A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico
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But in Mexico City, matters looked very different. After an initial attempt at negotiations with Santa Anna collapsed, Trist found himself without recourse. Scott’s victory had led to chaos in Mexico’s government. Santa Anna had fled the capital and factions battled for control. Some argued for peace, while others demanded that the nation keep fighting, with guerrilla forces if necessary, until the invaders were ejected. Some of the wealthiest families supported the total annexation of Mexico by the United States as the option most likely to bring stability to the country. The occupying U.S. troops were set upon by guerrillas on a daily basis. Those irregular forces made it nearly impossible to get any news back to Washington.
Trist and General Scott spent long hours discussing the futility of occupying central Mexico. There were just too many Mexicans, and many of them understandably hated their occupiers. Out of the eight million inhabitants in Mexico, Scott wrote, “there are not more than one million who are of pure European blood. The Indians and the mixed races constitute about seven millions. They are exceedingly inferior to our own. As a lover of my country,” he later explained, “I was opposed to mixing up that race with our own.” Scott was adamant that “too much blood has already been shed in this unnatural war.”22 The situation was chaotic, unstable, and very likely to end in disaster.
America’s soldiers found their first extended experience as an occupying army unsettling. Many, including Ulysses Grant, were shocked by Mexico’s poverty. “With a soil and climate scarsely equaled in the world she has more poor and starving subjects who are willing and able to work than any country in the world,” he wrote to his fiancée, Julia. “The rich keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is incredible. Walk through the streets of Mexico for one day and you will see hundreds of beggars, but you never see them ask alms of their own people, it is always of the Americans that they expect to receive.” And the occupying army was getting antsy. “The Mexicans swear they will not fite any more and they will not cum to any terms of piece and I can’t tell how long we will remain here,” complained one North Carolina volunteer. “We would much rather they would cum to some terms of piece or fite one or the other for we are getting tired of lying still and doing nothing.”23
Mexico might not choose to fight, but plenty of its citizens were willing. Stone-throwing mobs set upon U.S. soldiers, who were in turn forced to break up riots, such as the one that resulted when a local man, accused of murdering an American, was publicly whipped. Embedded journalists no longer adjusted their coverage to protect the troops. The New Orleans Crescent noted that the army’s morale began to decline during the occupation. “Robbery seems to be the order of the day,” it reported. “I can trace this bad conduct on the part of some belonging to the army to nothing but the insatiable appetite for gaming that exists in this city. Men lose their money, then their credit, and self-respect. Some of them will stoop to most anything.” The New Orleans Picayune reported that the night after a Texas Ranger was killed by guerrillas, “a company of Rangers went to the vicinity of the murder and killed 17 Mexicans, and wounded some 40 more.” The article, titled “Massacre of Mexican Citizens!,” was reprinted as far away as Albany.24
With a clear view of the reality of the American occupation, Trist’s perspective on Manifest Destiny and America’s mission began to change. Polk’s instructions were nothing, he wrote, next to “the iniquity of the war.” America’s invasion of Mexico and its occupation of the capital were “a thing for every right-minded American to be ashamed of.” And Trist was ashamed. He wanted to go home, and he hoped Polk might reward him for his service in a manner that would allow him some free time. But he also realized that he had to bring the war to an end, not just for his own sake, but for the sake of his country and the country that had been invaded. He determined to make peace with “as little exacting as possible from Mexico.”25
Just weeks before Trist learned of his recall, prospects for negotiation began to improve. Santa Anna had, once again, been sent into exile, and the new president, Supreme Court justice Manuel de la Peña y Peña, who had opposed the war in 1846, was pushing for peace. Peña and his moderate supporters asserted that accepting America’s terms offered Mexico the best opportunity for rebuilding the shattered country and preventing further encroachment by its avaricious northern neighbor. But these views were considered treasonous by many in Mexico who maintained that a sustained guerrilla war was a better, more honorable outcome than surrendering any land to the Americans. The majority of people in Mexico steadfastly believed that the Nueces River was the rightful southern boundary of Texas.
