Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  "Mr. Polk's War" evoked opposition from Whigs in Congress, who voted against the resolution affirming a state of war with Mexico in May 1846. After the Democratic majority passed this resolution, however, most Whigs supported appropriations for the armies confronting enemy forces. Having witnessed the disappearance of the Federalist party after it opposed the War of 1812, a Whig congressman said sardonically that he now favored "war, pestilence, and famine." Nevertheless, Whigs continued to accuse Polk of having provoked the conflict by sending

  1. Polk's motives and actions are laid out in detail by Charles G. Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist 1843–1846 (Princeton, 1966).

  American troops into territory claimed by Mexico. They sniped at the administration's conduct of the war and opposed territorial acquisition as a result of it. Encouraged by the elections of 1846 and 1847, in which they picked up 38 seats and gained control of the House, Whigs intensified their attacks on Polk. One of these new Whig congressmen, a lanky, craggy Illinoisian with gray eyes, disheveled black hair, and illfitting clothes introduced resolutions calling for information about the exact spot where Mexicans had shed American blood to start the war. Though the House tabled Abraham Lincoln's resolutions, it did pass one sponsored by another Whig declaring that the war had been "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President."2

  Like the war, Manifest Destiny was mainly a Democratic doctrine. Since the day when Thomas Jefferson overcame Federalist opposition to the purchase of Louisiana, Democrats had pressed for the expansion of American institutions across the whole of North America whether the residents—Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, Canadians—wanted them or not. When God crowned American arms with success in the Revolution, vouchsafed a Democratic congressman in 1845, He had not "designed that the original States should be the only abode of liberty on earth. On the contrary, He only designed them as the great center from which civilization, religion, and liberty should radiate and radiate until the whole continent shall bask in their blessing." "Yes, more, more, more!" echoed John L. O'Sullivan, inventor of the phrase Manifest Destiny. "More . . . till our national destiny is fulfilled and . . . the whole boundless continent is ours."3

  Whigs were not averse to extending the blessings of American liberty, even to Mexicans and Indians. But they looked askance at doing so by force. Befitting the evangelical origins of much Whig ideology, they placed their faith in mission more than in annexation. " 'As a city set upon a hill,' " the United States should inculcate the ideas of "true republicanism" by example rather than conquest, insisted many Whigs.

  2. CG, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., 64, 95, and Appendix, 93–95. The best study of opposition to the war is John H. Schroeder, Mr. Polk's War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848 (Madison, 1973). But see also Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The War with Mexico in the American Imagination (New York, 1985), which shows how popular the war was with the public outside of New England and a few other areas along the Atlantic seaboard.

  3. John Wentworth of Illinois and O'Sullivan quoted in Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (New York, 1963), 28, 52.

  Although it would "be a gain to mankind if we could spread over Mexico the Idea of America—that all men are born free and equal in rights," said antislavery clergyman Theodore Parker in 1846, "we must first make real those ideas at home." While the Democratic notion of progress envisioned the spread of existing institutions over space, the Whig idea envisaged the improvement of those institutions over time. "Opposed to the instinct of boundless acquisition stands that of Internal Improvement," said Horace Greeley. "A nation cannot simultaneously devote its energies to the absorption of others' territories and the improvement of its own."4

  Acquisition of Mexican territory was Polk's principal war aim. The desire of American settlers in Oregon and California for annexation to the United States had precipitated the dual crises with Britain and Mexico in 1846. Praising these emigrants as "already engaged in establishing the blessings of self-government in the valleys of which the rivers flow to the Pacific," Polk had pledged to extend American law to "the distant regions which they have selected for their homes."5 A treaty with Britain secured Oregon north to the 49th parallel. But efforts to persuade Mexico to sell California and New Mexico had failed. So Polk decided to use force. Soon after becoming president he ordered the Pacific fleet to stand ready to seize California's ports in the event of war with Mexico. In the fall of 1845 Polk instructed the U.S. consul at Monterey to encourage annexation sentiment among American settlers and disaffected Mexicans.

