America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  Three hundred yards across the Rio Grande, the citizens of Matamoros clambered to their rooftops, waving good-naturedly to the four thousand or so Yanks, who waved back. American soldiers enjoyed the view of the young, dark-skinned Mexican women who, without inhibition, disrobed along the riverbank and plunged in for a bath. Several soldiers waded into the river to get a closer look, but Mexican guards warned them away.

  President Paredes made clear to the Polk administration that he considered the presence of American troops on the banks of the Rio Grande an act of war. To affirm his position, he refused to meet with John Slidell, the oft-rejected emissary from Washington who now hoped to arrange an agreement with the new and financially strapped Mexican government to buy New Mexico and northern California. But no Mexican government could sell those territories at any price and remain in power.

  The Mexicans and the Americans watched each other warily across the river. The only troop movement occurred among some of Taylor’s Irish Catholic soldiers. In the early spring of 1846, they began to cross over to the other side of the river, responding to Mexican pleas of religious brotherhood and a bounty of 320 acres. The Mexicans asked them to weigh the bigotry they encountered in American cities against the full citizenship and the grant of land they would enjoy in Mexico. After fourteen Irish Americans swam over one night, General Taylor issued shoot-to-kill orders. When two more attempted desertion shortly thereafter, they were shot. Desertions declined but not before at least two hundred Irish Catholics joined the Mexican army, forming the San Patricio Battalion.6

  On the Matamoros shore one April morning, a solemn file of priests appeared, sprinkling holy water on the cannons aimed at American troops. When Colonel Truman Cross, the quartermaster, did not return from his usual morning horseback ride, Taylor sent out a patrol. The patrol encountered sixteen hundred Mexican soldiers, who easily overwhelmed them. That evening, an American soldier wrote home: “All idea of there being no fight has ceased. War has commenced, and we look for a conflict within a few days.” Taylor reported to the president in his usual terse style: “Hostilities may now be considered as commenced.”7

  No telegraph line existed between Texas and Washington, so it would be three weeks before the president submitted his message to Congress requesting a declaration of war. The message, like most of Polk’s writings, was long and larded with legal jargon citing “grievous wrongs perpetrated upon our citizens throughout a long period of years.” The United States had maintained a remarkable forbearance through these insults. But, with the Mexican invasion of American soil, the nation must defend itself. That Mexico claimed this territory and that the lengthy oppression of American citizens was an overwrought assertion did not faze the Congress. The House of Representatives took all of thirty minutes to debate Polk’s message and then voted for war. It took a bit longer in the Senate—John C. Calhoun put forth the novel idea that perhaps it might be best to wait and see if the Mexican government would repudiate the ambushers—but who could vote against punishing Mexico for killing Americans?8

  War fever erupted. Crowds thronged city streets shouting “Mexico or Death!” Posters plastered public buildings and businesses. In Illinois, three regiments were called for and fourteen regiments volunteered; Tennessee was forced to hold a lottery as thirty thousand men volunteered for three thousand places. The young editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Walt Whitman, joined the war whooping: “Mexico must be thoroughly chastised … with prompt and effectual hostilities.… Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not spoiling for a quarrel, America knows how to crush as well as how to expand.”9

  It was the idea of expansion that so intrigued the young editor, as it had motivated President Polk and tens of thousands of other Americans. Predestined, sanctified, and inevitable expansion. Celebrating the war declaration, Whitman wrote, “The daring, burrowing energies of the Nation will never rest till the whole of this northern section of the great West World is circled in the mighty Republic—there’s no use denying that fact!” Like the Indian, the Mexican was no worthy steward of the New World: “What has miserable, inefficient Mexico,” Whitman asked, “with her actual tyranny by the few over the many—what has she to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?”10

  Whitman spoke the unbounded optimism of youth. With his parents, he had joined the great migration to the cities, greater than that of the westward movement and enveloped in the same spirit of hope and success. What these emigrants, both to the West and to the cities, held in common was a faith in America, that they and the country were traveling on an unstoppable arc of progress. They identified with their country as they identified themselves. As a saga of empire unfolded on the Rio Grande, its underpinnings could be found on the trails to the Pacific and in the streets of the burgeoning cities.

  When Whitman was a boy of six, in 1825, the marquis de Lafayette visited Brooklyn to lay the cornerstone for the Apprentices’ Library Building. The young republic put great stock in education, for an educated populace was both a requisite for and guarantor of democratic government. A crowd of schoolchildren followed the French general’s procession as he rode up Fulton Street in an open carriage. The construction site was a hole in the ground bounded by piles of dirt, and men lifted youngsters on their shoulders to take in the scene. The marquis descended from the carriage and waded through the crowd. Suddenly, young Walt found himself whisked into the general’s arms for a better view. The encounter made a lasting impression on Whitman. The incident also underscored how close Americans were to the hallowed Revolutionary generation.11

  Yet the Revolutionary generation was gone. A distance had set in. The living had to carry on and interpret a most uncommon legacy. George Bancroft, a historian, politician, and writer, set about to write the history of the United States in the 1830s. His task would take him ten volumes and forty years to complete. How presumptuous it seemed to Europeans that a country barely more than a half century old could think that it had a history. Bancroft’s history was as unique as the nation he wrote about, a sweeping chronicle of providential will and virtuous statesmen coming together to create a unique experiment whose ultimate destiny still awaited. The Founders had become gods and the nation a new Israel.12

  Whitman, like so many other Americans of that era, held a sense of obligation to that first generation, not only to honor their work and ideals but also to fulfill their vision. When Whitman assailed the Mexicans and trumpeted the destiny of America, it was not the bloody yawp of a mindless warmonger but an essay of belief that all of this, pain included, would make the world a better place.

  Whitman believed, as did many other Americans, that almost anything was possible in this new land, just because it was new. As with the person, so with the country—work hard, overcome obstacles, and attain success even at a price. Such was the credo of Young America. In James K. Polk, Young America had a president, and Young America would soon have its poet. And Young America would have a war, and then an empire.

  Polk had little in common with Whitman, but they both shared the optimism of a nation beyond history, a country that would reach the Pacific, build great cities, and lead the world to salvation. When Polk sent Zachary Taylor and the “tan-faced children” of Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Louisiana to that contested patch of ground, it was with the same confidence with which Whitman strode the streets of New York, that this was our land and by right it will be.

  When word reached New York of Congress’s declaration of war on Mexico in May 1846, a boisterous multitude filled the streets shouting hurrahs. The theme of ’76 played across the land. For this generation of Americans, here was an opportunity to honor the Founders’ legacy and extend the experiment across the continent. The United States Army was God’s sword, whose “every cannon ball is a missionary; and every soldier is a Colporteur [a traveling salesman of religious literature].”13

  To be sure, voices, especially in the Whig Party a
nd 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.”16

  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.17

  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.”18

  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.”19

  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 Augus
t 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.”22