A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico
Page 24
The brightest spot on his immediate horizon was the upcoming River and Harbor Convention in Chicago in early July. President Polk had predictably vetoed an act passed by the closely divided Democratic Congress to provide federal funding for river and harbor improvement. Such federal action was anathema to his small-government views. Whigs responded with a call for a great national gathering in Illinois’s burgeoning metropolis, the midwestern transportation hub of Chicago.
It would be Lincoln’s first visit to the city; he was going as a convention delegate from Illinois, and he would deliver a speech. He would finally have the opportunity to promote his ideas about the importance of federal action in the interest of internal improvements, an opportunity denied him during the election when Illinois was focused on war. He would brilliantly unmask the shortsightedness of Democratic policies in the presence of thousands of like-minded and politically connected Whigs from around the country. He had high hopes his speech would bring him positive publicity, perhaps even the beginnings of a national reputation.10
But Hardin’s name remained in the papers. A meeting called to support Taylor for president adopted a resolution that with the death of John Hardin, “the whole country has lost a statesman of exalted patriotism.” Far from Illinois, Hardin was proclaimed “one of Nature’s noble spirits, a soldier tried and true, a rare union of the best qualities of the head and heart.”11
Hardin was lauded by Zachary Taylor and by General Wool, who issued an order naming Hardin’s sacrifice essential to the victory at Buena Vista. This assertion was patently false, for Hardin died in vain, blundering into a trap set by Santa Anna. The deaths of ninety-one Illinois men in a Mexican ravine served no strategic or tactical purpose. But this was too painful to contemplate, let alone verbalize. It was far better that Hardin’s mourners focus on his bravery, leadership, and patriotism, rather than on his willingness to die a pointless death in a war he no longer understood or endorsed.
There were the many poems about Buena Vista that reminded readers of his particular heroism. In May a returning veteran stated that it was Hardin and not Taylor who so brilliantly chose the army’s position at Buena Vista. Taylor chose not to contradict him. In June news of Sarah Hardin’s plans for the funeral was reported as far away as Baltimore, and when the town of Frankfort, Kentucky, asked Sarah Hardin for the right to return her husband’s remains to the “same soil” that held the remains of the Kentucky Hardins, the correspondence was reprinted in distant Albany and New Orleans. Writing for the widow, Hardin’s law partner David Smith insisted that Hardin’s grave rest in Illinois, “where he is admired and beloved.” The use of the present tense appeared to be deliberate. The Kentucky state legislature chose to inscribe Hardin’s name on their memorial to the war dead anyhow. Calhoun County, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, renamed its county seat Hardin in honor of the colonel, despite the fact that there was already a county in Illinois named after John Hardin’s grandfather, the Revolutionary War hero and Indian fighter.12
The public outpouring of grief reached a crescendo in July, just as the River and Harbor Convention came to a close. The twelve-month volunteers recruited at the start of the war had completed their year of service, and most of them returned home. The First and Second Illinois volunteers, retracing the same route that had taken them to Mexico, arrived by the steamer Missouri in St. Louis on July 7. They bore with them the remains of their beloved colonel. Hardin’s funeral became a multiday, two-state affair, its account reprinted in papers large and small around the nation. His coffin, along with that of a Missouri officer, was loaded on a hearse, followed by Hardin’s beloved “war mount”—the “beautiful grey charger” that accompanied him through Mexico.13
Leading Hardin’s charger was Benjamin, the African American servant who had accompanied Hardin to Mexico. Slavery was illegal in Mexico, and from the start of the war the coerced black servants traveling with the army understood that Mexico offered economic and social opportunities denied them in the United States. Many black men taken to war discovered that, for them, Mexico was the real land of freedom. They escaped into Mexico and never returned.14 But Benjamin did not desert. He showed a striking loyalty to Hardin, given the fact that the colonel never mentioned his name in a letter home. Although he was a young man, he not only marched alongside the colonel in life but accompanied his horse home after Hardin’s death, carrying “his clothes, sword, saddle, and other articles” with him through Mexico and Texas.15 And yet, like virtually all the other unheralded servants in Mexico, Benjamin received no public acknowledgment. He received none of the acclaim accorded the white American men of his age who left for Mexico. Nor, in fact, did he receive as much acknowledgment as Hardin’s horse. In reports of the funeral, he was simply Hardin’s unnamed servant.
