Thirty Years' View (Vol. I of 2)

The inexpediency of the treaty was in the question of crippling and mutilating Arkansas, reducing her to the class of weak States, and that against all the reasons which had induced Congress, four years before, to add on twelve thousand square miles to her domain; and to almost double the productive and inhabitable capacity of the Territory, and future State, by the character of the country added. I felt this wrong to Arkansas doubly, both as a neighbor to my own State, and because, having a friendship for the delegate, as well as for his territory, I had exerted myself to obtain the addition which had been thus cut off. I argued, as I thought, conclusively; but in vain. The treaty was largely ratified, and by a strong slaveholding vote, notwithstanding it curtailed slave territory, and made soil free which was then slave. Anxious to defeat the treaty for the benefit of Arkansas, I strongly presented this consequence, showing that there was, not only legal, but actually slavery upon the amputated part – that these twelve thousand square miles were inhabited, organized into counties, populous in some parts, and with the due proportion of slaves found in a southern and planting State. Nothing would do. It was a southern measure, negotiated, on the record, by a southern secretary at war, in reality by the clerk McKinney; and voted for by nineteen approving slaveholding senators against four dissenting. The affirmative vote was: Messrs. Barton, Berrien, Bouligny, Branch, Ezekiel Chambers, Cobb, King of Alabama, McKinley, McLane of Delaware, Macon, Ridgely, Smith of Maryland, Smith of South Carolina, John Tyler of Virginia, and Williams of Mississippi. The negative was, Messrs. Benton, Eaton, Rowan, and Tazewell. – Mr. Calhoun was then Vice-President, and did not vote; but he was in favor of the treaty, and assisted its ratification through his friends. The House of Representatives voted the appropriations to carry it into effect; and thus acquiesced in the repeal of an act of Congress by the President, Senate, and Cherokee Indians; and these appropriations were voted with the general concurrence of the southern members of the House. And thus another slice, and a pretty large one (twelve thousand square miles), was taken off of slave territory in the former province of Louisiana; which about completed the excision of what had been left for slave State occupation after the Missouri compromise of 1820, and the cession to Texas of contemporaneous date, and previous cessions to Indian tribes. And all this was the work of southern men, who then saw no objection to the Congressional legislation which acted upon slavery in territories – which further curtailed, and even extinguished slave soil in all the vast expanse of the former Louisiana – save and except the comparative little that was left in the State of Missouri and in the mutilated Territory of Arkansas. The reason of the southern members for promoting this amputation of Arkansas in favor of the Cherokees, was simply to assist in inducing their removal by adding the best part of Arkansas, with its salt springs, to the ample millions of acres west of that territory already granted to them; but it was a gratuitous sacrifice, as the large part of the tribe had already emigrated to the seven millions of acres, and the remainder were waiting for moneyed inducements to follow. And besides, the desire for this removal could have no effect upon the constitutional power of Congress to legislate upon slavery in territories, or upon the policy which curtails the boundaries of a future slave State.

I have said that the amputated part of Arkansas was an organized part of the territory, divided into counties, settled and cultivated. Now, what became of these inhabitants? – their property? and possessions? They were bought out by the federal government! A simultaneous act was passed, making a donation of three hundred and twenty acres of land (within the remaining part of Arkansas), to each head of a family who would retire from the amputated part; and subjecting all to military removal that did not retire. It was done. They all withdrew. Three hundred and twenty acres of land in front to attract them, and regular troops in the rear to push them, presented a motive power adequate to its object; and twelve thousand square miles of slave territory was evacuated by its inhabitants, with their flocks, and herds, and slaves; and not a word was said about it; and the event has been forgotten. But it is necessary to recall its recollection, as an important act, in itself, in relation to the new State of Arkansas – as being the work of the South – and as being necessary to be known in order to understand subsequent events.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

