FLORIDA TREATY AND CESSION OF TEXAS.
I was a member of the bar at St. Louis, in the then territory of
Missouri, in the year 1818, when the Washington City newspapers
made known the progress of that treaty with Spain, which was signed
on the 22d day of February following, and which, in acquiring
Florida, gave away Texas. I was shocked at it--at the cession of
Texas, and the new boundaries proposed for the United States on
the southwest. The acquisition of Florida was a desirable object,
long sought, and sure to be obtained in the progress of events;
but the new boundaries, besides cutting off Texas, dismembered the
valley of the Mississippi, mutilated two of its noblest rivers,
brought a foreign dominion (and it non-slave-holding), to the
neighborhood of New Orleans, and established a wilderness barrier
between Missouri and New Mexico--to interrupt their trade, separate
their inhabitants, and shelter the wild Indian depredators upon
the lives and property of all who undertook to pass from one to
the other. I was not then in politics, and had nothing to do with
political affairs; but I saw at once the whole evil of this great
sacrifice, and instantly raised my voice against it in articles
published in the St. Louis newspapers, and in which were given, in
advance, all the national reasons against giving away the country,
which were afterwards, and by so many tongues, and at the expense of
war and a hundred millions, given to get it back. I denounced the
treaty, and attacked its authors and their motives, and imprecated
a woe on the heads of those who should continue to favor it.
"The magnificent valley of the Mississippi is ours, with all its
fountains, springs and floods; and woe to the statesman who shall
undertake to surrender one drop of its water, one inch of its soil,
to any foreign power." In these terms I spoke, and in this spirit I
wrote, before the treaty was even ratified. Mr. John Quincy Adams,
the Secretary of State, negotiator and ostensible author of the
treaty, was the statesman against whom my censure was directed,
and I was certainly sincere in my belief of his great culpability.
But the declaration which he afterwards made on the floor of the
House, absolved him from censure on account of that treaty, and
placed the blame on the majority in Mr. Monroe's cabinet, southern
men, by whose vote he had been governed in ceding Texas and fixing
the boundary which I so much condemned. After this authoritative
declaration, I made, in my place in the Senate, the honorable amends
to Mr. Adams, which was equally due to him and to myself. The
treaty was signed on the anniversary of the birth-day of Washington,
and sent to the Senate the same day, and unanimously ratified on
the next day, with the general approbation of the country, and the
warm applause of the newspaper press. This unanimity of the Senate,
and applause of the press, made no impression upon me. I continued
to assail the treaty and its authors, and the more bitterly,
because the official correspondence, when published, showed that
this great sacrifice of territory, rivers, and proper boundaries,
was all gratuitous and voluntary on our part--"_that the Spanish
government had offered us more than we accepted_;" and that it was
our policy, and not hers, which had deprived us of Texas and the
large country, in addition to Texas, which lay between the Red River
and Upper Arkansas. This was an enigma, the solution of which, in
my mind, strongly connected itself with the Missouri controversy
then raging (1819) with its greatest violence, threatening existing
political parties with subversion, and the Union with dissolution.
My mind went there--to that controversy--for the solution, but with
a misdirection of its application. I blamed the northern men in Mr.
Monroe's cabinet: the private papers of General Jackson, which have
come to my hands, enable me to correct that error, and give me an
inside view of that which I could only see on the outside before.
In a private letter from Mr. Monroe to General Jackson, dated at
Washington, May 22d, 1820--more than one year after the negotiation
of the treaty, written to justify it, and evidently called out by
Mr. Clay's attack upon it--are these passages: "Having long known
the repugnance with which the eastern portion of our Union, or
rather some of those who have enjoyed its confidence (for I do not
think that the people themselves have any interest or wish of that
kind), have seen its aggrandizement to the West and South, I have
been decidedly of opinion that we ought to be content with Florida
for the present, and until the public opinion in that quarter shall
be reconciled to any further change. I mention these circumstances
to show you that our difficulties are not with Spain alone, but are
likewise internal, proceeding from various causes, which certain men
are prompt to seize and turn to the account of their own ambitious
views." This paragraph from Mr. Monroe's letter lifts the curtain
which concealed the secret reason for ceding Texas--that secret
which explains what was incomprehensible--our having refused to
accept as much as Spain had offered. Internal difficulties, it was
thus shown, had induced that refusal; and these difficulties grew
out of the repugnance of leading men in the northeast to see the
further aggrandizement of the Union upon the South and West. This
repugnance was then taking an operative form in the shape of the
Missouri controversy; and, as an immediate consequence, threatened
the subversion of political party lines, and the introduction of the
slavery question into the federal elections and legislation, and
bringing into the highest of those elections--those of President
and Vice-President--a test which no southern candidate could stand.
