A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico
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Polk was sympathetic to Houston’s vision, but the All-Mexico Movement, as it was known, did nothing to improve the prospects of peace. And peace, above all else, was what Polk dreamed about—on the rare occasions when he slept, that is. The vitriol and controversy combined with his ceaseless labor took an increasing toll on his fragile health. Night after night Sarah pleaded with him to stop work and come to bed, while members of his inner circle noted his “shortened and enfeebled step, and the air of languor and exhaustion which sat upon him.”30 Yet Polk kept going. What he needed was peace with honor, and as much of Mexico as he could take with it.
11
Duty and Justice
POLK’S FETISH for secrecy was open knowledge. But generally speaking, what he chose to hide remained hidden. The president, therefore, had every confidence that Nicholas Trist’s assignment would remain a “profound secret.” Commissioner Plenipotentiary Trist traveled as a special agent so that Polk could bypass the Senate, and he was paid out of the president’s private funds. He adopted an alias, “Dr. Tarreau,” a French merchant, so as to avert suspicion. And Trist was known for his discretion; Andrew Jackson had vouched for it.1
This mission was strictly classified. In the president’s view, it was no one’s business that he was making overtures for peace to a despised and diminished Mexico. Publicity could only bring criticism, both from the extremists in his own party and from the Whigs, who were clearly in the ascendancy. “The success of Trist’s mission,” he wrote in his diary, “must depend mainly on keeping it a secret from that portion of the Federal [Whig] press & leading men in the country who, since the commencement of the war with Mexico, have been giving ‘aid and comfort’ to the enemy by their course.” With luck, Trist would be home, treaty in hand, before the hostile Thirtieth Congress was seated at the start of December. Until then, “the strictest injunctions of Secrecy” must be followed.2
But within three days of Trist’s departure from Washington, the New York Herald disclosed both the details of Trist’s mission and the terms of the proposed treaty, “with remarkable accuracy and particularity.” Polk fumed to his diary, “I have not been more vexed or excited since I have been president.” Worst of all, he had no idea whom to blame for the “treachery.”3 He suspected the secretary of state, whose ambitions for the presidency had positively crippled his objectivity and ability to do his job. Buchanan, in turn, pointed to Virginia Trist. Perhaps Trist himself was to blame.
It was impossible to determine who was at fault. The leaks continued. Just days after Trist “fetched up, to use a seaman’s phrase, at Vera Cruz,” his journey was so well publicized that Trist’s own family and friends looked “to the newspapers” to learn of his progress. “He writes but seldom,” Trist’s brother wrote to Virginia, but “I see enough about him in the news papers.”4
Soon the very pretense of secrecy appeared futile to virtually everyone except Polk. The embedded journalists spoke openly of Trist’s movements, as did the press and common soldiers in Mexico. Whig newspapers accused Polk of sending Trist to Mexico in order to “spy” on General Scott or otherwise undermine his operations. And before the end of the year, both Trist and his peace treaty appeared as the subplot of popular author Charles Averill’s The Mexican Ranchero; or, The Maid of the Chapparal: A Romance of the Mexican War. The pulp novelette was available for purchase for twenty-five cents at “periodical depots” throughout the United States and Canada, as well as from wholesale agents in cities throughout the Midwest and along the eastern seaboard. The “trade” was of course furnished with a “liberal discount.”5
