Kearny's March

by Winston Groom

  He was offered a high commission in the Union army but like many Missourians refused to fight against the South. In 1861 he attended the much ballyhooed “Peace Conference” in Washington, which accomplished nothing. He died in 1887 in Richmond, a small town outside St. Louis, still practicing law, at the age of seventy-nine, having outlived his wife, as well as both of his sons, who were killed in accidents. Alexander William Doniphan, too, has a county, a city, and various byways in Missouri honoring his name.

  And when his thousand ragamuffins gathered on the boat decks headed home, could anyone among their number see within a dozen years those river flagpoles draped in Stars and Bars, the banner of a new and angry nation gouged out from the old? Being from Missouri, they probably would have said, “Go show me”—but in the end the story turned out well.

  The intrepid cavalry captain John Reid, who led the charge at the Battle of the Sacramento and saved Mexican children from Indians, also returned to his law practice in Missouri. Unlike Doniphan he became a state representative and then a U.S. congressman, but in 1861 he withdrew, and was later expelled, for siding with the Confederacy. He served as an aide to the Confederate general Sterling Price, who had put down the Taos rebellion in New Mexico. After the war Reid resumed law and died in 1881, aged sixty.

  Price, for his part, returned to become a wealthy governor of Missouri but also threw in his lot with the Confederacy during the Civil War. He became a major general and commanded an army but his battle record was undistinguished. At the end of the war he took the remnants of his army into Mexico rather than surrender, but an attempt to begin an American colony at Veracruz failed when Price contracted cholera, or some similar disease, which ultimately killed him in 1867, at age fifty-eight. He was buried in St. Louis in what was one of the cities largest funerals at the time.

  After his trading expedition to Mexico, Samuel Magoffin also retired to Missouri. He “acquired a sizable estate near Kirkwood,” where he took up the life of a cotton planter and real estate man. His wife, Susan, our diarist, gave birth to his daughter in 1851, but the strain seemed to have ruined her health and, as was all too common in those times, she died during her next childbirth in 1855, at the age of twenty-seven, and is buried in St. Louis. In addition to her family, she left behind her priceless memoir, first published in 1926 as Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico.

  James Magoffin, Susan’s narrowly escaped brother-in-law, finally received a healthy claim settlement from the federal government for his part in securing the peaceful American acquisition of Santa Fe and the New Mexico Territory. He later established an outpost in what is now the city of El Paso and became a wealthy entrepreneur until his death in 1868, at the age of sixty-nine.

  Of the other men on Kearny’s march, Colonel Philip St. George Cooke had one of the most colorful careers. After mustering out his Mormon Battalion, Cooke returned east where he became an Indian fighter during the early 1850s uprisings, defeating the Jacarilla Apaches in 1854 and the Sioux in 1855, then he tried to keep the peace in “bleeding” Kansas. He was an observer for the United States during the Crimean War and wrote a famous two-volume manual on cavalry tactics.

  When the Civil War began, Cooke’s family of Virginians was consumed in a perfectly dreadful schism. His daughter was married to the soon-to-be legendary Confederate cavalry chieftain J. E. B. Stuart, and Cooke’s son, John Rogers Cooke, became a brigade commander in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

  But Cooke remained loyal to the Union, despite Stuart’s gibe that “He will regret it only once, but that continually.” As a general, Philip St. George Cooke commanded the federal cavalry during the 1862 Yorktown Peninsula Campaign up toward Richmond, along with then Major General George Stoneman, who had been Cooke’s lieutenant during the Mormon march and was wounded in the hand during the “Great Bullfight.”b

  The Yorktown Peninsula was where J. E. B. Stuart made his storied “ride around the Union army,” in which the infamous Rebel horseman led his cavalry in a devastating and humiliating raid completely encircling McClellan’s huge army, even leaving a note addressed to his mortified father-in-law—“Sorry I can’t stay for dinner.”

  After that Cooke, who was then fifty-two, withdrew from service in the field and assumed desk and administrative duties for the remainder of the war. He was promoted to major general toward the end, and later he returned to western commands until his retirement in 1873, after some fifty years of service. Like most southerners who had sided with the Union, Cooke never returned to the South and lived out his remaining years in Detroit, where he died in 1895, peacefully in bed, at the age of eighty-six.

  The road across the Southwest that Cooke’s Mormon Battalion built was so perfectly constructed topographically, due to his flawless engineering and astronomical calculations, that in 1853 the United States paid Mexico an additional $10 million for the Gadsden Purchase, some 30,000 square miles of southern New Mexico and Arizona that Cooke had laid out, for the transcontinental railway line. It is presently the route of Amtrak’s famous Sunset Limited, a scenic train, begun in 1894 by the Southern Pacific Railroad.

  When Cooke disbanded the Mormon Battalion in California many of the men went to work temporarily for Sutter, who was then hiring and paying high wages. They were there when gold was discovered at the mill Sutter was building, and many lined their pockets with gold dust and nuggets. When word finally came that Brigham Young had found a place to settle the colony on the banks of the Salt Lake in Utah, these men crossed the mountains to their new home. With them went the so-called Sutter Gun, a gift, presumably, from Captain Sutter. Lore has it that when the Mormons built their great temple, they used the cannon as a sort of battering ram or wrecking ball to tamp down the stones by continually hauling it up, then dropping it from a gun hoist. It is said that the Sutter Gun remains there today, buried in the foundation of the Mormon Tabernacle.

