When Texans challenged Mexican authority, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna marched north from Mexico City in 1836. His massive column, which he quickly divided, numbered some 6,000 troops, some of whom he dispatched under General José de Urrea to mop up small pockets of resistance. The Texans responded with a March 1, 1836, Declaration of Independence founding the Republic of Texas. Sam Houston, an 1832 emigrant from Tennessee, was elected president of the Lone Star Republic, and subsequently the general of the Texan army, which prepared to fight Santa Anna’s column.
Even before the declaration of Texan independence, Santa Anna had had to deal with a small resistance in San Antonio at the Alamo, an adobe mission-turned-fort. Opposing Santa Anna’s 4,000-man army was the famed 187-man Texan garrison led by Colonel William B. Travis and including the already famous Jim Bowie and David Crockett. “Let’s make their victory worse than a defeat,” Travis implored his doomed men, who sold their lives dearly. It took Santa Anna more than a week to bring up his long column, and his cannons pummeled the Alamo the entire time. Once arrayed, the whole Mexican army attacked early in the morning on March sixth, following a long silence that sent many of the lookouts and pickets to sleep. Mexicans were at—or even over—the walls before the first alarms were raised. The Texans, having spent much of their ammunition, died fighting hand to hand. Crockett, one of the last survivors found amid a stack of Mexican bodies, was shot by a firing squad later that day. “Remember the Alamo” became the battle cry of Houston’s freedom fighters.
The generalissimo had won costly victories, whereas the Texans staged a retreat that, at times, bordered on a rout. Only Houston’s firm hand—Washington-like, in some respects—kept any semblance of order. Unknown to him, Santa Anna had sustained substantial losses taking an insignificant fort: some estimate that his assault on the Alamo left 500 dead outside the walls, reducing his force from one fourth to one third after accounting for the wounded and the pack trains needed to deal with them. If he won the Alamo, he soon lost the war. Pursuing Houston, Santa Anna continued to divide his weary and wounded force. Houston, convinced he had lured the enemy on long enough, staged a counterattack on April 21, 1836, at San Jacinto, near Galveston Bay. Ordering his men to, “Hold your fire! God damn you, hold your fire!” he approached the larger Mexican force in the open, struggling to push two cannons called the Twin Sisters up a ridge overlooking the Mexican positions. Given the nature of Houston’s advance, Santa Anna apparently did not think the Texans would charge. He could not help but see their movements: the Texans had to unlimber their cannons and form up in battle lines, all within sight of Santa Anna’s scouts, Mexican pickets who did not sound the alarm. Houston’s troops charged and routed Santa Anna, who was seen “running about in the utmost excitement, wringing his hands and unable to give an order.”52 When the Texans screamed out the phrases, “Remember the Alamo, Remember Goliad,” the Mexican forces broke and ran. Santa Anna escaped temporarily, disguised as a servant. His capture was important in order to have the president’s signature on a treaty acknowledging Texan independence, and the general was apprehended before long, with 730 of his troops. Texan casualties totaled 9 killed, whereas the Mexicans lost 630. In return for his freedom, and that of his troops, Santa Anna agreed to cede all of Texas to the new republic, but repudiated the agreement as soon as he was released. He returned to Mexico City and plotted revenge. Meanwhile, the government of the Texas Republic officially requested to join the United States of America.53
The request by Texas brought to the surface the very tensions over slavery that Van Buren had sought to repress and avoid. In the House of Representatives, John Quincy Adams, who had returned to Washington after being elected as a Massachusetts congressman (he and Andrew Johnson, a senator, were the only former presidents ever to do so) filibustered the bill for three weeks. Van Buren opposed annexation, the Senate rejected a ratification treaty, and Texas remained an independent republic sandwiched between Mexico and America.
Mr. Polk’s War
When, in 1842, the president of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston, again invited the United States to annex his “nation,” the secretary of state at the time, Daniel Webster, immediately suppressed the request. Webster, an antislavery New Englander, wanted no part in helping the South gain a large new slave state and, at a minimum, two Democratic senators. In 1844, however, with Calhoun shifting over from the Department of War to head the State Department, a new treaty of annexation was negotiated between Texas and the United States with an important wrinkle: the southern boundary was the Rio Grande. This border had been rejected by the Mexican Congress in favor of the Nueces River farther north.
