in office, and Clay was ready to call in those debts in order to accede to the nation’s highest office. Clay hadn’t been officially nominated yet; the convention wasn’t until May. But New Orleans was the launching pad for a lengthy tour of the Southeast designed to shore up his support in the region, and so far things had gone swimmingly. In public squares and in private drawing rooms, the good people of New Orleans proclaimed Henry Clay their undisputed choice for president. Nothing appeared to stand in his way—until he heard the news about Texas on Valentine’s Day.
Texas had been brewing as a problem since 1835, when a band of slave-owning American settlers, attracted by Mexico’s generous immigration policies and the ample land available for growing cotton, rose in rebellion in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. The Texians (as they called themselves) invoked the American Revolution to justify their actions, but their objections to Mexican rule extended beyond representation, taxes, and trade. In 1830 Mexico attempted to restrict immigration into Texas and to limit slave-holding. The laws were utterly unenforceable, and probably just as many in the region were as upset about Mexico’s attempt to collect revenue and increase central authority as they were about the fate of their slaves. But the survival of the “peculiar institution” made for a perfect call to arms. The nation was, in the words of a Texas newspaper, attempting to “give liberty to our slaves, and to make slaves of ourselves.”10
Most Americans viewed the Texas Revolution not as a war for slavery but as a race war between brown Mexicans and white Texians, and as a result supported the Texians wholeheartedly. Thousands of white American men from the South and West illegally crossed into Texas in order to join the fight against Mexico. Many fewer, primarily ministers and abolitionists, attacked the legitimacy of the rebellion. In Philadelphia, Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy left no doubts about his views on the subject when he titled his 1836 pamphlet The War in Texas; A Review of Facts and Circumstances, Showing That This Contest Is a Crusade Against Mexico, Set on Foot and Supported by Slaveholders, Land Speculators, &c, in Order to Re-establish, Extend, and Perpetuate the System of Slavery and the Slave Trade. A second edition expanded on his arguments against “the grand deception” calling itself Texas independence.11 But outside New England, where a significant minority supported the abolition of slavery, few Americans believed that Mexicans occupied the moral high ground in this conflict. Not even Quaker Pennsylvania was a safe place to protest the Texas Revolution: a Philadelphia mob destroyed Lundy’s printing press and threatened his life a year after the second edition of The War in Texas appeared in print.
Marked by dramatic battles, the Texas Revolution was ripe for exploitation in America’s vibrant and competitive penny press. There was no need to exaggerate or sensationalize. Mexican troops, driven by the battle cry “Exterminate to the Sabine” river, acted barbarously. First came the cruel slaughter of American Texians by Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna at the Alamo. Mexican forces piled up Texian corpses, soaked them in oil, and set them on fire. At Goliad, although his subordinate agreed to treat surrendering forces as prisoners of war, Santa Anna arbitrarily set aside the agreement, marched 340 Texians out of town, and had them all shot. Then came the astounding victory of the rebels under the command of a former Tennessee governor, Sam Houston, at the Battle of San Jacinto. Mexico sustained fourteen hundred casualties in eighteen minutes, while only seven of Houston’s men died. Texians took their revenge, slaughtering defenseless Mexican soldiers who cried out, “Me no Alamo. Me no Goliad.”12
It made for great headlines, and Americans followed the conflict with intense partisanship. But not every battle was deemed newsworthy: when Texas slaves attempted to seize their own freedom, the uprising was brutally quelled by white Texians. But since this story had no place in the newspapers’ heroic narrative of white Texian freedom, it was relegated to a few abolitionist publications and to the Mexican press.13
Texians declared a republic in March 1836 and captured Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21. In May they forced him to sign a treaty acknowledging Texas’s independence and withdrawing his troops south of the Rio Grande. In a second secret treaty, Santa Anna promised to support boundary talks wherein Texas would have a boundary that would “not lie south” of the Rio Grande.14 Mexico’s government promptly repudiated Santa Anna and all his negotiations with Texas, but Texians and Americans rejoiced. Although Mexico steadfastly maintained that Texas was a rebel province and not an independent nation, President Andrew Jackson offered diplomatic recognition to the self-proclaimed republic. And then Texas turned to the United States for annexation.
In 1836 the United States could have annexed Texas, but only at the cost of war. Not only would Mexico have considered the annexation of its rebel province an act of aggression, but so would the rest of the world. As a result, three presidents and the majority of congressional representatives turned their backs on annexation, and for good reason. A state of intermittent warfare continued between Texas and Mexico.