  Americans in California needed little encouragement, especially when they had among them a glory-hunting captain of the army topographical corps, John C. Frémont. Famous for his explorations of the West, Frémont was also the son-in-law of Missouri's powerful Senator Thomas Hart Benton. When rumors of war with Mexico reached the Sacramento valley, Frémont took it upon himself to assist settlers in an uprising that proclaimed an independent California. This "bear flag republic" (its flag bore the image of a grizzly bear) enjoyed a brief existence before its citizens celebrated official news of the war that ensured their annexation by the United States.

  4. Schroeder, Mr. Polk's War, 75–76; Parker, "A Sermon of War," in Robert E. Collins, ed., Theodore Parker: American Transcendentalist (Metuchen, N.J., 1973), 252; Greeley quoted in Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979), 21.

  5. Sellers, Polk, 210.

  While these proceedings unfolded, Missouri volunteers and a regiment of regulars were marching over the Santa Fe trail to seize the capital of New Mexico. Commanded by Stephen Watts Kearny, these tough dragoons occupied Santa Fe on August 18, 1846, without firing a shot. After raising the American flag, Kearny left behind a garrison and pushed across the desert to California with a hundred men who joined a few hundred sailors, marines, and volunteers to subdue Mexican resistance there by January 1847. During the next several months a string of stunning American victories south of the Rio Grande culminating in the capture of Mexico City ensured the permanence of these American conquests. The only remaining question was how much territory to take.

  Polk's appetite was originally sated by New Mexico and California. In April 1847 he sent Nicholas Trist to Mexico as a commissioner to negotiate a treaty for these provinces. But the ease of American conquest made Polk suddenly hungry for more territory. By the fall of 1847 a Democratic movement to annex "all Mexico"—or at least several additional provinces—was in full cry. The whipsaw cuts and rasps of all-Mexico Democrats and no-territory Whigs left Trist on a precarious limb three thousand miles away in Mexico City where the proud Santa Anna proved reluctant to yield up half his country. Polk sided with the hard-liners in Washington and recalled Trist in October 1847. But a breakthrough in negotiations appeared possible just as Trist received the recall dispatch, so he disobeyed orders and signed a treaty that fulfilled Polk's original instructions. In return for a payment by the United States of $15 million plus the assumption of Mexican debts to American citizens, Mexico recognized the Rio Grande boundary of Texas and ceded New Mexico and upper California to the United States.6 When this Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo reached Washington in February 1848, Polk initially spurned it. On second thought, however, he submitted it to the Senate, where the Whigs would have enough votes to defeat any treaty that sliced off more Mexican territory but might approve one that avoided the appearance of conquest by paying Mexico for California and New Mexico. The strategy worked; the Senate ratified the treaty by a vote of 38–14, with five of the opposition votes coming from Democrats

  6. This cession included the present states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of New Mexico and Arizona, and parts of Oklahoma, Colorado, and Wyoming as well as one-third of Texas.

  who wanted more territory and seven from Whigs who wanted none.7

  This triumph of Manifest Destiny may have reminded some Americans of Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophecy that "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."8 He was right. The poison was slavery. Jefferson's Empire for Liberty had become mostly an empire for slavery. Territorial acquisitions since the Revolution had added the slave states of Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas to the republic, while only Iowa, just admitted in 1846, had increased the ranks of free states. Many northerners feared a similar future for this new southwestern empire. They condemned the war as part of a "slave power conspiracy" to expand the peculiar institution. Was not President Polk a slaveholder? Had he not been elected on a platform of enlarging slave territory by annexing Texas? Were not pro-slavery southerners among the most aggressive proponents of Manifest Destiny? Did not most of the territory (including Texas) wrested from Mexico lie south of the old Missouri Compromise line of 36° 30′—a traditional demarcation between freedom and slavery? The Massachusetts legislature indicted this "unconstitutional" war with its "triple object of extending slavery, of strengthening the slave power, and of obtaining control of the free states." James Russell Lowell's rustic Yankee philosopher Hosea Biglow fretted that

  They just want this Californy

  So's to lug new slave-states in

  To abuse ye, an' to scorn ye,

  An' to plunder ye like sin.9

  Polk could not understand what the fuss was about. "In connection with the Mexican War," he wrote in his diary, slavery was "an abstract question. There is no probability that any territory will ever be acquired from Mexico in which slavery would ever exist." Agitation was thus "not only mischievous but wicked." But a good many congressmen—

  7. Senate Executive Docs., 30 Cong., 1 Sess., no. 52, p. 36. The other two opposition votes came from Democrats who disliked the treaty for other reasons.

