Explosion on the "Princeton": Chance or Destiny?

by OSCAR HANDLIN

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THE chill of early morning had not yet left (he air when the man-of-war Princeton moved down the Potomac on February 28, 1844. She was the pride of the American Navy, a steamer fitted with an Ericsson propeller. Launched scarcely six months earlier, she had already demonstrated her speed by outracing the famous British liner of steam and sail, the Great Western. On this day her commander, Captain Stockton, was to make another display of her power.

Aboard were several distinguished passengers. President Tyler and his most important military and naval advisers, along with a select group of politicians, had come to observe a trial of the Princeton s new gun, the “Peacemaker.” an immense 12-inch piece, fully 16 feet long, capable of throwing a 225-pound ball. With the President was his Secretary of State, Abel P. Upshur, a Virginian recently elevated to the post. He had a particular interest in the trip, for as the former Secretary of the Navy he had watched the development of this new piece of ordnance.

The pleasant cruise proceeded some distance below Fort Washington, and on the way the Princeton fired several bursts to the satisfaction of all. The ladies took a “sumptuous repast” in the captain’s cabin, and then it was the turn of the gentlemen at the table. Bottles were passed and a goodly number of toasts were drunk. The President was in genial humor, and noticeably attentive to pretty Julia Gardiner. Thirty years his junior, she was soon to be his bride.

As dusk descended, several of the distinguished guests drifted back to the deck, where they stood in little groups, relaxed in easy conversation, watching the shore slip by.

’Those in the cabin were surprised to hear another gun go off; the dull explosion seemed prolonged. There was a moment of silence; then could be heard screams of men in agony and the1 sound of running feet overhead. The visitors hastened to the deck, where they were alarmed to see the ship’s surgeon desperately working over a group of bodies, one of them covered with a flag. The “Peacemaker” had exploded; several bystanders had been killed, and among them was Secretary of State Upshur,

Upshur had been well liked; he was capable, a man of few enemies; and the ship’s company were left in horrified silence. With the mourning at the personal loss, there were other more general forebodings. Who would now carry forward the momentous negotiations in which the Secretary of State had been engaged? How would the incident affect the presidential election, less than a year away? How would it influence the delicate balance of power that held the contending sections of the nation together?

When Upshur had left his desk, he had been preoccupied with the affairs of Texas. His successor would inherit a sadly tangled web of problems involving American relationships with that young republic.

Remote from the centers of government, with all boundaries and jurisdictions vague and undefined, Texas had for decades been a magnet for all sorts of trading and filibustering expeditions.

Twice in the twenty years after 1800, Americans had been involved in abortive revolutions along the long, indented coast of the Gulf of Mexico. In 1812 Augustus Magee and Bernardo Gutierrez had led a small, foolhardy force to total extermination by the Spaniards. In 1821 Mexico gained its own independence, and again filibustered tried their luck. Out of Mississippi came James Long, leader of a spirited band of frontiersmen determined to make Texas their West, and not. above summoning Jean Lafitte, the pirate, to their aid to do so. At Nacogdoches they proclaimed a republic and rode daringly into the interior to make good their pretensions. Long, too, met defeat and death at the hands of the Mexicans.

Meanwhile the United States had renounced its own vague claims to the territory. That, with the failure of the successive uprisings, put the whole region safely in t he handsof the new Mexiean Republic.

Acceptance of these political conditions did not, however, hold back the American settlers. Sharpeyed men, toughened by the wilderness, self-reliant through experience, and accustomed to making their interests one with their rights, were turning the possibilities over in their minds. They believed that Texas was theirs for the bidding.

One of these was Moses Austin. A Yankee trader from Connecticut, he had come south to Richmond after the Revolution; but the littie town did not offer him the opportunity he sought. The West, unrevealed, seemed full of promise, the more attractive to Austin as his disappointments made him dissatisfied with his petty trader’s life. In 1708 he was off to Missouri, then still Spanish, and there, for nearly two decades, he drifted in and out of one unsuccessful enterprise after anolher. By then his time was running out. As his sixtieth birt hday drew near, his heart sank with ihe realization that he might after all wind up a failure. Only in the empty spaces of the farther West, in Texas, was there one more chance of a happy ending to a long career of aimless striving. His determination fastened on that hope.