  As for the Mormons themselves, the tiny sect that Joseph Smith started in 1830 has grown to nearly 14 million today, worldwide, and counts among its prominent members such notables as Governor Mitt Romney, Glenn Beck, and Senator Harry Reid.

  Captain William Emory went back to Mexico with a Maryland regiment and fought until war’s end; then he directed the U.S.–Mexican boundary survey of 1848–55. During the Civil War he, too, sided with the Union and as a brevet major general commanded the Nineteenth Corps in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864. He retired in 1876 and died in Washington, D.C., in 1887 at the age of seventy-six. Emory Peak in Big Bend National Park, in Texas, is named in his honor.

  As President Polk had predicted the war heroes and political Whigs Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, the two leading American commanders, vied for the U.S. presidency in the election of 1848. Taylor handily won the Whig nomination and the presidency as well.

  Until the election, Taylor had never publicly discussed his politics, or for that matter even voted in a presidential election, an omission of which he was proud. Aside from being a general, he was also a Louisiana planter and slaveholder, which made him attractive to Whigs looking for southern support. For all the campaign knew he might as well have been a Know-Nothing, too, since he was utterly noncommittal on political issues, including those of his own party.

  The slavery issue consumed most of the nation’s political discourse by the time Taylor took office, but congressional Whigs were infuriated when he turned against some of their favorite domestic programs, in particular “internal improvements, a national bank, and protective tariffs—basically, the entire Whig economic platform.” On slavery, Taylor was, like Polk, of the opinion that it would not spread to the territories acquired from Mexico due to sheer impracticality. Maybe so, but what of Kansas and the interior states?

  Under the bitterly contested Compromise of 1850, citizens of U.S. territories would be allowed to vote on whether they wished to be free or slave states, but Taylor died before it passed. He had served only a year in office when he became ill watching the Fourth of July groundbrea
king for the Washington Monument and died five days later from what doctors diagnosed as gastroenteritis. He was replaced by Vice President Millard Fillmore.

  From then until now assassination theories have abounded, implying that Taylor had been deliberately poisoned by some food brought to the groundbreaking ceremony. By then of course he had made enemies enough on both sides of the political spectrum, but in 1991, when rumors at last forced the exhumation and examination of his remains, no traces of arsenic or any other poison could be found.

  Winfield Scott remained chief of the U.S. Army until 1861, the first year of the Civil War, by which time at the age of seventy-five he had become enormously corpulent and unable to mount a horse. Before his resignation, however, Scott undertook to offer Robert E. Lee command of all the Union armies and, failing in that, devised perhaps the single most important strategy of the war, the so-called Anaconda Plan to seal off the South with a blockade. He lived to see the Union victorious but died in 1866, just shy of eighty, and is buried at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.

  The Mexican-American War concluded with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848. By then the United States was so divided over the aims of the war and the possible spread of slavery that it was doubtful whether the pact could attract ratification by two-thirds of the Senate, but ultimately it passed muster on March 10, by a vote of 38–14. In exchange for more than $18 million, Mexico ceded a total of approximately 600,000 square miles of territory, including what are now New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, and parts of Colorado and Utah.

  This acquisition has subsequently been the subject of much criticism and revisionist history, including that of luminaries such as Ulysses Grant, who condemned the action as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Many Whigs were equally outspoken even as the conflict was raging. There is something to be said for both sides.

  First, Mexico had threatened war, and loudly, ever since the U.S. Congress voted to accept Texas into the Union. Earlier, actually; the Mexicans said there was going to be war if the United States even tried to annex Texas. They recalled their ambassador in Washington and refused to see the peace commissioner sent by Polk to mitigate the issues. And they attacked and massacred a company of U.S. cavalry on what Texas had long claimed was its soil.

  On the other hand, Polk made no secret that he wanted not only Texas but California and New Mexico in the Union. He offered to compensate Mexico, and well, but the offer was refused, even though Mexico was broke and, as we have seen, unwilling or unable to properly protect or care for the citizens of its northern territories, practically all of whom were being terrorized by the Indians. Neither was it any secret that sending Zachary Taylor’s army to Matamoros would be interpreted by Mexico as a provocation.

  In the event, Mexico tried to bell the cat and got slapped down, as we have also seen. The trouble that nags is: was it improper for the U.S. government to bait Mexico into a war of acquisition? This forces us to question whether said “provocation” actually amounted to “baiting.” After all, if Mexico had not moved an army to its border with Texas and attacked the bait, there probably would have been no war. That is one view, with substantial gravitas.

  Was the United States a bully, being larger and more powerful than its southern neighbor? Certainly it was larger and more powerful, but it was fighting on foreign soil a long way from home, and the casualty rate in the American army—nearly 13,000 dead of all causes—was horrendous in relation to the numbers serving. With better leadership it is certainly possible that Mexican armies could have destroyed the U.S. forces at Monterrey, Buena Vista, and possibly Cerro Gordo. But because they did not have better leadership the question becomes moot.

