of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of History at Miami University in Ohio. She is also a book reviews editor for the Journal of the Early Republic and the
coordinator for The Ohio Seminar in Early American History and Culture.
Schakenbach Regele applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Flowers, Guns, and Money at the University of Chicago Press website.investments (Trinity Land Company offered him $10 million to secure the cession of Texas to the United States), the Galveston Company preferred that Texas remain Mexican. They commissioned General José Antonio Mexía, secretary of the Legation of Mexico in Washington, to lobby for the removal of the provision of the 1830 law that prohibited U.S. citizens from settling along the border. Soon after the ban on U.S. immigrants was lifted in 1834, the General Land Office of Texas closed without the Company having received its premium land for settling the requisite number of families. The Company, however, continued to profit from land development, and decades later, they received a claims settlement from the United States and Mexican Claims Commission. They were also instrumental in the development of independent Texas.Page 99 comes toward the end of the fourth of nine chapters and places the reader in Mexico in the second half of the 1820s, when Poinsett served as the United States’ first minister plenipotentiary to newly independent Mexico. In many ways, this chapter is the heart of the book because it centers on the aspect of Poinsett’s career that he was most known for. The chapter explores official U.S. diplomacy in Mexico in the context of “interest.” Although historians generally agree that the value placed on “disinterest,” or impartiality, in politics faded away by the early 1800s--replaced by a tacit acknowledgement that self-interest could and should be compatible with national interest--Poinsett and his peers continued to tout traditional understandings of disinterest. In practice, however, he manipulated his political power for private gains. For example, he became involved in freemasonry in Mexico, used the political connections he gained to establish a US-based mining company, and then misrepresented the profitability of the mines to investors.
Despite early setbacks in Texas-Coahuila, there was much potential profit for those willing and able to hold out, and for those with connections. In addition to Poinsett’s involvement in the mining companies and the Galveston Bay Company, he managed Richard Exter’s estate after his death in June, 1829. Exter had received two empresario grants in northwestern Texas with Stephen Julian Wilson, a North Carolina native who became a naturalized Mexican citizen. The two requested a fur trading monopoly from the Mexican government on the grounds that most fur trappers from the U.S. and Great Britain deprived the government of significant tax revenue by hunting in Mexico and selling elsewhere; Exter and Wilson conversely would employ Mexican citizens and pay Mexican taxes. The government quickly rescinded their license, but the partners retained their land. When Exter died, his land passed to his widow, María Dolores Soto y Saldaña. Several months after Exter’s death, she married John Charles Beales, a British doctor and land speculator, who sought Poinsett’s help in administering the land. He wanted Poinsett to take charge of settling the land so that his company would be able to claim their prize land before the contract expired. Beales also needed help asserting his right to the grant over Dennis A. Smith, Poinsett’s associate in the mining venture, who had entered a purchase agreement with Exter in 1827. Shortly before Exter’s death,Smith organized a $400,000 company to develop the land. Beales argued that Smith’s claim to, and investors shares in, Exter’s land was illegitimate because it violated the 1830 colonization law. Exter’s brothers wanted Poinsett to ensure that Exter’s widow and child secured profits from the land.
Poinsett attempted to represent all his interested constituents by recommending New York Congressman Churchill C. Cambreleng, who owned stock in Smith’s Tlacotal Mining Company, to oversee the ad-
[footnotes omitted]
Readers might be confused if they only saw page 99 because it discusses a web of financial connections around land and says nothing about patriotism, which is in the book’s title. At the top of the page, I am making the point that not all U.S. investors in Texas wanted annexation. The sentence starts on the previous page and uses Poinsett’s diplomatic successor Anthony Butler as a comparison, highlighting the fact that individual diplomats made different decisions based on their own interests. Although this page says nothing about patriotism, it illustrates a larger argument of the book, which is that Poinsett personified a type of patriotism that emerged following the American Revolution, one in which statesmen served the nation by serving themselves, securing economic prosperity, and military security while often prioritizing their own ambitions and financial interests. In that sense, the Page 99 Test works.
Yet if browsers opened to this page, they would get very little sense of Poinsett’s multi-decade career or his personal life—the fact that he did not marry until age 54, and before he was married, he had a son with an unnamed woman who died in childbirth (Poinsett’s earlier biographers either ignored or did not know about this woman and child). I would want readers to know, for example, that Poinsett had, prior to his time in Mexico, served as a secret agent in South America, and would later, as secretary of war, oversee the genocide of the Trail of Tears, before helping establish the Smithsonian Institute. His life, like the history of the nation he served, was paradoxical.
--Marshal Zeringue
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