A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico

by Amy S. Greenberg

  Polk’s policy of leaving Slidell in Mexico in order “to satisfy the American people that all had been done which ought to have been done to avoid the necessity of resorting to hostilities” was having its intended effect, and not only among military men such as Hardin. At the end of April, just one week before the state Whig convention met to nominate Abraham Lincoln for Congress, rumors of a military maneuver at the border spread across the state. It appeared that Zachary Taylor’s troops, sent recently to the Rio Grande to protect Texas, had retreated. “We do not like the appearance of Gen. Taylor moving from under the guns of the Mexicans,” proclaimed the local Whig paper. “Surely fear could not have induced him to abandon his position.” Something needed to be done about Mexico, the paper concluded. “We think that the Mexican authorities have insulted our government, and robbed our people sufficiently, to call for some other policy than that of suing at their feet for our just rights.”62

  With the fate of Taylor’s army in doubt, and passions against Mexico running high, Abraham Lincoln was nominated for Congress. He was on the verge of achieving his dream, with no premonition of the crisis about to engulf the nation.

  5

  “The Mischief Is Done”

  NICHOLAS TRIST WAS not indifferent to expansion. As chief clerk of the State Department, second in command to Secretary of State Buchanan, he had been appointed by Polk to help him accomplish his goals. He was an excellent choice: his Spanish was impeccable, and his understanding of the “Spanish Character” and internal politics of Mexico set him apart from most other diplomats. Trist distinguished himself in other ways as well. Tall and handsome, with enviable posture and formal manners, the chief clerk radiated poise and confidence. He was fully aware that he was not only one of the best-pedigreed Democrats in the United States but also one of the most capable.

  Trist also brought a little glamour to the administration. Thomas Jefferson had been responsible for his legal education, personally tutoring the young man for two years, sixteen hours a day. Jefferson and Trist’s grandmother, Elizabeth, were old friends, and he early recognized a nascent intelligence in young Nicholas that commanded his attention. Trist’s essential character and beliefs had been shaped by Jefferson: religious skepticism, love of logic, and commitment to abstract notions of justice. Just as important, Jefferson had blessed Trist’s marriage to his granddaughter, Virginia, and made him his private secretary. Trist’s intellect, abilities, and love more than repaid Jefferson’s investment. He served as the aging Jefferson’s companion on rides through the Virginia countryside, long walks around the grounds of Monticello, and countless conversations in the president’s library, the contents of which Trist catalogued. And at the end of his life, Nicholas and Virginia Trist provided Thomas Jefferson with a great-granddaughter, named Martha and called Patsy like Jefferson’s daughter. Jefferson acknowledged his dependence on Trist by naming him an executor of his will.

  Nicholas Trist. Portrait by John Neagle, 1835. Nicholas Trist was thirty-five years old when this portrait was painted by the fashionable artist John Neagle. Trist was on a visit home from his duties as U.S. consul to Cuba. Although he had held the position for only a year, he had already decided that foreign service, particularly in the tropics, did not agree with him. He longed for a posting back in the United States. Courtesy Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., at Monticello. (photo credit 5.1)

  After Jefferson, Andrew Jackson took him under his wing. Jackson thrilled to Trist’s stories of life with the first Democratic leader, and treasured him as a conduit to the president he venerated above all others. Nicholas and Virginia Trist were frequent guests at the executive mansion, and the president often summoned Trist to discuss issues of the day.

  Trist, like so many other Democrats, found Jackson’s powerful personality intoxicating. He gleefully recorded an instance when Jackson announced, “I care nothing for clamors, sir, mark me! I do precisely what I think just and right!” Trist greatly approved of the statement. For his part, Jackson grew nearly as dependent on Trist’s intellect and fine penmanship as had Jefferson. He made Trist his personal secretary, provided him lodgings at the White House, and traveled with him. Jackson later named Trist American consul in Havana. Nicholas found the posting onerous—he worried about catching a tropical disease, and Virginia found the Havana climate intolerable. The Trists returned to Washington.1

  In the spring of 1845, Jackson convinced Polk to hire Trist as chief clerk of the State Department. For a man who had never really wanted to work hard, whose priorities were family life and reading, the forty-five-year-old Trist had built himself a nice career.