Peña’s position was precarious. Another political coup seemed possible at any time, and the new administration would likely be far less amenable to compromise. A treaty of peace, signed by representatives of a legitimately recognized government, was clearly necessary to bring the war to an end. After all, the original dispute over Texas’s independence was in large part the result of the fact that Texans never signed a peace treaty with Mexico in 1836.
As the occupation dragged on, the soldiers became more and more desperate. Ulysses S. Grant wrote Julia, “Mexico is a very pleasant place to live because it is never hot nor ever cold, but I believe evry one is hartily tired of war … I pity poor Mexico.” Lieutenant John M. Brannan of Indiana, who like a number of his fellow officers in Mexico would go on to greater fame in the Civil War, had recently been brevetted to captain for “gallant and meritorious conduct” in the Battle of Contreras and Churubusco. But the honors hardly mattered. He and his men also wanted to go home. He bemoaned the seemingly endless occupation in a letter to his brother at the end of October. “There is no prospect of ever seeing a white face or the United States again,” he complained. “You will soon hear what Congress intends doing in regard to this war. I have made up my mind that we have to conquer and occupy the whole country and regenerate this ignorant, superstitious and vicious race.”26
Brannan wasn’t the only person waiting anxiously for the Thirtieth Congress to convene at the end of December and to make clear their intentions regarding the war. If and when Nicholas Trist came to some agreement with Mexico, Congress would have to ratify the treaty. If things continued to drag on without a resolution, as seemed likely, it would be up to the Whig-controlled House of Representatives to take charge and force the president to do the people’s bidding.
Across the United States that fall, congressmen were setting off for Washington, wondering how the war would shape their terms. When Congressman Lincoln looked east in the fall of 1847, he could visualize a number of different routes to Washington. None of them was simple, and neither he nor Mary had ever traveled east of Kentucky. With rambunctious and (others thought) badly governed four-year-old Robert and their toddler Eddie to tend to, the journey must have seemed especially daunting. Eddie had begun showing signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him less than three years later, and Mary had begun to suffer from debilitating headaches. But after all the years they had spent working toward this election, and nearly a year and a half of waiting since it took place, the Lincolns were ready for the journey. In October they leased their Springfield home for the year for ninety dollars, and two days later started for Washington.
There was no easy way to get to Washington from Springfield in 1847. You couldn’t travel by train. Nor was there a route by water. Indeed, the general difficulty of getting anywhere easily from the remote towns and cities of western states such as Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee explains the appeal of the Whig vision of an activist central government among a population that otherwise venerated the frontier values and expansionist platform of Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party. What hope could there be for a fledgling community far from the seat of power, or for a young and penniless but ambitious man, without the helping hand of the government, with its protective tariffs and ability to extend credit? A number of mid-westerners were as angry about Polk’s veto of the Rivers and Harbors Bill, which would have done so much to improve
transportation and commerce in their portion of the country, as they were about the war with Mexico.