From a pro-war perspective there were worse places for Nicholas Trist to land, although Polk probably didn’t see it that way. The Mexican Ranchero was one of the better works in the healthy genre of sensationalistic war fiction. Cheap potboilers printed on rough paper with eye-catching covers, war novelettes placed fictional characters in real battles and featured plenty of sex, violence, heroism, and racial stereotyping. A large audience of readers who appreciated convoluted plotting and nonstop action consumed them voraciously, particularly urban working men. The Mexican Ranchero, like many of its genre, featured romance between a white American soldier and a light-skinned Mexican woman. This romance helped readers imagine that the ultimate resolution of their violent war would not be theft, misery, and the forced displacement of Mexican citizens, but a sort of international marriage that would bring bliss to both husband and wife, United States and Mexico.6
This was a popular fantasy, particularly among the growing minority of expansionist Democrats who hoped to annex all of Mexico to the United States. Sam Houston recommended that the crowd of men who gathered in New York City in support of annexing all of Mexico “take a trip of exploration there, and look out for the beautiful senoritas, or pretty girls, and if you should choose to annex them, no doubt the result of this annexation will be a most powerful and delightful evidence of civilization.” Some who heard him almost certainly had read Mexican Ranchero. Perhaps they had a copy at home. The editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger used the same reasoning in December 1847 in response to those who claimed Mexicans were too foreign to annex. “Our Yankee young fellows and the pretty senoritas will do the rest of the annexation, and Mexico will soon be Anglo-Saxonized, and prepared for the confederacy.”7
Nor was this fantasy limited to politicians, editors, and novelists. Some in the occupying army had similar thoughts. One Indiana captain wrote his brother that in order to conquer the country “every man is required to give in his mite and I shall therefore commit matrimony with the first decent, clean and respectable, yellow Mexican gall I can meet with—I will annex myself to this country by some such desperate act.” What Houston and the Public Ledger both understood was that sex sells, and that the fantasy of sex with Mexican women, or “personal annexation,” could help sell white American workingmen on absorbing Mexico, just as surely as it could sell novels. Given the increasing clamor for taking all of Mexico in the fall of 1847, the sales pitch appears to have been working.8
Rejon the Ranchero. Rejon, the eponymous guerrilla partisan of the 1847 dime novel The Mexican Ranchero, determined to kidnap Nicholas Trist to prevent peace between the two countries. Dime novels such as The Mexican Ranchero promoted both the war and annexation of Mexican territory with thrilling tales of adventure and romance on the front. Charles Averill, The Mexican Ranchero (1847), 53. (photo credit 11.1)
It was at this moment that Trist’s mission was fictionalized, offered for sale for twenty-five cents, and avidly consumed by readers around the country. The fate of his treaty is a key plot of The Mexican Ranchero, secondary only to the romantic travails of three Mexican and three American characters hell-bent on personal annexation. At the start of the action a band of Mexican guerrillas, led by the skilled partisan Rejon the Ranchero, are doing their best to derail the peace process by killing U.S. soldiers. They take the Mississippi Volunteer Corps hostage and hatch a plot to kill General Taylor. They also decide to waylay Nicholas Trist, the only man who can bring peace to Mexico. Rejon sends a mysterious and beautiful cross-dressing female ranchero called the Maid of the Chapparal to capture the American minister.