Northern-based Whigs, of course, stood mostly against incorporating Texas into the Union, and thus to win their support, the Whig candidate, Henry Clay, whose name was synonymous with sectional compromise, could not come out in favor of an annexation program that might divide the nation. Both Clay and Van Buren, therefore, “issued statements to the effect that they would agree to annexation only if Mexico agreed.”54 In an amazing turn of events, the leaders of each major party, who personally opposed the expansion of slavery, adopted positions that kept them from addressing slavery as an issue. The system Van Buren designed had worked to perfection.
Yet there was a catch: at least half the nation wanted Texas annexed, and the impetus for annexation was the November 1844 election of Tennessean James K. Polk. With both Van Buren and Clay unpopular in large parts of nonslaveholding states, and with Van Buren having to fight off a challenge within the Democratic Party from Lewis Cass of Michigan, a northerner who supported annexation, a deadlock ensued that opened the door for another annexationist nominee, a dark horse candidate congressman—Polk. The son of a surveyor, James Knox Polk was a lawyer, Tennessee governor, former Speaker of the House, and a southern expansionist who not only supported annexation, but even labeled it reannexation, claiming that Texas had been a part of the Louisiana Purchase. Defeated for reelection as Tennessee governor in 1843, he turned his attention to the national stage. Polk maneuvered his way to the Democratic nomination after nine ballots, to his own surprise.
Facing Clay in the general election, Polk turned Clay’s conservatism against him. The Kentuckian said he had “no personal objection to the annexation of Texas,” but he did not openly advocate it.55 Polk, on the other hand, ran for president on the shrewd platform of annexing both Texas and Oregon. Clay’s vacillation angered many ardent Free-Soilers, who found a purer candidate in James G. Birney and the fledgling Liberty Party. Birney siphoned off 62,300 votes, certainly almost all at the Whigs’ expense, or enough to deprive Clay of the popular vote victory. Since Clay lost the electoral vote 170 to 105—with Polk taking such northern states as Michigan, New York, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania—it is likely that the Liberty Party cost Clay the election. New York alone, where Birney took 6,000 votes from Clay to hand the state to Polk, would have provided the Kentuckian his margin of victory. By any account, the election was a referendum on annexing Texas and Oregon, which Polk had cleverly packaged together. Linking the Oregon Territory took the sting out of adding a new slave state. The election accelerated the trend in which a handful of states had started to gain enough electoral clout that they could, under the right circumstances, elect a president without the slightest support or participation from the South.
Calling himself Young Hickory, Polk found that his predecessor had made much of the expansionist campaign rhetoric unnecessary. Viewing the results of the election as a mandate to annex Texas, in his last months in office Tyler gained a joint annexation resolution (and arguably a blatant violation of the Constitution) from Congress. This circumvented the need for a two-thirds Senate vote to acquire Texas by a treaty, and the resolution passed. Tyler signed the resolution in March 1845, a month before Polk took office, and Texas was offered the option of coming into the Union as one state or later subdividing into as many as five. On December 29, 1845, a unified Texas joined the Union as a slave
state, a move John Quincy Adams called “the heaviest calamity that ever befell myself or my country.”56 Mexico immediately broke off diplomatic relations with the United States—a sure prelude to war in that era—prompting Polk to tell the American consul in California, Thomas Larkin, that if a revolt broke out among the Californios against the Mexican government, he should support it.