Almost every American believed that the United States had a special destiny in the world. They took it for granted that the blessings of “republican liberty” enshrined in the Constitution “should expand over the earth, and spread their benign influence from pole to pole.”15 But few in the 1830s felt that territorial expansion should proceed at the cost of war with a neighboring republic. Not even Andrew Jackson—a mentor and personal friend of Sam Houston’s and the man whose actions led the Five Civilized Indian Tribes to walk the Trail of Tears so that expansionists in what is today the American Southeast could take their land—was willing to propose the annexation of Texas.
Jackson had more than one possible war in mind when he sidestepped the question of the annexation of Texas. Few politicians wanted to disturb the delicate sectional balance between North and South. Men who believed with their whole hearts that all of North America would eventually become part of the United States, who lobbied even for the acquisition of Canada, objected to allowing Texas into the Union. For the enormous territory would enter as a slave-owning state, possibly as many as five slave states. And for those who believed (as did many northerners) that there was a “slave power conspiracy” at work in the government, the last thing they wanted to do was increase the power of the South, particularly in the Senate. Antislavery firebrand John Quincy Adams, a fixture in Congress since the end of his presidency in 1829, made exactly this point when he warned his colleagues in no uncertain terms that annexing Texas would “secure and rivet” the “undue ascendancy of the slave-holding power in the government.”16
So although Americans felt a strong kinship with the white population of Texas, and most Texians, under siege by Mexico and falling into ever greater debt, were desperate to join the Union, year after year annexation remained unconsummated. Jackson’s successor, the “little magician” from New York, Democrat Martin Van Buren, skillfully sidestepped the issue of Texas with his customary political adroitness. So too did the first Whig president, General William Henry Harrison, elected after Van Buren’s magic proved insufficient to extricate the Democratic Party from a national financial panic that started under its watch in 1837 and lingered through the election of 1840.
It took a desperate man to upset the status quo and make the annexation of Texas a reality. John Tyler, a rogue Whig distrusted by both his own party and the opposition Democrats, had been William Henry Harrison’s vice president, succeeding the aging former general when he died of pneumonia in 1841, just a month after his inauguration—thus forever branding him “His Accidency.” However, Tyler’s greatest ambition was to be elected to his own term. To achieve that, all he had to do was smoothly manage the remainder of Harrison’s.
This proved to be beyond Tyler’s abilities. He plowed his rough way forward for four years, a slaveholding Virginia aristocrat who had allied himself with Clay and his Whigs in the 1830s out of a shared distrust of Andrew Jackson’s Democratic agenda. But his states’-rights ideology made him just as suspicious of the nationalist program of internal improvements and centralized banking that Clay’s party attempted to push through after Harrison’s election. In power for the first time, the Whigs understandably considered the presidencies of Harrison and Tyler their own.
But Tyler would not play along. He repeatedly vetoed legislation to centralize the banking system, infuriating Henry Clay, who had masterminded the legislation, and ultimately leading to the resignation of nearly the entire presidential cabinet. Clay formally read Tyler out of his party. Whig stalwarts in the cabinet, many of whom were indebted to Clay, were replaced by yes-men and cronies, including Abel Upshur, a close friend since Tyler’s youth. Clay’s supporters were dismissive of Tyler’s men, but objective minds (and there were a few in Washington at the time) recognized that the new secretary of state was a man of substance. As navy secretary, Upshur had done a brilliant job modernizing and reorganizing the navy. One underestimated his capabilities at one’s own risk.
Now a president without a party, Tyler made overtures to the Democrats, but they proved no more receptive to supporting the rogue president than had been their opponents. Desperate for an issue that might win him election, Tyler saw salvation in Texas.
Tyler reasoned that sentiment in favor of annexation was so high outside Washington that accomplishing it would keep him in office without the help of either major party. He pursued Texas with the conviction that the annexation of that republic, independent from Mexico for only seven years, was essential not only to the “salvation of the Union” but also to the salvation of his own political career.17
Tyler and Upshur threw themselves into the project beginning in 1842. Texians, concerned that overtures from the United States would mobilize Mexican forces against them, demanded a guarantee of military protection before commencing the courtship. Upshur offered a verbal promise, enough to start the proceedings, but Texas demanded something in writing before taking the relationship to the next level. The same day that Clay read in the paper that Tyler was on the verge of presenting an annexation treaty to the Senate, the Texians got their own valentine. On February 14, 1844, the American representative in Texas promised, in secret negotiations, that the moment Texas signed a treaty of annexation, “a sufficient naval force shall be placed in the Gulf of Mexico, convenient for the defense of Texas, in case of any invasion which may threaten her seaboard,” and measures would be taken “to repel any invasion by land.”18 Signed, the document essentially committed U.S. troops to certain war with Mexico.