In 1820 he hastened to Bexar (San Antonio), carrying a grandiose scheme for a colony on which he promised to plant three hundred families. Perhaps the intensity of his longing lent conviction to his plea. Or perhaps his plan was in accord with the ambitions of the local officials, among whom he found an old Iriend. In any ease, Austin carried back to Missouri with him the promise of the cherished land grant, lie died almost at oner on his return, worn oul by his eflorts. But the prize, long elusive, was his.

The burden of carrying forward the project fell to his son, Stephen F. Austin. The .young man was cut from an altogether different cloth. Born in Virginia, Stephen Austin had had an uneasy bringing upon the southern frontier. lie had followed his father’s wanderings to the Southwest, and was no si ranger to the plains. He was not a handsome man, but his high forehead and deep eyes gave him an air of earnestness and integrity. Everywhere, his patience and tael and a kind of relaxed ability to get on with any man stood him in good stead. He was only twenty-seven when Moses died, bul he had already been active in territorial politics and had served a term as circuit judge in Arkansas.

In 1821 Stephen Austin fitted out and led to the banks of 1 lie Brazos a company who became the first permanent settlers in Texas from the United Slates. What was more, with infinite tolerance for the inclination of Mexican officials toward procrastination, he secured confirmation of the grants in return for 1 he agreement to people them and so opened the way to further concessions for other Americans.

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IN THE next few years a little enclave of norfeamencanos established itself in the province. In the region between the Sabine and Nueces rivers, the government of Mexico handed over to the newcomers a succession of grants, each as much as eleven square leagues in size. The empresarios who took possession agreed to establish one hundred families on the land; and although they were far from meeting this obligation, a stream of settlers moved into the area. By 1880 Texas could boast of a total population of perhaps 20,000, almost all migrants from the United States.

From the start there was trouble. The rude, selfconfident frontiersmen clashed all too often with officials accustomed to the more leisurely ways of an easier society. Control of the state of CoahuilaTexas was in the hands of officials appointed from Mexico City. But the Americans had their own organ of local government in the ayuntamiento. The newcomers were not accustomed to give much regard to the punctilios of law, and consequently ran frequently afoul of the elaborate Mexican codes. The empresarios were bound by obligations to the government of Mexico; the farmers they induced to migrate had no such responsibilities. Some of the settlers, coming oul of the South, had brought Negro slaves with them, hoping to establish cotton culture on the fertile soil. Others aspired to import, slaves and to create a plantation system. True, a Mexican law of 1824 forbade the importation of slaves, but the rising demand offered a convincing reason for forget ling a law that no one enforced.

Nor were the cinprcsanas and the other settlors more likely to heed the Idler of Mexican law with regard to religion. They were Rrotestants, but by their coming had tacitly agreed to take on theestablished religion of the country. Yet none of them took the obligation seriously.

On these and other scores there were clashes now and then between the new settlers and the government, the bitterness of which was tempered only by the fact that the center of authority was remote; the federal gox eminent was itself insecure and unwilling to bring issues to a bead.

Nexerlheloss, the crisis was not long postponed. In 1826 a hotheaded empresario, Haden Edxvards, rose in rebellion and proclaimed the Fredonian Republic. Edwards was not one of Austin’s followers. A firebrand, he was not a man to command the confidence of his fellows; he failed to gain support and, yielding to a repressive expedition from Mexico City, fled to Louisiana.

The uprising, vain though it was, frightened the Mexican administration. The specter of Yankee conquest haunted the timorous rulers of the republic. The empresarios were growing steadily in numbers; and who could tell but that they were plotting with the government of the United States to secure the transfer of the province? Confirmation of these fears could indeed be found in events across the border. A newspaper campaign by expansionists in the United States openly announced the necessity for acquiring Texas; and President Jackson in 1829 actually explored the possibility of purchasing the province.