  Polk saw in Trist a man who shared his values. They were both southerners and slaveholders, true believers in the party and the expansionist agenda first advocated by the two Democratic giants. Both speculated in southwestern land, and both owned plantations where slaves grew staple crops, although Trist’s sugar plantation in Louisiana was never remotely as profitable as Polk’s cotton plantation in neighboring Mississippi. Trist, moreover, had attended West Point, suggesting that he understood the power of the military to advance American interests. Along with experience and competence, Trist was also known for the attributes Polk valued most: loyalty and discretion.

  But there was no personal relationship between the two. There is no evidence that Polk ever as much as asked Trist about either Jefferson or Jackson, a fact that can only be attributed to Polk’s singular reserve. He never invited the chief clerk for dinner. Secretary of State James Buchanan was a frequent and enthusiastic guest at Sunday dinners at the spacious Trist family abode in Washington, but Polk never visited. Buchanan became well known to Thomas Jefferson’s great-grandchildren; Polk never met them. Had Polk followed the lead of Jackson and Jefferson in befriending Trist, history might have turned out differently. But as it was, Polk never got to know Nicholas Trist well enough to recognize two traits that Jefferson left to his grandson-in-law: the conviction that he was smarter than almost everyone else, and an innate distrust of war.

  The distrust of war was perhaps more his grandmother’s doing than Jefferson’s. The president’s struggles to keep the United States out of war with England and France during the last years of his presidency were well known and had been widely condemned at the time, but Jefferson had also encouraged a somewhat aimless eighteen-year-old Trist to attend the fledgling military academy at West Point. His grandmother, however, did not want Nicholas to become a warrior. While she initially agreed with his course of study (she rarely disagreed with Jefferson about anything), during his second year she sent her grandson a letter that clearly condemned both war and those who waged it. “I would as soon hear of your turning Highway man as to join any army, from ambitious motives,” she told him. “War is at best a horrid calamity and those who wage war for the purpose of subjugating nations to their will are guilty of a heinous crime.” She reminded “Dear Nicholas” that “when the hour arrives that you must quit this World let not your conscience upbraid you with having done any thing to dishonor humanity.” Reminding him of the mental suffering that his father had experienced after killing a man in a duel, Elizabeth Trist asked, “What must be the reflection of those who are instrumental in heaping misery on thousands, how many Widows and Orphans are thrown into the world destitute and wretched”?2

  Not that he required a great deal of convincing on this point. Trist excelled in academics at West Point and made a number of lifelong friends, including Andrew Jackson Donelson, Old Hickory’s nephew and namesake. But neither the spartan living conditions nor the intense physical demands of the military academy agreed with him. Painfully thin and prone to hypochondria, he worried constantly about his health. And he had trouble submitting to authority. As he explained to Donelson, “I claim the liberty of regulating my own conduct by what I deem right.”3 Not surprisingly, Trist gradually came to the conclusion that he was unsuited for a military career. He left West Point without graduating and returned to Monticello determined to marry Vi
rginia Randolph and serve Jefferson any way he could.