Benjamin escorted Hardin’s horse and body through the streets of St. Louis in a grand parade accompanied by a military band. Their destination was the courthouse rotunda, where the entire second floor had been decorated in what reporters deemed “excellent taste,” both “solemn and imposing.” The darkened room was lit only by lamps, while military banners and black crepe hung from the columns. Hardin’s coffin, along with that of the officer from Missouri, were placed on a bier, draped in black and edged with white lace.
Thomas Hart Benton addressed the crowd. His comments were brief but highly emotional. He praised the volunteers for fulfilling the “pious and sacred” duty of returning Hardin’s “earthly remains” over three thousand miles, and, ignoring the fact that the rest of the Illinois dead remained in Mexico, he stated that the graves of Americans “should not be trod by foreign feet.” He confirmed that all of Washington, including the president himself, had been absorbed by “anxiety” over the fate of Taylor’s army before learning the “glorious news of a great and almost unparalleled victory.” And he reflected that both Illinois and Missouri had contributed more than their share of the dead at Buena Vista. Pointing to the coffin, he intoned, “The brave, lamented and beloved Hardin lies there!” On behalf of the state of Missouri, he offered thanks for the opportunity to pay tribute to the great hero of Illinois. On the “bloody and glorious field of Buena Vista,” Benton assured them, the “American character … immortalized itself by valor.”16 It was largely a political performance. Hardin’s remains didn’t need to visit St. Louis. But their return provided an opportunity for a leading Democratic politician to glorify the cause of war. With the twelve-month volunteers returning from service, the army was desperately in need of new bodies. Recruiting posters papered the walls of St. Louis that July. The courthouse remained in its mourning garb for two days to allow the “very many who have not yet seen it” an opportunity to experience the “very solemn effect” and “highly impressive character” of the funeral rites. As for Hardin, his coffin was returned to the steamboat Defiance, which delivered the colonel, his horse, and Benjamin to Illinois.17
A week later, John Hardin was laid to rest in his hometown of Jacksonville. It was Bastille Day, a fitting date to bury a man who many believed sacrificed his life for the cause of liberty. It was a hot, dry day, and by midmorning Jacksonville was overflowing with a crowd of fifteen thousand admirers from around the state. There was a festive air in the town, with rural families decked out in their best clothes and parasols “as plenty as blackberries.”18
Jacksonville was a small town, but it was the seat of one of the most fertile counties in the state, and among its eight thousand residents were many men of means originally drawn from New England and Kentucky. It had certain pretensions to both sophistication and what the Whig ruling class considered right-minded reform. It boasted the State Asylum for the Deaf and Mute (procured through John Hardin’s efforts while in the state legislature), along with a small college founded by one of the sons of renowned theologian Lyman Beecher, a Plato Club, an art association, and the “flourishing” Jacksonville Female Academy, where Ellen Hardin was educated. It boasted a number of fine brick homes, t
he oldest of which had been built for John Hardin. The residents of the town were committed to providing “all the refinements of social life” and the “cultivation of … higher aspirations.”19
Town residents liked to call it the “Athens of the West,” but on the day of the funeral the public square felt more like Rome. Mounted marshals dressed in white sashes cavorted in front of the stores, hotels, and offices that lined the square, while a military band entertained the throngs. Jacksonville was a “dry” town, but many in the crowd were visibly drunk, either unaware or unconcerned that the man they arrived to honor had been a lifelong advocate of temperance.20
Among the crowd, but most likely sober, was the entire delegation to the Illinois state constitutional convention, which was then meeting thirty miles away in Springfield in order to revise the state constitution. Among the most serious issues they faced was whether to enshrine into the constitution the ban against the “immigration and introduction, under any circumstances, of free negroes into the state.” That the new constitution would explicitly restrict voting to “white citizens” was a foregone conclusion. During Abraham Lincoln’s first term in the state legislature, he voted in favor of a resolution that “the elective franchise should be kept pure from contamination by the admission of colored voters.” That resolution passed, 35–16.21
