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5.0 out of 5 stars
If you read history, read widely, January 31, 2011
This review is from: Fruits of Propaganda in the Tyler Administration (Hardcover)
There are many different types of historical works. There are sweeping synthetic works that attempt to convey an entire era. Some of those are quite good. We have recently been treated to two excellent surveys of the antebellum period by Sean Wilentz and David Howe. I call these works synthetic because the authors rely so much on their own secondary reading.
But that is where the fun really begins. Anytime you read a great synthetic work of history, note carefully the work that the author relied on and then go on to your own reading of that. For one thing, it will help you determine just how much you can rely on the original author for accurately presenting the works of others.
But the real pleasure is in coming across a book like this one. I have noted before in some of my reviews that the readings of the work of previous generations of historians is full of surprises. There are enormous differences in the foci of research and the way certain aspects of a period are emphasized and interpreted. There are also some historians who are worth reading for more philosophical reasons. Plutarch's Lives may be full of errors but it is still worth several readings over a lifetime.
Frederick Merk is a worthy read. He published this little study in his 84th year and credits his wife Lois as a coauthor. It was published a year before Slavery and the Annexation of Texas with which it should be read.
Both books talk about the 1840s and specifically, the means used by the Tyler and Polk administrations to sway public opinion on border issues between the U.S. and Canada and the annexation of Texas. The last third of both books are original documents that are hard to find and which the Merks depended on in making their argument.
The Merks feel that the Tyler administration employed propaganda in order to convince the people of Maine that they should accept a compromise proposal that was being worked out by Daniel Webster (during his tenure as Secretary of State for Tyler)and Lord Ashburton, the British diplomat.
The Merks' research amply proves that the Tyler administration reached into a secret fund (that was earmarked for use in foreign affairs only) in order to pay Francis O.J. Smith (a Maine politician) to conduct a campaign to sway public opinion in advance of the treaty. The people of Maine and their government were very
resistant to any movement away from the way they understood the boundary to have been drawn up during the negotiations that ended the Revolutionary War. Unfortunately, no accurate, annotated and signed maps were appended to that agreement and, naturally, over time both Canadians and Maine men begin to interpret the boundary (especially the valuable forests)to their advantage.
Webster and Tyler looked back on forty years or so of Maine intansigence that had gotten nowhere and decided to work out a compromise.
Smith prepared the way for that by making the argument for such a compromise in advance in anonymous editorials and essays and by conversation with his fellow Maine politicians. When the compromise treaty was publically announced, some of the Maine papers headlined the event as a day of celebration. It was a good treaty, the people of Maine recognized it as such, accepted it and potential conflict along the border was avoided. There was a brief congressional investigation into the story a year or two later but nothing came out of that.
The second seciton of the book deals with the campaign to prepare the American public as a whole for the annexation of Texas. The Merks go into much greater detail about this campaign in the second book, Slavery and the Annexation of Texas (I promise a review when complete) but they do discuss the impact of a letter published both serially in newspapers/periodicals and as a pamphlet by Robert Walker (very much an insider in the Tyler administraton). This extraordinary document is appended to the end of the Merks' book and is worth the price of the book in itself.
To sum it up briefly, Walker makes the argument that slave agriculture inevitably wrings the soil useless. The result is that slave based agriculture is always in search of new soil. Texas will drain the slaves out of the slave states and the border states by inexorable economic forces. When the Texan soil is exhausted, the slave owners will then be faced with emancipation or bankruptcy. They will emancipate their slaves who will be drawn to the tropical climes of Mexico, Central and South American. The slave issue, indeed, the race issue, will then disappear from the American republic. And all this would take place with 75 years or so.
Walker also makes much of the horrific alternatives that will occur if annexation were not to happen. Race war, mass insanity and public insolvency were inevitable if we listened to those who wanted to not annex Texas.
By the by, past experience in Amazon reviews has taught me to declare that the preceeding paragraph does not represent my views nor those of the Merks. It is, however, a fair summation of a pamphlet that was very influential is forming public opinion back in the mid-1840s. Blame the people of that time, not me.
This is a superb little book. It cast an intense and focused light on two small moments in the history of American governmental manipulation of public opinion. It also just goes to show that some of older historians really knew what they were doing. And that the Bush administration was following in the footsteps of John Tyler! Sorry, I just had to throw that little provocation into the mix.
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