The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876

by Nester, William

  While virtually all Americans took pride in how decisively their armies had crushed the enemy, they heatedly debated what spoils, if any, to take from Mexico. Most Whigs wanted a victory without conquest. Everyone else wanted territory to justify the loss of blood and treasure but split over just what to take. Some Whigs and most Democrats were content with keeping New Mexico, California, and a Texas boundary at the Rio Grande; some Democrats insisted on adding to that the Baja Peninsula and a swath across northern Mexico; and a few Democrats demanded all of Mexico.

  As vexing was the question of whether slavery should be permitted or forbidden in whatever land was taken. The United States was then composed of fifteen slave states across the South and fourteen free states across the North. Most southerners were dead-set to retain their edge, terrified that if they lost it the free states might one day vote to abolish slavery. This fear, then and for many years to come, was irrational. Most northerners at once abhorred and accepted slavery where it currently existed but opposed its expansion to new territories that would eventually be transformed into states, each with two senators. If that happened, the northern fear, also unfounded, was that southerners would vote to legalize slavery everywhere across the United States. David Wilmot, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, tried to preclude that on August 8, 1846, by amending an appropriation bill with the Wilmot Proviso that forbade slavery in any territories won from Mexico. Although a majority in the House of Representatives voted for this bill and subsequent ones with the Wilmot Proviso attached, Senate majorities stripped the bills of the measure, so it remained a popular sentiment rather than law.1

  Finally, a small but vocal minority argued that America should never have warred against Mexico in the first place and condemned the Polk administration for stampeding Congress into a war of aggression rather than necessity. A freshman representative from Illinois was among these latter voices.2

  For the second time in his life, Abraham Lincoln stepped behind the podium in the House of Representatives on January 12, 1848. Although he was an experienced and skilled orator, he was likely a bit nervous. He was about to launch one of the most blistering attacks on a president ever uttered in that chamber. For the next forty-five minutes, he systematically picked apart “Mr. Polk’s War” as grounded upon, “from beginning to end, the sheerest deception” and “the half insane mumbling of a fever dream.” He condemned the president’s shifting and contradictory statements on the war, insisting that “his mind, taxed beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature on a burning surface, finding no position on which it can settle and be at ease.” Among the war’s worst evils was that Polk was surely “deeply conscious of being in the wrong,” yet stayed the course come what may. Even so, Lincoln could not help but feel compassion for such “a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.”3

  Lincoln’s ire was partly aroused by the Polk administration’s silence toward his maiden speech of December 22, 1847, when he eschewed the customary expression of gratitude and dedication to his constituents and the nation. He chose instead to raise a contentious issue whereby he took an unpopular minority stand. He proposed a resolution that required the president to prove that Mexican troops had invaded and shed American blood on American soil, Polk’s key justification for asking Congress for a war declaration in May 1846.4

  If the White House ignored Lincoln’s proposal, Congress did not. On January 3, 1848, George Ashmun of Massachusetts was inspired to offer a more explicit resolution that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the president of the United States.”5 Lincoln joined eighty-five fellow Whigs in voting for this resolution.

  Lincoln and the war’s other opponents defied the views of most Americans, including William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner. Herndon upheld the Polk administration’s position that the border of Texas rested on the Rio Grande, not the Nueces River 150 miles farther north, as Mexico claimed. Thus the Mexicans invaded American territory by crossing the Rio Grande and started the war when they attacked part of Gen. Zachary Taylor’s army. In his reply to Herndon and other critics, Lincoln argued that the land between those rivers remained Mexican because its mostly Mexican inhabitants had not joined the Texas rebellion. He cited the terrible precedent cast by the Polk administration: “Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, wherever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion . . . and you allow him to make war at pleasure.”6

  Although Lincoln condemned the war, he lauded the soldiers who fought it: “Our arms have given us the most splendid successes, every department and every part, land and water, officers and privates, regulars and volunteers, doing all that men can do, and hundreds of things which it had ever before been thought men could not do.”7 He dutifully voted for every war appropriation bill.

  Lincoln, then an obscure freshman congressman, was not the only war opponent who would eventually rise to the political pinnacle. Ulysses S. Grant was then a young army captain who had no doubt over just who started the war: “The presence of United States troops on the edge of the disputed territory furthest from the Mexican settlements was not sufficient to provoke hostilities. We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it.” After Congress declared war, Grant was “bitterly opposed to the measure and to this day regard[s] the war which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”8

  It takes a powerful will and sense of principle to oppose a war that one’s government and most fellow citizens zealously favor, at least initially. Grant understood that: “Once initiated there were but few public men who would have the courage to oppose it. Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, no matter right or wrong, occupied no enviable place in history.”9