Laws restricting the immigration of free blacks into midwestern states were long-standing and widespread, but they were enforced only sporadically before the 1830s. In 1819 and 1829 the Illinois legislation had attempted, and failed, to limit immigration to whites. But starting in the 1830s, rising racism led northern and western states under Democratic control to increase their enforcement and pass increasingly restrictive laws limiting the political and social rights of free African Americans. Black people in Illinois could neither marry white people nor testify against them in court. Public schools in Illinois excluded black children. Abraham Lincoln was on record as opposing the “injustice” of slavery in the legislature in 1837, but he was even more open in his opposition to abolition societies “and the doctrines promulgated by them.”22 Like virtually every other politician in Illinois in the 1840s, Abraham Lincoln appealed to racial prejudice in order to advance his political beliefs. In 1836 and 1840, he accused Martin Van Buren of favoring black suffrage. Had he still been in the statehouse, Lincoln might well have voted to ban black immigration into the state. But this was by no means a foregone conclusion. Amending the state constitution was a serious matter and required sustained debate.
Those attending the constitutional convention had a lot to deal with, but John Hardin’s death took precedence. They took the week off to attend the funeral, and resolved to wear black crepe armbands for thirty days in Hardin’s honor. Also in attendance at the funeral were “many members” of the Chicago River and Harbor Convention. The gathering, which editor Horace Greeley of New York declared to be the largest meeting held in America up to that time, would have fully met Lincoln’s expectations, had his short speech in favor of internal improvements gained any attention at all. But it wasn’t even reprinted in his local Whig paper. The convention concluded on June 7, and delegates to the convention from New England and the South went “many miles out of their course to be present” in Jacksonville for the funeral.23
Lincoln didn’t have to go far out of his way to pay his last respects to John Hardin. He shared a stagecoach through the Illinois prairie with a writer for the Boston Courier, traveling from the convention to the funeral. When they reached the outskirts of Springfield the latter noted that Lincoln “knew, or appeared to know, every body we met, the name of the tenant of every farm-house, and the owner of every plat of ground … he had a kind word, a smile and a bow for everybody on the road, even to the horses, and the cattle, and the swine.” However he felt about the colonel, the congressman-elect’s attendance in Jacksonville would have been expected. Most likely Lincoln, along with his traveling companion from Boston, was part of the crowd jockeying for position in the Bastille Day heat. He would not have been drinking. Like John Hardin, Lincoln never touched the stuff.24
At ten o’clock, a formidable procession got under way. Taking the lead was a militia group named in Hardin’s honor, followed by the governor and his retinue, the delegates to the Illinois state convention, and judges, academics, and doctors. A smartly dressed local volunteer fire company carrying a banner, members of the clergy, and the local Masonic fraternity marched ahead of the funeral car with pallbearers. Behind them was “the noble animal upon which the bold Hardin had ridden for many a weary mile, over many a desert and dangerous waste,” again led by Benjamin. Sarah Hardin and Ellen and her two brothers followed, along with other relatives, and after them came the surviving members of Hardin’s regiment. The assembled citizens trailed behind. A marching band provided a funeral dirge, “impressive and solemn beyond description,” composed especially for the occasion. They stopped at the Hardin family’s “large and hospitable mansion” at the eastern end of town and gathered beneath the “noble trees, reared by the hand now still in death.” Before he was laid to rest by his “Masonic brethren,” the assembled multitude heard a very peculiar eulogy, provided by Hardin’s first law clerk.25
