. . .
As soon as Mexican officials heard of the American vote for annexation, they severed diplomatic relations, and both nations moved troops to the contested border region. Polk sent John Slidell of Louisiana on a secret mission to Mexico City with instructions to negotiate a settlement. Although the Mexican press was loud in its denunciation of Texas independence, Slidell found that in private officials were willing to accept annexation if the United States would agree to the old provincial boundary at the Nueces River. But Slidell, adhering to Polk’s orders, insisted on a boundary along the more southerly Rio Grande. Mexican public opinion ran hotly against the Americans, which left the diplomats little room to maneuver, so instead of a fixed boundary, the vexed negotiators created a disputed region—the Nueces Strip—a hundred-mile swath along the left bank of the Rio Grande populated by Mexicans that reached from the Gulf to the Rocky Mountains. The talks broke off when Slidell pressed the leaders in Mexico City to sell the provinces of New Mexico and California. If they acceded to his terms, the Mexicans told him, the people would kill them. Slidell returned to Washington empty-handed and offered some advice that suggested why he had failed as a peacemaker: “We can never get along well with them until we have given them a good drubbing.”18
Though fuming, the Mexicans had no plan to invade the United States to reclaim a province they had lost ten years before and over which the Comanches held the balance of power. Polk, however, was spoiling for a fight. He announced to his cabinet that the acquisition of California—with the fine Pacific ports of San Diego and San Francisco—was the prime goal of his presidency. He ordered General Zachary Taylor—a veteran of campaigns against Tecumseh, Black Hawk, and the Seminoles—to march his Army of Observation into the Nueces Strip. The Mexicans warned Taylor to back off and observe from a respectful distance across the Nueces River, but he remained on the contested ground. On April 24, 1846, Mexican troops crossed the Rio Grande, attacked a party of United States dragoons, and killed eleven of them. Polk leapt at the provocation. “Mexico,” he crowed, “has invaded our territory and shed American blood on the American soil.” Congress voted for war on May 13.19
Not everyone cheered. “That region belonged to Mexico. Certainly it did not belong to the United States,” charged Whig senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. “Here was an act of aggression.” The war was “one of the most unjust waged by a stronger nation against a weaker nation,” Ulysses S. Grant, who served as a junior officer under Taylor, wrote years later. “It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”20
Yet for the most part Polk’s gambit worked: aggressive expansion brought people together. Most Americans overwhelmingly supported the war. Volunteers from Illinois, Missouri, Texas, and the states of the Old Southwest marched off singing new verses to the tune of “Old Dan Tucker” rhyming lines with “Rio Grandey” and declaring their intention to hike to Matamoros and “conquer all before us.”21
. . .
The Mexican War was far easier to start than to finish. The Mexican army performed poorly, but the Mexican people excelled at guerrilla fighting, which exacted a bloody toll from the Americans. In the final tally it cost the United States nearly one hundred million dollars to win California and a new Southwest. By official and conservative government reckoning, it was also the most destructive war to that point in American history, claiming the lives of nearly thirteen thousand Americans and a minimum of twenty thousand Mexicans.
Polk planned a campaign with three principal theaters of operations. In Mexico itself, an American army under General Taylor swept south from Texas and in January 1847 destroyed the numerically superior Mexican army of General Santa Anna at the Battle of Buena Vista, near Saltillo. In the United States, Taylor was celebrated as the hero of the hour. President Polk, viewing Taylor’s popularity as a political threat, transferred the bulk of his troops to the command of General Winfield Scott, who in March successfully invaded and seized the Mexican port city of Veracruz and began a slow military march through the mountains to the capital of Mexico City. Battered but unbowed, General Santa Anna refused to negotiate peace as long as an American army remained on Mexican soil.
The conquest of New Mexico, the second theater, was directed by General Stephen Watts Kearny. Like Taylor, Kearny had served on the frontier continuously since the War of 1812. He and his sixteen hundred dragoons took the provincial capital of Santa Fe in August 1846 without firing a shot. Kearney appointed trader Charles Bent as the first American governor of the province. A close associate of former governor Manuel Armijo and married into a prominent Hispanic family, Bent seemed a perfect choice to both keep the peace and represent the Americans. But he had his enemies, and animosities toward the new conquerors simmered beneath the surface. In early 1847, Pueblo Indians and New Mexicans rose in a brief rebellion that claimed the lives of several Americans, including Governor Bent.