All along, Mexico suspected the United States of being behind an 1837 revolution in New Mexico. Then there remained the continuing issue of whether the Nueces River, and not the Rio Grande, was the actual boundary. Despite his belligerent posturing, Polk sent Louisianan James Slidell as a special envoy to Mexico in January 1846 with instructions to try to purchase New Mexico and California with an offer so low that it implied war would follow if the Mexicans did not accept it. Anticipating the failure of Slidell’s mission, Polk also ordered troops into Louisiana and alerted Larkin that the U.S. Navy would capture California ports in the event of war. Slidell’s proposal outraged Mexico, and he returned home empty-handed. Satisfied that he had done everything possible to avoid war, Polk sent General Zachary Taylor, “Old Rough-and-Ready,” with a large force, ordering them to encamp in Texas with their cannons pointed directly across the Rio Grande. Polk wanted a war, but he needed the Mexicans to start it. They obliged. General Mariano Arista’s troops skirmished with Polk’s men in May, at which point Polk could disingenuously write Congress asking for a war declaration while being technically correct: “Not withstanding our efforts to avoid it, war exists by the act of Mexico herself.”57 He did not mention that in December he had also sent John C. Frémont with a column west and dispatched the Pacific Fleet to California, ostensibly “in case” hostilities commenced, but in reality to have troops in place to take advantage of a war.
Northern Whigs naturally balked, noting that despite promises about acquiring Oregon, Polk’s aggression was aimed in a decided southwesterly direction. A Whig congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, openly challenged the administration’s policy, demanding to know the exact location—the “spot”—on which American blood had been shed, and sixty-seven Whigs voted against providing funds for the war. Lincoln’s “spot resolutions” failed to derail the war effort, but gained the gangly Whig political attention for the future. For the most part, Whigs did their duty, including Generals Taylor and Winfield “Old Fuss and Feathers” Scott. The Democratic South, of course, joined the war effort with enthusiasm—Tennessee was dubbed the Volunteer State because its enlistments skyrocketed—and the Mexican War commenced.
Some observers, such as Horace Greeley, in the New York Tribune, predicted that the United States “can easily defeat the armies of Mexico, slaughter them by the thousands, and pursue them perhaps to their capital.”58 But Mexico wanted the war as well, and both Mexican military strategists and European observers expressed a near universal opinion that Mexican troops would triumphantly march into Washington, D.C., in as little as six weeks! Critics of American foreign policy, including many modern Mexican and Chicano nationalists, point to the vast territory Mexico lost in the war, and even Mexican historians of the day blamed the war on “the spirit of aggrandizement of the United States…availing itself of its power to conquer us.”59 Yet few have considered exactly what a victorious Mexican government would have demanded in concessions from the United States. Certainly Texas would have been restored to Mexico. The fact is, Mexico lusted for land as much as the gringos did and fully expected to win.
Polk made clear in his diary the importance of holding “military possession of California at the time peace was made,” and he intended to acquire California, New Mexico, and “perhaps some others of the Northern Provinces of Mexico” whenever the war ended.60 Congress called for 50,000 volunteers and appropriated $10 million. Taking part in the operation were several outstanding junior officers, including Ulysses Grant, George McClellan, Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, Braxton Bragg, Stonewall Jackson, George Pickett, James Longstreet, and William Tecumseh Sherman.
At Palo Alto, in early May, the Americans engaged Arista’s forces, decimating 1,000 Mexican lancers who attempted a foolish cavalry charge against the U.S. squares. It was a brief, but bloody draw in which Taylor lost 9 men to the Mexicans’ 250, but he was unable to follow up because of nightfall. At his council of war, Taylor asked for advice. An artillery captain blurted out, “We whipped ’em today and we can whip ’em tomorrow.” Indeed, on May ninth, the Americans won another lopsided battle at Resaca de la Palma.61
While the military was winning early victories in the field, Polk engaged in a clever plan to bring the exiled dictator who had massacred the defenders of the Alamo and Goliad back from exile in Cuba. On August 4, 1846, Polk negotiated a deal to not only bring Santa Anna back, but to pay him $2 million—ostensibly a bribe as an advance payment on the cession of California. The former dictator convinced Polk that if the United States could restore him to power, he would agree to a treaty favorable to the United States.