The U.S. Constitution specifies that Congress, and only Congress, has the power to declare war. Tyler blanched when he received a copy of the pledge several weeks later. He instantly recognized that the vow to provide military protection to Texas exceeded his powers as president and would infuriate Congress if, or rather when, it was made public. He countermanded the written pledge, but not before the courtship had advanced to the point of no return on Texas’s part. Mexico began massing forces near the Texas border. Not long after Valentine’s Day, annexation suddenly appeared inevitable.
None of this should have come as a surprise to Henry Clay. His Washington friends might not have told him explicitly about the treaty, but several of them had warned him of Tyler’s intentions. Nor did one need inside information to figure out that the Texas issue was on the verge of exploding.
The tension had been building for months. Over the course of the fall of 1843, the legislatures of several southwestern states petitioned Congress for the admission of Texas. After the president spoke out in favor of annexation, his supporters unleashed a sophisticated propaganda campaign extolling the advantages of annexation and advancing specious claims that Texas rightfully “belonged” to the United States by virtue of the Louisiana Purchase. Rumors of British designs on Texas began appearing in Democratic newspapers. Americans both resented and feared their former colonizer, and threats of British encroachment were almost always effective at mobilizing the public. Now it appeared that if the United States didn’t move fast, the British might annex Texas themselves, abolish slavery there, and threaten the peace and security of the United States.
In November the North American, one of the nation’s leading papers, stated definitively that “the project of annexing Texas to the United States will be proposed and urged by the acting President and his Secretary of State,” while that same month local newspapers from Charleston, South Carolina, to Bridgeport, Connecticut, proclaimed it “certain” that a treaty would soon come before Congress.19
Clay himself had been inundated with letters from supporters about the issue, most of which he ignored. To one friend he replied in early December, “I am surprised that Texas should occasion you so much uneasiness at the North. In the whole circle of my acquaintance in K.[entucky] I do not remember to have heard lately a solitary voice raised in favor of or against Annexation.”20
This was balderdash. Few states had stronger ties to Texas than Kentucky. Many of the original settlers of Mexican Texas hailed from the Bluegrass State, the Texas secretary of war was a Kentuckian, and, as Clay well knew, his good friend John Crittenden’s son George was currently serving in the Texas army. Texas annexation was hugely popular in Clay’s state and growing more so by the day, as it was throughout the entire Southwest. In the last months of 1843 Whig voters in both the North and South began pestering their representatives with questions about Clay’s views on annexation, and newspapers from Indiana, Kentucky, Boston, and New York openly debated how the Sage of Ashland might vote on an annexation bill.21
Clay ignored it all. He refused to accept that John Tyler, the very definition of an impotent politician, could negotiate a treaty of annexation with Texas, let alone convince two-thirds of the Senate to ratify it. It was too implausible to contemplate. “Let Mr. Tyler recommend” annexation, he told a friend, “if he please, and what of that?… Such a recommendation would be the last desperate move of a desperate traitor.” When John Crittenden warned Clay in early December that Tyler had set his sights on Texas, Clay dismissed his concerns. Having already determined that annexation was impossible, Clay was sure that Tyler was introducing it “for no other than the wicked purpose of producing discord and distraction in the nation.” This was nothing more than a cynical plot on the part of extremists to divide both the country and his party, and Clay did not “think it right to allow Mr. Tyler, for his own selfish purposes, to introduce an exciting topic to add to the other subjects of contention that exist in this country.”22
Manifest Destiny aside, Henry Clay had his own destiny to consider. His five-month electioneering tour of the Southeast would return him to Washington for the opening of the Whig nominating convention in May 1844. He would not allow Texas to become a diversion, either from the economic issues that mattered to the country or from the forthcoming election that mattered to him. The same week that Clay arrived in New Orleans, a New York abolitionist paper expressed astonishment that anyone could still doubt that a bill to annex Texas would come before the present session of Congress. The following day the Telegraph of Houston reported that Texas’s House of Representatives had passed a joint resolution in favor of annexation. Although the article was quickly reprinted in the papers of New Orleans as well as the rest of the United States, Henry Clay somehow missed the news.23
Clay’s degree of denial in this matter was astounding but not really out of character. His critics had long condemned him for trying to be all things to all people. But Clay’s unwillingness to engage with deeply divisive issues wasn’t primarily the product of his personal ambition. It was a necessary survival mechanism for any presidential hopeful within the two-party political system of the era. Because the Whigs and the Democrats were national parties, a candidate who alienated the mass of his supporters in one or another region lost all hope of winning a national election. Appeasing both the North and the South was a delicate balancing act, and becoming more so by the day, but Clay had thus far demonstrated an excellent sense of balance. Surely it wouldn’t fail him now.