Gloomily surveying the prospect, on the scene, was an emissary from Mexico City, General Manuel de Mier y Teran, commandant general of the eastern provinees of Mexico and responsible for the defense of Texas. Mier y Teran, now middle-aged, was a man of scientific interests who had been drawn into the Mexican revolution by patriotic fervor, He was determined to maintain the integrity of his country. This courtly man, who loved order and decent regard for form, looked somberly upon the strange mixture of people pouring across the border, He resented the lack of respect for government and the violation of law that he found everywhere, and he was impatient with religious laxity. Above all, he feared “the most avid nation in the world ” to the north. That power, he warned, “by silent means,” without “armies, battles, or invasions,” had already laid hands on a great part of the continent. It threatened now to encroach upon Mexican soil, and the empresarios, who wore its vanguard, had to be restrained in the interests of national security. Upon his recommendation, the Mexican Congress in 1830 forbade further colonization by citizens of the United States. At the same time, it encouraged Mexicans and Europeans to move in and it provided for the area’s military defense.

Smoldering dissatisfaction broke out in a local revolt in Galveston in 1832. A minor skirmish deposed the commander of the garrison but left the immediate region in a state of revolt.

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AT THIS point, the cause of Texas became bound up with the career of Antonio López do Santa Anna. Almost forty at the time, Santa Anna had already had a tempestuous career, He had abandoned the business into which his family had put him and had taken up the profession of arms. In the struggle for Mexican independence, he had first been a royalist. Then he had turned against his Spanish masters and had advanced in power under the new government. He was vain and without sense of humanity; his romantic ambition had no limits. lie was able when he wished to be, but he was often incapable of disciplining his abilities. At the time of the Galveston revolt he made a contested election the pretext for mutiny, and he encouraged the Americans around Galveston in their rebellion.

Santa Anna was not a theorist; he grasped at whatever chance seemed likely to add to his power. Aspiring to the presidency, he discovered a useful slogan in stales’ rights. His vague statements about decentralization encouraged the Texans to believe that under his administration they could attain some sort of autonomous position within the Mexican Republic.

Santa Anna no sooner gained power — the Mexican Congress recognized him as President in 1833 — than he forgot even the shadowy promises he had earlier made. Instead he introduced a series of measures against the American settlers more restrictive than those of his predecessors. Once at the center of affairs, Santa Anna was hardly the man to let authority slip out of his hands. In 1835 he was responsible for the enactment of a law that centralized the administration of the whole country and crushed the vestiges of states’ rights. The hopes of the Texans for autonomy as a Mexican state died that year.

They now sought self-government outside the Mexican Republic, For several years groups of Texans had been meeting in conventions to petition for redress of their grievances and the reform of their government. Stephen F. Austin and the empresarios had exercised a moderating influence in these gatherings. Become conservative as they had become wealthy, they were conscious of their debt to Mexico and anxious for an accommodation that would keep the country intact and yet meet the pressing demands of the other Americans in Texas.

Santa Anna’s repression of federalism was the last straw. A “consultation’ or convention had already been scheduled to meet at New Washington on the Brazos in October, 1835, When it assembled, its members determined to lake up arms in resistance. Yet even here the conservatism of Austin made itself felt. Fearful lest the convention move “too fast and too far,” he persuaded that body to adopt as its aim the restoration of constitutional government within the Mexican Republic.

Alas, Santa Anna’s callousness put to naught all the results of Austin’s tact. The “consultation ” had created a provisional state government and had adjourned to meet again in March, 1836. Before that date arrived, news came of the battle at the Alamo.

In the little mission in San Antonio, 188 Americans under W . B. Travis had been hemmed in by an army of 5000. The men who stood siege had come a long way to this little outpost up the river. They had come in their faith that this West was American and would be their home. At whatever cost, they were determined to cling to that faith. And that involved resistance, without compromise, to any infringement of their rights as free men. They had no illusions as they issued a defiant call for help to “all Americans in the world”; above the cathedral they could see the black flag of No Quarter. But they would not yield, though they knew they were cut off from every hope of aid.

For a few days they held off the attackers. Then, exhausted, their supplies gone, they still did not surrender. As Santa Anna ‘s army swarmed over the walls to the sound ol the degüello (the beheading call), they fought on in hand-to-hand conflict, and died in silent fury. Xo quarter was asked or given; three women, two children, and a Negro servant survived.