  In opposing the war with Mexico, Lincoln boldly set himself against the literal march of American history. If imperialism is the conquest of one people by another, then America has been imperialistic from its beginning. The English colonists took land from the Indians and over the next century and a half expanded their holdings to the Appalachian Mountains and in some places beyond. After winning its war of independence, the United States carried on that imperialism. Most Americans at once exalted in their nation’s swelling borders while denying the often deceptive, brutal, and dishonorable means whereby it unfolded. Proponents justified expansion in various ways. Thomas Jefferson proclaimed America “an empire of liberty” that benefited all peoples within its embrace. In 1845 John O’Sullivan, the New York Tribune’s editor, justified that imperialism with the expression “Manifest Destiny,” or the inherent American right to expand. The war with Mexico was simply the latest stage of American history illuminated by Manifest Destiny.10

  The Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, split the difference between the extremes of those who wanted nothing and those who wanted everything. Mexico agreed to recognize America’s previous annexation of Texas with a frontier on the Rio Grande and to cede the provinces of New Mexico and California—522,000 square miles of territory that today includes not just those two states but Arizona and parts of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. In return, the United States agreed to pay Mexico $15 million and assume the roughly $3.25 million in debts that Mexico’s government and citizens owed Americans.

  President Polk received the treaty on February 21 and sent word to Congress. Later that day in the House of Representatives, the Speaker submitted a resolution to thank the generals for leading the nation to victory. John Quincy Adams, among the war’s most stalwart critics, struggled to his feet, red-faced and fuming, muttered “no,” then collapsed. He lingered two days before dying on the evening of February 23. His last words were, “This is the end of the earth, but I am composed.”11

  This same day Polk sent the treaty to the Senate. The subsequent debate raged for two and a half weeks. A majority voted down a proposal by Democrat Jefferson Davis of Mississippi th
at the treaty be amended to include northern Mexico. George Badge, a North Carolina Whig, lost his bid that the United States take no territory from Mexico. Other resolutions were aired and rejected. Of the fifty-eight senators, twenty-six voted at least once against an attempt to amend the treaty. It was not until March 10 that opponents exhausted their alternatives and the Senate voted on the original treaty. The Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo was ratified by a tally of thirty-eight to fourteen, with four abstentions. The treaty was promptly sent to Mexico, whose government eventually also ratified the original version after a bitter congressional debate. The ratifications were formally exchanged on May 30.12

  President Polk tried to give Americans special cause to rejoice that Fourth of July by formally declaring the treaty in effect that day. The treaty’s celebration was hardly universal. Although the debate over what to take from Mexico was over, the debate over what to do with what was taken had only just begun.13

  America’s triumph in the Mexican War had already literally begun to pay off. James Marshall was a carpenter for John Sutter, who owed a vast cattle and horse ranch in California’s Central Valley and had founded the settlement of New Helvetia, guarded by Sutter’s Fort on the Sacramento River, in 1840. On the chilly morning of January 24, 1848, Marshall was supervising a team of men building a sawmill when he spotted a gold-colored speck glittering in the millrace. He plucked it out, rubbed it between his fingers, and pondered a moment. “Boys,” he announced in a classic laconic western drawl, “I believe I have found a gold mine.”14

  Marshall hurried to his boss with his find. Sutter excitedly concluded that his land appeared to have yielded a new source of wealth. They tried to keep the discovery secret but word was already racing through New Helvetia and other ranches across the region. Scores of workers quit their jobs, scoured streambeds for gold, and exchanged what they found for goods at Sam Brannan’s store. In May Brannan journeyed down to San Francisco with a vial full of gold flakes and announced the strike. That set off a rush to Sutter’s land and elsewhere along the Sierra foothills. As more of their crews deserted, captains ordered their vessels’ anchors raised and sails lowered while they still had any men left. Word eventually reached the eastern United States. President Polk trumpeted that news as part of his December 1848 address to Congress.

  As a national and international phenomenon, the gold rush did not begin until the next year. The “Forty-Niners” had two ways to reach California, neither easy nor quick. A ship from the east coast took seven or eight months of straight sailing to reach San Francisco. A shortcut across the narrow waists of the Americas through Nicaragua or Panama to a vessel on the Pacific coast might cut that journey’s time in half. The overland trail from Independence, Missouri, took from four to five months. Most people went overland, with perhaps forty thousand reaching California by that route in 1849 alone. California’s population soared from fourteen thousand in 1848 to over one hundred thousand in 1850, when it received statehood.15

  For foreign diplomats accredited to the United States, Washington City appeared not just an unlikely but a dismal place for the capital of an empire that now stretched across the continent. Indeed, the British government deemed America’s capital a hardship post until the twentieth century. Charles Dickens charitably called it a “city of magnificent intentions,” referring to Pierre L’Enfant’s design of interconnecting squares, ovals, and institutions.16 In 1848 the city had barely begun to fulfill the vision that L’Enfant had outlined nearly seven decades earlier. There were still more empty than developed lots. Even the two most prominent buildings were either forlorn or unfinished. Depending on the weather, a muddy or dusty field surrounded the White House. The Capitol was missing its dome. Throughout the town, shanties and taverns clustered near handfuls of elegant mansions. Although the winters were mild, the summer air was filled with sweltering heat and hordes of mosquitoes. Among Washington’s forty thousand inhabitants were eight thousand free blacks and two thousand slaves. To the shame of some people and the pride of others, auction blocks stood literally in the Capitol’s shadow.

