Prelude to War

SO IT WAS US AFTER all–us Texicans–who, clamoring for admission to the Union during those first heady years of freedom and independence, helped set in train the events that tore the Union apart not long afterwards. If only someone had warned us!

On the other hand, what if someone had? What if the political leadership of the day had guessed at the violence and intensity of the storm that Joel Silbey sees as springing from passions loosed by the quest to annex Texas? Might the politicians, from Presidents John Tyler and James K. Polk on down, have approached the annexation enterprise with greater care and unction? Would they have approached it at all?

We’ll never know, for all that Silbey, a political historian at Cornell, glimpses in the Texas controversy is signs and portents of awfulness.

To gratify the South, northern Democrats went along with annexation, at severe cost to the general harmony that the political parties of the time maintained in their own ranks. Henceforth, sectionalism, fed by the South’s insistence on preserving and extending slavery, drove the wagon. Nor could prudent leaders apply the brake when necessary.

The annexation of Texas, in Silbey’s telling, made an end to “evasion and compromise” on slavery. Subsequently, the South took over the Democratic party; antislavery, or just anti-Democratic, sentiment drained into the new Republican party. Then came the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the South’s discovery that the game was up.

Such is Silbey’s thesis. “Texas,” as he sees it, “unleashed demons that, while restrained and apparently put back into the bottle after a short period, were never completely repressed.” In the turbulent 1850s, as the nation veered toward breakup, “memories of Texas infused what subsequently happened with certain fears, outlooks that approached the edge of paranoia, and deeplyheld understandings about how the political process was being misused. At such moments, Texas became a benchmark against which to measure and assess the nature and direction of the events coming before the American people.”

The South (as northerners saw it) was on its high horse, threatening to ride down all opposition to its aims.

There’s something there, all right. I’m not certain it’s as much as Silbey thinks. Historians exhibit a tendency to construct explanatory frameworks larger than necessary for immediate purposes. You can see why: Events, unless culled and collated, are just events; the historian pulls events together and explains What It All Means. Silbey is a good explainer, if hardly a riveting writer. But he leaves stuff out.

Grant, by all means, the tensions that Texas annexation brought to the surface of American politics. Still, you have to ask: Was Texas not going to be annexed? Was it going to lie baking there in the sun for the British to pick off, or the Mexicans to reconquer? Not for a New York minute. It was going to become part of the United States because that was what most Americans wanted and, equally to the point, because “their people are our people,” in the succinct formulation of a Virginia congressman. Freed from Mexican oppression by the guts and marksmanship of Americans, Texas had no purpose, no raison d’etre, other than union with the United States of America. I find in Silbey’s text entirely too few intimations of this important reality.

And, yes, the admission of Texas to the Union did, in some ways, worsen relationships between slave and free states. But outside Silbey’s explanatory framework lies the point–unspoken, unmentioned–that there wasn’t any getting around this slavery question, Texas or no Texas. America, as Lincoln would express the matter, paraphrasing Jesus Christ himself, was a house divided against itself, liable to topple over without prior notice to the tenants. It’s possible to see the annexation controversy as having hastened that collapse; it’s safer, perhaps, not to stress the point unduly.

Let’s be grateful to Joel Silbey all the same for deftly reminding us that political dysfunction didn’t originate during the Clinton and Bush administrations. There was a ferocity–indeed, a loopiness–to the debates of the 1840s and ’50s that will seem alarmingly familiar to moderns. Slave states, free states, red states, blue states: You wonder sometimes, Don’t Americans like each other?

Not the least encouraging lesson from these mid-19th-century brouhahas is that we could go at each other with hammer and tongs, and yet somehow eventually patch things up. One may only hope that highly prized knack hasn’t been lost in the family attic.

William Murchison is the Radford distinguished professor of journalism at Baylor.