America Aflame (8 page)

To be sure, voices, especially in the Whig Party and in New England, spoke out against the war. A disgusted Whig editor in Georgia complained, “We have territory enough, especially if every province, like Texas, is to bring in its train war and debt and death.” Some of the professional soldiers questioned the basis for going to war. Lieutenant Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock confided that “my heart is not in this business; I am against it from the bottom of my soul as a most unholy and unrighteous proceeding. It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country [Mexico] as possible.”
14

Some saw a foreboding in the conflict. Not one given to optimism in any case, now-Senator John C. Calhoun warned, “A deed has been done from which the country would not be able to recover for a long time, if ever.” Ralph Waldo Emerson shared the senator's concern: “The United States will conquer Mexico but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”
15

Nor did the evangelical Christian community line up with the Polk administration. Theodore Parker, among several New England evangelicals, intoned, “War is an utter violation of Christianity. If war be right, then Christianity is wrong, false, a lie.” Invoking the spirit of '76 much as the war's proponents did, Parker continued: “Men will call us traitors;… That hurt nobody in '76. We are a rebellious nation; our whole history is treason; our blood was attainted before we were born; our creeds are infidelity to the mother church, our constitution treason to our fatherland. What of that?… Let God only be a master to control our conscience.”
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Dissent from the war produced fine literature and poetry, inspirational sermons, and Henry David Thoreau's notable civil disobedience, but the wave of patriotism drowned these voices. The Bible included numerous examples of violence, often inflicted by God or His hosts, to further greater ends. The greater end was extending the American mission across a continent, saving souls from false religion, and planting the flag of democracy in the face of despotism. Mexico disdained democracy and exhibited the same pomposity as the regimes of the Old World. The disarray of its government attracted European interest and meddling. This had already occurred in Texas. With Great Britain and possibly France and Russia breathing down the Pacific Coast, where California hung on to its Mexican government by a thread and where Oregon was by no means yet secure, peace was a luxury. Americans must defend their experiment.

The boys signing up in droves spoke volumes against the dissenters. The early news from the war further dampened opposition. Even the Whig Party, which grumbled about the conflict and set strict conditions for its conduct, began to weigh the possibilities of riding Zachary Taylor's growing popularity into the White House in 1848. Taylor scored quick victories against courageous but disorganized Mexican troops at the Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma in May 1846. Americans hailed him as the common man's Napoleon, “Old Rough and Ready,” who spurned the trappings of his rank like a true democrat.

Polk was now the ringmaster of a three-ring circus: intrigue in California, staring down the British in Oregon, and war in Mexico. He moved quickly to defuse the Oregon standoff, retreating from his campaign promise of “54° 40' or Fight” and settling on the British offer of the 49th parallel. Northern Democrats, who had stood with Polk on Texas and Mexico, rebelled. He had promised them all of Oregon, a safety valve for their workers and dreamers, and now he had given part of it away. Maybe the Whigs were right that the Mexican War was just a plot to extend slavery and grab territory.

In August 1846, Polk asked Congress to appropriate $2 million for “extraordinary expenses” connected to the war. Many suspected the funds represented a down payment on land the United States would purchase from the Mexican government, already reeling from a series of military reverses. By this time, few lawmakers held to the fiction that the conflict with Mexico was simply a defensive war. The president had already dispatched expeditions to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and California to dislodge those provinces from Mexico. To be fair, although Polk hailed from a slave state, his territorial ambitions were primarily patriotic. A firm believer in manifest destiny, he just wanted to hurry the process along. Others, however, looked upon the president as a tool of the slaveholders. The Oregon betrayal was merely the latest in a line of devious deeds to add more slave territory.
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It was 7:00 P.M. on a fetid August evening in the Capitol when Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot, a member of Polk's Democratic Party, rose to attach an amendment to the appropriations bill that for all the fuss about Polk's motives seemed destined for passage, especially since everyone wanted to go home and escape the cloying heat of Washington. Wilmot's amendment was a model of simplicity: “
Provided
: That as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of the said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted.”

Manifest Destiny and anti-Catholic sentiment combine in this 1846 drawing mocking supposedly celibate priests retreating with their women from American forces at Matamoros. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

David Wilmot was not an abolitionist—as he put it, he had no “morbid sympathy for the slave”—but he detested slavery because he believed bonded black labor would compete unfairly with free white labor. In order to place his proviso within a conservative constitutional context, Wilmot had deliberately cribbed from the language of Thomas Jefferson's Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that prohibited slavery in those territories. All he wanted was to preserve the territories for “the sons of toil, of my own race and own color.”
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Wilmot and his constituents, indeed most northern whites, couldn't have cared less about slavery where it existed. But the West as a place of personal and national redefinition and rebirth held a sacred place among American ideals. To defile the West with bonded labor, to nullify the hard work and perseverance of those migrants who sacrificed so much to make the journey, would be a crime of great enormity. Pennsylvanians were not about to debark for the West tomorrow, but many had moved from other places, and they would move again, and they wanted above all a fair chance. Slavery removed that possibility.