  A quarter of a century later, Trist found himself in a far less pleasant position in James K. Polk’s administration. The chief clerk had had no idea that working for this president would prove so arduous. Trist enjoyed books, music, long dinners, and quiet time with his family. Polk, on the other hand, fully believed that “no president who performs his duty faithfully and conscientiously can have any leisure.” Trist’s workload was staggering. “There has never been one day in which I had not on hand some subject (or several subjects) to dispose of which require … deliberate thought and research. And these subjects have all had to be disposed of by snatches,” he wrote miserably. The “enormous mail” was overwhelming, and he was responsible for overseeing the work of the entire staff of the State Department. “Everything that comes passes through my hands in the first instance, anything that goes passes though my hands in the last instance.”4

  He struggled to meet Polk’s high standards. The perfectionist president was convinced that if he handed over “the details and smaller matters to subordinates constant errors will occur.” With no little sense of pride, Polk admitted that “I prefer to supervise the whole operations of the Government myself rather than entrust the public business to subordinates, and this makes my duties very great.”5

  It also made Trist’s duties great. The chief clerk frequently found his letters returned to him for correction. The hours were endless, the intensity stressful, and Trist felt his health declining. “Without a single day’s intermission,” he wrote, “by the time I get away from the office I am broken down for the day.” He began fantasizing about a less onerous posting somewhere far from the center of power. Instead, since James Buchanan, the secretary of state, was frequently out of the office, he found himself running the department.6

  Thus he had quite a clear view of Polk’s provocation of Mexico, and the president’s latest move ordering Zachary Taylor a hundred miles into the Nueces Strip. Polk had already decided that if this tactic failed, he would risk the consequences and simply declare war. On April 25, 1846, he told his assembled cabinet that the time had come to “take a bold and firm course toward Mexico,” and that “forbearance was no longer either a virtue or patriotic.” Employing a language more common to dueling and other affairs of honor among southerners than to high diplomacy, Polk was adamant that the United States “take redress for the injuries done us into our own hands.” According to him, by rejecting minister John Slidell, by refusing to pay claims put forward by U.S. citizens, and above all by refusing to recognize Texas’s ownership of the Nueces Strip, Mexico had insulted the United States to such a degree that honor required the southern neighbor be punished.

  As for the many injuries done to Mexico by the United States—the annexation of Texas, the occupation of the Nueces Strip, the repeated insults offered by America’s incompetent and offensive minister—none of them factored into Polk’s analysis. Mexico, inferior in both race and power, must necessarily bend to the will of its neighbor. To those who suggested that it might be unseemly, even un-Christian, to attack a weaker nation, Polk argued that “we must treat all nations, whether great or small, strong or weak, alike.”7

  Polk’s concept of justice was unquestionably shaped by his experience as a slave master. Some slaveholders, such as Henry Clay, or Thomas Jefferson a generation before, struggled with the knowledge that slavery was wrong. But like most intensely conservative slave masters in the 1840s, Sarah and James Polk believed the domination of white over black was part of God’s plan. James may have been influenced by his wife’s views on this point. He liked to repeat evidence of Sarah’s “acumen” on the topic by relating a conversation the two had had on a hot July afternoon in the White House. Gazing out the window at slaves working the grounds, Sarah interrupted her husband from his writing with the assertion that “the writers of the Declaration of Independence were mistaken when they affirmed that all men are created equal.” When James suggested this was just “one of your foolish fancies,” Sarah elaborated. “There are those men toiling in the heat of the sun, while you are writing, and I am sitting here fanning myself … surrounded with every comfort. Those men did not choose such a lot in life, neither did we ask for ours; we were created for these places.” Domination of the strong over the weak, and white over black or brown, was not just the reality of slavery, it was also, in their perspective, right.8

  That James K. Polk viewed international relations through the lens of slaveholding and dominance is notable but not particularly surprising for a southerner who modeled himself on General Andrew Jackson. Newspapers throughout the South echoed the belief that national honor, like personal honor, was a matter of highest significance, one that sometimes required the physical reprimand of inferiors. Just days before Polk addressed his cabinet, the New Orleans Bulletin explained that “the United States have borne more insult, abuse, insolence and injury, from Mexico, than one nation has ever before endured from another.… They are left no alternative but to extort by arms, the respect and justice which Mexico refuses to any treatment less harsh.” If not, other nations would lose all respect for the United States. The New Orleans Delta warned that if the United States did not take “active measures” against Mexico, “every dog, from the English mastiff to the Mexican cur, may snap at and bite us with impunity.”9

