CW-1:

The First Civil War, 1830-1842 

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CONTROL NETWORKS:
Alamán and Calhoun

Young Nationalists, and the Indigenous Challenge

• Calhoun, the older of the two, led the vocal support in Congress for the War of 1812 against Britain.  Becoming secretary of war in James Monroe's cabinet, he pushed to extend frontier forts, and the fur-trading interest, against British rivals to the northwest and Hispanic to the southwest.  Like almost all U.S. politicians, conservative or liberal, he argued that Indians could not survive until moved beyond the white frontier.  Lake many, too, he said that he wanted to see Indians civilized -- which would enable them to live on smaller tracts of land.  Like many, he urged that Indians who did move west should be guaranteed in their new lands.  His personal tastes ran to a more carefully regulated frontier trade, a greater role for corporate than for individual action, and some restraint on border captains like Andrew Jackson.
• Some conservatives simply held aloof from politics while lesser men engaged in controversy.  Many young men of position in New England did that, since their region had little sympathy for challenges to British commercial policy.  So did some in Mexico.  Alamán came from a family linked to silver interests in Guanajuato, and his family suffered in the riots committed in the popular uprising against Spain, in 1810. Still wealthy, for a time, he spent much of the following war years touring Europe, seeing to his own education as aristocratic intellectual, and picking up the latest mining technology to take back to Mexico.  Hardly back in Mexico when Spain underwent a brief liberal revolution, he now supported independence as a way to protect conservative social harmony.
And do not say that the revolution in America, as the Council of State thinks and the Government repeats, has been incited by some specific subjects or other, or has resulted from such-and-such a cause.  No, sir:  the revolution was already done before the period that they think they are describing, and it has not been the movement of one class, but a simultaneous movement, an even movement, a movement that cannot be reversed -- much less with the measures that the Government proposes.
["Ni se diga que la revolución de América, como opina el consejo de Estado y repite el Gobierno, ha sido excitada por tales o cuales sujetos, y que ha sido obra de tal o cual causa.  No señor:  la revolución estaba ya hecha antes de la época a que se quiere hacer referencia, y no ha sido el movimiento de una clase sino un movimiento simultáneo, un movimiento igual, un movimiento que no puede retroceder, y mucho menos con las medidas que el Gobierno propone."]
 
Alamán was ready to jump when key pro-Spanish generals shifted to supporting independence.  An educated man of standing, he made himself available to the new government.  In 1823, age 30, he became Minister of Foreign Relations.

The Monroe Doctrine and the Panama Congress

• The Monroe Doctrine, the work of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, was his response to a British proposal that Britain and the United States proclaim a joint policy against further European expansion into the New World.
• Adams insisted that the U.S. go it alone, warning off the powers, but avoiding any commitment that the United States not expand on its own account.
• The Doctrine thus prophesied a particular type of social evolution. Instead of accepting an international leadership network that would link Britain and the United States, it left open the possibility of a different network, one binding Latin American societies to a sophisticated industrial class that was only just developing in the United States.  The Adams vision, like the British proposal, included the idea of an industrial class leading the consolidation of an international social formation.  But it would center that class within a future United States.  It therefore offered greater power to industrial interests in that United States, and threw out a long-range challenge to any planters who might not accept the easy patriotism of a Monroe or Jackson. The Doctrine contained within it the possibility of long-term collaboration between planter and industrial elements.
• Alamán made his own move when Simón Bolívar called American nations to the Panama Congress, which finally met of 1826. The core membership of the Congress would be those nations in close communication with Colombia, the inviting nation.  That included Mexico.  But who else should attend? Alamán was no visionary, and no less practical than Bolívar. Neither was he any worshipper of the United States.  But he had his own ideas about the kind of security that Mexico needed. He feared that Bolívar's charisma would amplify the emotionalism of the anti-Spanish cause.  "Death to the gachupines!" had been a rallying cry of the Hidalgo rebellion.  The demand to expel Spaniards was still a motive and organizing slogan for Mexican radicals.  To blunt that radicalism, Alamán insisted that invitations go out to two additional governments: to the Empire of Brazil, which was a monarchy, and conservative, but now independent from Portugal; and to the stable criollo government that was the United States.  John Quincy Adams was the incoming president of the United States, with Henry Clay of Kentucky his secretary of state.  Clay became an enthusiast for the idea of the Panama Congress, even though other Southern politicians feared any involvement with mixed-race republics to the south.  (To Adams the project seemed a little hare-brained, but he tolerated it.)  In the outcome, neither Brazil nor the United States managed to have representatives present at the Congress when it gathered.  It talked, and did little.

Alamán, who did dislike the expansionist, Protestant  impulses of the United States, had signaled that conservatives would accept foreign influence -- might tolerate even gringos -- if they brought help in controlling the lower classes.