RENEWAL OF THE OREGON JOINT OCCUPATION CONVENTION

The American settlement at the mouth of the Columbia, or Oregon, was made in 1811. It was an act of private enterprise, done by the eminent merchant, Mr. John Jacob Astor, of New-York; and the young town christened after his own name, Astoria: but it was done with the countenance and stipulated approbation of the government of the United States; and an officer of the United States navy – the brave Lieutenant Thorn, who was with Decatur at Tripoli, and who afterwards blew up his ship in Nootka Sound to avoid her capture by the savages (blowing himself, crew and savages all into the air), – was allowed to command his (Mr. Astor's) leading vessel, in order to impress upon the enterprise the seal of nationality. This town was captured during the war of 1812, by a ship of war detached for that purpose, by Commodore Hillyar, commanding a British squadron in the Pacific Ocean. No attempt was made to recover it during the war; and, at Ghent, after some efforts on the part of the British commissioners, to set up a title to it, its restitution was stipulated under the general clause which provided for the restoration of all places captured by either party. But it was not restored. An empty ceremony was gone through to satisfy the words of the treaty, and to leave the place in the hands of the British. An American agent, Mr. John Baptist Prevost, was sent to Valparaiso, to go in a British sloop of war (the Blossom) to receive the place, to sign a receipt for it, and leave it in the hands of the British. This was in the autumn of the year 1818; and coincident with that nominal restitution was the conclusion of a convention in London between the United States and British government, for the joint occupation of the Columbia for ten years – Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Rush the American negotiators – if those can be called negotiators who are tied down to particular instructions. The joint occupancy was provided for, and in these words: "That any country claimed by either party on the northwest coast of America, together with its harbors, bays, and creeks, and the navigation of all rivers within the same, be free and open, for the term of ten years, to the subjects, citizens, and vessels of the two powers; without prejudice to any claim which either party might have to any part of the country." – I was a practising lawyer at St. Louis, no way engaged in politics, at the time this convention was published; but I no sooner saw it than I saw its delusive nature – its one-sidedness – and the whole disastrous consequences which were to result from it to the United States; and immediately wrote and published articles against it: of which the following is an extract:

"This is a specimen of the skill with which the diplomatic art deposits the seeds of a new contestation in the assumed settlement of an existing one, – and gives unequal privileges in words of equality, – and breeds a serious question, to be ended perhaps by war, where no question at all existed. Every word of the article for this joint occupation is a deception and a blunder – suggesting a belief for which there is no foundation, granting privileges for which there is no equivalent, and presenting ambiguities which require to be solved – peradventure by the sword. It speaks as if there was a mutuality of countries on the northwest coast to which the article was applicable, and a mutuality of benefits to accrue to the citizens of both governments by each occupying the country claimed by the other. Not so the fact. There is but one country in question, and that is our own; – and of this the British are to have equal possession with ourselves, and we no possession of theirs. The Columbia is ours; Frazer's River is a British possession to which no American ever went, or ever will go. The convention gives a joint right of occupying the ports and harbors, and of navigating the rivers of each other. This would imply that each government possessed in that quarter, ports, and harbors, and navigable rivers; and were about to bring them into hotch-potch for mutual enjoyment. No such thing. There is but one port, and that the mouth of the Columbia – but one river, and that the Columbia itself: and both port and river our own. We give the equal use of these to the British, and receive nothing in return. The convention says that the "claim" of neither party is to be prejudiced by the joint possession. This admits that Great Britain has a claim – a thing never admitted before by us, nor pretended by her. At Ghent she stated no claim, and could state none. Her ministers merely asked for the river as a boundary, as being the most convenient; and for the use of the harbor at its mouth, as being necessary to their ships and trade; but stated no claim. Our commissioners reported that they (the British commissioners) endeavored 'to lay a nest-egg' for a future pretension; which they failed to do at Ghent in 1815, but succeeded in laying in London in 1818; and before the ten years are out, a full grown fighting chicken will be hatched of that egg. There is no mutuality in any thing. We furnish the whole stake – country, river, harbor; and shall not even maintain the joint use of our own. We shall be driven out of it, and the British remain sole possessors. The fur trade is the object. It will fare with our traders on the Columbia under this convention as it fared with them on the Miami of the Lakes (and on the lakes themselves), under the British treaties of '94 and '96, which admitted British traders into our territories. Our traders will be driven out; and that by the fair competition of trade, even if there should be no foul play. The difference between free and dutied goods, would work that result. The British traders pay no duties: ours pay above an average of fifty per centum. No trade can stand against such odds. But the competition will not be fair. The savages will be incited to kill and rob our traders, and they will be expelled by violence, without waiting the slower, but equally certain process, of expulsion by underselling. The result then is, that we admit the British into our country, our river, and our harbor; and we get no admittance into theirs, for they have none – Frazer's River and New Caledonia being out of the question – that they will become sole possessors of our river, our harbor, and our country; and at the end of the ten years will have an admitted 'claim' to our property, and the actual possession of it."

