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humiliating defeat for "the father of Texas," which was salved somewhat when Houston appointed him to be the Republic's first secretary of state. Houston also appointed Austin's fellow commissioner William H. Wharton as the first Texan minister to the United States. Soon thereafter Houston sent Memucan Hunt (fig. 5) to join Wharton in Washington. Hunt came from a prominent North Carolina family. He moved to Mississippi where he became a planter. When the Texas revolution broke out, he raised a company of volunteers for Texas in 1836, but they arrived after the Battle of San Jacinto. Even so, Burnet appointed him a gen- eral in the Texan army, and Houston asked him to join Wharton in Washington. The majority of Texans wanted immediate annexa- tion to the United States, but to the surprise of nearly everyone, Jackson was unenthusiastic. Jackson was a warm friend of Sam Houston and several other Texans, but he feared that annexation of Texas, which Mexico still considered a rebellious province, would lead to war with that country. Equally significant, by the time of the Texas Revo- lution the antislavery movement was rising in the United States; it was obvious that Texas would be a slave state if it became part of the union. Controversy over the slavery question had grown greatly since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and Congress was being flooded with thousands of anti-slavery petitions. Many of them were introduced by John Quincy Adams, who, follow- ing his presidency, had been elected to Congress from Massachusetts in 1830. In 1836, Congress passed a "Gag Rule" prohibiting the introduction of anti-slavery petitions, but Adams circumvented the rule by introduc- ing them as petitions against Texas annexation. 10 It was clear that annexation would agitate the slavery question in the United States and damage the election chances of Jackson's hand-chosen successor, Martin Van Buren. So Jackson stalled. He sent Henry Morfit, a Washington claims attorney and political operative, as a special agent to Texas to investigate circum- stances there. In a series of reports, the agent said that he doubted Texas could successfully defend its indepen- dence against Mexico. The reports gave Jackson the room he needed. In a special message to Congress on 21 December 1836, the president advised against "too early" recognition of Texas as an independent state. The United States, he said, should stand back until time and events demonstrated that Texas could sustain its independence. 11 Finally, Texas supporters in Congress devised a back-door method to attain recognition. With Jackson due to leave office on 4 March 1837, Congress passed a resolution providing for a U.S. diplomatic represen- tative to Texas whenever the president felt there was "satisfactory evidence that Texas is an independent power." The bill passed the House by a vote of 121 to 76. Just before midnight, on 3 March, the Senate con- firmed (by a vote of 23 to 19) the appointment of Alcée La Branche, a Louisiana sugar planter, as the first U.S. chargé d'affaires to the Republic of Texas. That night Jackson invited Wharton and Hunt to the White House to celebrate the occasion with a glass of wine. The commissioners rather grandly informed their govern- ment that "President Jackson has closed his political Fig. 5. Memucan Hunt, c. 1850, produced by Mathew Brady's studio 40 THE CAPITOL DOME