California, Polk’s dream objective, supplied the third front. After subduing New Mexico, Kearny set out for the Pacific coast. On the way he learned that California had already fallen. In June 1846, a small irregular force of hunters and traders rode into the village of Sonoma, invaded the home of prominent ranchero Mariano Vallejo, and proclaimed the independence of the California Republic. They acted with the backing of Captain John C. Frémont of the Topographical Engineers, in California with a troop of men on what was purported to be a mapping expedition to the Far West. Frémont later acknowledged that he had secret instructions from President Polk to secure California for the United States in the event of war with Mexico. The invasion of Sonoma looked warlike enough for Frémont, and he took command of the uprising.
THE U.S.-MEXICAN WAR
The American rebels raised a flag with a lone star and a crude drawing of a bear. The star signaled the intention of the Americans to “play the Texas game,” while the bear indicated their desire to secure “rough justice.” But to the Mexican Californians (known as Californios) cattle-thieving bears, los osos, were symbols of piracy, and these “Yankee Osos” were “savage hordes.” The Americans barely rose to the Californios’ low opinion of them. They insulted and imprisoned Vallejo and other respected Californios, they plundered homes and killed civilians. “We must be conquerors,” declared their leader, William B. Ide, or else “we are robbers.”22
The flag raised by American insurgents at Sonoma in 1846, later destroyed in the fire that followed the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Wikimedia Commons.
The Bear Flag Republic lasted only a month. In July, Commodore John D. Sloat of the United States Navy sailed into San Francisco Bay with the news that the United States and Mexico were at war. Promising guarantees of Californio lives and property, Sloat was appalled by Frémont’s terror. Many prominent Californios, including Vallejo, favored a break with Mexico and annexation by the United States. But Sloat, who was ailing, was soon relieved by Commodore Robert F. Stockton, an old salt dedicated to bellicose division rather than peaceful congruence. A future presidential nominee of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American Party, better known as the Know Nothings, Stockton escalated the conflict by commissioning Frémont to lead a new fighting unit, the California Battalion of Mounted Volunteers, composed of sharpshooters from the Topographical Engineers, Bear Flaggers, and Indian mercenaries. Frémont and Stockton swept south and took the pueblo of Los Angeles. But they bullied and belittled the locals, stoking an insurgent backlash. Residents of Los Angeles rose up and expelled the invaders.
Unaware of the uprising, General Kearny and his dragoons crossed the desert into California and were badly mauled in an engagement with the Californio insurgents. Not until January 1847 did the combined American force converge on Los Angeles and finally complete the conquest of California. Captain Frémont accepted the surrender, but with egotistical bravado he refused orders from General Kearny, his military superior, and reported instead to Commodore Stockton,
who had authorized the formation of the California Battalion. Kearny later charged Frémont with insubordination and treason, a court-martial found him guilty, and he resigned from the service. The jostling among American commanders for power, prestige, and perks forecast conflicts to come.
Meanwhile the American campaign for the conquest of Mexico City slogged on. Mexican losses on the field of battle were followed by rear-guard guerrilla actions harassing supply lines and slowing General Scott’s army. The Americans retaliated with outrages against civilians. A Mexican editor described the invaders as a “horde of banditti, of drunkards, of fornicators . . . vandals vomited from hell, monsters who bid defiance to the laws of nature, . . . shameless, daring ignorant, ragged, bad-smelling, long-bearded men with hats turned up at the brim, thirsty with the desire to appropriate our riches and our beautiful damsels.” These were understandable feelings from a wartime adversary, but American officers, too, were critical of the operation. Lieutenant Ulysses Grant wrote home that “some of the volunteers and about all the Texans seem to think it perfectly right to impose on the people of a conquered city to any extent, and even to murder them where the act can be covered by dark. And how much they seem to enjoy acts of violence too!” Even General Scott admitted that his troops had “committed atrocities to make Heaven weep and every American of Christian morals to blush for his country,” including “murder, robbery and rape of mothers and daughters in the presence of tied-up males of the families.” It was six months before the Americans finally reached their objective, storming Chapultepec, the palace of the viceroys in the suburbs, then seizing the center of the city and raising the American flag above the national palace on September 14, 1847.23
Mexican-American War lithograph, 1847. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
General John E. Wool and his staff, Saltillo, Mexico, 1847. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
. . .
President Polk read about the war in the Baltimore Sun. Partisan newspapers, fed by Samuel Morse’s telegraph system, which began operation in 1844, spread news of the conflict. The Democrats had hoped that expansion would unify the country, but the detailed press coverage only seemed to inflame the opposition. As the war dragged into its second year, public opinion polarized. The majority continued to believe Polk’s rhetoric about the duty of the nation to protect the cause of liberty. The president affirmed early in the war that the United States would never fight for conquest and that forced annexation was unthinkable, but he soon began to hedge under the guise of seeking repayment for the escalating costs of the war. There was never any doubt that California, Polk’s primary objective from the beginning, would remain in American hands, and geopolitical logic demanded that the territory between Texas and California be included in the package. The region was worthless to Mexico, the argument ran, but the United States might push a transcontinental railroad through it, bypassing the Rocky Mountains and linking New Orleans with Pacific ports.