After the Alamo, even Austin recognized that no further connection with Mexico was tolerable; independence for Texas was the only possible course. The provisional government proclaimed itself a sovereign state and prepared to fight to make the proclamation successful. Santa Anna had every intention of snuffing out this uprising. It would take courage, energy, and skill to resist.

Responsibility for guiding the Texans through this crisis fell to an aging comrade-in-arms of Andrew Jackson. Sam Houston had been born in Virginia of the same Scotch-Irish stock as “Old Hickory.” Ho too had served in the War of 1812, and like Jackson had moved into Tennessee politics. A striking figure, six feet two in height, Houston had become adept as a stump speaker and had made himself Congressman and Governor. When he married Eliza Allen, a woman of wealth, grace, and social position, he had been well on the way to establishing himself in the new Southern aristocracy. But he could not accommodate himself to his wife. She left him, and Houston at once sensed a bitter discontent with everything he had become. By the divorce he lost his home, his status, and his place in politics. He turned to the West and sought refuge in the Indian country, among the nomadic tribesmen of the plains. In a gesture of rejection he took a new wife from among the Indians and was himself adopted by the Cherokees. In I he next few years he led a dissolute life, trading in a small way, carousing with his Tiana, existing without ambition or purpose.

In 1833 Houston had had some contacts with the Texans, who had been impressed with his military reputation. Their admiration stirred the embers of his self-respect, of the desire for fame. When the crisis deepened, the new republic called upon him to be its commander in chief. Slowly, rekindled ambitions induced him to heed the summons; and it was he who led the way to Texan independence.

By the best standards of military science, Houston was not much of a general. His strategy was simple: to wait, like the Indians, for the opportunity for ambush or surprise and then to strike in one merciless blow that would avenge the martyrs of the Alamo and repel the immediate threat to Texas. Something less than a thousand men had gathered under his standard, rough and untrained, but imbued with a fierce desire to destroy the invader. With this army Houston drew back into the interior, knowing the Mexicans would not hasten to follow.

President Santa Anna himself was in command of the federal Mexican troops. Victory at the Alamo had bolstered his confidence. He had no great respect for the fighting power of the Yanquis; so he moved in leisurely pursuit, dividing his attentions between a beautiful young mistress he had acquired en route and desultory plundering of the homes of terrorized settlers.

In mid-April, Houston struck without warning. Forced marches, in little more than two days, brought his army back the fifty-five miles to New Washington. There Santa Anna was encamped without a suspicion that the Texans were anywhere within reach, without even sentries on guard. A sudden attack threw the President into a panicky withdrawal that left him the next afternoon trapped in the swamps of the San Jacinto River. Houston then hit the Mexicans at the siesta hour, while Santa Anna was asleep. When the battle ended, six Texans and more than six hundred Mexicans were dead, and the President himself was Houston’s prisoner. The independence of Texas was assured. After a brief captivity, Santa Anna, who valued his own skin above all, was released on condition that he withdraw Mexican troops from the new republic.

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FOR the United States, Texan independence posed an embarrassing problem. Jackson had earlier wished this area to be part of the Uhion. But he had hesitated, unwilling to antagonize Mexico and conscious that new territory might disturb the delicate balance of sections in the United States. He and Van Buren, his successor, thought it wise, for the time being, simply to recognize Texan independence and to proceed slowly to eventual annexation.

Caution became still more necessary in 1840 when the Whig Party came to power. Daniel Aebster, who played a leading role in the new administration, had earlier opposed annexation; influential groups in the North feared, with him, that new Southern states might weaken Xew England s power in Congress. Moreover, the I nited States was then negotiating with Great Britain the ticklish disputes over the northern boundaries of Oregon and Maine. Any precipitate step toward annexation might antagonize London.

Britain too had long been interested in the territory. For two decades English statesmen had been encouraging the Latin-American states in their slruggle for freedom. In their view, Texas was similarly to be sustained. Furthermore Texas, they hoped, might be the field for an interesting experiment. English factories consumed cotton in large and growing quantities. Yet if was galling to be dependent for that staple on the slave-tilled fields of the South. The abolition of slavery in the British West Indies a few years earlier had demonstrated that other tropical crops could be raised with free labor. Might not Texas be the occasion for a similar trial with cotton?