The repugnance in the northeast was not merely to territorial
aggrandizement in the southwest, but to the consequent extension
of slavery in that quarter; and to allay that repugnance, and to
prevent the slavery extension question from becoming a test in the
presidential election, was the true reason for giving away Texas,
and the true solution of the enigma involved in the strange refusal
to accept as much as Spain offered. The treaty was disapproved
by Mr. Jefferson, to whom a similar letter was written to that
sent to General Jackson, and for the same purpose--to obtain his
approbation; but he who had acquired Louisiana, and justly gloried
in the act, could not bear to see that noble province mutilated,
and returned his dissent to the act, and his condemnation of the
policy on which it was done. General Jackson had yielded to the
arguments of Mr. Monroe, and consented to the cession of Texas as a
temporary measure. The words of his answer to Mr. Monroe's letter
were: "I am clearly of your opinion, that, for the present, we ought
to be contented with the Floridas." But Mr. Jefferson would yield
to no temporary views of policy, and remained inflexibly opposed to
the treaty; and in this he was consistent with his own conduct in
similar circumstances. Sixteen years before, he had been in the same
circumstances--at the time of the acquisition of Louisiana--when he
had the same repugnance to southwestern aggrandizement to contend
with, and the same bait (Florida) to tempt him. Then eastern men
raised the same objections; and as early as August 1803--only
four months after the purchase of Louisiana--he wrote to Dr.
Breckenridge: "Objections are raising to the eastward to the vast
extent of our boundaries, and propositions are made to exchange
Louisiana, or a part of it, for the Floridas; but as I have said,
we shall get the Floridas without; and I would not give one inch
of the waters of the Mississippi to any foreign nation." So that
Mr. Jefferson, neither in 1803 nor in 1819, would have mutilated
Louisiana to obtain the cession of Florida, which he knew would be
obtained without that mutilation; nor would he have yielded to the
threatening discontent in the east. I have a gratification that,
without knowing it, and at a thousand miles from him, I took the
same ground that Mr. Jefferson stood on, and even used his own
words: "Not an inch of the waters of the Mississippi to any nation."
But I was mortified at the time, that not a paper in the United
States backed my essays. It was my first experience in standing
"solitary and alone;" but I stood it without flinching, and even
incurred the imputation of being opposed to the administration--had
to encounter that objection in my first election to the Senate,
and was even viewed as an opponent by Mr. Monroe himself, when I
first came to Washington. He had reason to know before his office
expired, and still more after it expired, that no one (of the young
generation) had a more exalted opinion of his honesty, patriotism,
firmness and general soundness of judgment; or would be more ready,
whenever the occasion permitted, to do justice to his long and
illustrious career of public service. The treaty, as I have said,
was promptly and unanimously ratified by the American Senate; not so
on the part of Spain. She hesitated, delayed, procrastinated; and
finally suffered the time limited for the exchange of ratifications
to expire, with out having gone through that indispensable
formality. Of course this put an end to the treaty, unless it
could be revived; and, thereupon, new negotiations and vehement
expostulations against the conduct which refused to ratify a treaty
negotiated upon full powers and in conformity to instructions. It
was in the course of this renewed negotiation, and of these warm
expostulations, that Mr. Adams used the strong expressions to the
Spanish ministry, so enigmatical at the time, "That Spain had
offered more than we accepted, and that she dare not deny it."
Finally, after the lapse of a year or so, the treaty was ratified by
Spain. In the mean time Mr. Clay had made a movement against it in
the House of Representatives, unsuccessful, of course, but exciting
some sensation, both for the reasons he gave and the vote of some
thirty-odd members who concurred with him. This movement very
certainly induced the letters of Mr. Monroe to General Jackson and
Mr. Jefferson, as they were contemporaneous (May, 1820), and also
some expressions in the letter to General Jackson, which evidently
referred to Mr. Clay's movement. The ratification of Spain was given
October, 1820, and being after the time limited, it became necessary
to submit it again to the American Senate, which was done at the
session of 1820-21. It was ratified again, and almost unanimously,
but not quite, four votes being given against it, and all by western
senators, namely: Colonel Richard M. Johnson, of Kentucky; Colonel
John Williams, of Tennessee; Mr. James Brown, of Louisiana, and
Colonel Trimble, of Ohio. I was then in Washington, and a senator
elect, though not yet entitled to a seat, in consequence of the
delayed admission of the new State of Missouri into the Union, and
so had no opportunity to record my vote against the treaty. But
the progress of events soon gave me an opportunity to manifest my
opposition, and to appear in the parliamentary history as an enemy
to it. The case was this: While the treaty was still encountering
Spanish procrastination in the delay of exchanging ratifications,
Mexico (to which the amputated part of Louisiana and the whole of
Texas was to be attached), itself ceased to belong to Spain. She
established her independence, repulsed all Spanish authority, and
remained at war with the mother country. The law for giving effect
to the treaty by providing for commissioners to run and mark the
new boundary, had not been passed at the time of the ratification
of the treaty; it came up after I took my seat, and was opposed by
me. I opposed it, not only upon the grounds of original objections
to the treaty, but on the further and obvious ground, that the
revolution in Mexico--her actual independence--had superseded the
Spanish treaty in the whole article of the boundaries, and that it
was with Mexico herself that we should now settle them. The act was
passed, however, by a sweeping majority, the administration being
for it, and senators holding themselves committed by previous
votes; but the progress of events soon justified my opposition
to it. The country being in possession of Mexico, and she at war
with Spain, no Spanish commissioners could go there to join ours
in executing it; and so the act remained a dead letter upon the
statute-book. Its futility was afterwards acknowledged by our
government, and the misstep corrected by establishing the boundary
with Mexico herself. This was done by treaty in the year 1828,
adopting the boundaries previously agreed upon with Spain, and
consequently amputating our rivers (the Red and the Arkansas), and
dismembering the valley of the Mississippi, to the same extent as
was done by the Spanish treaty of 1819. I opposed the ratification
of the treaty with Mexico for the same reason that I opposed its
original with Spain, but without success. Only two senators voted
with me, namely, Judge William Smith, of South Carolina, and Mr.
