The Mexican War, though popular among the American people, was controversial and divided the country’s leaders. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass was opposed, attributing it to America’s “cupidity and love of dominion.” Ralph Waldo Emerson thought it unwise and imperialist. Thoreau refused to pay his Massachusetts poll tax on the grounds that it would help fund the Mexican War. (He was jailed for a night while a relative paid the tax and obtained his release.) By contrast, Walt Whitman argued that Mexico was the aggressor and therefore “Mexico must be thoroughly chastised.”6
Congressman Abraham Lincoln opposed the war, as did his mentor Henry Clay. The Whig position was against expansion—Whigs generally believed that America should set an example of a free republic rather than expand its boundaries. In the 1844 presidential election, the Whig candidate Henry Clay lost to the Democrat James Polk in part because Clay opposed admitting Texas to the Union. Clay later condemned the Mexican War as motivated by a lust for conquest and “a spirit of universal dominion.”7 By contrast, the Democrats favored extending freedom by enlarging the boundaries of the United States, through purchase and treaty when possible, through force when warranted. This debate was complicated by the slavery issue: Southerners wanted the country to get bigger so they could add more slave states; Northerners wanted to ensure that any additions to America would be free states rather than slave states.
Lincoln contended that President Polk had found an excuse to go to war with Mexico by falsely claiming that Mexicans had shed American blood on American soil. Lincoln introduced sarcastic “spot resolutions” demanding that Polk identify the precise spot on which that blood had been spilled. Even so, Lincoln’s position had its own nuance. Lincoln never disputed that the Mexican government was tyrannical, or that the Texans had a right to assert their independence. If Americans had a right to revolt against British rule, surely the Texans had the right to throw off the tyranny of the Mexican oligarchs. Later, in his Mexican War speech on January 12, 1848, Lincoln would proclaim the Declaration of Independence to be “a most valuable, a most sacred right—a right which, we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.”8 Lincoln’s argument in opposition to the war was merely that it had been started under false pretexts, and that Polk had gone beyond defending Texas to coveting Mexican territory.
The war was short and decisive. The Mexicans were commanded by General Santa Ana, who had led the successful Mexican revolt against Spain. But Santa Ana was no match for the United States forces, led by Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. Taylor would later become president of the United States, and Scott the highest ranking general in the army. Junior officers in the American army included such familiar names as Ulysses Grant, George McClellan, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis—future Civil War adversaries, now fighting on the same side.
The war ended in 1847, when the Mexican capital fell to the United States. The United States flag flew over Mexico City, which was occupied by the U.S. army for nine months. Ultimately the Americans withdrew and the peace was secured by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which settled the Texas border and granted the United States a vast area extending from the present states of New Mexico to California to Wyoming. America, however, could have kept all of Mexico. The United States decided to keep half and give half back.
How to assess the Mexican War? I don’t feel sorry for the Mexican government, which started the war and lost the war. Nor will I deny that this was in part an American war of conquest that added a million and a half square miles to the territory of the United States. Who suffered as a consequence of the war? Howard Zinn, performing “history from below,” focuses on the small number of American soldiers who refused to fight because they opposed America’s involvement in the war. Motivated by opposition to the war, and also by land grants offered to defectors by the Mexican government, around three hundred American soldiers joined the Mexican army. So a small contingent of soldiers quit or switched sides—who cares? The real issue is the impact on Mexicans who were directly affected by the war. We have to consider what became of them and their descendants.
Consider the claims we hear today about how Mexicans merely want to return and work on their own land that was unjustly taken. But no land was taken from them at all. After the war, the United States immediately recognized as valid the property rights of Mexicans who were now part of U.S. territory. The change was not in any individual’s land ownership but in the fact that people who were once Mexicans now became Americans.
Normally it is a lengthy process to become an American citizen—I know, because as an immigrant I went through it myself. Yet according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Mexicans who ended up on the American side were immediately made American citizens. Article IX of the Treaty guaranteed them “all the rights of the citizens of the United States.” This itself is historically unique: of the three main “involuntary” minority groups—American Indians, blacks, and Mexicans—only Mexicans were offered immediate American citizenship. They were granted more rights, including more secure property rights, than they had ever enjoyed before.
