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

by Amy S. Greenberg

  The war raised fundamental questions, questions that proved too painful to answer at the time. After dismantling a neighboring republic for the sole purpose of aggrandizement, could the United States any longer make claims to altruism in international affairs? After Polk provoked a war and then lied to Congress about it, could presidents be trusted to behave honestly in matters of life and death? After annexing Mexico’s northwest, could the United States still contrast its acts with the imperialist oppression of its then-nemesis, Britain? Why had it been so easy to manipulate the American public to support a war as contrary to American principles as this one? How could the opposition party so readily surrender its objections as the Whigs did in 1846?

  The conflict Polk engineered became the transformative event of the era. It not only changed the nation but also created a new generation of leaders, for good and for ill. In the military, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall Jackson, George Meade, and Jefferson Davis all first experienced military command in Mexico. It was there that they learned the basis of the strategy and tactics that dominated the Civil War. Polk’s war also catapulted the officers Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce into presidencies for which they were woefully ill equipped.

  Then there was the congressman from Illinois.

  In 1848 a Democrat won election to Congress from the Seventh Congressional District. The seat held by Hardin, Baker, and Lincoln was no longer safe for the Whigs. Many blamed Lincoln’s antiwar activism for the loss. Lincoln returned home in 1849 and did not run again for Congress. But he had learned something that might now be called Lincolnesque: the necessity of melding political and ethical considerations. As he protested the war and condemned slavery, he was not embracing a simple politics of morality, though it must often have seemed to his few supporters that his sense of decency was mangling his ambition. In fact, he was learning to avoid false dichotomies between morality and hard political decisions. The war showed him how to make ambition, ethics, and politics work in concert. He helped to bring the war to a close, and then helped elect a war hero from his own party to the presidency.28

  But he never forgot Henry Clay. When Clay died in Washington in 1852, Lincoln delivered a eulogy at the Springfield statehouse. Most of Clay’s eulogists praised his genius for compromise. Lincoln did not. He focused instead on Clay’s “devotion to human liberty.” Lincoln’s portrait of Clay was of a man who sacrificed for what was right. “The long enduring spell with which the souls of men were bound to him, is a miracle,” Lincoln proclaimed.29 Taking a stand against the U.S.-Mexican War helped make Clay great. Taking a similar stand made Lincoln a better politician, and perhaps also a better person.

  Ten years later, when he ran for the Senate, the people of Illinois had not forgotten what he’d said about the war. Despite the fact that Lincoln was careful while in Congress to always vote for supplies for the troops, his words haunted him politically for the rest of his life. During their famed 1858 senatorial campaign debates, Stephen A. Douglas reminded the Illinois public that “whilst in Congress” Lincoln “distinguished himself by his opposition to the Mexican War, taking the side of the common enemy against his own country; and when he returned home he found that the indignation of the people followed him everywhere, and he was again submerged or obliged to retire into private life, forgotten by his former friends.” The editor of the Chicago Tribune wrote a confidential letter to Lincoln afterward, warning the candidate that Douglas’s charges were “calculated to do mischief” among potential Republican voters. “Tens of thousands of our party are old Democrats, and you know their sentiments on this Mexican War supply question.”30

  Again in 1860, Lincoln’s opponents revisited the legend of the Ranchero Spotty, accusing him of aiding and abetting the enemy in 1848. The charges did not fall on dull ears, as questions about Lincoln’s patriotism and actions at that time remained unresolved among voters of all educational levels. One “undisided yet … honest man” wrote Republican candidate Lincoln in 1860 to ask two questions. “The first is this did you vote against sending provisions to the soldiers when they was in mexico … the second is this did you refuse to vote A bill of thanks to the soldiers that fought in mexico did you say that you would not vote A bill of thanks to the soldiers without they would add this amendment to it. that it was an injust war.”31

  A New York iron merchant also hoped for clarification before casting his vote in 1860. On business stationery featuring an attractive representation of his spacious iron dealership, William H. Wilson queried Lincoln, “Will you be kind enough to say if you did or did not while you were in congress vote against supplies to the american army while on the Battle fields of Mexico. The charge has been brought forward by your opponents and I have as often charged it to be a falsehood and although opposed to betting I as a last resort have agreed to back my opinion that such was not the fact.”32

  Lincoln won in 1860, of course. And while America’s unjust war of imperial desire shoved the nation into the most horrible of national fractures, yet at the same it time helped create the leader who was able to reunite the states. It was Lincoln who would prove the greatest man of his generation, not Polk, Clay, Trist, or his once unstoppable rival, John Hardin. The Battle of Buena Vista and its pantheon of heroes had faded from memory by the time Abraham Lincoln lost his life in the service of his country eighteen years later.

  EPILOGUE

  Lineage

  THE NATION FORGOT about Colonel John Hardin, but his children did not. In 1851 their mother married Reuben Hyde Walworth, the last chancellor of New York State and a widower twenty-four years her senior. The Chancellor, as he was universally known, moved the Hardin family into his mansion in Saratoga, New York. In an attempt to emulate their father’s military glory, both of the Hardin boys fought in the Civil War. Martin became a brigadier general in the Union Army, while Lemuel joined a band of Confederate raiders in border-state Kentucky and later fled to Canada. Both men sustained serious injuries in the conflict.