Texas was no ordinary issue, however. It was proving to be exceptionally polarizing. Secretary of State Abel Upshur publicly maintained that annexation would be for the good of the entire nation, but he wrote privately to a friend in August 1843 that the South should “demand” the annexation of Texas regardless of the opinion of northerners. “The history of the world does not present an example of such insult, contempt, and multiplied wrongs and outrages from one nation to another as we have received and are daily receiving from our northern brethren!!” Upshur wrote. “It is a reproach to us that we bear it any longer.”24
Nor were all southerners as circumspect as Upshur. Most saw no need to keep their feelings to themselves, and many northerners found the southern bluster difficult to stomach. As Texas heated up and Henry Clay remained cold, abolitionist papers increased their invective against politicians afraid to “exasperate the South” lest they “feel her talons.” The country was full of men like Clay who refused to see that “the South has been anxiously watching and earnestly making its opportunity to strike a death-blow on the free labor of the North.” This push for Texas was a prime example. Extremists on both sides agreed that more was at stake than merely winning an election. This debate was about manhood itself. “This is not the spirit of manly freedom,” one paper declared in disgust. “When men at the North act like slaves, the South will treat them as such. When they are tame, she will domineer—when they whimper she will put on the lash—but when they face her with a look of manly decision, she will cringe, and be respectful to our honor and our rights.”25
Henry Clay thought he could navigate these waters, but on Valentine’s Day he received evidence that his sense of direction had failed him. This news should have raised a warning flag and made him question his political intuition, perhaps even reconsider the extent of his omniscience. But because of his towering faith in his own abilities, he instead considered this only a momentary lapse. It would take nearly a year before Henry Clay realized that this momentary lapse was something far greater, that his life and his country were on the verge of dramatic change.
On February 27, 1844, Secretary of State Upshur completed negotiations with Texas to bring the republic into the United States. He and President Tyler had done the impossible: Texas would be a state at last. All that was left was to sell it to the Senate.
The following day dawned bright and cloudless. Senators broke early from a lively debate over the future of the Oregon Country, jointly controlled by the United States and Britain, which was the object of increasing and passionate desire by northern expansionists. Thousands of American settlers had made the arduous trek by covered wagon to farm its fertile soils, and they were anxious to see British claims to the region extinguished. But Britain’s navy was the most powerful in the world, and the country’s claims to the region equally formidable. Plenty of senators had strong feelings about how to handle Britain, but this debate would have to wait.
The wealthy and powerful in Washington were off to a party. Senators, members of the cabinet, and assorted other luminaries lucky enough to receive one of the formal invitations on thick card stock gathered at Bradley’s Wharf “precisely at 11 o’clock” for a cruise of the Potomac aboard the new steam frigate Princeton, the “pride of the navy.”26 Tyler and Upshur were there, with ample reason to celebrate. The afternoon promised both entertainment and relaxation. The guests would have the great good fortune to witness a demonstration of the world’s largest naval gun, nicknamed “Peacemaker,” and a lavish banquet belowdecks would cap the festivities.
Both the Princeton and its cannon represented the fulfillment of a personal crusade on Upshur’s part to strengthen the U.S. Navy, which had been perennially underfunded and long the subject of mockery. The Princeton and “Peacemaker” offered evidence that the scientific and financial resources poured into the navy had paid off. These technological marvels surely offered proof that the U.S. Navy was more than prepared to face Mexico, or even England if need be, in battle. As the flag-festooned vessel steamed along at a brisk pace through abundant ice floes, the secretary of state must have felt a special pride.27
Spirits among the passengers were high, and the champagne flowed freely. When the captain fired off “Peacemaker,” the cheers of the well-dressed crowd were universal and enthusiastic. They headed belowdecks for an elaborate feast, appetites stoked by the display of American militarism. As the sun began to set, the Princeton turned toward her anchorage. With Mount Vernon, George Washington’s historic estate, in view, Thomas Gilmer, a rising political star who had been secretary of the navy for just ten days, called on the captain for one final cannon discharge in honor of the nation’s first president.