Houston, for one, was not bound by any particular attachment, to the United States, and was quite willing to turn to England for support. Although the majority of Texans probably leaned toward the Union, they were not willing to wait indefinitely. They might accept as an alternative an understanding by which Great Britain would recognize the republic, as France already had in 1839. Britain might guarantee the independence of Texas and, by loan or subsidy, enable it to free its slaves and establish itself on a firm financial basis.

So, at least, ran the fears of President Tyler. Tyler, too, was a Virginian. His long record as a states’ rights Democrat had not prevented him from entering into a temporary alliance with the Whigs in the election of 1840. As a candidate for the vice-presidency he had been expected to cut into Democratic votes and to be amply rewarded by the tenure of a dignified but innocuous position. The death of President Harrison shortly after the inauguration had altered the situation. Tyler became chief executive, and he unexpectedly displayed both an unwillingness to act the figurehead and the desire to run again in 1844. For three years he battled factions of both parties, antagonizing many members of the Senate and House and governing by a de facto coalition of his own supporters.

As the presidential year 1844 approached, Tyler attempted to reassess his own position. The Whigs were decisively alienated. He could aspire to a second term only with Democratic support. But since the party leaders were hostile, he could attract that support only by identifying himself with some popular issue. There, in his mind, lay the significance of Texas. On that question he could draw upon the deep wells of expansionist sentiment throughout the country — enough to carry him once more to the White House. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty had settled the outstanding disputes with Great Britain. Relieved of those burdens, Tyler felt free to pursue the Texan negotiations. He broke with Webster, whom he had kept in office to conclude the English negotiations, and appointed the Virginian Upshur as Secretary of State in place of the godlike Daniel.

from Tyler ‘s point of view the diplomatic key to the negotiations was the assurance to the Texans that the United States would protect them in the event that Mexico should resume the attack. It was equally important that annexation be consummated without stirring up the slavery controversy. Were the question to become one of slavery against freedom, the two-thirds majority necessary to ratify a treaty in the Senate could not be secured. The occupation, independence, and annexat ion of Texas, therefore, had to be treated as what it had in fact been: a stage in the process of expansion, unrelated to slavery.

In the desire to put the matter in terms of manifest destiny, Tyler had the cooperation of responsible statesmen of both parties. Clay and Van Buren, the presumptive Whig and Democratic candidates, issued statements that were intended to soothe potential fears. And I pshur, as Secretary of State, was carrying out discreet, secret negotiations to complete the diplomatic arrangements without heated public debate. Had Upshur lived to carry through the plans, Texas might have come into the l nion without the blaze of controversy that actually followed its admission.

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HE explosion aboard iho Princeton vacated the office of Secretary of State and placed in new hands the conclusion of the dealings with Texas. In the choice of a successor to Upshur, Tyler confronted a difficult decision. The political crisis and the approaching election narrowly restricted the range of possible candidates. Since Tyler had broken with both parties, he could not approach any of the recognized party leaders. Nor were any of them likely to accept office in a dying administration without popular or congressional support. Only a man equally isolated would throw in his lot with the President. That man was John C. Calhoun.

Calhoun was now approaching the inglorious twilight of his career. At sixty-two he had lost every important battle and alienated every colleague. As he sat in Washington, cut off from his family, his anxious thought s would drift back to the wife whom he loved, yet who punished him with frenetic fits of “nerves" for his absorption in a career she jealously hated. Every position short of the nation’s highest office he had already held—in South Carolina, in the Senate, in the cabinet, as well as the vice-presidency. And his ambitions for the presidency he had surrendered.

Now he looked bitterly at a country he had helped to make but which he no longer recognized. Thirty years earlier, he too had seen the vision of a great nation, free and expansive. In the intervening decades, however, he had made too many wrong choices. In the last years of his life, Calhoun devoted his best energies to the justification of his lost causes. His superb brain had twisted its way through many disputes; he could now turn it to support any argument. As his horizons crowded in upon him, Calhoun fixed bis attention ever more on the defense of his own state and bis own section, knowing in his inner heart they were doomed with all else that he cherished. “The South! The poor South!” he was to murmur as he died. Yet be was forever wiping away his sense of guilt about his desertion of the national ideals that had so moved him in his young manhood.