  Ellen Hardin gained greater fame than either of her brothers, though some of it was decidedly unwanted. At age twenty, just a year after her mother’s wedding, she married her stepbrother, Mansfield Walworth. They had six children in quick succession, and Mansfield found success as an author of lowbrow popular fiction. On the surface, the family was attractive and prosperous, but Mansfield proved emotionally unstable and physically abused his wife. Ellen left him. After he threatened her life in 1873, their eldest son, Frank, shot him to death in a New York hotel room. The “uncommonly shocking murder” in such an elite family became a media sensation, with reporters avidly following the resulting trial. Frank was convicted of parricide. Intent on overturning his conviction, Ellen put herself through law school at New York University, a singularly rare thing for a woman to do in the 1870s. More remarkably, she managed to secure Frank’s release from prison in 1877 on the grounds of legal insanity.1

  Left to support a large family, Ellen practiced law for a period of time, but she felt increasingly drawn to her childhood love of history—a passion she attributed to her father’s influence. She recounted how her father would read history to her when she was a girl, “and he accompanied the reading by explanations of the geography and government of the nations named.” He had encouraged her interest. “When I asked for something to read,” she recalled, “I was sent to ‘Plutarch’s Lives’ which became like a long continued fairy story to my young imagination.”2

  As Ellen grew older she discovered that America’s history was just as compelling as Europe’s. It was all around her in upstate New York, and she set out to document and commemorate it. In the years after the Civil War, she took the lead in preserving Saratoga’s Revolutionary War battlefields. Her interests in historic preservation took a national turn when she spearheaded a campaign in 1876 for funds to renovate George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon. Suddenly, Ellen Hardin Walworth was a figure of importance in her own right, and found herself invited to the same sort of social events i
n Washington, D.C., that her father, as a freshman congressman, had attended thirty years earlier. She corresponded with the wives of Presidents Harrison, McKinley, and Wilson, and was one of the first people to propose the establishment of the U.S. National Archives, in a speech at the World’s Columbian Expedition in Chicago.

  Ellen began to write, and found she was good at it. Her husband found success as a novelist, but she gravitated toward fact. A skilled amateur geologist, she was one of the first women to publish a paper in the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But above all else it was the history of the early United States that she enjoyed chronicling. She wrote the visitor’s guide to the Saratoga battlefields, a rousing history of the Saratoga Campaign, and the official history of the Saratoga Monument Association. She began publishing historical articles, edited a journal, and became a prolific author on topics related to the Revolutionary War.

  Despite the formative influence of the U.S.-Mexican War on her life, Ellen wrote just a single article on the 1847 conflict, a lengthy and technical military analysis of the Battle of Buena Vista that she published in 1874. Her narrative of the conflict was long on praise for the Whigs, including her father, who overcame their political scruples to volunteer, and short on analysis of the larger implications of the conflict. She condemned Taylor’s management of the battle and suggested that had the army built breastworks the night before the battle, many lives would have been saved.3 And then she returned to writing about the Revolution.

  It is telling that Ellen Hardin Walworth devoted her later life to promoting the memory of the Revolutionary War, rather than the U.S. war with Mexico. In Mexico, la invasíon norteamericana exerted a powerful force in the political realignment of the late nineteenth century, the creation of a centralized state, and the forging of a common Mexican identity. But the half-life of the war north of the border region was remarkably short. In the decades after the Civil War, the 1847 conflict faded from memory. Most Americans, including Ellen, preferred to think about it as little as possible. One of Polk’s supporters assured the president in 1846 that over time his actions would be vindicated. “History will be … ready with her sentence of condemnation” for those who opposed the president and his war, the Democratic stalwart predicted, just as the opponents of the War of 1812 were later demonized. “It cannot be doubted that in a few years, fewer than elapsed after the war of 1812, those now assailing you for the war with Mexico and the principles on which it is waged, will be as anxious to throw oblivion over their conduct as were those who denounced Mr. Madison for the war against England.”4

  But Polk’s supporters were wrong. It was antiwar forces that ultimately proved victorious in the battle over the memory of the 1847 war. In 1879 former president Ulysses S. Grant told a journalist, “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.” At the end of his life he elaborated on his feelings. The U.S.-Mexican War was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation,” he wrote in his memoirs. The Civil War, he declared, was “our punishment” for that “transgression.”5

  By the late nineteenth century, Grant’s views had become mainstream. The Republican Party, born from the collapse of the Whig Party in the 1850s, adopted the Whig view of the war as its own and dominated national politics through the second half of the century. Republicans asserted that the 1847 war was wicked, wrong, and a blot on the nation’s proud military history. Ellen Hardin wasn’t the only American to much prefer the Revolution. Far better to focus on a war that all Americans could agree was right and just, a war for principle, rather than the fatal and destructive war for empire that tore the nation apart. Better to return, at least in memory, to a period when Americans were united against an oppressor.