Most of the guests were still belowdecks and felt little concern when they heard a loud explosion. But as billowing smoke filled the cabin, and shouts and screams echoed from above, it became obvious that something had gone terribly wrong. “Peacemaker” had exploded, instantly killing Upshur and eight other men, including Henry, the slave who dressed President Tyler each morning; Thomas Gilmer, the new secretary of the navy; and David Gardiner, a former state senator from New York. Dozens of others were injured, including one of the nation’s leading expansionists, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, whose right eardrum was shattered.
John J. Hardin, an up-and-coming thirty-four-year-old congressman from Illinois, was on deck when the gun burst. His wife, Sarah, the mother of three young children, was fortunately still in the cabin. “The horrors of that scene are still before me,” he wrote to a friend a week later. “The ghastly countenances of the dead, the shattered limbs, the gashes in the wounded and their mournful moanings, can neither be described or imagined. Yet sadder and more piercing to the breast than this were the wailings and shrieks of agony of the wives of those who were killed.”28
President Tyler survived. At the time of the explosion the widowed president was belowdecks flirting with Gardiner’s twenty-four-year-old daughter Julia, a New York belle less than half his age. Tyler proved instrumental in helping Julia overcome the grief of losing her father, and Julia lessened the president’s distress over the “awful and lamentable catastrophe” that was in fact the worst tragedy ever to befall a presidential cabinet.29 Two months later the couple was engaged.
The explosion aboard the Princeton left Washington in shock and the fate of annexation in question. Supporters and foes alike recognized that without Upshur guiding matters, Tyler would have a difficult time bringing Texas into the Union before the 1844 nominating conventions in May. The president knew it too. Only days after the tragedy he admitted to one of his daughters that along with his closest servant, two friends, and the man who would have been his father-in-law, his hopes of reelection died that afternoon as well.30
Had he been in Washington, Henry Clay might well have been aboard the Princeton. Instead he spent that fateful evening at a “splendid ball” in Mobile, Alabama, held in his honor by his friend Octavia LeVert and her husband.31 Clay had several months of strenuous campaigning ahead of him, but the disaster bought him time to consider his options regarding Texas. Upshur’s replacement as secretary of state was John C. Calhoun, a brilliant proslavery ideologue from South Carolina. It would be his job to prepare the Texas treaty for ratification by the Senate.
While Calhoun got settled in his new office, Clay consulted with Whig colleagues about how best to turn the Texas issue to his political advantage. In the decades before the Civil War, the easiest way for a politician to reach a mass audience was to write a letter for publication and submit it to a friendly newspaper; within days he could expect to see it reprinted in local papers around the nation.
Having finally come to the realization that Texas was not going away, Henry Clay determined to publish just such a letter. He would clearly outline his reasons for opposing annexation, and explain to the public, his public, why Tyler’s treaty was such a disaster. To a man, however, Clay’s friends rejected this plan. They recognized what Clay did not: that Texas annexation was wildly popular across the South and West. Unless the candidate was willing to openly antagonize potential voters, he needed to hold his tongue.
But as he slowly traveled from Mobile back to Washington, Henry Clay grew increasingly dissatisfied with this course of action, or rather inaction, as he saw it. He was inundated by questions about Texas by audiences in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. The good citizens of Charleston wanted to know if he was “for or against the annexation of Texas.”32 The New Orleans Picayune demanded that both Clay and Martin Van Buren, the presumptive Democratic nominee, “respond like men” and “declare categorically” their views on the subject, “for thousands are anxious to know what they think.”33
Why shouldn’t Clay respond like a man? Once a subject captured Henry Clay’s attention, it wasn’t in his nature to remain quiet. He was sure that he could provide an answer to the Texas question that would “reconcile all our friends, and many others to the views which I entertain.” As he told his incredulous friend John Crittenden, “Of one thing you may be certain, that there is no such anxiety for the annexation here at the South as you might have been disposed to imagine.”34 Henry Clay might have accepted that a treaty was on the table, but he was still in denial that many Americans could possibly support it.
