Other offensives against Mexican outposts in the southwest and in California occurred simultaneous to the main Mexican invasion. Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny marched from Leavenworth, Kansas, to Santa Fe, which he found unoccupied by enemy forces, then set out for California. Reinforced by an expedition under Commodore Robert Stockton and by the Mormon battalion en route from Iowa, Kearny’s united command reached San Diego, then swept on to Los Angeles. By that time, the Mexicans had surrendered—not to Stockton or Kearny, but to another American force under John C. Frémont. The Pathfinder, as Frémont was known, had received orders from Polk to advance to California on a “scientific” expedition in December 1845, along with the Slidell Pacific Fleet orders. Thus, from the outset, Polk had ensured that sufficient American force would rendezvous in California to “persuade” the local pro-American Californios to rise up. What ensued was the the Bear Flag Revolt (hence the bear on the flag of the state of California), and Polk’s ambition of gaining California became a reality.
In Mexico, in August, Scott renewed his advance inland toward Mexico City over the rugged mountains and against stiff resistance. Scott had no intention of slogging through the marshes that protected the eastern flank of Mexico City, but instead planned to attack by way of Chapultepec in the west. As he reached the outskirts of Chapultepec, he found the fortress defended by 900 soldiers and 100 young cadets at the military college. In a pitched battle where American marines assaulted positions defended by “los niños”—students from the elite military school—and fighting hand to hand, saber to saber, Scott’s forces opened the road to Mexico City. On September 14, 1847, in the first-ever U.S. occupation of an enemy capital, American marines guarded the National Palace, “the Halls of Montezuma,” against vandals and thieves. Santa Anna was deposed and scurried out of the country yet again, but 1,721 American soldiers had died in action and another 11,155 of disease.
Occupying both California and Texas, plus the southwestern part of North America, and following Scott’s capture of Mexico City, the United States was in a position to negotiate from strength. Polk instructed Nicholas Trist, a staunch Whig, to negotiate a settlement. Polk thought Trist, a clerk, would be pliant. Instead, Trist aggressively negotiated. Whigs and some Democrats cast a wary eye at occupied Mexico herself. The last thing antislavery forces wanted was a large chunk of Mexico annexed under the auspices of victory, then converted into slave territory. They recoiled when the editor of the New York Sun suggested that “if the Mexican people with one voice ask to come into the Union our boundary…may extend much further than the Rio Grande.”71 Poet Walt Whitman agreed that Mexico “won’t need much coaxing to join the United States.”72
Such talk was pure fantasy from the perspective of majorities in both the United States and Mexico. White Americans had no intention of allowing in vast numbers of brown-skinned Mexicans, whereas Mexico, which may have detested Santa Anna, had no love for the gringos.
Trist and Mexican representatives convened their discussions in January 1848 at the town of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and a month later the two sides signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It provided for a payment of $15 million to Mexico, and the United States gained California, the disputed Texas border to the Rio Grande, and a vast expanse of territory, including present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada. Trist ignored Polk’s revised instructions to press for acquisition of part of northern Mexico proper.
Polk was furious and recalled Trist, who then ignored the letter recalling him, reasoning that Polk wrote it without full knowledge of the situation. Trist refused to support Polk’s designs on Mexico City; and Scott, another Whig on-site, concurred with Trist’s position, thus constricting potential slave territory above the Rio Grande. Polk had to conclude the matter, leaving him no choice but to send the treaty to Congress, where it produced as many critics as proponents. But its opponents, who had sufficient votes to defeat it from opposite sides of the slavery argument, could never unite to defeat it, and the Senate approved the treaty on March 10, 1848. As David Potter aptly put it, “By the acts of a dismissed emissary, a disappointed president, and a divided Senate, the United States acquired California and the Southwest.”73
Victorious American troops withdrew from Mexico in July 1848. Polk’s successful annexation of the North American Southwest constituted only half his strategy to maintain a balance in the Union and fulfill his 1844 campaign promise. He also had to obtain a favorable settlement of the Oregon question. This eventually culminated in the Packenham-Buchanan Treaty. A conflict arose over American claims to Oregon territory up to Fort Simpson, on the 54-degree 40-minute parallel that encompassed the Fraser River. Britain, however, insisted on a Columbia River boundary—and badly wanted Puget Sound. Polk offered a compromise demarcation line at the forty-ninth parallel, just below Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island—which still gave Americans claim to most of the Oregon Territory—but the British minister Richard Packenham rejected Polk’s proposal out of hand. Americans aggressively invoked the phrase “Fifty-four forty or fight,” and the British, quickly reassessing the situation, negotiated with James Buchanan, secretary of state, agreeing to Polk’s compromise line. The Senate approved the final treaty on June 15, 1846.
Taken together, Mexico and Oregon formed bookends, a pair of the most spectacular foreign policy achievements in American history. Moreover, by “settling” for Oregon well below the 54-degree line, Polk checked John Quincy Adams and the Whigs’ dreams of a larger free-soil Pacific Northwest. In four short years Polk filled out the present boundaries of the continental United States (leaving only a small southern slice of Arizona in 1853), literally enlarging the nation from “sea to shining sea.”