  After a life full of tragedy and drama, Ellen Hardin found meaning in the past, in the sacrifices of soldiers who died before she was born. She cultivated a patriotism grounded in her links to that past, and as she looked around at the inequality and social unrest of the late nineteenth century, she became increasingly convinced that such historically grounded patriotism not only had been good for her personally but also could help uplift the nation as a whole. She believed that the knowledge of what their “forefathers and mothers … sacrificed for home and country” might allow Americans “to comprehend the price of the legacy left, and to realize that if we hold this magnificent inheritance … we must keep the camp fires of loyalty alive, that there shall be no wavering of devotion to the principles they planted, her institutions must be kept pure, her laws just, her government upright.”6

  On Columbus Day in 1890, Ellen and three like-minded women met together in the parlor of the Strathmore Arms Hotel in Washington, D.C. Their goal was to found a women’s organization devoted to the promotion of historic memory and American patriotism. They vowed to work together to “perpetuate the memory and spirit of the men and women who achieved American Independence,” and to “cherish, maintain, and extend the institutions of American freedom, to foster true patriotism and love of country, and to aid in securing for mankind all the blessings of liberty.” They imagined chapters of their “patriotic and national Society” in towns and cities of every state in the Union. Thinking big, they invited Sarah Polk to join their board of directors as an honorary vice president. The eighty-seven-year-old former First Lady, still dressed in black forty years after the death of her husband and still living in Polk Place, the Nashville home she and James had shared for just three months, happily accepted the invitation. Mrs. James K. Polk entirely endorsed the patriotic mission of the group, which was so close to her own. Who had been more instrumental in securing “the blessings of liberty” for mankind than she and James? Had her own husband not given his life for this very cause?7

  The vice presidency of the organization Ellen Hardin founded was one of the last honors in Sarah’s long life. Less than a year later she died at home, and was buried next to James on the Polk Place grounds.

  As for Ellen, she never forgot her father, but she had trouble finding a lesson in his sacrifice. She could summarize his career in a single sentence: “He was a member of Congress from Illinois, was opposed to the annexation of Texas, but when war was declared against Mexico he raised a regiment, was in the battles of Gen’l Taylor’s Division, and lost his life in the battle of Buena Vista.” But what did it mean? She contemplated writing his biography and even conducted research for the project. But she set it aside and returned to writing about the war of 1776.8

  Ellen Hardin Walworth, 1899. As director general of the Women’s National War Relief Association, John Hardin’s daughter directed the outfitting of an ambulance ship and yellow fever hospital during the Spanish-American War while promoting the expansion of the Daughters of the American Revolution overseas. Women’s National War Relief Association, The Women’s National War Relief Association (New York: Printed by order of the Board of Directors, 1899), vii. (photo credit epl.1)

  Although she was truly a daughter of the U.S.-Mexican War, she and her colleagues named their new organization the Daughters of the American Revolution. Ellen provided the society with its first motto, Amor patriae, Latin for “love of country,” with patriae, or “country,” derived from pater, or “father”—love of the fatherland. The sole requirement for membership was “proven lineal descent” from a patriot of the American Revolution, something she, Sarah Polk, and the other organizers all shared.9

  As she proudly documented in her application for admission as a charter member of the DAR on December 16, 1890, Ellen Hardin had as a patriotic forefather John Hardin. This was not the John Hardin who was a colonel in the U.S.-Mexican War, and for whom a county seat in Illinois was named, but her great-grandfather John Hardin, a colonel in Wayne’s campaign, a lieutenant in Morgan’s rifle corps, and the recipient of public thanks from General Gates for his “distinguished services�
� at the Battle of Saratoga. “When the first call for troops was made to resist Great Britain John Hardin began recruiting,” she proudly stated. “He was in the march through Canada and in every engagement and movement of the Rifle Corps until 1779.”10

  She looked back to the John Hardin for whom Hardin County in Kentucky, Hardin County in Ohio, and Hardin County in Illinois were named, a man whom Ellen never knew but had no problem imagining and describing. But hers was a selective history. She recounted how “in 1792 he was sent from Kentucky by special order of General Washington, through General Wilkinson, on a mission of peace to the Indians of Northern Ohio, and was massacred by them.” But she left out of the story John Hardin’s long history of violence against Indians. She never mentioned his assaults on Indian villages from Virginia to Indiana, despite the fame those acts gained him among both white and Indian people during his life. She said nothing about his troubled history with the Shawnee who killed him. And she certainly never mentioned the slave who was murdered by his side.11

  The Daughters of the American Revolution was founded in the fervent belief that awareness about America’s first patriots would lead Americans to live up to “the principles they planted.” But John Hardin’s history with slaves and Indians was not the legacy Ellen cared to transmit. Western expansion had always come at a cost to someone. In her nostalgic remembrance, however, the patriots of the Revolutionary War were guiltless of the sins not just of their fathers but of her father. Theirs was a war for freedom, not oppression.