  8. Edward W. Emerson and Waldo E. Forbes, eds., Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols. (Boston, 1909–14), VII, 206.

  9. H. V. Ames, ed., State Documents on Federal Relations (Philadelphia, 1906), 241–42; The Works of James Russell Lowell, Standard Library ed., 11 vols. (Boston, 1890), VIII, 46–47.

  even some in Polk's own party—did not share the president's conviction. They believed agitation of the question necessary. This issue overshadowed all others from 1846 to 1850. Hundreds of congressmen felt moved to speak on the matter. Some of them agreed with Polk that it was an "abstract" issue because "natural conditions" would exclude slavery from these lands. "The right to carry slaves to New Mexico or California is no very great matter," said John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, because "no sensible man would carry his slaves there if he could."10 But numerous southerners disagreed. They noted that cotton was already grown in river valleys of New Mexico. Slaves had labored in mines for centuries and would prove ideal mineworkers in these territories. "California is peculiarly adapted for slave labor," resolved a southern convention. "The right to have [slave] property protected in the territory is not a mere abstraction." A Georgia newspaper heightened abolitionist suspicions of a slave-power conspiracy by professing a broader purpose in opening these territories to slavery: it would "secure to the South the balance of power in the Confederacy, and, for all coming time . . . give to her the control in the operations of the Government."11

  Of the congressmen who spoke on this matter, more than half expressed confidence (if southern) or fear (if northern) that slavery would go into the new territories if allowed to do so.12 Many of them conceded that the institution was unlikely to put down deep roots in a region presumed to be covered with deserts and mountains. But to make sure, northern congressmen voted for a resolution to exclude slavery therefrom. This was the fateful Wilmot Proviso. As Congress neared adjournment on the sultry Saturday night of August 8, 1846, Pennsylvania's first-term Representative David Wilmot rose during the debate on an appropriations bill for the Mexican War and moved an amendment: "that, as an express and fundamental condition of the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico . . . neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory."13

  10. Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Diary of James K. Polk during His Presidency, 1845 to 1849, 4 vols. (Chicago, 1910), II, 308; Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1978), 77.

  11. Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York, 1970), 18–20; Milledgeville Federal Union, Nov. 10, 1846, quoted in Schroeder, Mr. Polk's War, 55.

  12. Desmond D. Hart, "The Natural Limits of Slavery Expansion: The Mexican Territories as a Test Case," Mid-America, 52 (1970), 119–31.

  13. CG, 29 Cong., 1 Sess., 1217.

  More lay behind this maneuver than met the eye. Antislavery conviction motivated Wilmot and his allies, but so did a desire to settle old political scores. Wilmot acted for a group of northern Democrats who were vexed with Polk and fed up with southern domination of the party. Their grievances went back to 1844 when southerners had denied Martin Van Buren the presidential nomination because he refused to endorse the annexation of Texas. The Polk administration had given the patronage in New York to anti-Van Buren "Hunkers." Rate reductions in the Walker Tariff of 1846 embittered Pennsylvania Democrats who thought they had secured a pledge for higher duties on certain items. Polk's veto of a rivers and harbors bill angered Democrats from Great Lakes and western river districts. The administration's compromise on the 49th parallel for the Oregon boundary incensed the many Democrats who had chanted the slogan "Fifty-four forty or fight!" Having voted for the annexation of Texas with its disputed Rio Grande border at risk of war with Mexico, they felt betrayed by Polk's refusal to risk war with Britain for all of Oregon. "Our rights to Oregon have been shamefully compromised," declared an Ohio Democrat. "The administration is Southern, Southern, Southern! . . . Since the South have fixed boundaries for free territory, let the North fix boundaries for slave territories." "The time has come," agreed Connecticut Congressman Gideon Welles, "when the Northern democracy should make a stand. Every thing has taken a Southern shape and been controlled by Southern caprice for years." We must, Welles concluded "satisfy the northern people . . . that we are not to extend the institution of slavery as a result of this war."14