Party discipline collapsed as northern Democrats rallied behind the Wilmot Proviso and against the president, who was furious that his appropriations bill had become a vehicle for grandstanding on an extraneous and divisive issue. He considered the proviso “a Mischievous & foolish amendment.” Polk wrote in his journal what he deeply believed: “What connection slavery had with making peace with Mexico it is difficult to conceive.” Others found it much easier to make the connection. The
Boston Whig
summarized the impact precisely: “As if by magic, it brought to a head the great question which is about to divide the American people.”
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Threats and recriminations flew. The rhetoric of the Congress ratcheted to a fever pitch. Ohio congressman Columbus Delano warned the South: “We will establish a cordon of free states that shall surround you; and then we will light up the fires of liberty on every side until they melt your present chains and render all your people
free
.” Southerners responded in kind. Whig senator Robert Toombs of Georgia issued a warning: “I do not hesitate to avow before this House and the Country, and in the presence of the living God, that if, by your legislation, you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people … thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half the states of this Confederacy,
I am for Disunion
.”
20

The truth was that much of the territory, any territory, that could be gained from Mexico would likely remain free, proviso or no. Too many emigrants from the free states, too few slaveholders, and a climate and soil uncertain for the gang cultivation of crops necessary for slave labor to be profitable. But from August 1846 onward, reality scarcely made a demonstration in the Capitol. Symbols mattered. It mattered to the South when the rest of the nation did not respect its institutions. Pride, honor, face-saving, call it what you will, tinged every issue henceforth. And every issue seemed to touch on slavery. Missouri Democrat Thomas Hart Benton compared the slavery question with the plague of frogs that God had inflicted on the Egyptians to convince them to release the Hebrews from bondage: “You could not look upon the table but there were frogs, you could not go to the bridal couch and lift the sheets but there were frogs!” So it was with “this black question, forever on the table, on the nuptial couch, everywhere!”
21

The House of Representatives would pass the Wilmot Proviso more than fifty times over the next four years, but it would always fail in the Senate. For those who loved the Union and what it stood for more than anything else, these were ominous times. The great mission of the nation to the world hung in the balance. Its new alabaster cities stretching now from the Atlantic to the Pacific, its productive farms and thriving small towns, and the deep and abiding faith in personal and national destiny must overcome this trial. America could not collapse back on itself.

While politicians wrangled, American soldiers fought, and fought better than anyone had hoped or expected. General Taylor's successes in northern Mexico, the fall of the venerable trading outpost of Santa Fe, and then the province of California, to the American forces, stoked the dreams of manifest destiny. Children in the streets of American cities sang, “Old Zack's at Monterrey / Bring out your Santa Anner; / For every time we raise a gun / Down goes a Mexicaner.”
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The success of American forces, often outmanned, gave cause for more than children to burst into patriotic song. Mounting losses did not deter General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the target of children's ditties and American artillery. President Polk recognized that nothing short of capturing Mexico City would put a satisfactory end to this military exercise. General Winfield Scott, as officious and resplendent as Taylor was casual and crumpled, took his crisp uniforms and giant ego to Vera Cruz. After taking the port with an amphibious landing, he marched overland with fewer than nine thousand troops, most of who were unaccustomed to military discipline. Scott defied conventional military wisdom, cut his supply line, lived off the land, and fought his way into a capital guarded by a hundred thousand able-bodied men. Scott had two advantages over the Mexicans: light artillery expertly positioned and aimed, and a junior officer corps, each member of which was capable of making decisions in the field, including future luminaries George G. Meade, Ulysses S. Grant, Joseph E. Johnston, P. G. T. Beauregard, and Robert E. Lee. Despite spirited Mexican resistance, Scott prevailed, conquering the country in five months. At 7:00 A.M. on September 14, 1847, John Quitman, the president's emissary, raised the American flag above the Plaza de Armas in Mexico City, the first time the Stars and Stripes had flown over the capital of a conquered nation.

Now what? Immediately the cry of “All Mexico” went up, and President Polk began to rethink his modest objective of securing the Texas border and liberating New Mexico and California. Some southerners saw Scott's dash to victory as an opportunity to extend the slave empire and thereby save slavery as well as the souls and society of the liberated Mexicans. South Carolina novelist and poet William Gilmore Simms wrote excitedly to his senator James Henry Hammond that “slavery will be the medium & great agent for rescuing and recovering to freedom and civilization all the vast tracts of Texas, Mexico &c., and our sons ought to be fitted out as fast as they are ready to take the field, with an adequate provision in slaves and find their way in the yet unopened regions.” Once the United States secured all of Mexico, it would ensure, Simms predicted, “the perpetuation of slavery for the next thousand years.” Though many Americans and Mexicans would dispute the proposition that a thousand-year slave empire was necessary for their salvation, the argument resonated well in the South.
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As in Oregon, Polk settled for less. The high political risks and the idea of absorbing a large alien population persuaded the president to choose the more modest course. Modest was quite a bit. By the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico received $15 million in exchange for the Rio Grande boundary the Polk administration had claimed to begin with and the cession of both California and New Mexico. The Senate ratified the treaty 38 to 14 with four abstentions. The annexations of Texas and Oregon combined with the territories gained from the Mexican Cession comprised America's greatest expansion ever, as the nation's territory increased by 66 percent. The United States was now a continental empire, a status predicted, preached, and promoted for a generation. The Mexican and British obstacles dissolved. Only the Indians remained to challenge America's continental ambitions. It would not be long before the United States recouped the monetary cost of the war at least a thousandfold. The moral accounting would follow, and a greater threat to America's destiny would emerge. Quickly.