Tyler Administration Conducts Secret Texas Annexation Negotiations to Expand Slavery

President John Tyler’s administration conducted secret negotiations for Texas annexation beginning in September 1843, explicitly designed to expand slavery while deceiving the public about its true motivations. Tyler, expelled from the Whig Party in September 1841 after vetoing their legislative agenda, independently pursued annexation in a bid to build political support for another term. On September 18, 1843, Tyler ordered Secretary of State Abel Upshur to open secret talks with Texas minister Isaac Van Zandt. Face-to-face negotiations commenced on October 16, 1843, with Tyler seeking to outmaneuver suspected British diplomatic efforts toward emancipation in Texas that would “undermine slavery in the United States.”

The administration deliberately misrepresented annexation as a national security concern rather than a slavery expansion project. Evidence suggests Tyler’s own administration manufactured rumors about Britain’s supposed plot to end slavery in America, using fabricated threats to drum up public support. However, when Upshur died in an accident, his successor John C. Calhoun of South Carolina abandoned the deception and “brashly championed annexation as a way to strengthen slave interests in the U.S.” The Packenham Letter, in which Calhoun explicitly defended the treaty on grounds that annexation was necessary to protect Southern slavery, destroyed overnight the support Upshur had carefully built by framing the issue as national security.

Northern senators reacted furiously to the exposed deception, and on June 8, 1844, the Senate soundly rejected the annexation treaty. The treaty and Calhoun’s naked defense of slavery “reinforced the impression of the ‘slave power’ in the Union”—a conspiratorial faction manipulating federal institutions to expand slavery regardless of majority opposition. After James K. Polk won the 1844 election on an expansionist platform, Tyler used “legally questionable means” requiring only a bare majority vote rather than the traditional two-thirds treaty ratification to push annexation through Congress in one of his final acts as president on March 1, 1845. Texas officially joined as a slave state on December 29, 1845.