By the time Clay reached Raleigh, North Carolina, on his sixty-seventh birthday, he had determined to write the letter. With typical impetuosity, he turned right to it. Seated beneath a towering white oak on East North Street, Clay composed a missive that he would later come to regret. He outlined his many reasons for opposing annexation: the crippling Texas debt the United States would be forced to assume, the decided opposition of a large portion of Americans, the likely sectional discord, the evidence that the United States had relinquished all claim to Texas in an earlier treaty, and, most important, the fact that Mexico had never abandoned its claim to the region. Make no mistake, Clay warned readers: “annexation and war with Mexico are identical.” Such a war, Clay argued, would be a catastrophe. “I regard all wars as great calamities … and honorable peace as the wisest and truest policy of this country.”35
Clay mailed the letter to John Crittenden in Washington with instructions that it be published in the nation’s leading Whig newspaper, the National Intelligencer, the following week. No doubt anticipating his friend’s reaction upon reading such a definitive rejection of annexation, Clay assured Crittenden that the likely Democratic nominee, Martin Van Buren, would “occupy common ground” with him on the issue.36 There would be no political repercussions. Clay was sure of it.
When Secretary of State John C. Calhoun submitted the completed treaty to the Senate on April 22 for closed debate, its fate looked promising. But events that week would conspire against the annexation of Texas. The first strike against it was the work of a shocked antislavery Democrat, Senator Benjamin Tappan of Ohio. Firmly believing that the treaty would “disgrace the nation,” Tappan leaked it to the press. The administration had hoped to keep the details out of the public eye for as long as possible, but on Saturday, April 27, the treaty appeared in full along with supporting documents that revealed the covert nature of the proceedings and questionable promises made to Texas, including that Valentine’s Day commitment to protection from Mexico. That same Saturday Henry Clay’s Raleigh letter rejecting the annexation of Texas also appeared in print, as did a letter from Martin Van Buren on the same subject.37
Van Buren’s language differed from Clay’s, but he too rejected annexation. The canny New Yorker was considered by many to be the very epitome of the scheming politician, and Whigs were not alone in condemning “his selfishness, his duplicity, his want of manly frankness.” Yet conscientious scruples led him to oppose immediate annexation, political ramifications aside. Given that every other nation would consider the annexation of Texas an unjustified act of aggression against Mexico, Van Buren suggested that annexation might “do us more real lasting injury as a nation than the acquisition of such a territory, valuable as it undoubtedly is, could possibly repair.” He argued that “we have a character among the nations of the earth to maintain.… The lust of power, with fraud and violence in the train, has led other and differently constituted governments to aggression and conquest,” but the United States was motivated by “reason and justice.” If Van Buren had anything to say about it, the United States would not lose that reputation over Texas.38
Nor was that all the news on Saturday, April 27. A fourth astounding report could be found in the columns of the Washington daily press: a letter from John C. Calhoun to the British minister, Sir Richard Pakenham, stating that the annexation of Texas was essential to the security of the South and to the expansion of slavery, which Calhoun argued was a social ideal. Because slavery was “essential to the peace, safety, and prosperity of states in the union in which it exists,” Texas must be annexed.39
This was not the spin the administration had hoped for from the secretary of state. Like Calhoun, Tyler and Upshur were slaveholders, but they had steadfastly maintained a public stance that annexation was an issue of national interest, unconnected to slavery. Upshur was confident that the initial “burst of repugnance at the North” toward the idea of annexation could be overcome once the North realized the economic advantages of the union. He had explained his reasoning to Calhoun back in August 1843: “I have never known the north to refuse to do what their interest required, and I think it will not be difficult to convince them that their interest requires the admission of Texas into the Union as a slaveholding state.” Tyler and Upshur spent the winter of 1843–44 making exactly this argument.40
Calhoun refused to play along. The new secretary of state was a pro-slavery radical and an uncomfortable fit in a political system that divided Americans by party rather than section. Seemingly forgetting that in his role as secretary of state his allegiance belonged to the nation as a whole and not to his beloved South, Calhoun released his letter to Pakenham precisely because he wanted to force the Tyler administration to publicly embrace slavery. In the process he upended the Texas debate on the eve of ratification.