At the same time, his policies doomed any chance he had at reelection, even should he have chosen to renege on his campaign promise to serve only one term. Polk’s policies had left him a divided party. Free-soilers had found it impossible to support the Texas annexation, and now a reduced Oregon angered northern Democrats as a betrayal, signaling the first serious rift between the northern and southern wings of the party. This breach opened wider over the tariff, where Polk’s Treasury secretary, Robert J. Walker, pressed for reductions in rates. Northerners again saw a double cross.
When Polk returned to Tennessee, where he died a few months later, he had guided the United States through the high tide of manifest destiny. Unintentionally, he had also helped inflict serious wounds on the Democratic Party’s uneasy sectional alliances, and, as he feared, had raised a popular general, Zachary Taylor, to the status of political opponent. The newly opened lands called out once again to restless Americans, who poured in.
Westward Again
Beneath the simmering political cauldron of pro-and antislavery strife, pioneers continued to surge west. Explorers and trappers were soon joined in the 1830s by a relatively new group, religious missionaries. Second Great Awakening enthusiasm propelled Methodists, led by the Reverend Jason Lee, to Oregon in 1832 to establish a mission to the Chinook Indians.74 Elijah White, then Marcus Whitman and his pregnant wife, Narcissa, followed later, bringing along some thousand migrants (and measles) to the region. White and Lee soon squabbled over methods; eventually the Methodist board concluded that it could not Christianize the Indians and dried up the funding for the Methodist missions. The Whitmans were even more unfortunate. After measles spread among the Cayuse Indians, they blamed the missionaries and murdered the Whitmans at their Walla Walla mission. Such brutality failed to stem the missionary zeal toward the new western territories, however, and a number of Jesuit priests, most notably Father Pierre De Smet, established six successful missions in the northern Rocky Mountains of Montana, Idaho, and Washington.
Pioneer farmer immigrants followed the missionaries into Oregon, where the population rose from fifty to more than six thousand whites between 1839 and 1846. They traveled the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri, along the southern bank of the Platte River, across Wyoming and southern Idaho, and finally t
o Fort Vancouver via the Columbia River. Oregon Trail pioneers encountered hardships including rainstorms, snow and ice, treacherous rivers, steep mountain passes, and wild animals. Another group of immigrants, the Mormons, trekked their way to Utah along the northern bank of the Platte River under the leadership of Brigham Young. They arrived at the Great Salt Lake just as the Mexican War broke out; tens of thousands of their brethren joined them during the following decades. The Mormon Trail, as it was called, attracted many California-bound settlers and, very soon, gold miners.
Discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill near Sacramento in 1848 brought hordes of miners, prospectors, and speculators, virtually all of them men, and many attracted to the seamier side of the social order. Any number of famous Americans spent time in the California gold camps, including Mark Twain and Henry Dana, both of whom wrote notable essays on their experiences. But for every Twain or Dana who made it to California, and left, and for every prospector who actually discovered gold, there were perhaps a hundred who went away broke, many of whom had abandoned their families and farms to seek the precious metal. Even after the gold played out, there was no stopping the population increase as some discovered the natural beauty and freedom offered by the West and stayed. San Francisco swelled from a thousand souls in 1856 to fifty thousand by decade’s end, whereas in parts of Arizona and Colorado gold booms (and discoveries of other metals) could produce an overnight metropolis and just as quickly, a ghost town.
The Pacific Coast was largely sealed off from the rest of the country by the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Travel to California was best done by boat from ports along the Atlantic to Panama, then overland, then on another boat up the coast. Crossing overland directly from Missouri was a dangerous and expensive proposition.
St. Joseph, Missouri, the jumping-off point for overland travel, provided plenty of reputable stables and outfitters, but it was also home to dens of thieves and speculators who preyed on unsuspecting pioneers. Thousands of travelers poured into St. Joseph, then on across the overland trail to Oregon on a two-thousand-mile trek that could take six months. Up to 5,000 per year followed the trail in the mid-1840s, of which some 2,700 continued on to California. By 1850, after the discovery of gold, more than 55,000 pioneers crossed the desert in a year. Perhaps another thousand traders frequented the Santa Fe Trail. Many Forty-niners preferred the water route. San Francisco, the supply depot for Sacramento, overnight became a thriving city. In seven years—from 1849 to 1856—the city’s population filled with merchants, artisans, shopkeepers, bankers, lawyers, saloon owners, and traders. Access to the Pacific Ocean facilitated trade from around the world, giving the town an international and multiethnic character. Saloons and gambling dens dotted the cityscape, enabling gangs and brigands to disrupt peaceful commerce.
