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[Continuing chapter three]
When Pakenham had left, Travis got up and walked to the framed world map that hung on the wall beside the door. So much of it was colored red, for Britain, that even the white of the Empire, dominating Central Europe, was dwarfed. How would this map look, he wondered, had the French succeeded in their revolution? Their great general, Napoleon, had been genius enough to conquer the entire continent of Europe had he not been so bold as to invade Egypt.
The general’s death, and France’s subsequent defeat, he remembered, had directly led to Britain’s claiming Louisiana. Travis had been just two years old when the United States, having rejected Jefferson’s bid for a second term because the man refused to fight for Louisiana, went to war with Britain to drive the old enemy once and for all from North America. After a promising beginning the result had been disaster. “Jefferson’s War,” they called it now, a sardonic tribute to the man who wouldn’t fight, who wasted his own greatness in the pursuit of a goal of mere self-sufficiency that was too small for the country he led.
There are Americans all over this continent, Travis thought, and yet there is no single American government. The great experiment of 1776, which had been meant to prove that there were better ways for men to govern themselves than the patchwork of kingdoms and empires that made up old, corrupt Europe, seemed to have ended with the New World forming itself into an echo of the Old. The great federation envisaged by Washington, Franklin and the others was now split in two, with the old Union fighting to force the people of the Confederacy back into the Constitution against their will. A huge swath of red on the map split North America in two, the lost territory of Louisiana a dagger through the heart of the continent. Texas and the Californias, by logic and manifest destiny intended to be a part of a greater United States, lay vulnerable to factionalism or domination by Britain or the Mexican Empire.
Not even South America was immune to this shattering; the liberation movement led by Bolivar, Byron and San Martin had begun with the goal of unifying the rebellious Spanish colonies, and resulted in a crazy-quilt of opposing states that hated each other almost as much as they hated Spain. Bolivar was dead, San Martin disgraced in exile, and Byron was now the reactionary governor-general of Canada and King William’s representative in a North America dominated by Britain.
What a world, Travis thought. And what is to be our place in it? Texas had great potential; Pakenham was quite right about that. But the English ambassador, perhaps understandably, saw that potential in the light of an extension of Canada, or at best a protectorate. Why couldn’t the English be satisfied with the two-thirds of the continent they already held?
We belong with the United States, Travis thought. He had worked, before the tragedy of Secession, to that end, being one of David Crockett’s strongest supporters in the Republic. Crockett, the man who was now Confederate vice president—and, if the stories about President Calhoun’s health were true, just months or even weeks from becoming the Confederacy’s new president—had built a second political career on the issue of annexing Texas to the Union. To Travis, and to many other transplanted Southerners who’d settled in Texas and fought for her independence from Mexico, it should have been just a matter of time before the links between Texas and the United States were made formal.
Perhaps, he told himself, the war between the states doesn’t have to mean the end of that dream. He turned his gaze from Europe to North America, to the southern states sited just east of the red dagger along the Mississippi. Travis had always thought of the United States in terms of its southern constituents anyway, and he suspected that most of his fellow-Texans felt the same. He’d never even seen the North; his life had constituted a steady migration south- and westward, first to Alabama—he winced at the memories of failure and betrayal associated with his time there—and thence to Texas, where he had finally become the successful man he had always dreamed of being. Most Texans had followed a similar path, though perhaps a less painful one, and still thought of one or another of the Confederate States as home. Most of these people, he suspected, would prefer to be members of a greater Confederacy rather than to leave themselves continually at the mercy of English commercial and political interests. Let the English rule Canada and meddle with Mexico if they want, Travis thought. Only leave us alone—and if we have to join the Confederacy for that to happen, then so be it.
He left the map and took a cigar from the humidor on the sideboard. Lighting it with the sour-smelling flame from a lamp, he puffed until the tobacco was well-alight, enjoying the bitterness on his tongue, the rich heavy smell, and the brief spurt of giddiness and euphoria he always felt when beginning a cigar.
“I’m going out,” he said to Henson when he came through the door into the outer office. “I’m going to walk over to the Capitol and see if I can speak to Reynolds. We have to do something about the British and their damned anti-slavery agitation.”
“You going to tell them to be damned?” Henson asked eagerly. It was not the sort of question a diplomat’s secretary should ask, even in private, but Travis understood the emotion behind it.
“No, I am not. Bankruptcy is not a pretty word, Henson.”
“It’d be worth it, though, just to see the look on that fat Limey’s face.”
“That’s enough,” Travis said. “I thought we’d discussed your language and you’d agreed it was necessary to be more circumspect.”
Henson hung his head. “Sorry, sir.” He looked up again. “It’s just that I hate seeing them lord it over us. Will we ever be able to pay back those debts? It’s millions of dollars now, sir.”
“You leave me to worry about that, son.” Travis stopped in the doorway. “Oh, would you write a note for me requesting a meeting, and send it to Mister Bromowski at the Empire’s embassy? I’d like to see him sometime in the next few days, if I can.”
On the street, Travis paused to savor his cigar and watch the men working on the new Capitol building. It wasn’t going to be as large as its namesake in the older Washington on the Potomac, but it would still be a most suitable home for the congressmen of this newer republic.
It’s a pity we can’t just walk away from our debts, he thought. That was the course of action he’d taken; he’d come to Texas twenty years ago precisely because it was a place none of his creditors would want to follow him to. Twenty years ago this month, he reminded himself. My God, where does the time go?
Then he remembered the humiliation of that final appearance in an Alabama courthouse, of his shock when his own friends had repudiated him in front of a judge for non-payment of his debts. He wondered if Alabama still jailed debtors. She had in 1831, and that had left Travis with little choice but to run. Rosanna’s infidelity had only made the decision to run that much easier. My son is a man now, he realized with a start. I wonder what she has told him of me.
He had once intended to pay the debts as soon as he’d established himself in his new home. But he no longer felt that way. The struggle toward respectability had been too long and too hard; ultimately only by fighting the Mexicans had he been able to attain the success that should have been his by virtue of his intelligence alone. Now his attitude was that those who could afford to lend money ought to be more generous in the terms they asked. The fact that they could afford to risk losing the money was proof enough that what they loaned was surplus to their needs.
Lord Pakenham, he decided, understood his feelings. A true gentleman, he had no love for money-grubbing merchants, even when they were his own countrymen. The ambassador had offered him a golden opportunity to liberate Texas from its debts and the growing British influence they permitted. He would be derelict in his duty to his country if he failed to act. What he had to do now, he realized, was to persuade others of that fact as well. He might as well begin with the hardest nut to crack. He began to walk, and as he thought about the opportunity his pace increased until he was moving at very nearly a run. Senior government officials in most governments would be ashamed of such exertion. But Travis couldn’t afford dignity. Texas government was government in a hurry.
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