The shortest route to Washington from Springfield was 840 miles, mostly by stagecoach, which was a fantastically uncomfortable way to travel, particularly with small children. Overcrowded coaches bounced and jostled over rutted roads that were dusty in the summer and muddy in the winter. In difficult patches passengers were expected to get out and walk. Travel was totally unregulated and accidents frequent. Undergreased axles broke or caught fire; coaches collided with pedestrians and smaller vehicles, sank into streams or holes, or, dramatically, toppled over, often resulting in serious injuries. On the “splendid turnpikes in Kentucky” (financed with help from Henry Clay) travel was relatively safe, but on the “natural roads” virtually everywhere else, “the pitching from side to side was like that of a small steamer on a coasting trip.” In the best of circumstances passengers could expect to arrive at their destination hungry, thirsty, sleepy, and covered with dust. Grisly accounts of less favorable outcomes were easy to find in local newspapers.27
But the Lincolns didn’t choose the shortest route, and the reason had little to do with comfort. Mary wanted to visit her family in Lexington. And members of Congress were reimbursed for their travel at what was then the astronomical sum of forty cents a mile. It was the rare congressman who didn’t choose a route that was, in the words of New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, another Whig elected to the Thirtieth Congress, “exceedingly crooked, even for a politician.”28 Lincoln’s chosen route was twice as long as necessary. It included lengthy trips by river steamer down the Mississippi and then up the Ohio and Kentucky rivers to Frankfort, Kentucky, followed by a train trip to Lexington to visit the Todds. They then returned to Frankfort, went by steamer to Pennsylvania, caught a stagecoach to Cumberland, Maryland, and from there traveled by train first to Relay Station, Maryland, and then by the Baltimore and Ohio to Washington. Lincoln’s trip of 1,626 miles cost the taxpayers $1,300.80, approximately $30,000 today. Although his journey cost $878.80 more than the shortest possible route, Lincoln, like most congressmen, assumed he was entitled to inflated mileage to offset his low congressional salary. The wealthy didn’t have to worry about such things, of course, but for a common man, mileage was one of the great benefits of serving in Congress.
The highlight of this meandering journey for Mary Todd Lincoln was visiting her family in Lexington. If she sometimes considered herself superior to the society she found in Springfield, it was because she measured everything about her current situation against the benchmark of Lexington. And Springfield just didn’t measure up. It had some graceful trees and a few homes of architectural note, as well as a few markers of its emerging gentility, including a Thespian Society and a Young Men’s Lyceum, although it wasn’t nearly as genteel as Jacksonville.
But Springfield’s most outstanding characteristic was its mud. During rainy periods the streets were virtually impassable by foot, particularly for ladies. To make matters worse, the numerous hogs who roamed the streets in search of scraps enjoyed uprooting the wooden sidewalks. Thanks in part to lobbying by Abraham Lincoln, the twenty-five-hundred-person town of Springfield had become the capital of Illinois on July 4, 1839. The unfinished statehouse sported classical columns, but the business district, full of shanties, was an eyesore. Illinois’s new capital had ambition to spare, but in the 1840s it was still very much a work in progress.
Lexington was altogether different. It had grand homes in town and grander hemp plantations outside it (Mary’s grandfather’s estate was one of the nicest). Lexington also had Transylvania University, the oldest institution of higher learning west of the Alleghenies, and the alma mater of John J. Hardin, Jefferson Davis, and Mary’s own father. Robert Todd was fortunate enough to have studied law there under Henry Clay in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Lexington had high society and families of long standing like her own, many of whom had originally migrated from the Piedmont region of Virginia, where they knew a thing or two about living well. They had brought their love of horse racing, gambling, and hard liquor to the Bluegrass Region, and prospered thanks to their many slaves.29
Lexington had a beautiful setting amid undulating hills, fertile limestone soil, and the highest concentration of slaves in the state. Kentucky was part of the border South, caught uneasily between the large cotton plantations that dominated the states to the south and the relative freedom of the states to the north. There were 210,000 slaves in Kentucky at the end of the 1840s, fully one-fifth of its population. But most of the state, including Hardin County, where Abraham Lincoln was born, was composed of small farms worked by families without the aid of slave labor.
Lexington, by contrast, was home to large plantations and a slave population with a density closer to that found in the Deep South. Slaves in Lexington, like those in Mississippi or Alabama, were likely to labor outdoors under the oversight and lash of white overseers, to sleep in separate slave quarters, and to interact primarily with other slaves. Most of the wealthy families in Lexington owned slaves. The Clays and Todds were no exception.
The landlocked city was in some ways on the decline in the 1840s, bypassed by Louisville since steamers opened up the river depot to the New Orleans trade via the Mississippi. Lexington no longer bid fair to take the seat of government away from Frankfort despite years of lobbying by Henry Clay, but it was still the cultural capital of the region. Lexington had a somewhat better claim than Jacksonville to the title “Athens of the West.” Lexington was Mary’s ideal of a city. She remained a Kentucky girl at heart, and throughout her years in Springfield she always subscribed to a Lexington newspaper.