So it was that on the very day the public became aware of the annexation treaty in all its detail, both of the likely presidential candidates rejected the annexation of Texas in a manner that strongly suggested collusion, while the secretary of state willfully alienated northern support of the treaty by casting the issue in starkly sectional terms. Tyler’s dream of annexing Texas, once so close, began to evaporate along with the promised northern support for the treaty. The Whig-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee sat on the treaty for three weeks and then sent it back to the Senate without comment on May 10. Senators of both parties called for a full investigation into the irregular manner in which the administration had conducted its negotiations, particularly the promises made to protect Texas. Even Democrat Thomas Hart Benton, one of the Senate’s staunchest expansionists, alliteratively railed against the “insidious scheme of sudden and secret annexation” brought forth by “our hapless administration.”41
None of this made the slightest difference at the 1844 Whig national convention, which met in Baltimore less than a week after the treaty and the controversial letters appeared in the Washington daily press. Van Buren’s letter left Whigs in “a perfect state of exultation.”42 Few of them doubted that Old Van, a northerner in the pro-expansion party, would be hurt far worse by his anti-annexation stance than would Clay, a southerner in a party that was ambivalent about expansion. Come November, Clay should have no problem beating Van Buren in the general election.
Thousands of Whigs from around the country traveled to Baltimore to make Henry Clay’s coronation official. On the second of May they paraded through Baltimore, a “great mass of noble, fine-looking fellows,” for almost an hour and a half. The weather was cool, the skies overcast. It was a joyous and colorful procession, a “day of jubilee” with “each state under its proper banner, and each individual swelling out its numbers, with flags and patriotic devices, badges and the weapons of peace.” According to sixty-three-year-old Philip Hone, a wealthy sophisticate and member of the New York delegation, it “presented a pageant more bright and brilliant than any I ever beheld.” He delighted in the crowd. They were “cheered on by the bright eyes of the prettiest young women in the world … with handkerchiefs waving overhead and wreaths and bouquets thrown at their feet.”43
The crowd was equally pleased by the loud, colorful, and festive proceedings. Congressman John J. Hardin of Illinois was dumbstruck. “The Grand procession … far exceeded anything which I imagined or could describe,” he wrote his wife, now back home in Illinois with their children. “It was larger than ever was convened, or ever will be again convened in the United States in my lifetime. There were arches & flags & banners extended across the streets by scores; & banners & flags in the procession by hundreds. The procession was 4 or 5 miles long.… The city contains 130,000 inhabitants, & all the inhabitants, & all its citizens, with their tens of thousands from other states were on the streets through which the procession passed. Every window on the street was open & filled with human hands.”44 Hardin couldn’t help but conclude that the American people loved and trusted his Whig Party.
Spectators noted the many live raccoons, symbols of the party ever since Harrison had been portrayed wearing a coonskin cap in the election of 1840, as well as highly polished and beribboned looms, spinning machines, and cotton presses, all of which spoke to the Whig faith in developing American industry. The parade also featured ballot boxes, stuffed eagles, bands of minstrel singers, and mechanics carrying the tools of their trades.
But far outnumbering these were flags and banners, many sewn and presented to the delegations by Clay’s legions of female supporters, testifying to the party’s frenzy for one man. “Harry, the Star of the West” was lauded as “the champion of American industry,” “our brave chieftain,” and “our country’s hope.” New Jersey Whigs professed their adoration for Clay because “he’s honest, he is capable, for his patriotism and talents we honor him, for his virtues and worth we will elevate him.” Baltimore Whigs coupled a portrait of Clay with the motto “History and fame will long proclaim our Harry’s Deeds.” New York City Whigs married an image of Clay to his famous statement that he would “rather be right than be president,” but lest that sentiment seem out of place, the Alabama banner reminded viewers that “there’s no such word as fail.”45 Perhaps the delegations from the Southwest offered fewer images of Clay than those in the Northeast, but the unity of the Whig Party was striking in its totality.
Clay’s visage was even more ubiquitous at the assembly, which gathered in the Universalist Church on Calvert Street. “Clay badges hung conspicuously at all button holes.… Clay portraits, Clay banners, Clay ribands, Clay songs, Clay quick-steps, Clay marches, Clay caricatures, meet the eye in all directions.” All of Baltimore seemed to be in a frenzy for Henry Clay, and leave it up to the Whigs to figure out a way to make money from the spectacle. Hat shops offered “Clay hats,” and tailoring shops offered Clay coats.