Two separate developments ended all hopes of a quick peace. First, Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot attached a proviso to the $2 million payment that slavery be prohibited from any lands taken in the war. Wilmot, a freshman Democrat from Pennsylvania, further eroded the moratorium on slavery debate, which had been introduced in December 1835 to stymie all legislative discussion of slavery. Under the rule all antislavery petitions and resolutions had to be referred to a select committee, whose standing orders were to report back that Congress had no power to interfere with slavery.62 This, in essence, tabled all petitions that in any way mentioned slavery, and it became a standing rule of the House in 1840. But the gag rule backfired. “This rule manufactures abolitionists and abolitionism,” one Southerner wrote, comparing the rule to religious freedom: “It is much easier to make the mass of the people understand that a given prayer cannot be granted than that they have no right to pray at all.”63 (Ironically, the gag rule had applied to prayer in Congress too.) After it fell into disuse in 1845, Speakers of the House kept the slavery discussion under wraps by only recognizing speakers who had the Democratic Party’s trust. The chair recognized Wilmot largely because he had proven his loyalty to Polk by voting with the administration on the tariff reduction when every other Democrat had crossed party lines to vote against it.64 But Wilmot hammered the president with his opening statements before invoking the language of the Northwest Ordinance to prohibit slavery from any newly acquired territories.
Although the Wilmot Proviso never passed, a second obstacle to a quick treaty with Santa Anna was the Mexican president himself, who probably never had any intention of abiding by his secret agreement. No sooner had he walked ashore, slipped through the American blockade by a British steamer given a right-of-way by U.S. gunboats, than he had announced that he would fight “until death, to the defense of the liberty and independence of the republic.”65 Consequently, a Pennsylvania congressman and a former dictator unwittingly collaborated to extend the war neither of them wanted, ensuring in the process that the United States would gain territory neither of them wanted it to have.
Meanwhile, in the field, the army struggled to maintain discipline among the hordes of volunteers arriving. New recruits “came in a steamboat flood down the Mississippi, out onto the Gulf and across to Port Isabel and thence up the Rio Grande to Matamoros of Taylor’s advanced base…[When the “12-monthers” came into camp in August 1846], they murdered; they raped, robbed and rioted.”66 Mexican priests in the area called the undisciplined troops “vandals” from hell and a Texas colonel considered them “worse than Russian Cossacks.”67 Each unit of volunteers sported its own dress: the Kentucky volunteers had three-cornered hats and full beards, whereas other groups had “uniforms” of every conceivable color and style. Once they entered Mexico, they were given another name, “gringos,” for the song they sang, “Green Grow the Lilacs.” With difficulty Taylor finally formed this riffraff into an army, and by September he had about 6,000 troops who could fight. He marched on Monterrey,
defended by 7,000 Mexicans and 40 cannons—a formidable objective.
Even at this early stage, it became clear that the United States would prevail, and in the process occupy large areas of territory previously held by Mexico. At Monterrey, in September 1846, Taylor defeated a force of slightly superior size to his own. The final rush was led by Jefferson Davis and his Mississippi volunteers. On the cusp of a major victory, Taylor halted and accepted an eight-week armistice, even allowing the Mexicans to withdraw their army. He did so more out of necessity than charity, since his depleted force desperately needed 5,000 reinforcements, which arrived the following January. American troops then resumed their advance.
Attack was the American modus operandi during the war. Despite taking the offensive, the United States time and again suffered only minor losses, even when assaulting Mexicans dug in behind defenses. And every unit of Taylor’s army attacked—light dragoons, skirmishers, heavy infantry. The success of the Americans impressed experienced commanders (such as Henry Halleck, who later wrote about the offensives in his book, Elements of Military Art and Science), who shook their heads in wonder at the Yanks’ aggressiveness.68
Meanwhile, Taylor now had a reputation as a true hero. Suddenly it dawned on Polk that he had created a viable political opponent for any Democratic candidate in 1848, and he now scrambled to swing the military glory to someone besides Old Rough-and-Ready. Ordering Taylor to halt, Polk instructed General Winfield Scott, the only other man truly qualified to command an entire army, to take a new expedition of 10,000 to Vera Cruz. Polk ironically found himself relying on two Whig generals, “whom he hated more than the Mexicans.”69 Scott had no intention of commanding a disastrous invasion, telling his confidants that he intended to lose no more than 100 men in the nation’s first amphibious operation: “for every one over that number I shall regard myself as a murderer.”70 In fact, he did better, losing only 67 to a fortified city that had refused to surrender.
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