  John Eisenhower writes quite astutely that “The fact is that Mexico stood in the way of the American dream of Manifest Destiny.” It is best left to the scholars and pundits to argue the morality or rightness of it. One thing to ponder through is this: if the war had not been fought and won, would the United States have found a second chance to create a nation from sea to shining sea? Such opportunities do not often present themselves to democracies and, after the 1848 war, it is hard to imagine when or how the United States could have acquired these territories. Which leaves us with this: but for the Mexican-American War—be it right or wrong—citizens of the American West, from Denver to Phoenix, from Reno to San Francisco and points in between, today just might be speaking English as a second language and paying their taxes to Mexico City.

  Another enduring legacy of the war was that it proved once and for all the efficacy of martial training at West Point, which had been called into question on numerous occasions since the U.S. Military Academy was established in 1802. A large number of the junior officers who did the actual fighting were West Pointers, who time and again outmaneuvered and outfought their Mexican counterparts, never losing a battle. For better or worse, this improved their confidence and warrior spirit and, more ominously, served as grim preparation for nearly all of the top generals in the American Civil War, which of course lay just over the horizon. In addition to the aforementioned Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, John Pope, Joseph Hooker, George B. Meade, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, Ambrose Burnside, Braxton Bragg, P. G. T. Beauregard, and James Longstreet served in the conflict with Mexico, as did Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America.

  Eighteen forty-six was a remarkable year in United States history. It was a year when a great number of people set themselves in motion; Americans en masse suddenly became agitated enough to haul across the next ridge west, and the next, in such numbers that it began to shake and shift the national equilibrium.

  With every step the Wilmot Proviso echoed like the clang of the log splitter’s wedge; antislavery literature and abolitionist screeds in newspapers were one thing but acts of Congress were a powerful gauntlet. (Versions of the proviso were soon regularly appended to any legislation regarding new territories, in hopes that one would stick. An outraged Thomas Hart Benton compared it to the biblical plague of frogs: “You could not look upon the table but there were frogs, you could not sit down at the banquet but there were frogs, you could not go to the bridal couch and lift the sheets but there were frogs!” So it was with Wilmot’s proviso—“this black question, ever on the table, on the nuptial couch, everywhere!” so Old Bullion roared.)

  And the southern slavers sat and thumbed their noses. Yet at least it got the question of slavery out of the drawing rooms and into the political arena for good. After that, it was only a matter of time. Toward the end of the Mexican-American War, Ralph Waldo Emerson sized it up: “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.” He was not alone in saying it; many wise men of the day said the same but were powerless to prevent it.

  The political consequences of the war were immediate and seismic. A coalition of northern Democrats and so-called Conscience Whigs split off from their respective parties and, with members of the Liberty Party, formed the Free Soil Party for the upcoming elections. Martin Van Buren was its presidential candidate. Things were already beginning to fall apart, rarely a good sign. In time the victory glow of Monterrey, of Buena Vista, Cerro Gordo, Sacramento, and Veracruz, shrank back into the stormy chaos that was Mexico, and in its place an awful dazzling hatred glared across the newfound continental map, driving men mad until they grasped the sword and nearly dealt themselves a mortal blow.

  What of Polk, the political cipher who set it all into motion? He had promised from the start that he would seek only one term, and he was good to his word. On the evening of the same day that Polk accompanied Zachary Taylor to the Capitol to be inaugurated, he and Sarah boarded a steamboat on the Potomac for a monthlong trip through the South before returning to Nashville. However, what began as a restorative vacation for the ex-president quickly became a relentless orgy of speeches, luncheons, din
ners, parades, balls, and galas that sapped Polk’s energy instead of restoring it.

  At New Orleans he was taken ill by an intestinal bug that left him drained. He cut the trip short and headed up the Mississippi, remaining aboard ship and attended by doctors at ports along the way. At Nashville, where he was met by cheering crowds, he seemed to rally and soon took an active part in preparing the library of their new home in the former Grundy mansion, now renamed Polk Place. But in less than two months he was struck down during a cholera epidemic that was sweeping the South and died on June 15, 1849. He was fifty-three years old. His last request had been to be baptized, which he was, into the Methodist Church.

  Many modern historians disparage Polk, mainly because of his drab personality. I don’t know why that is. It sometimes seems as if all it takes for a president to be accepted is that he play golf and tell good jokes. When Polk went to the White House, he went knowing precisely what he wanted to accomplish, a rarity of course. Even Harry S. Truman thought so a hundred years later. “A great president,” he remarked. “Said what he wanted to do and did it.”

  Indeed, Polk did it, accomplished each of the four things he wanted, although it took a war to achieve the last one. As Eisenhower astutely points out, “Manifest Destiny was not Polk’s invention, but he was its ideal agent.”

  Polk died believing that the acquisitions in the West would make the United States stronger, but in one of the great quirks of history it did no such thing, at least for the then foreseeable future.