Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/808

 798 E. C. Barker charged that President Jackson connived at his plot. The primary authority for this is a somewhat hysterical story told by a Dr. Robert Mayo and strengthened by the well-known friendship be- tween Houston and Jackson and the not altogether unbiassed acceptance of Mr. Adams. Mayo was an eccentric, gossipy, med- dlesome person, who, by his own account, once admired General Jackson to the point of hero-worship. His disillusionment came in this wise : In 1830 fortune threw him in the way of a slight in- timacy with Houston. As the acquaintance ripened the latter con- fessed that he was preparing an expedition in the United States to wrest Texas from Mexico and make it an independent country. He offered Mayo a surgeon's appointment in his army. This was declined, and their friendship progressed no further. Houston had spoken only vaguely of his method of procedure, but Mayo learned more of it later from a chance-met fellow-lodger in a Washington boarding-house, a Mr. Hunter, lately dismissed from West Point. By pretending to know more than he did, he led Hunter to reveal the whole plan. Hunter declared that he himself was a recruiting agent for the Washington district ; " that there were agencies estab- lished in all the principal towns, and various parts of the United States. . . . That several thousands had already enlisted, along the sea-board from New England to Georgia, inclusive. That each man paid thirty dollars to the common fund, and took an oath of secrecy and good faith to the cause on joining the party. That they were to repair, in their individual capacities, as travellers, to dif- ferent points on the banks of the Mississippi, where they had already chartered steamboats, on which to embark, and thence ply to their rendezvous, somewhere in the territory of Arkansas, or Texas, con- venient for action, — and that they meant to establish an independent government, and resist any attempt of the United States to wrest so valuable a prize from them." Dr. Mayo felt it his duty to apprize the President of this con- templated breach of our neutrality laws, and did so verbally in November, 1830. At the subsequent request of the President he made his communication in writing (December 2, 1830). Much to his surprise the president's message of December 7 did not refer to the subject. On the contrary it declared our relations with Mexico entirely satisfactory. But six years passed before an in- cident convinced him of Jackson's hypocrisy, and caused him to resolve, in his own words, "NEVER TO SEE HIM MORE." January 23, 1838 (Van Buren MSS. in Library of Congress), in which Gen- eral Jackson quotes from his letter-book an entry of May 31. 1829, regarding a statement made to him by General Duff Green, page 802, note 2, below.