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annexing Texas was put to a vote.
    American distrust for Great Britain had diminished little since the Revolutionary War and had only been reinforced by the War of 1812. It was a time when the sun truly never set on the British Empire, and there was widespread fear that Britain would seek to establish a new toehold on the North American continent by bringing Texas into the fold. Slavery in Texas would then be banned, as it had recently been in Britain’s other possessions. Many southerners feared that escaped slaves would then flood into Texas, seeking sanctuary. They also hoped to increase their power by adding Texas to the Union as a slave state.
    Tyler had been extremely vocal in defending slavery, and his secretary of state, John C. Calhoun, had even written to the British government about the virtues of this practice. As a result, many senators who had no love for Britain but even less for slavery now lined up against Tyler’s resolution. When it came time to vote, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly decided against the measure, thirty-five to sixteen. Texas would remain an independent nation.
    But the battle was far from over. A cornerstone of the decade-old Whig Party was their staunch opposition to a strong executive branch. Yet rather than let the Texas matter die, Tyler decided to force it through Congress as a joint resolution (needing approval in the House and Senate, but by a simple majority rather than two-thirds). This last-ditch effort to push his agenda sealed his fate within his party. The Whigs turned their back on the unrepentant Tyler when it came to selecting their 1844 candidate, making him the first incumbent president in U.S. history not to win his party’s nomination. With just a few short months left in his term, Tyler rededicated himself to American expansion via the joint congressional resolution.
    For years, American political writers had argued that the United States had a God-given right to expansion, because it was more virtuous than other nations. John L. O’Sullivan, a zealous Democrat, had argued that America was “the Great Nation of Futurity” in a November 1839 issue of the
United States Democratic Review.
“Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another,” wrote O’Sullivan. He repeated two words over and over in that essay:
manifest
and
destiny,
both in reference to America’s inherent moral authority to expand its boundaries. He would later combine the words into a single sweeping pronouncement. The United States, O’Sullivan would write, had a “manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.”
    That vainglorious notion was a subcurrent to American life during the 1840s, as evidenced by the ever-growing number of pioneers flooding to settle lands west of the Mississippi. To Tyler and an increasing number of politicians, the next logical step was to wrestle Oregon away from Britain, snatch California and New Mexico away from Mexico, and add Texas to the Union. That last item on the list, thanks to Texas’s pro-American leanings, was the most logical place to start.
    Annexation became a vital part of each candidate’s campaign platform in the 1844 presidential election. When Martin Van Buren, a northern Democrat who had been leading in the polls and was the favorite to win his party’s nomination, went on record as opposing annexation, the southern voting bloc threw their weight behind Tennessee firebrand James K. Polk, who sought a “reannexation” of Texas, as if the territory had once been American. The dark horse Polk prevailed for the Democratic nomination and would face Whig Henry Clay, who wanted Texas to join the Union, but only if it could be accomplished without war.
    Polk was a lawyer and a slave owner whose gift for oratory had earned him