THE TENNESSEE CONNECTION: JACK DANIELS, THE TEXAS "FORMULA" AND LEX, THE SNOWBIRD

By Juan Montoya
I met Lex (I can't recall his last name) a few years ago.

I had stumbled into the old Frontier Lounge when it used to front Washington Street on one of those hot, late fall/early winter afternoons when temperatures in the 80s are not uncommon. It is now a segunda, a second-hand store.

The entrance and walkway was dark and only lighted once you walked toward the back where a bar was lit up by one of those Budweiser beer wagon displays with the Clydesdale draft horses pulling a  beer wagon and the Dalmatian mother dog is leaning over the side keeping an eye on her litter of spotted black and white puppies running alongside the wagon.

Having acquired a taste for old country music from the years I spent in the military in North Carolina and as a child the Midwest, I noticed an old-time Victrola jukebox and sauntered over to see their selection. I plunked a few quarters in the slot (they actually took quarters back then) and punched in some Johnny Horton, Hank Williams (Sr.), George Jones (Mr. Jones to you) and, of course, Patsy Cline.

 I even threw in a few by Johnny Cash and the Carter Family for leavening. At the time, the place was filled with Winter Snowbirds quaffing a few and they turned appreciatively from the bar when the music started to play.

One of those was Lex, a strapping, ruddy 6'5" open-faced farm boy who walked over to the corner table where I was sitting with his hand outstretched in greeting.

"Now, that's music, buddy," he said as an introduction. "Where'd you hear the Sinking of the Bismark?"

Turned out Lex was wintering in Brownsville with his mother and was staying at a trailer park on Boca Chica Blvd. just before you go to the airport. 

They were from Tennessee and they had heard about the weather and the cost of living from friends. He and his brother back home raised Tennessee Walking Horses on a farm not far from Lynchburg, home of the Jack Daniels distillers. Lex had come to Brownsville over the past few years once winter set in Tennessee.

"I guess you haven't heard of too many folks coming all the way down here from our neck of the woods?" he joked.

I thought about that for a while and told him that historically, the state of Tennessee had provided many personages that figured prominently in the development of Texas.

"David Crockett, one of the heroes of the Alamo, was from Tennessee," I said. "In fact, Sam Houston, the first president of the Republic of Texas was also from there. Go figure."

Lex was intrigued when I told him that the reason he was sitting in a bar in Brownsville, Texas talking to someone in English was because of another Tennessean, James K. Polk, the nation's 11th president. Although he wasn't born in Tennessee, he moved there as a young man and quickly became a popular politician.

He was elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives from 1823 to 1825, served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1825 to 839, was Speaker of the House from 1835 to 1839 and was later elected Governor of Tennessee and served from 1839 to 1841.

While he was the speaker, he was the floor leader of President Andrew Jackson's fight against the U.S. Bank. That relationship was to serve Polk well in his quest to the U.S. presidency.

"How does that make him important to people down here?" Lex ( I could tell he was the impatient type) asked.

I explained that both men were ardent expansionists, with Jackson eyeing Texas as the next logical step for the nation to annex, while Polk wanted California as the next U.S. acquisition. Polk served as president from 1845 to 1849, and the "Texas question" played a large role in getting Jackson's endorsement in his bid for office.

I told Lex that author a writer named Walter R. Borneman in his book, "POLK: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America," makes clear that the traditional view of Polk as a warmonger whose embrace of Manifest Destiny prompted his invasion of a peaceful nation without any provocation is too simplistic.

This line of thinking has been the thrust of historians like John D. Eisenhower (So Far From God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846-1848), and earlier, of iconoclasts like Bernard De Voto (The Year of Decision: 1846). Both these works made Polk out to be the quintessential imperialist set to grab as much real estate as he could by force of arms, if need be.

But Borneman makes clear that there were many forces at work that prompted Polk to order Zachary Taylor and the U.S. Army from Fort Jasper, in Louisiana, to the mouth of the Nueces and then to the Rio Grande.

To begin with, when the presidential aspirants to the Democratic nomination of 1844 were quizzed on their stand on the annexation of Texas, only Polk responded in the affirmative.

John Quincy Adams, who only 17 years before the declaration of the Republic of Texas in 1836, had negotiated the Adams-Onis Treaty recognizing the territory as part of Mexico, came out publicly against its annexation.

Martin Van Buren, who was vying for a second presidential term, also wrote against the inclusion of Texas as a state. And when even Henry Clay, a Whig (later the Republican Party), wrote his famous “Raleigh Letter” in opposition to annexation, the die was cast.

With no one else championing Texas, the Manifest Destiny mantle fell comfortably on Polk’s shoulders. Before then, the petition by the Texans (Sam Houston, of Tennessee, was president) for annexation by the U.S. was rejected twice by the previous administrations. Even after Texas declared her independence in 1836, the president and the Congress refused to act and risk the eruption of a civil war over the slavery question, which eventually did happen.

That's where the boys from Tennessee came in.

Former president Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson, Sam Houston, Polk, and even Crockett, who had served in the U.S. Congress with Polk, got in the picture.

Houston, who left Tennessee after a failed marriage, would later go on to be president of the Republic of Texas and maintained a running correspondence with both Jackson and Polk.

Houston was riled because twice he had proposed U.S. presidents and the U.S Congress to annex Texas as a state, and had been left at the altar twice. But with Jackson’s encouragement from The Hermitage and Polk’s platform for annexation, he was dissuaded from encouraging closer ties between the Texas Republic and Britain and assured that annexation would occur once Polk took over the presidency. 

The answer? The so-called "Texas Hand" formula which called for the settlement of Texas by southerners, a declaration of independence against the Mexican government for the "tyrannical" treatment of illegal white settlers, and the taking of their property (slaves), to call for the U.S. to come to their aid.

In fact, Jackson Andrew Donelson - Jackson’s nephew and Polk confidant - was quickly named charge d’affaires to Texas after the death from yellow fever of Tilghman A. Howard. Donelson, another Tennessean, was to deliver Polk’s message to Gov. Houston that help was on the way.

"So you see," I told Lex, "you're not the first resident of the Volunteer State to look our way. We just wish you had brought your friend Jack Daniels instead of Zachary Taylor."
"Amen to that," Lex laughed.

In the years after that initial encounter with Lex, I found out through friends he had reunited with his estranged wife, was still raising horses in Tennessee and had become a member of the Opossum Society of the United States (He claimed that the American possum was the most misunderstood marsupial in the world).

I'll probably never hear from again, but he, like his fellow Tennesseans before him, sure stirred shit up.