Storm over Texas
The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
In the Spring of 1844, a fiery political conflict erupted over the admission of Texas into the Union, a hard-fought and bitter controversy that profoundly changed the course of American history. Indeed, as Joel Silbey argues in Storm Over Texas, the battle over Texas marked the crucial moment when partisan differences were transformed into a North-vs-South antagonism, and the momentum towards Civil War leaped into high gear.
One of America's renowned political historians, Silbey offers a swiftly paced and compelling narrative of the Texas imbroglio, with an exceptional cast of characters, including John C. Calhoun, John Quincy Adams, James K. Polk, and Martin Van Buren. He shows in particular how the Van Buren bloc of the Democratic Party--the "Barnburners"--stood at the heart the annexation controversy. We see how a series of unexpected moves, some planned, some inadvertent, sparked a crisis that intensified and crystallized the North-South divide, which then became, for the first time, a driving force in national affairs. Sectionalism, Silbey shows, had often been intense, but rarely widespread and generally well contained by other forces on the political landscape. But after Texas statehood, the political landscape was transformed into one sculpted by implacable sectional differences. The bitter discord over annexation--with slavery the core issue--was the seed from which America's great crisis of union grew, leading ultimately to Southern secession and Civil War.
The Texas controversy released demons that were never again pushed back into the bottle. With subtlety, great care, and much imagination, Joel Silbey shows that this brief political struggle became, in the words of an Alabama congressman, "the greatest question of the age"--indeed, a pivotal moment in American history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The convulsive rearrangement of antebellum American politics around an increasingly bitter sectional divide is probed in this enlightening historical monograph, part of Oxford's Pivotal Moments in American History series. Historian Silbey situates the debate over the 1845 annexation of the Republic of Texas in the framework of the Jacksonian party politics that dominated the United States. Both the Democrats and the Whigs, he argues, were national parties with strong support in all sections, and they cooperated to downplay sectional politics, especially the issue of slavery, in favor of a national consensus over economic policy and territorial expansion. That all changed when Secretary of State John C. Calhoun, a pro-slavery firebrand, advanced the argument that Texas must be annexed to prevent it from falling into the orbit of abolitionist Great Britain, which would, he claimed, use it as a platform to undermine slavery in the United States. The policies of the incoming Democratic Polk administration, especially the maximalist claims about Texas's boundaries that led to war with Mexico, further exacerbated the sectional polarization by making suspicious Northern Democrats lend credence to Northern Whigs' claims of a conspiratorial slave power controlling national government. These developments, Silbey contends, set the stage for the 1850s breakdown of nationwide political alliances in favor of an increasingly vitriolic antagonism between North and South. Silbey presents a lucid, fine-grained political history, complete with nuanced profiles of political leaders, that illuminates this watershed era of American history. Photos.