  The United States looked impressive on a map but was anything but a unified nation in 1848. The people were split among a spectrum of political, economic, social, religious, racial, and ethnic lines. The most glaring differences were, of course, black and white, slave and free. The 1850 census revealed that more than four million Americans, or one in six, were black, with nine of ten slaves and nineteen of twenty living in the South.

  Although an industrial revolution was increasingly fueling America’s economy, 85 percent of the population still lived in the countryside while only 15 percent resided in towns with twenty-five hundred or more people. America remained a largely Protestant nation—36,534 Protestant churches with 14 million parishioners starkly overshadowed 1,227 Catholic churches and 37 Jewish synagogues, with their respective 676,000 and 19,000 members.17

  A growing distinction was between native and foreign born. Of the 23,191,000 people counted in the 1850 census, 2,244,000, or one in ten, were immigrants, of whom 1,470,000 had stepped ashore in just the previous decade. The potato famine in northern Europe, most severely in Ireland, was the most powerful push behind all those immigrants. Then, in 1848, a surge of political refugees swelled the year’s wave as mass revolts erupted in most of Europe’s capitals and largest cities. The underlying causes were worsening poverty, famines, and repression, whose injustices revolutionary leaders illuminated through the ideologies of liberalism, nationalism, or socialism. In most countries, the governments crushed those rebellions. France, however, did experience a short-lived revolution that overthrew the monarchy and briefly established a liberal republic.18

  In upstate New York that year a small group of mostly women announced their own peaceful revolution. The first Women’s Rights Convention in human history took place in six sessions at Seneca Falls on July 19 and 20.19 At the gathering’s conclusion, exactly one hundred people, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men, of the several hundred who attended, signed a Declaration of Sentiments that revised America’s Declaration of Independence to read, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”

  That convention and declaration were inspired by the abolition movement. During the 1840s, more women who fervently championed the emancipation of slaves came to realize that equality should prevail between genders as well as races. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Coffin Mott, the convention’s organizers, leaders, and keynote speakers, first met in 1842 and for the next half-dozen years developed this ideal among themselves and a growing network of followers. The abolitionist and women’s rights movements complemented each other. Frederick Douglass, the only African American to attend the convention, rose to declare that the liberation of blacks and women should be inseparable and to condemn the “denial of the right to participate in government” that led “not merely [to] the degradation of women and the perpetuation of a great injustice . . . but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.”20

  Two progressive events in New York prompted Stanton and Mott to call for the convention. In April the state assembly passed the Married Women’s Property Act that for the first time gave women the right to keep the property they brought to a marriage along with what they acquired during the marriage. Then in June, during the Liberty Party convention in Buffalo, Mott received five votes to be Gerrit Smith’s vice presidential running mate, the first time a woman was officially considered for a position of national power. These two votes at once illuminated how far women trailed men in rights and opportunities while hinting that a vigorous mass movement could narrow and one distant day eliminate that gap. Like black men, women struggled for decades before they achieved legal equality, although they continue to trail in wealth and power.

  Had James Polk not been a perfectionist, he might have derived enormous satisfaction during his last year in the White House. He had fulfilled all f
our promises that he had made when he became president. He signed a tariff bill that reduced the rate to a level that produced revenues but did not strongly protect American industries and a banking bill that helped stabilize financial markets. Far more spectacularly, he took the Oregon Territory from Britain and the Southwest Territory from Mexico.

  Yet each of these triumphs provoked acrimonious debates between Democrats and Whigs that presidential year, none more so than whether slavery should be allowed in the Mexican War conquests.21 In his speech announcing his latest run for the presidency, House Speaker Henry Clay condemned “Mr. Polk’s War” as “unnecessary and . . . offensive” and predicted that the conquests “might prove a fatal acquisition, producing distraction, dissension, division, possibly disunion.”22

  The Democratic Party nominated Senator William Cass of Michigan for the presidency during its convention at Baltimore in May. Cass’s supporters won only after a long, hard fight against those of Martin Van Buren, the president from 1838 to 1842. The Cass and Van Buren factions were bitter enemies. After Cass won, Van Buren and his faction bolted the convention, vowing to form their own party. Cass and his supporters called the defectors Barnburners, claiming they were so single-minded that they would burn down their own barn to rid it of mice. In retort, Barnburners called their critics Hunkers for allegedly being so venal that all they “hunkered” after in politics was to fill their pockets with “campaign contributions.” Genuine disputes over policies lay behind the name-calling. Barnburners were “free soilers” who upheld both the 1820 Missouri Compromise and the Wilmot Proviso limits on slavery’s expansion. Hunkers championed the “popular sovereign” right of territorial and state governments to determine whether they would be free or slave.