Trist would have been flattered by his portrait in this novel. As imagined by the author, Trist is no ordinary diplomat. A sterling specimen of American Anglo-Saxon manhood, the fictional Trist stands tall, with a “muscular and well developed form,” and a “face on whose every lineament was marked the impress of thought. That bold, open countenance and towering brow told at once of a powerful intellect and commanding mind.” Diplomats were not usually elevated to heroic status in war novelettes. It is a testimony to the public’s knowledge of and concern about Trist’s peace mission in the fall of 1847 that Charles Averill was willing to endow diplomacy, and the making of a treaty, with the highest level of manliness and drama.9
The fictional Trist’s personal virtues are not sufficient to keep his mission secret, however. The Maid of the Chapparal h
ad no more problem locating Trist than did the American newspapers, which repeatedly enraged the president by reporting the details of his peace mission. “You are Mr. Trist, the American diplomatist, commissioned to negociate a peace?… You are even now on your way to the capital with peace propositions in your possession?” the female ranchero asked him. “ ‘You are strangely correct …, mysterious lady,’ answered the wondering Trist.—‘This mission was supposed to be a secret between myself and my government. How you have discovered it, senora, I can not pretend to surmise.’ ”10
Trist is eventually rescued by the escaped Mississippi Volunteers, and Rejon is revealed to be Ambassador Don Almora, not an enemy at all, but rather a friend to America. Mexican characters marry Americans, and the reader is assured that the eminently capable Trist is about to bring the war to a close with his skillful diplomacy. “The war is well nigh self-exhausted; Peace with its smiling face is treading close upon the bloody footsteps of the grim old King of Carnage.”11
If only Nicholas Trist’s reality had been so simple. In The Mexican Ranchero the only thing standing between diplomatist Trist and peace was a band of misguided rancheros. These Mexican partisans needed only to accept the love offered them by their American invaders to realize that they were all one family. Peace was on its way, but what kind of peace? The author never speculates on the ultimate fate of Mexico. How much of it would be absorbed by the United States? Would it continue to exist as an independent country? And the increasing discord in the United States between opponents of the war and aggressive expansionists demanding all of Mexico played no role in the drama. As Trist learned in the fall of 1847, guerrilla partisans were the least of his troubles. For in truth it was not the people of Mexico but his own president who was attempting to waylay him on his way to the capital “with peace propositions in his possession.” And it appeared doubtful that anyone was coming to save him or his treaty.
Polk regretted sending Trist to Mexico as soon as he received his envoy’s first petulant letter about Scott. The president complained that “because of the personal controversy between these self important personages, the golden moment for concluding a peace with Mexico may have passed.” It was bad enough when Trist and Scott were quarreling like children. But when the two men reconciled, matters actually became more ominous. Scott was the last confidant he wanted for his agent; moreover, months went by without any official communication from the front, and early evidence suggested that the minister was easy to manipulate.12
Trist’s initial negotiations with Santa Anna were not promising. In fact, he wasn’t even supposed to be negotiating: his job was to see that the treaty Polk had stipulated was signed by Mexico. His “plain duty,” as Polk put it, was “to submit the ultimatum of his Government.” Yet Trist had the temerity over the summer to forward a Mexican proposal for a boundary at the Nueces River. Given that Polk’s excuse for invading Mexico was that American blood had been shed on American soil when the Mexican army crossed the Rio Grande, nothing was more likely to embarrass him in front of his political opponents than news that a U.S. representative openly acknowledged a possible Mexican claim to the Nueces Strip. “You have placed us in an awkward position,” Buchanan wrote Trist privately. “To propose” that the United States could possibly “abandon that portion of our country where Mexico attacked our forces and on our right to which the Whigs have raised such an unfounded clamor, will be a fruitful case of appeal against us in the next Congress.”13
Polk was exceedingly irritated that “Mr. Trist has managed the negotiation very bunglingly and with no ability.” No further progress toward peace appeared to have been made since then. Polk’s imagination ran wild with visions of a conspiracy, Trist as Scott’s “mere tool … employed in ministering to his malignant passions.”14 The two of them would undermine everything he had worked for.