There is probably some truth to Robert Rosenbaum’s claim that, as a consequence of the war, “most mexicanos in the United States lost their freedom to live as they wanted to live.” Rosenbaum is the author of Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest. He documents several cases—not numerous but significant—in which Mexicans fought against American occupation. Rosenbaum also notes that “full citizenship and property rights did not result in economic opportunity or social integration for mexicanos.” Besides the differences in language and culture, there was nativism and discrimination to contend with. Even so, Mexican Americans enjoyed more opportunity to improve their lives than they would have had in Mexico. They now enjoyed the whole set of rights under the U.S. Constitution, including the right to self-government. Political scientist Harry Jaffa writes, “The accessions of parts of Mexico to the United States did not mean a denial of self-government to the inhabitants of these regions but the first effective assurance of self-government they would have had.”9
Mexicans have always enjoyed a preferred status in U.S. immigration policy, and not just because of the country’s proximity to America. In the 1920s the United States passed immigration restrictions, imposing quota limits on immigration from most countries, but there were no limits on Mexican immigration. Mexicans, in fact, were racially classified as “white” for the purposes of immigration policy. Today, despite the high number of legal immigrants America takes from Mexico, a majority of illegal immigrants also come from that country. Remarkably, had America retained control of all of Mexico, those illegals wouldn’t have to cross the border; they would already be U.S. citizens. While progressives deplore American aggression, one wonders whether there are Mexicans who wish America had been more aggressive. What we do know is that the vast majority of Mexicans who ended up on the American side of the border, following the Mexican War, never attempted to return to Mexico. And neither have their descendants.
CHAPTER 8
THEIR FOURTH OF JULY
Other revolutions have been the insurrection of the oppressed; this was the repentance of the tyrant.1
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
In 1862, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a group of African Americans about his plan, at the conclusion of the Civil War, to relocate blacks to a new country that they could call their own. He noted that more than ten thousand free blacks had already emigrated to the nation of Liberia. As Lincoln knew, Congress had at his request appropriated $600,000 in funds for black relocation—what at the time was called “colonization.” Lincoln established a special colonization office in the Department of the Interior. That office had solicited and received several proposals for relocation. Among the areas considered were British Honduras, British Guiana, Colombia (in what is now Panama), and an island off the coast of Haiti.2
In his speech, Lincoln acknowledged before his black audience that “your race is suffering in my judgment t
he greatest wrong inflicted on any people.” Even so, he said that many whites—including whites fighting on the Northern side—detested blacks, and blacks returned that hatred. Lincoln remarked, “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.” Lincoln invited free blacks to volunteer to be the first to relocate. He recognized that asking free men to move to another country was a burden. Yet he said, “For the sake of your race you should sacrifice something of your current comfort.” After all, “In the American revolutionary war, sacrifices were made by men engaged in it.”3
It may seem surprising to see Abraham Lincoln—the great emancipator—promote a colonization scheme that today seems wrong-headed and even racist. Yet colonization was an idea that predated Lincoln by almost a century. In fact, it was an idea first advanced by blacks, and it was supported by several American Founders. Thomas Jefferson raised it as a possibility, and James Madison and Daniel Webster offered early colonization proposals. Madison’s scheme involved selling land acquired from American Indians to newly arriving European immigrants and using the money to repatriate blacks to Africa.4
The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816, and it had white and black members. The Society convinced President Monroe to send agents to help found the country now known as Liberia—its capital city was named Monrovia in honor of the American president. Lincoln’s mentor, Henry Clay, was a member of the American Colonization Society. The concept of colonization was supported by a number of Northern Republicans, including abolitionist leader Thad Stevens. Prominent newspapers like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune editorialized in favor of it. Black supporters of colonization included the abolitionist pamphleteer J. Willis Menard, physician and writer Martin Delany of Pennsylvania, political activist Charles Babcock of Massachusetts, and New Yorkers Junius Morel, a journalist, and the abolitionist preacher Highland Garnet of Shiloh Presbyterian Church.5
Frederick Douglass, the best-known black abolitionist leader, opposed colonization. In an 1894 speech, Douglass insisted colonization was abhorrent for the Negro because “it forces upon him the idea that he is forever doomed to be a stranger and a sojourner in the land of his birth, and that he has no permanent abiding place here.” Instead, colonization condemns the Negro to “an uncertain home” someplace else. “It is not atonement, but banishment.” Douglass resoundingly concluded that “the native land of the American Negro is America” and “we are here and here to stay.”6
Yet a few decades earlier, this same Douglass told a white audience in his famous Fourth of July oration, “This fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. I have no patriotism. I have no country. What country have I? The institutions of this country do not know me, do not recognize me as a man. I have not—I cannot have—any love for this country, as such, or for its constitution. I desire to see its overthrow as speedily as possible.”7 Douglass here is committing treason, but it is honorable treason. He is saying that one cannot be a good citizen in a bad country. Many abolitionists agreed with him, and they routinely denounced the American founding and burned copies of the Constitution which abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison termed a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” The abolitionist view, shared by Garrison and Douglass, was that on account of its compromise with slavery, America was ill-founded and the American Founders were craven hypocrites.