  When Wilmot introduced his proviso, therefore, he released the pent-up ire of northern Democrats, many of whom cared less about slavery in new territories than about their power within the party. Northern Whigs, who had a more consistent antislavery record, were delighted to support the proviso. This bipartisan northern coalition in the House passed it over the united opposition of southern Democrats and Whigs. This was a dire omen. The normal pattern of division in Congress had

  14. Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 22, Aug. 5, 1846, quoted in Stephen E. Maizlish, The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics 1844–1856 (Kent, 1983), 56, 60–61; Welles to Martin Van Buren, July 28, 1846, June 30, 1848, quoted in Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States 1837–1860 (New York, 1976), 143; speech by Welles in the House, Jan. 7, 1847, in CG, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., 136. See also Eric Foner, "The Wilmot Proviso Revisited," JAH, 56 (1969), 262–79.

  occurred along party lines on issues such as the tariff, the Bank, federal aid to internal improvements, and the like. The Wilmot Proviso wrenched this division by parties into a conflict of sections. The political landscape would never again be the same. "As if by magic," commented the Boston Whig, "it brought to a head the great question that is about to divide the American people."15

  The full impact of the proviso did not become apparent immediately, for Congress adjourned in 1846 before the Senate could vote on it. But northern Democrats reintroduced it at the next session, prompting an anguished lament from the president, who began to comprehend the whirlwind he was reaping as the result of his war. "The slavery question is assuming a fearful . . . aspect," wrote Polk in his diary. It "cannot fail to destroy the Democratic party, if it does not ultimately threaten the Union itself."16 The House again passed Wilmot's amendment by a se
ctional vote. But the South's greater power in the Senate (15 slave states and 14 free states composed the Union in 1847) enabled it to block the proviso there. Arm-twisting by the administration eventually compelled enough northern Democrats in the House to change their votes to pass the appropriations bill without the proviso. But the crisis had not been resolved—only postponed.

  Free-soil sentiment in 1847 can be visualized in three concentric circles. At the center was a core of abolitionists who considered slavery a sinful violation of human rights that should be immediately expiated. Surrounding and drawing ideological nourishment from them was a larger circle of antislavery people who looked upon bondage as an evil—by which they meant that it was socially repressive, economically backward, and politically harmful to the interests of free states.17 This circle comprised mainly Whigs (and some Democrats) from the Yankee belt of states and regions north of the 41st parallel who regarded this issue

  15. Aug. 15, 1846, quoted in Potter, Impending Crisis, 23.

  16. Quaife, ed., Diary of Polk, II, 305.

  17. Three-fifths of the slaves were counted as part of the population on which representation in the House was based. This gave southern voters relatively greater influence in national politics than northern voters. Because the average population of the slave states was less than that of free states, the equal representation of each state by two senators gave the South disproportionate power in the Senate as well. And since each state's electoral vote equaled its combined number of senators and representatives, the South also enjoyed disparate power in presidential elections. With 30 percent of the voting population in 1848, the slave states cast 42 percent of the electoral votes.

  as more important than any other in American politics. The outer circle contained all those who had voted for the Wilmot Proviso but did not necessarily consider it the most crucial matter facing the country and were open to compromise. This outer circle included such Whigs as Abraham Lincoln, who believed slavery "an unqualified evil to the negro, the white man, and the State" which "deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites," but who also believed that "the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils" by uniting the South in defense of the institution.18 The outer circle also included Democrats, like Martin Van Buren, who cared little about the consequences of slavery for the slaves and had been allied with the "slave power" until it had blocked Van Buren's nomination in 1844.