After his hopes for a speedy treaty were dashed, the president, along with other expansionists, found that his appetite for Mexico was growing. He had originally directed Trist to settle for nothing less than a southern boundary at the Rio Grande, as well as the annexation of Mexico’s provinces of Upper California and New Mexico. But now he imagined an American Sonora, an American Baja, and full command of the Gulf of California between the two. In September Polk told his cabinet that he was “decidedly in favour of insisting on the acquisition of more territory.” The United States should take Tamaulipas and the line of thirty-one degrees. And twenty million dollars was too much to pay.15
Trist and his treaty had clearly become a liability. But there was no unanimity in the cabinet about how to proceed. Possibly Trist was making a treaty; perhaps he already had done so. Given the delay in communications, it was impossible to know what was happening. Matters were becoming strained in the cabinet. Buchanan was “nervous” and exhibiting “a degree of weakness” in his pursuit of the presidency that Polk found “almost incredible.” Secretary of the Treasury Walker worked so hard that Polk was convinced that “his general health may be destroyed and his life endangered, if he continues to apply himself as he has heretofore done.” Polk was particularly sensitive to this after “careworn and “overwhelmed” Secretary of War Marcy’s nervous breakdown.16
This left Polk doing Marcy’s job in addition to his own. He was already “devoting all my time & energies” to micromanaging the war and “examining all the details of everything that is done, as far as it [is] possible for me to do so.” It was a “vast amount of labor” made worse by the fact that Polk didn’t feel he could trust the subordinate officers in the War Department, almost all of whom were Whigs. “Many of them are indifferent and … take no sort of responsibility on themselves, and this renders it necessary that the Secretary of War & myself should look after them, even in the performance of the ordinary routine of details in their offices.”17
Polk’s health was visibly failing. The chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs called on Sarah Polk to warn her that James “was wearing himself out with constant and excessive application, that if he did not take some recreation, he would die soon after the close of his term.” He suggested that she “insist upon his driving out morning and evening; that she must order her carriage and make him go with her.” Sarah, who understood her husband’s destructive work habits better than anyone, attempted to follow the advice. Day after day she ordered their carriage, “and the carriage waited and waited, until it was too late. It would have been obliged to wait all day, for somebody was always in the office, and Mr. Polk would not, or could not, come,” she later recalled. It was hopeless. “I seldom succeeded in getting him to drive with me.”18
James Knox Polk. The exact date when Polk sat for this daguerreotype is unclear, but his haggard appearance and thin hair indicate that it was late in his presidential term or perhaps in the months after he left office. One letter writer who saw Polk in the summer of 1847 described his “fatigued and careworn countenance, which me-thought, might turn the hearts of some of his most violent opponents” (Sandweiss, Eyewitness to War, 241). Daguerreotype with applied color, ca. 1847–49, 213/16 × 2⅜ inches. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, P1981.65.12. (photo credit 11.2)
In early October, Polk was struck by a serious attack of chills and fever. Bedridden, he “transacted no business of any kind” for nearly a week. Polk wasn’t used to idleness, and long days in bed left him too much time to think about the war. How had things gone so wrong? And how could he salvage the coming presidential election for the Democratic Party?19
When he finally rose from bed, still too “feeble” to remain standing for more than a few minutes at a time, Polk’s first decision was to fire Trist. He called the cabinet to his bedroom. He explained that if Trist remained in Mexico, it might well convince the Mexican government that “the U.S. were so anxious for peace that they would ultimate[ly] conclude one upon the Mexican terms.” The cabinet was unanimous in agreement: Trist should be fired. Nor would Polk appoint any other negotiator. It would be up to M
exico to come to him, and the longer the Mexicans waited, the more it would cost them. Buchanan sent a recall letter to Trist. All negotiations were to be immediately suspended, and Trist was to return home at once.20
Just two weeks later Polk learned of Scott’s capture of Mexico City. Rather than regret recalling Trist, however, the news only strengthened his conviction that Trist and the treaty he carried were woefully inadequate to the new reality. Matters now appeared in an entirely different light than they had back in April. The war was won, so why not escalate his demands? In October 1846, General Taylor had suggested that a boundary at either the Rio Grande or the “Sierra Madre Line,” giving the United States the cities of Matamoros and Monterrey and the states of Chihuahua and Sonora, “was the best course that can be adopted.” He told Polk that the Sierra Madre line would be easily defensible with small garrisons at Monterrey, Saltillo, Monclova, Linares, Victoria, and Tampico. This recommendation appeared sound, and it was conservative compared to the views of some in his own cabinet. Walker openly favored “taking the whole of Mexico.” Although Buchanan had initially argued against taking any territory from Mexico at all, as a presidential candidate he now declared that annexing all of Mexico was “that destiny which Providence may have in store for both countries.”21