The Lincolns arrived in Lexington on November 4, their fifth wedding anniversary, and passed three lovely weeks, ending on Thanksgiving Day, in the stately two-story brick home where she had lived as a teenager, complete with double parlors, coach house, and elaborate flower gardens leading to a gentle stream. It was Abraham’s first visit to his wife’s hometown, and his first introduction to her stepmother and small half brothers and half sisters. It was the first time the Todds had met Mary’s children as well. Mary was proud to show off her two handsome sons and congressman husband. By all accounts Lincoln charmed his in-laws during that visit.
This was the first real vacation of Abraham Lincoln’s life. It was also his first extended exposure to real slavery, as opposed to the indenture system of Illinois. During his sojourn in Lexington he had ample opportunity to study the “peculiar institution” firsthand. There were slaves in the Todd household, and separate slave quarters out back. Notices of runaway slaves appeared in the daily paper. Lexington was also the slave-trading center of the state. Slave auctions and shackled slaves were common sights, and Lincoln likely saw both during his visit. The jail of a slave trader was easily visible from the home of Mary’s grandmother down the street. From the terrace of her lawn, Lincoln could look down over spiked palings into the yard of the slave pen and hear the cries of slaves tied to the whipping post. Five slaves were sold during his visit to Lexington to satisfy a legal judgment in favor of his father-in-law. Slavery became a reality for Abraham Lincoln in a new way during those three weeks.
The visit to Lexington was as much a highlight of the long journey to Washington for Abraham Lincoln as it was for his wife, although for very different reasons. It wasn’t that Lincoln didn’t enjoy the Todd family circle. He got along particularly well with her father, whom he had previously met in Springfield. They shared not only family interests, including young Robert Lincoln, named after his grandfather, but also political beliefs. Robert S. Todd was one of the most prominent citizens in the town, president of the branch bank of Kentucky, engaged in the cotton manufacturing business, and a twenty-four-year member of the Kentucky state assembly. Although Todd and Lincoln came from dramatically different backgrounds and only one was a slave owner, both were dyed-in-the-wool Whigs. There were a lot of Whigs in Lexington. American hemp, a plant related to marij
uana that was grown for its fiber, was vastly inferior to that grown in Russia. Hemp became a profitable crop in Kentucky only because of a high protective tariff levied on Russian hemp passed by the Whigs. With its fledgling manufacturing concerns and remote location, Lexington was the center of Whig strength in Kentucky. Todd was on a first-name basis with all the leading Whig politicians in the state, including Lexington’s favorite son, Henry Clay. Mary had known the Clays since childhood, when she once brought a pony to Ashland to show it off to Clay. She admired the statesman almost as much as her husband did.30
It was Clay who made this such a special trip for Lincoln. A lawyer who parlayed success at the bar into a political career on the national stage, a firm nationalist whose abilities to compromise were unparalleled, and an advocate of the interests of westerners, Henry Clay was an easy man for Lincoln to admire and identify with. And like the rest of America, he also thrilled to Clay’s speeches. His cousin later attributed the fact that Lincoln initially became a Whig to the fact that he “always Loved Hen Clay’s Speaches.”31
Lincoln did indeed love Clay’s speeches, but he had never heard the orator in person. All agreed that Clay’s true genius as a speaker lay primarily in his animated, passionate delivery and deep bass voice. Listeners compared Clay’s voice to “the finest musical instrument,” which could be as “soft as a lute or full as a trumpet.” It was a voice of “wonderful modulation, sweetness, and power.”32 Lincoln knew that reading Clay’s speeches was like deciphering a musical score without ever having heard it performed. A few weeks before his marriage in 1842, Lincoln, as a member of the executive committee of the Springfield Clay Club, invited the Kentucky senator to deliver an address in Springfield. “The pleasure it would give us, and thousands such as we, is beyond all question,” he wrote.33