Storm over Texas by Silbey Joel H.;

Author:Silbey, Joel H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2005-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

“A Long Premeditated Crusade”

What was crucial to all of these Democrats as they viewed the shambles of the administration’s initiatives was that it was all of a piece. Each successive event, going back to the original provocation of the strike by the Tyler administration over Texas, was connected to every other. The sum of these connections revealed to the restive Democrats the presence of a larger pattern. It was a pattern that gave Texas even more significance, well beyond anything that it had already achieved. President Polk’s behavior since coming to power had put the Texas battle into a most troubling light.

The notion of a slaveholders’ conspiracy to control the Union had been around in American politics for some time. It had been largely confined to a few anti–slavery activists usually considered extreme in their views about all aspects of public policy. Texas annexation, the abolitionist Benjamin Lundy argued when the issue first arose in 1836, was “a long premeditated crusade . . . set on foot by slaveholders, land speculators, etc., with the view of reestablishing, extending, and perpetuating the system of slavery and the slave trade.” John Quincy Adams had made a similar argument on the floor of the House of Representatives then. Other expressions of the same theme—or accusation—had been heard throughout the decade that followed, whenever Texas was mentioned.62

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