  Sarah Polk, as fervent a believer in Manifest Destiny as her husband, agreed that the nation’s honor must be upheld at all costs. “Whatever sustained the honor and advanced the interests of the country, whether regarded as democratic or not,” she stated at a dinner party in defense of war, she “admired and applauded.”10

  These southerners were not alone. There were certainly northerners who believed in April 1846 that Mexico deserved punishment for the insults it had offered the United States. Walt Whitman, editor of a Democratic newspaper in Brooklyn, declared that “Mexico must be thoroughly chastised.… Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, America knows how to crush, as well as how to expand!”11

  But the threats and bluster were loudest from the South. It was the men of the South, that group that referred to themselves as “the chivalry,” who specialized in what Massachusetts Whig Robert Winthrop called “gasconading bravadoes.” The Milwaukee Daily Sentinel and Gazette saw Slidell’s mission for what it was: a plot to insult Mexico and then demand satisfaction for an insult supposedly done by Mexico against the United States. It was, in the newspaper’s judgment, a typically southern response. On April 29, the paper predicted that although Mexico “acted with becoming spirit and self respect” in dismissing Slidell, the United States “will insist upon ‘satisfaction,’ and as it is a question between us and a weaker nation on the South, the ‘chivalry’ will, doubtless, back up his demand and call upon the President and Congress to declare war against Mexico.” Northerners, far more than southerners, were likely to agree with the paper that “it will be an evil day for Human Progress, Civilization and Christianity when America disturbs the peace of the world.”12

  Nor was everyone in the cabinet ready for war in late April. Only Secretary of State Buchanan seconded the proposition that Polk “recommend a declaration of war” against Mexico to Congress. There was still the tricky matter of the Oregon boundary: surely it should be resolved before attacking Mexico. The cabinet agreed to discuss the matter further the following week. Two days later, Congress passed a joint resolution to end the joint occupation of Oregon with England, and invited the two countries to settle the matter amicably. Polk signed the bill and, with a clear message that he was willing to compromise and hand over the northern portion of the territory to England, had it sent across the Atlantic. Fully expecting the British to comply with a settlement that was very much in their interest, Polk turned his attention to Mexico. He began drafting a war message to present to Congress.13

  In Illinois, one politician was almost as anxious as Polk for hostiliti
es to begin. The Illinois press was full of rumors of hostilities at the border, and on May 2, John Hardin inquired if his good friend, Congressman Stephen A. Douglas, had any inside information about affairs with Mexico. Douglas was one of Illinois’s most powerful politicians and a leader of the state’s Democratic Party, but the secretive president wasn’t about to share with anyone, not even leaders of his own party, the fact that he had determined to go to war. “We are in a state of quasi war with that country, and are left to conjecture as to what is to be the sequel,” Douglas wrote his friend. Hardin was fixated on California. He suggested to Douglas that in the event of war, troops immediately march to California from the Midwest and seize California by land. And Hardin himself should be the man to organize those troops. Douglas was supportive but noncommittal, for in truth he knew no more than Hardin. “The intentions of the administration in this respect are a profound secret. No one pretends to know what course will be pursued,” he wrote Hardin.14

  Much depended on one unprepossessing man; a potbellied, undereducated, slave-owning career military officer from Virginia. Zachary Taylor favored civilian clothes and a large straw hat, and his résumé was exceedingly modest, consisting primarily of a victory over the Seminole tribe in 1837 and several decades of garrison duty. He was no intellectual, and had heretofore shown little genius for the science of war. Many of his junior officers questioned his abilities. But the enlisted men adored him for his lack of pretension and common touch. Astride his beloved mount, Old Whitey, Taylor inspired veneration among the troops, despite the fact that the steed’s appearance was a bit nobler than the rider’s.