With the addition and slow settlement of California, the Pacific Northwest, and the relatively unexplored American Southwest, Americans east of the Mississippi again turned their attention inward. After all, the objective of stretching the United States from sea to shining sea had been met. Only the most radical and unrealistic expansionists desired annexation of Mexico, so further movement southward was blocked. In the 1850s there would be talk of acquiring Cuba, but the concept of manifest destiny had crested. Moreover, the elephant in the room could no longer be ignored. In the years that followed, from 1848 until 1860, slavery dominated almost every aspect of American politics in one form or another.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The House Dividing, 1848–60
The Falling Veil
A chilling wire service report from Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, reached major U.S. cities on October 18, 1859:
Harper’s Ferry: 6 a.m.—Preparations are making to storm the Armory…. Three rioters are lying dead in the street, and three more lying dead in the river…. Another rioter named Lewis Leary, has just died, and confessed to the particulars of the plot which he says was concocted by Brown…. The rioters have just sent out a flag of truce. If they are not protected by the soldiers…every one captured will be hung.1
The “rioters” consisted of seventeen whites and five blacks (some former slaves) who intended to capture the federal armory in the city, use the arms contained therein to seize the town, and then wait for the “army” of radical abolitionists and rebel slaves that John Brown, the leader, believed would materialize. Brown, a Kansas abolitionist guerrilla fighter who had worked in the Underground Railroad, thought that the slave South would collapse if he conquered Virginia.
Virginia militiamen hastily grabbed guns and ammunition and began assembling. Farther away, other towns, including Charlestown, Martinsburg, and Shepherdstown, awakened to warnings from their church bells, with citizens mobilizing quickly to quell a rumored slave rebellion. The telegraph alerted Washington, Baltimore, and New York, whose morning newspapers reported partial information. Many accounts referred to a “Negro Insurrection” or slave revolt. Hoping to avoid a full-scale rampage by the militias, as well as intending to suppress Brown’s insurrection quickly, the president, James Buchanan, ordered U.S. Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee and his lieutenant, J.E.B. Stuart, to Harper’s Ferry. They arrived on October seventeenth, by which time Brown, who had hoped he could avoid violence for at least a few days to allow his forces to grow, was forced to act without any reinforcements. Lee’s troops surrounded Brown’s motley band, then broke into the engine house at the train station near the armory where the conspirators had holed up. In the ensuing gun battle, the soldiers killed ten, including two of Brown’s sons, and soldiers bayoneted Brown several times. He lived to stand trial, but his conviction was a foregone conclusion, and on December 2, 1859, John Brown was hanged in Charlestown, Virginia.
Brown’s raid triggered a wave of paranoia in the South, which lived in utter terror of slave rebellions, even though few had ever occurred and none succeeded. It also provoked Northern abolitionist sympathizers to try to differentiate the man from the cause. “A squad of fanatics whose zeal is wonderfully disproportioned to their senses,” was how the Chicago Press and Tribune referred to Brown.2 “His are the errors of a fanatic, not the crimes of a felon,” argued editor Horace Greeley in his New York Tribune. “There are fit and unfit modes of combating a great evil.”3
Few doubted Brown was delusional at some level, especially since his plan involved arming slaves with several thousand pikes. Historian C. Vann Woodward warned historians looking at Brown “not to blink, as many of his biographers have done,” on the question of Brown’s looniness. Woodward pointed to Brown’s history of insanity and his family tree, which was all but planted in the insane asylum arboretum: three aunts, two uncles, his only sister, her daughter, and six first cousins were all intermittently insane, periodically admitted to lunatic asylums or permanently confined.4 However, the fact that he suffered from delusions did not mean that Brown did not have a plan with logic and order to it, nor did it mean that he did not understand the objective for which he fought.5
Such distinctions proved insufficient for those seeking a genuine martyr, however. Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated Brown’s execution, calling him a “new saint, a thousand times more justified when it is to save [slaves from] the auction-block.”6
Others, such as abolitionist Wendell Phillips, blamed Virginia, which he called “a pirate ship,” and he labeled the Commonwealth “a chronic insurrection.”7 “Who makes the Abolitionist?” asked Emerson. “The Slaveholder.” Yet Emerson’s and Phillips’s logic absolved both the abolitionist lawbreakers and Jayhawkers (Kansas border ruffians), and their rationale gave license to cutthroats like William Quantrill and the James Gang just a few years later. Worse, it mocked the Constitution, elevating Emerson, Phillips, Brown, and whoever else disagreed with any part of it, above the law.
One statesman, in particular—one might say, alone—realized that the abolition of slavery had to come, and could only come, through the law. Anything less destroyed the very document that ensured the freedom that the slave crave
d and that the citizen enjoyed. Abraham Lincoln owed his political career and his presidential success to the concept that the Constitution had to remain above emotion, free from the often heartbreaking injustices of the moment, if it was to be the source of redress. By 1861, when few of his neighbors in the North would have fully understood that principle, and when virtually all of his countrymen in the South would have rejected it on a variety of grounds, both sides nevertheless soon arrived at the point where they had to test the validity of Lincoln’s assertion that the nation could not remain a “house divided.”
Time Line
1848:
Zachary Taylor elected president
1850:
Compromise of 1850; California admitted as a free state; Fugitive Slave Law passed; Taylor dies in office; Millard Fillmore becomes president
1852:
Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Franklin Pierce elected president
1853:
Gadsden Purchase
1854:
Kansas-Nebraska Act; formation of Anti-Nebraska Party (later called Republican Party)
1856:
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 42