Thus I wrote in the year 1818, when the joint occupation convention of that year was promulgated. I wrote in advance; and long before the ten years were out, it was all far more than verified. Our traders were not only driven from the mouth of the Columbia River, but from all its springs and branches; – not only from all the Valley of the Columbia, but from the whole region of the Rocky Mountains between 49 and 42 degrees; – not only from all this mountain region, but from the upper waters of all our far distant rivers – the Missouri, the Yellow Stone, the Big Horn, the North Platte; and all their mountain tributaries. And, by authentic reports made to our government, not less than five hundred of our citizens had been killed, nor less than five hundred thousand dollars worth of goods and furs robbed from them; – the British remaining the undisturbed possessors of all the Valley of the Columbia, acting as its masters, and building forts from the sea to the mountains. This was the effect of the first joint occupation treaty, and every body in the West saw its approaching termination with pleasure; but the false step which the government had made induced another. They had admitted a "claim" on the part of Great Britain, and given her the sole, under the name of a joint, possession; and now to get her out was the difficulty. It could not be done; and the United States agreed to a further continued "joint" occupation (as it was illusively called in the renewed convention), not for ten years more, but "indefinitely," determinable on one year's notice from either party to the other. The reason for this indefinite, and injurious continuance, was set forth in the preamble to the renewed convention (Mr. Gallatin now the sole United States negotiator); and recited that the two governments "being desirous to prevent, as far as possible, all hazard of misunderstanding, and with a view to give further time for maturing measures which shall have for their object a more definite settlement of the claims of each party to the said territory;" did thereupon agree to renew the joint occupation article of the convention of 1818, &c. Thus, we had, by our diplomacy in 1818, and by the permitted non-execution of the Ghent treaty in the delivery of the post and country, hatched a question which threatened a "misunderstanding" between the two countries; and for maturing measures for the settlement of which indefinite time was required – and granted – Great Britain remaining, in the mean time, sole occupant of the whole country. This was all that she could ask, and all that we could grant, even if we actually intended to give up the country.

I was a member of the Senate when this renewed convention was sent in for ratification, and opposed it with all the zeal and ability of which I was master: but in vain. The weight of the administration, the indifference of many to a remote object, the desire to put off a difficulty, and the delusive argument that we could terminate it at any time – (a consolation so captivating to gentle temperaments) – were too strong for reason and fact; and I was left in a small minority on the question of ratification. But I did not limit myself to opposition to the treaty. I proposed, as well as opposed; and digested my opinions into three resolves; and had them spread on the executive journal, and made part of our parliamentary history for future reference.

The resolves were: 1. "That it is not expedient for the United States and Great Britain to treat further in relation to their claims on the northwest coast of America, on the basis of a joint occupation by their respective citizens. 2. That it is expedient that the joint-occupation article in the convention of 1818 be allowed to expire upon its own limitation. 3. That it is expedient for the government of the United States to continue to treat with His Britannic Majesty in relation to said claims, on the basis of a separation of interests, and the establishment of a permanent boundary between their dominions westward of the Rocky Mountains, in the shortest possible time." These resolves were not voted upon; but the negative vote on the ratification of the convention showed what the vote would have been if it had been taken. That negative vote was – Messrs. Benton, Thomas W. Cobb of Georgia, Eaton of Tennessee, Ellis of Mississippi, Johnson of Kentucky, Kane of Illinois, and Rowan of Kentucky – in all 7. Eighteen years afterwards, and when we had got to the cry of "inevitable war," I had the gratification to see the whole Senate, all Congress, and all the United States, occupy the same ground in relation to this joint occupation on which only seven senators stood at the time the convention for it was ratified.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1828, AND FURTHER ERRORS OF MONS. DE TOCQUEVILLE

General Jackson and Mr. Adams were the candidates; – with the latter, Mr. Clay (his Secretary of State), so intimately associated in the public mind, on account of the circumstances of the previous presidential election in the House of Representatives, that their names and interests were inseparable during the canvass. General Jackson was elected, having received 178 electoral votes to 83 received by Mr. Adams. Mr. Richard Rush, of Pennsylvania, was the vice-presidential candidate on the ticket of Mr. Adams, and received an equal vote with that gentleman: Mr. Calhoun was the vice-presidential candidate on the ticket with General Jackson, and received a slightly less vote – the deficiency being in Georgia, where the friends of Mr. Crawford still resented his believed connection with the "A. B. plot." In the previous election, he had been neutral between General Jackson and Mr. Adams; but was now decided on the part of the General, and received the same vote every where, except in Georgia. In this election there was a circumstance to be known and remembered. Mr. Adams and Mr. Rush were both from the non-slaveholding – General Jackson and Mr. Calhoun from the slaveholding States, and both large slave owners themselves – and both received a large vote (73 each) in the free States – and of which at least forty were indispensable to their election. There was no jealousy, or hostile, or aggressive spirit in the North at that time against the South!