Richard Yates extolled John Hardin’s many virtues. He spoke of his political prowess and the fact that “he was never unsuccessful before any people for any office for which he was a candidate.” He made sure his audience heard all about Hardin’s distinguished forebears in Kentucky, including the original John Hardin. George Washington had selected that John Hardin to negotiate with the Shawnee in 1792, he claimed, “on account of his great knowledge of Indian character, his firmness of purpose, and his fearlessness of danger.” And the forebear died as he lived, “never avoiding the post of danger, and ever ready to serve his country.” Yates also praised John J. Hardin’s “classical education,” “brilliant intellectual facilities,” and “legal ingenuity.” Yates had studied law under Hardin and had a somewhat inflated opinion of his abilities. “To his competitors, he was a powerful opponent,” Yates stated. But Hardin was also beloved. “His uniform, courteous, manly and gentlemanly bearing” won “a warm respect and devoted friendship” among the legal community.26
What Yates focused on, above all, was Hardin’s “firm, noble, manly” character. “Need I say he was brave? He could not be otherwise,” Yates admitted. But unlike Thomas Hart Benton, Yates was not interested in extolling Hardin’s martial virtues or vindicating the losses at Buena Vista. On the contrary, he was intent on remembering a man of “exalted purity of moral character” without a “single vicious habit” or “base appetite.” What Hardin was notable for, Yates claimed, was not his martial virtue but his innate moral restraint. Hardin was “incorruptible” and “exemplary as a devoted and sincere Christian.” In a claim that may have raised the eyebrows of more than one tame, spiritless fellow in the audience, Yates claimed that “never was a nature more fitted for the enjoyment of the pleasures of home” than John Hardin. Never was one “more adapted to the discharge of all duties of a kind father and devoted husband.”27 The Hardin eulogized at his funeral was not the man who raised Illinois’s first regiment to fight America’s war of empire. It was a man who had conquered himself rather than conquering others.
To be sure, John Hardin was a temperance advocate who took pride in his upright “habits.” Just before leaving for Mexico he was elected an elder in the Presbyterian Church, and he had, in fact, donated the Jacksonville lot on which the church stood. His obituaries often contained the claim that “few men, amid the trials and temptations of public life, have been more successful at maintaining an upright and consistent character in all the walks of life” than had John Hardin.28
But to describe him as a restrained family man took some creativity, particularly at a military funeral. David Smith, whom Hardin had unsuccessfully tried to lure to Mexico, and Hardin’s widow and children, were not the only ones in the audience who recognized that for Colonel Hardin, the possibi
lity of military service always trumped the “enjoyment of the pleasures of home.” He was martial to the bone. But this was not how Yates chose to remember him.
This was because Yates had his doubts about the war with Mexico, doubts so strong that he was willing to air them at a military funeral for a war hero, surrounded by the surviving soldiers of Hardin’s regiment. “Differ as men may and do, as to whether the war could have been avoided,” Yates admitted, “there has been but one common, patriotic, national American sentiment” in response. The volunteers turned out, despite the fact that not all supported the cause. “Be the opinions of men on the war what they may, surely none could fail to admire the exalted patriotism which induced our volunteers … to endure privation, to encounter the disease of a strange climate, and to face death.”29
To what end? Buena Vista may have been a great victory to the nation, but “to us, my friends, this victory, however brilliant, is a sad defeat. To us the question comes at what cost?” The men of Illinois fell “in a strange land, far from kindred and home. There were no kind mothers, or sisters there—no wife to pillow their gallant heads.” Yates noted what Benton had not: that the remains of the vast majority of the dead, unlike John Hardin, Henry Clay Jr., and other officers famous or wealthy enough to merit special treatment, had not been returned for burial to the United States. They had been buried where they fell, on Mexican soil, trampled by foreign feet.
And there they remained. Yates asked his listeners to identify with “the deep felt sorrow of the wife, who shall never look on that loved one again,” as well as “the tears of the bright-eyed boys and girls whose father’s form now fills a soldier’s grave in a foreign land.”30 Yates could not bring himself to speak in favor of the war, even as he extolled a man he “loved” who sacrificed his life in Mexico.