The marketing of Henry Clay was in full bloom, and the Whigs were in absolute heaven. “Oh, the rushing, the stirring, the noise, the excitement! To see it and feel it all is glory enough for one day,” gushed a reporter. The enthusiasm reached all the way to New York, where a barber publicly professed his change of heart. No longer would he support Van Buren, since, as he told one reporter, “all the world’s going for Clay; and I, as barber, must go too.”46
In proceedings that were “brief and to the purpose,” Henry Clay was unanimously nominated his party’s candidate for president, on a platform that said nothing about Texas. The resolution was “accompanied by such cheers and clappings of hands as the world never heard before.” The hall vibrated with the applause. Philip Hone declared it “one of the most sublime moral spectacles ever exhibited” and wrote in his diary, “I shall always rejoice that I was present.” The following day an independent newspaper declared, “We never saw such a spirit of enthusiasm as now exists amongst the whigs in favor of Henry Clay,” and predicted that if Clay were “not elected president,” then the editors “don’t know a hawk from a handsaw.”47
Whig campaign ribbon, Baltimore National Convention, 1844. Silk ribbons featuring Henry Clay’s likeness were produced by the thousands for the Whig National Convention in Baltimore and proudly worn by delegates. This particular design proclaims Clay “the fearless Friend of his Country’s Rights” and offers a whitewashed image of Ashland, Clay’s Kentucky estate, worked not by slaves but by a white farmer. Clay, and the Baltimore convention, carefully avoided discussion of the controversial issues of slavery and Texas. Susan H. Douglas Political Americana Collection, #2214, Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. (photo credit 1.2)
As for Prince Hal, his bliss was complete. He felt “profound gratitude” for the unanimous nomination. It had taken ten weeks, but his valentine had arrived at last. The people loved him; the Texas treaty, mired in committee in the Senate, was in doubt; and as for the Democrats, “I do not think I ever witnessed such a state of utter disorder, confusion, and decomposition as that which the Democratic Party now presents,” he crowed to a friend. Everything seemed to be going Henry Clay’s way. Not that he ever had any doubt. He was “firmly convinced that my opinion on the Texas question will do me no prejudice at the South.”48
He was right about the Democrats, at least. In the weeks before their own convention at the end of May, matters looked particularly bleak. The party of Andrew Jackson had been adrift since the economic panic of 1837 and subsequent shocking victory of William Henry Harrison in 1840. Recent developments did not augur well for a return to power in 1844. Van Buren’s letter deeply unsettled party leaders in the South and West, and by mid-May it was widely reported that “gentlemen of the Mississippi Delegation, as well as from Alabama and Virginia, have openly declared that they will not go for any candidate that is not for the annexation of Texas.”49
But without Van Buren, what chance did the party have against Henry Clay? The latter was not alone in assuming that Van Buren “is really the strongest man of their Party.” Many Democrats doubted “whether anything can be done now—any candidate that may be proposed—or any measure that can be adopted—can stay the great and overwhelming tide that is urging the party that came into power with Gen. Jackson to utter dissolution.”50
Old Jackson himself was hardly more positive. Terminally ill at his Tennessee estate, he admitted to a friend that he was “unmanned” by Van Buren’s rejection of Texas, and “shed tears of regret” when he read it. Old Hickory had allowed diplomatic consideration to rule when he was president. He had kept Texas at arm’s length despite believing in his heart that territorial expansion was America’s destiny, despite a close personal relationship with Texas president Sam Houston, despite feeling as deeply as anyone that the Texians were kin who belonged back in the family.51
Now, at the close of his life, he felt the pull of Texas once more. Jackson was no longer the power broker of his party, but his opinion still counted. And he believed the time for annexation had come. Rousing himself from bed, he fired off a string of letters to friends and supporters, so many that they seemed to one concerned recipient to “manifest a mania” on the subject.52 Van Buren’s position was wrong. The party would have to find a new candidate, one who favored the annexation of Texas. Jackson loved Van Buren but could no longer support him. He wrote directly to his former vice president and warned him that his election in 1844 was impossible under these circumstances. Van Buren, shocked by the desertion of his mentor, destroyed the letter.
It wasn’t easy for Jackson to reject Van Buren, but the interests of the party, his party, and of his nation came first. Old Hickory had a plan for the salvation of both. He put pen to paper once more, and summoned James K. Polk to his bedside.