The election of General Jackson was a triumph of democratic principle, and an assertion of the people's right to govern themselves. That principle had been violated in the presidential election in the House of Representatives in the session of 1824-'25; and the sanction, or rebuke, of that violation was a leading question in the whole canvass. It was also a triumph over the high protective policy, and the federal internal improvement policy, and the latitudinous construction of the constitution; and of the democracy over the federalists, then called national republicans; and was the re-establishment of parties on principle, according to the landmarks of the early ages of the government. For although Mr. Adams had received confidence and office from Mr. Madison and Mr. Monroe, and had classed with the democratic party during the fusion of parties in the "era of good feeling," yet he had previously been federal; and in the re-establishment of old party lines which began to take place after the election of Mr. Adams in the House of Representatives, his affinities, and policy, became those of his former party: and as a party, with many individual exceptions, they became his supporters and his strength. General Jackson, on the contrary, had always been democratic, so classing when he was a senator in Congress under the administration of the first Mr. Adams, and when party lines were most straightly drawn, and upon principle: and as such now receiving the support of men and States which took their political position at that time, and had maintained it ever since – Mr. Macon and Mr. Randolph, for example, and the States of Virginia and Pennsylvania. And here it becomes my duty to notice an error, or a congeries of errors, of Mons. de Tocqueville, in relation to the causes of General Jackson's election; and which he finds exclusively in the glare of a military fame resulting from "a very ordinary achievement, only to be remembered where battles are rare." He says:

"General Jackson, whom the Americans have twice elected to the head of their government, is a man of a violent temper and mediocre talents. No one circumstance in the whole course of his career ever proved that he is qualified to govern a free people; and, indeed, the majority of the enlightened classes of the Union has always been opposed to him. But he was raised to the Presidency, and has been maintained in that lofty station, solely by the recollection of a victory which he gained twenty years ago, under the walls of New Orleans; – a victory which, however, was a very ordinary achievement, and which could only be remembered in a country where battles are rare." – (Chapter 17.)