Powhatan Ellis, of Mississippi. Thus I saw this treaty, which
repulsed Texas, and dismembered the valley of the Mississippi--which
placed a foreign dominion on the upper halves of the Red River
and the Arkansas--placed a foreign power and a wilderness between
Missouri and New Mexico, and which brought a non-slaveholding empire
to the boundary line of the State of Louisiana, and almost to the
southwest corner of Missouri--saw this treaty three times ratified
by the American Senate, as good as unanimously every time, and with
the hearty concurrence of the American press. Yet I remained in the
Senate to see, within a few years, a political tempest sweeping the
land and overturning all that stood before it, to get back this very
country which this treaty had given away; and menacing the Union
itself with dissolution, if it was not immediately done, and without
regard to consequences. But of this hereafter. The point to be now
noted of this treaty of 1819, is, that it completed, very nearly,
the extinction of slave territory within the limits of the United
States, and that it was the work of southern men, with the sanction
of the South. It extinguished or cut off the slave territory beyond
the Mississippi, below 36 degrees, 30 minutes, all except the
diagram in Arkansas, which was soon to become a State. The Missouri
compromise line had interdicted slavery in all the vast expanse of
Louisiana north of 36 degrees, 30 minutes; this treaty gave away,
first to Spain, and then to Mexico, nearly all the slave territory
south of that line; and what little was left by the Spanish treaty
was assigned in perpetuity by laws and by treaties to different
Indian tribes. These treaties (Indian and Spanish), together with
the Missouri compromise line--a measure contemporaneous with the
treaty--extinguished slave soil in all the United States territory
west of the Mississippi, except in the diagram which was to
constitute the State of Arkansas; and, including the extinction
in Texas consequent upon its cession to a non-slaveholding power,
constituted the largest territorial abolition of slavery that was
ever effected by the political power of any nation. The ordinance
of 1787 had previously extinguished slavery in all the northwest
territory--all the country east of the Mississippi, above the Ohio,
and out to the great lakes; so that, at this moment--era of the
second election of Mr. Monroe--slave soil, except in Arkansas and
Florida, was extinct in the territory of the United States. The
growth of slave States (except of Arkansas and Florida) was stopped;
the increase of free States was permitted in all the vast expanse
from Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains,
and to Oregon; and there was not a ripple of discontent visible on
the surface of the public mind at this mighty transformation of
slave into free territory. No talk then about dissolving the Union,
if every citizen was not allowed to go with all his "property,"
that is, all his slaves, to all the territory acquired by the
"common blood and treasure" of all the Union. But this belongs to
the chapter of 1844, whereof I have the material to write the true
and secret history, and hope to use it with fairness, with justice,
and with moderation. The outside view of the slave question in the
United States at this time, which any chronicler can write, is,
that the extension of slavery was then arrested, circumscribed,
and confined within narrow territorial limits, while free States
were permitted an almost unlimited expansion. That is the outside
view; the inside is, that all this was the work of southern men,
candidates for the presidency, some in abeyance, some in _præsenti_;
and all yielding to that repugnance to territorial aggrandizement,
and slavery extension in the southwest, which Mr. Monroe mentioned
in his letter to General Jackson as the "internal difficulty" which
occasioned the cession of Texas to Spain. This chapter is a point
in the history of the times which will require to be understood by
all who wish to understand and appreciate the events and actors of
twenty years later.