The alleged hypocrisy of the Founders was a major theme of British scorn directed against America at the time of the American Revolution. Typical was Samuel Johnson’s retort, “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” The same criticism of the Founders was taken up by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney in the Dred Scott decision. Taney reasoned that the Founders said “all men are created equal” but they could not have meant it, since they allowed slavery in the Constitution and some of them personally owned slaves. Therefore, Taney concluded, the Constitution gives blacks “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” And Senator John Calhoun—the intellectual architect of the pro-slavery doctrine of the South—declared that “all men are created equal” constituted “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.”8
While disavowing the Confederate cause, progressives today generally agree both with Northern abolitionist critics of the Constitution and pro-slavery Southerners that the Founders could not have meant what they said about all men being created equal. Many progressives hold, with Douglass, that slavery is America’s “original sin,” and that the Founders are guilty because they allowed it. Slavery—the argument continues—represents a two and a half century program of looting black labor without paying for it. America was built with the labor of the slaves, and the disadvantages imposed by slavery continue to keep blacks far behind whites in wealth and opportunity. In the view of some progressives, America today owes a huge debt of reparations to African Americans because as a group they are vastly worse off as a consequence of the enslavement of their ancestors.9
Can the progressive claim for reparations be sustained? Slavery is indeed a system of stolen labor, and historically slaves were taken as captives in war. Having conquered a nation or tribe, the victors would either kill or enslave the defeated group. From the dawn of mankind, every culture has had slavery. There was slavery in ancient Greece and Rome, in China, in Africa, and in India. American Indians had slaves long before Columbus arrived. What is uniquely Western is not slavery but the abolition of slavery. “No civilization once dependent on slavery has ever been able to eradicate it,” historian J. M. Roberts writes, “except the Western.”10
Moreover, from the founding through the end of the Civil War, there were black slave-owners in America. I am referring to free blacks who themselves owned black slaves. While the existence of black slave-ownership is known, its magnitude is surprising. A review of the relevant scholarship shows that in 1830 there were 3,500 American black slave-owners who collectively owned more than ten thousand black slaves. In Black Masters, Michael Johnson and James Roark tell the remarkable story of William Ellison, a free black planter and cotton gin maker in South Carolina, who owned more than a hundred slaves. Himself descended from slaves, Ellison did not hesitate to buy slaves and work them in the same manner as white slave-owners. Johnson and Roark write, “Ellison did not view his shop and plantation as halfway houses to freedom. He never permitted a single slave to duplicate his own experience. Everything suggests that Ellison held his slaves to exploit them, to profit from them, just as white slave-owners did.” When the Civil War broke out, most black slave-owners like Ellison joined their white counterparts in supporting the Confederacy.11
Obviously black slave-owners in America represented a tiny fraction of the total number of slave-owners—I mention them because so little is known about them, and because they illustrate the universal conquest ethic that sustained slavery from its beginnings. This conquest ethic is further confirmed by the fact that when Britain and France in the early to mid-nineteenth century considered abolition proposals, tribal leaders in Gambia, the Congo, Dahomey, and other African nations that had prospered under the slave trade sent delegations to Paris and London to vigorously protest against them.12 One African chief memorably stated that he wanted three things—foodstuffs, alcohol, and weapons—and he had three things to exchange for them—men, women, and children.
Slavery became controversial for one reason: the influence of Christianity. In my part-time career as a Christian apologist, I have debated this point with leading atheists, and they are reluctant to admit it. The atheists say that for many centuries Christians allowed slavery and it was only in the modern period—the period of the Enlightenment—that slavery came into question. The implication is that Enlightenment egalitarianism, not Christianity, propelled the anti-slavery cause. This, however, is simply false. Slavery was widespread duri
ng the Roman Empire which lasted until the fifth century. This was the period of pre-Christian Rome. Then slavery disappeared in Europe between the fifth century and the tenth century. Slavery was replaced by serfdom. While serfdom imposes its own burdens, serfs are not slaves. They own themselves, they can make contracts, they have a measure of freedom to work and marry that simply does not exist for slaves. The advent of serfdom was a huge change and a big improvement. It occurred during the so-called Dark Ages, when Europe was completely and thoroughly Christian. So what, if not Christianity, caused the extinction of slavery in Europe?
Unfortunately slavery was revived in the modern era, not so much in Europe as in America. This occurred for economic reasons: there was work to be done in the new world, and there were people who could be made to do it for free. There was a flourishing slave trade in Africa, supplying slaves to Asia and the Middle East, with an apparently inexhaustible supply of captives waiting to be sold. This “supply” found a new “demand” in the plantations of North and South America. Slavery was profitable for the planter class, and also for the Africans who engaged in the trade. Yet the institution once again became controversial, and once again it was Christians who took up the cause of getting rid of slavery. It is a fact of great significance that only in the West—the region of the world officially known as Christendom—did anti-slavery movements arise. There is no history of an anti-slavery movement outside the West.
Even the atheists admit that the anti-slavery movements in England and America were led by Christians. I am not suggesting that the Christians were the only ones who disliked slavery. From ancient times there had been another group that disliked slavery. That group was called slaves. So there were always reports of runaways, slave revolts, and so on. What Christianity produced was an entirely different phenomenon: men who were eligible to be masters who opposed slavery. This idea is beautifully expressed in Lincoln’s maxim, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”13 Lincoln understood this to be nothing more than an application of Christ’s golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her Page 12