This may pass for American history, in Europe and in a foreign language, and even finds abettors here to make it American history in the United States, with a preface and notes to enforce and commend it: but America will find historians of her own to do justice to the national, and to individual character. In the mean time I have some knowledge of General Jackson, and the American people, and the two presidential elections with which they honored the General; and will oppose it, that is, my knowledge, to the flippant and shallow statements of Mons. de Tocqueville. "A man of violent temper." I ought to know something about that – contemporaries will understand the allusion – and I can say that General Jackson had a good temper, kind and hospitable to every body, and a feeling of protection in it for the whole human race, and especially the weaker and humbler part of it. He had few quarrels on his own account; and probably the very ones of which Mons. de Tocqueville had heard were accidental, against his will, and for the succor of friends. "Mediocre talent, and no capacity to govern a free people." In the first place, free people are not governed by any man, but by laws. But to understand the phrase as perhaps intended, that he had no capacity for civil administration, let the condition of the country at the respective periods when he took up, and when he laid down the administration, answer. He found the country in domestic distress – pecuniary distress – and the national and state legislation invoked by leading politicians to relieve it by empirical remedies; – tariffs, to relieve one part of the community by taxing the other; – internal improvement, to distribute pubic money; – a national bank, to cure the paper money evils of which it was the author; – the public lands the pillage of broken bank paper; – depreciated currency and ruined exchanges; – a million and a half of "unavailable funds" in the treasury; – a large public debt; – the public money the prey of banks; – no gold in the country – only twenty millions of dollars in silver, and that in banks which refused, when they pleased, to pay it down in redemption of their own notes, or even to render back to depositors. Stay laws, stop laws, replevin laws, baseless paper, the resource in half the States to save the debtor from his creditor; and national bankrupt laws from Congress, and local insolvent laws, in the States, the demand of every session. Indian tribes occupying a half, or a quarter of the area of southern States, and unsettled questions of wrong and insult, with half the powers of Europe. Such was the state of the country when General Jackson became President: what was it when he left the Presidency? Protective tariffs, and federal internal improvement discarded; the national bank left to expire upon its own limitation; the public lands redeemed from the pillage of broken bank paper; no more "unavailable funds;" an abundant gold and silver currency; the public debt paid off; the treasury made independent of banks; the Indian tribes removed from the States; indemnities obtained from all foreign powers for all past aggressions, and to new ones committed; several treaties obtained from great powers that never would treat with us before; peace, friendship, and commerce with all the world; and the measures established which, after one great conflict with the expiring Bank of the United States, and all her affiliated banks in 1837, put an end to bank dominion in the United States, and all its train of contractions and expansions, panic and suspension, distress and empirical relief. This is the answer which the respective periods of the beginning and the ending of General Jackson's administration gives to the flippant imputation of no capacity for civil government. I pass on to the next. "The majority of the enlightened classes always opposed to him." A majority of those classes which Mons. de Tocqueville would chiefly see in the cities, and along the highways – bankers, brokers, jobbers, contractors, politicians, and speculators – were certainly against him, and he as certainly against them: but the mass of the intelligence of the country was with him! and sustained him in retrieving the country from the deplorable condition in which the "enlightened classes" had sunk it! and in advancing it to that state of felicity at home, and respect abroad, which has made it the envy and admiration of the civilized world, and the absorbent of populations of Europe. I pass on. "Raised to the Presidency and maintained there solely by the recollection of the victory at New Orleans." Here recollection, and military glare, reverse the action of their ever previous attributes, and become stronger, instead of weaker, upon the lapse of time. The victory at New Orleans was gained in the first week of the year 1815; and did not bear this presidential fruit until fourteen and eighteen years afterwards, and until three previous good seasons had passed without production. There was a presidential election in 1816, when the victory was fresh, and the country ringing, and imaginations dazzled with it: but it did not make Jackson President, or even bring him forward as a candidate. The same four years afterwards, at the election of 1820 – not even a candidate then. Four years still later, at the election of 1824, he became a candidate, and – was not elected; – receiving but 99 electoral votes out of 261. In the year 1828 he was first elected, receiving 178 out of 261 votes; and in 1832 he was a second time elected, receiving 219 out of 288 votes. Surely there must have been something besides an old military recollection to make these two elections so different from the two former; and there was! That something else was principle! and the same that I have stated in the beginning of this chapter as entering into the canvass of 1828, and ruling its issue. I pass on to the last disparagement. "A victory which was a very ordinary achievement, and only to be remembered where battles were rare." Such was not the battle at New Orleans. It was no ordinary achievement. It was a victory if 4,600 citizens just called from their homes, without knowledge of scientific war, under a leader as little schooled as themselves in that particular, without other advantages than a slight field work (a ditch and a bank of earth) hastily thrown up – over double their numbers of British veterans, survivors of the wars of the French Revolution, victors in the Peninsula and at Toulouse, under trained generals of the Wellington school, and with a disparity of loss never before witnessed. On one side 700 killed (including the first, second and third generals); 1400 wounded; 500 taken prisoners. On the other, six privates killed, and seven wounded; and the total repulse of an invading army which instantly fled to its "wooden walls," and never again placed a hostile foot on American soil. Such an achievement is not ordinary, much less "very" ordinary. Does Mons. de Tocqueville judge the importance of victories by the numbers engaged, and the quantity of blood shed, or by their consequences? If the former, the cannonade on the heights of Valmy (which was not a battle, nor even a combat, but a distant cannon firing in which few were hurt), must seem to him a very insignificant affair. Yet it did what the marvellous victories of Champaubert, Montmirail, Château-Thierry, Vauchamps and Montereau could not do – turned back the invader, and saved the soil of France from the iron hoof of the conqueror's horse! and was commemorated twelve years afterwards by the great emperor in a ducal title bestowed upon one of its generals. The victory at New Orleans did what the connonade at Valmy did – drove back the invader! and also what it did not do – destroyed the one fourth part of his force. And, therefore, it is not to be disparaged, and will not be, by any one who judges victories by their consequences, instead of by the numbers engaged. And so the victory at New Orleans will remain in history as one of the great achievements of the world, in spite of the low opinion which the writer on American democracy entertains of it. But Mons. de Tocqueville's disparagement of General Jackson, and his achievement, does not stop at him and his victory. It goes beyond both, and reaches the American people, their republican institutions, and the elective franchise: It represents the people as incapable of self-government – as led off by a little military glare to elect a man twice President who had not one qualification for the place, who was violent and mediocre, and whom the enlightened classes opposed: all most unjustly said, but still to pass for American history in Europe, and with some Americans at home.