Secrecy

• Independent Mexico was based on the Plan de Iguala, the understanding by which conservative generals (Iturbide) and radical guerrilla leaders (Vicente Guerrero) agreed on a vague national unity.  Conservatives like Alamán reacted sharply when the supporters of Guerrero went outside the constitution to make their man President in 1829.  When conservatives then ousted Guerrero, Alamán became minister of foreign relations in the cabinet that pursued the War of the South, against the ex-President.  When Guerrero was tricked into capture, Alamán took part in the decisions that led to the Guerrero's execution.  While he later distanced himself from the trick and the execution vote, no satisfactory record remained of just how he had acted in the matter.
• Calhoun was elected Vice President in 1824, by an Electoral College that had split bitterly when it tried to elect a President.  In office during the J.Q.Adams presidency, he was re-elected at the time that Andrew Jackson won the top office.  All the while, there were divisions between nationalists and localists within Calhoun's own state, South Carolina.  It was to his political interest to preserve enough image as nationalist to keep gathering votes from all directions.  But 1826 and 1827 saw a shift in economic interests.  Commercial, free-trade interests in New England were losing out to manufacturers who asked for higher tariff protection.  Against the nationalist, protectionist position, Calhoun now worked -- but at first in secret.  Anonymously, he wrote the South Carolina Exposition and Protest (1828), arguing that the tariff was unconstitutional, and that any state had the right to nullify the implementation of unconstitutional law within its borders.
The idea of Nullification was not new, nor confined to the defense of slavery, nor confined to the United States.  Early in 1829 the legislature of the state of Zacatecas was reeling from attacks that large bands of outlaws, supported by "the populace," mounted on the mining towns of Fresnillo and Sombrerete. Similar riots in Mexico City had opened the way for the national Congress to reverse the results of the recent election, in order to make Vicente Guerrero President, over the moderate Gómez Pedraza.  Still hostile to Guerrero, the Zacatecas legislature seized on a press-control law that Congress passed in September, called it an attack on the freedom of the press, and declared that
neither the resolution in question, nor any other marked as anticonstitutional, shall be put into execution in this State.
[... ni la referida resolución, ni cualquiera otra carecterizada con la nota de anticonstitucional, tendrá ejecución en el Estado.]

History, & Constitutional Theory

• Calhoun' s mature system dealt with white-men's concerns, and in legalistic terms.  Its public evasiveness applied also to the social content of controversy among whites.
 
In 1842, the leaders of poor whites in Rhode Island, where property requirements prevented many from voting, staged their rather small-scale rebellion.  It raised federal questions because the conservative state government might ask for federal assistance to suppress insurrection.  During these same years the Tyler administration in Washington was receiving panicky notes from U.S. agents in Cuba, suggesting British complicity in slave conspiracy there.  When Calhoun became Tyler's Secretary of State, in 1844, actual revolts had broken out  in Cuba.  These were being repressed, with great brutality, at a time when Calhoun was writing opinions on whether federal force could be used in Rhode Island.  He also faced the reality, not rumor, that the independent Republic of Texas was engaged in some negotiations with Britain and Mexico.  The British were reported to favor emancipation there, too.  To these different conspiracies he reacted on his two levels:
• On the Rhode Island question, he replied with his legalism, presenting page after page of detailed constitutional analysis, in which he concluded that it was legitimate to support conservative state government.  He never digressed, not for one sentence of background commentary, to say anything about the problems of government control in a time of rapid social change.  He made no reference to the obvious fact that this position would make it less "sectional" for the federal government to act against possible black insurrections in the South.
• To Richard Pakenham, the British minister in Washington, he directed a series of denunciations, against any interference with U.S. moves to annex Texas.  This time he made the application to slavery explicit.  Slavery, he said, was "a political institution, essential to the peace, safety, and prosperity" of wide sections of U.S. society.
 
• Alamán's method was rather to explain each disturbing incident by the range of historical comparisons it would set up in the minds of educated listeners.  When his party was out of power, he devoted much of himself to writing a history of Mexico, one that treated liberal administrations with disdain.  History was a weapon to use against politicians who would force national life to conform to mere abstract ideals.

 
Reporting to Congress in the days between the capture and execution of Vicente Guerrero, he described the "secrecy and caution" with which the sparks of a conflagration had been distributed from Guerrero's home town:
 
... they were using nothing more than the cry of viva Guerrero, a cry that terrorizes property-owners, and has such shameful meaning in the doleful history of our political disturbances. ... This war that, more than any mere dispute over political opinions, is really like the invasions of barbarian peoples from the North into the Roman Empire, lays waste whole states, wipes out towns, attacks and destroys families, compromises the Nation's credit , and weakens all the springs of the social machine . . . 
["... no se empleaba más que la voz de viva Guerrero, voz que aterroriza al propietario y que ha adquirido tan vergonzoso significado en la historia funesta de nuestras conmociones políticas . . . Esta guerra, que más que una disputa sobre opiniones políticas, tiene el carácter de las invasiones que hacían los pueblos bárbaros del Norte sobre las provincias del imperio romano, desola los Estados, aniquila las poblaciones, arruina y afrenta a las familias, compromete el crédito de la Nación y debilita todos los resortes de la máquina social . . ."]

References:

• José C. Valadés, Alamán: estadista e historiador (1938)
• Alfonso Noriega, El pensamiento conservador y el conservadurismo mexicano (1991)
• Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun: Nationalist, 1782-1828 (1944)
• John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union (1988)
• Elias Amador, Bosquejo histórico de Zacatecas (1892)
• Lucas Alamán, Historia de Méjico desde los primeros movimientos que prepararon su independencia en el año de 1808, hasta la época presente (1849-52)
• John C. Calhoun, Papers, ed. W. Edwin Hemphill & al. (1959- )

Copyright 1999 The Intermountain History Group, intermtn@sprynet.com. All rights reserved.