Always he came back to slavery. It was that institution that had driven a wedge between the North and the South, that had deprived him of the presidency. Slavery had led the South away from the path the North had taken, away from the visions Calhoun once had glimpsed. But this cast-iron man was incapable of admitting error in himself or seeing tragedy in the history of his section. Slavery could not have been wrong; slavery was necessary — indeed, beneficent; indeed, a good and proper institution. South Carolina had come the right way, while the rest of the world was steeped in error.

For Calhoun, Texas was of transcendent importance. It was the occasion to demonstrate that slavery was not a dying, anachronistic vestige of the past, but rather a living, creative, expansive institution, not doomed to retreat but to spread. It was more than time to shift away from the defensive stand conservative Southern politicians had taken, and to assume the aggressive posture worthy of the civilization the South defended.

Calhoun’s first thoughts as Secretary of State were of Texas. The proposed treaty was in good shape, with all the essential points agreed upon in earlier conversations with the Texan commissioner. But before him was a note from Lord Ashburton, the British Foreign Secretary, commenting on his government’s interest in Iexas. The document closed with assurances that England had no intention of interfering in American domestic affairs, but added a conventional statement of interest in the extension of freedom throughout the world.

Calhoun deliberately made this statement the occasion for a tart retort to dramatize the issue as he saw it. He went far beyond the immediate necessity of the argument to a general, abstract defense of slavery as a positive good. Widely circulated, his answer brought into the open the controversy that every other American statesman had tried to repress.

The immediate results were confusing. Northerners who might have voted to join Texas to the In ion could not now assent to the addition of another slave state; the treaty was defeated in the Senate.

Texas figured prominently in the election of 1844. Tyler was passed over in the choice of candidates. Van Buren, for his antislavery predilections, was rejected by the Democratic Party; and Clay, wavering between North and South, could not take a position strong enough to appeal to either section. The victory went to J. K. Polk, an expansionist who had made clear his Southern, proslavery sympathies. And the election was no sooner over than annexation was consummated through a joint resolution of Congress that brought Texas in —■ a slave state.

What followed was almost anticlimactie. The Mexicans recognized neither the independence of Texas nor its annexation by the Fnited Slates. But their stubborn pride was tempered by caution. By now Texas was no longer the issue. Further west toward the Pacific lay what is now California and New Mexico, and some Americans were already considering the acquisition of all Mexico. Santa Anna was not eager for battle. But a feint at the border in 1846 provoked him into fighting; and when the short war reached its conclusion, the United States stretched in an unbroken mass westward across the continent. The expansive forces that had led people across the Ohio, then beyond the Mississippi into Louisiana, and then onward into Texas, had lulfilled their manifest destiny.

It was now no longer a question of territorial expansion, however. At the turning point in 1844, when the new Secretary of State had taken Upshur ‘s place, the problem of slavery inherited from the nation’s past had come to absorb all mens attention. Calhoun’s intervention had united inextricably the future of slavery and of westward expansion. Thereafter there could be no evading the question. In any further additions of territory, would slavery march with the American flag or not? Moderate opinion in the North now began to wonder whether the abolitionist bands were not after all right to attack the slaveholders’ “conspiracy.”

In Pennsylvania young David Wilmot, a Democratic Congressman, pondered the question and decided that there could, in conscience, be no answer but the negative. When the question ol the disposition of the territories acquired from Mexico came before the House of Representatives in 1848, Wilmot introduced a proviso declaring the new lands forever free. The Compromise of 1850 did not dose the debate thus started, nor did the KansasNebraska Act of 1854. Rather it dragged on through the bloody battlefields of Kansas and was protracted in the convention halls in which the Southern states, in 1861, enacted their ordinances of secession. As it developed, the existing political parties collapsed and a tragic cleavage opened between the two sections of the nation.

At long last there would come a spring day in Charleston Harbor when the Carolina gentry would come down to watch the guns booming across the bay at the little island over which the Union flag still waved. The shells that fell around Fort Sumter in 1861 had long before been touched off by the failure of the “Peacemaker” on the Princeton. For it was then that the issue bad been drawn, whether the future of the country would be one of growing freedom or of spreading slavery.