A History of the American People

acknowledging the independence of Texas. The fighting was thus over in seven weeks.
Independent Texas proceeded quickly to hold presidential elections, in which Houston defeated
Stephen Austin, receiving 80 percent of the 6,000 votes cast. Houston had lived with the Indians
in his youth and married an Indian girl. He was known as The Raven' and was said to drinka
barrel of whiskey a day.' He was also an old friend and fellow-Tennessean of the President,
General Jackson.
Jackson wanted Texas to be part of America. He also hated Mexicans. When, in the middle of
a Cabinet meeting on June 28, 1836, he received a report from Commodore Dallas, US naval
commander in the Mexican Gulf, about the indignities inflicted on the American consul and US
citizens in Tampico by the Mexican authorities, he rapped out a characteristic order-without
bothering to ask the rest of the Cabinet their views: Write immediately to Commodore Dallas, & order him to blockade the harbor of Tampico, & to suffer nothing to enter until they allow him to land and obtain his supplies of water & communicate with the Consul, & if they touch a hair of the head of one of our citizens tell him to batter down and destroy their town & exterminate their inhabitants from the face of the earth.’ However, when he cooled down and consulted Kendall, he decided not to annex Texas as a new state, at the risk of outright war with Mexico, but to let things be for a time. Kendall told Jackson that he had to think of international opinion, which would note and resent land-grabbing by the American republic but would not object if, in due course, all were to drop into its lap:The time will come when Mexico will be overrun by our
AngloSaxon race, nor do I look upon it as a result to be at all deplored. I believe it would lead to
the amelioration and improvement of Mexico herself; but as guardians of the peace and interests
of the United States we are not permitted to go to war through philanthropy or a design to
conquer other nations for their own good.’ Old Hickory pondered this pacific advice for a time
and, surprisingly, agreed to follow it.
So Texas remained independent for a decade and flourished mightily, though continuing to
press for its inclusion in the United States as a slave state. Jackson, now retired, coined in 1843,
a propos of Texas, the saying that adding to America was extending the area of freedom'- although grabbing Texas from Mexico had already meant the legal reimposition of slavery there. In the meantime, President Tyler had been slowly moving towards the annexation of Texas, being anxious to ingratiate himself with the Southerners in order to secure his reelection in 1844, this time in his own right. Early in the election year, on February 28, 1844, a disaster occurred which had a profound political impact. Congress had been persuaded to provide funds to build a revolutionary new warship, the USS Princeton, the first to be driven by a propeller-screw, invented by a young Swedish engineer, John Ericsson. It had two enormous wrought-iron 12- inch guns, calledOregon' and Peacemaker.' To call a huge new gun such a name was an affront to providence, and during a gala trip down the Potomac which President Tyler had arranged for his Cabinet, diplomats, senators, and numerous grand ladies,Peacemaker' exploded, killing
Secretary of State Abel Upshur, the Navy Secretary, and a New York State senator, and
wounding a dozen others, including Senator Benton. The force of the explosion literally flung
into the President's arms the beautiful Julia Gardiner, daughter of the dead state Senator, and she
shortly afterwards became his wife. Equally, perhaps more, important, it enabled Tyler to
reconstruct his Cabinet, excluding Northerners completely, and bringing in Calhoun as secretary
of state. The object was twofold: to get Tyler the Southern ticket and to annex Texas.
The first maneuver did not succeed. The Democrats chose a Jackson protégé from Tennessee,
James Knox Polk (1795-1849), who took a strong stand on the Manifest Destiny platform, and
beat Henry Clay by 170 electoral college votes to 105 (the popular vote was closer: 1,337,243 to