Polk’s conquest struck some as unduly restrained. Extreme expansionists argued that the Mexicans deserved American overlords. Its languishing economy was matched only by its flailing political institutions. The country would be better off and develop more efficiently under new management. While Polk was talking honor and duty, treasury secretary Robert J. Walker commissioned a study of the fiscal implications of total annexation. “Why not take all of Mexico?” asked John L. O’Sullivan in the pages of the New York Morning News.24
Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina had an answer to O’Sullivan’s question: because Mexico came with all those undesirable Mexicans. Calhoun’s was the loudest voice for white supremacy in the country. “We make a great mistake, sir,” he announced, “when we suppose that all people are capable of self-government.” More than half of Mexico’s residents were Indians, and the rest were “impure races, not as good as the Cherokees and Choctaws.” Were Mexico annexed and made a territory of the United States, a mongrel population would be placed on an equal level with racially pure Americans. “I protest utterly against such a project,” Calhoun concluded.25
A third body of opinion considered the war immoral and unworthy of the nation. Abolitionists charged that a southern president had incited the war as a way of extending slavery farther into Mexican territory. Black abolitionist leader and escaped slave Frederick Douglass condemned the war as an expression of “the spirit of slavery,” and so too did the writer Henry David Thoreau, who refused to pay his taxes and spent a night in jail in protest of a war for slavery. Others worried that this war of conquest had done serious damage to the republican ideals of liberty and self-government. Transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller lamented that the nation’s gaze “was fixed not on the stars, but on the possessions of others.” Instead of strengthening the United States, the Mexican War threatened to erode its foundations.26
Yet even in the writings of these opponents there was little concern for the struggles and bravery of the Mexicans. Antiwar activists tended to adopt the same demeaning and racist rhetoric as the war’s supporters. Few Americans paid attention to the Mexican side of the war. Race, religion, and cultural smugness hindered their empathy, shadowing Americans in a common blind spot even as the conduct and aftermath of the war shuttled them into opposite corners.
The increasing force of the political crosswinds encouraged the president to find the nearest exit. He dispatched a peace emissary, Nicholas Trist, to march with Scott and seek negotiations at the first opportunity. Trist’s wish list included the Mexican acceptance of Texas annexation as well as a deal on California and New Mexico. Mexican officials, however, were experiencing even fiercer political storms, and they negotiated gingerly. Trist reported their reluctance to Polk. The president responded with a harder line to punish Mexican foot-dragging and please the “all-of-Mexico” faction of his party. But Trist ignored Polk’s bellicosity and kept talking. In January 1848, the two sides agreed on a treaty based on earlier American aims. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo confirmed the annexation of Texas and set the Rio Grande as the international boundary. As reparations for the cost of the war, Mexico ceded California and New Mexico, a vast territory of 529,000 square miles, that includes not only those present-day states but also Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and southern Colorado. The United States paid Mexico $15 million and reimbursed American citizens for claims they held against Mexico amounting to $3.75 million. That’s about five cents an acre.
TERRITORIAL ACQUISITIONS AND STATEHOOD
A joint United States–Mexico commission was established with the power to draw an exact boundary from Texas westward to the Pacific. The American half of the commission split along sectional lines. When the head of the commission, John Russell Bartlett of New England, chose the northernmost of all the boundary options, southerners howled. In 1853, to make up for this “less-of-Mexico” decision and provide a right-of-way for a southern transcontinental railroad, the United States paid Mexico another $10 million for the Gadsden Purchase. Named after its American negotiator, James Gadsden, the purchase bought the land south of the Gila River in present-day New Mexico and Arizona. In all, including Texas, Mexico surrendered a total of 602 million acres, a third of its national domain.
. . .
During the negotiations to end the conflict, Mexican officials worried about the status of their citizens residing in territory occupied by the United States. “The condition of the inhabitants,” reported Nicholas Trist, “is the topic upon which most time is expended.” The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo stipulated that “male citizens of Mexico” in the ceded territory could choose either to retain their Mexican citizenship or to become citizens of the United States and be “maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exercise of religion without restriction.” In the war’s aftermath, however, Mexicans found their civil rights slipping away, their property in jeopardy, and their Catholic religion under assault. The 1850s marked a high
tide in intense nativism and anti-Catholicism in the United States, and Anglo newcomers treated the native population as Mexicans, regardless of their formal American citizenship.27
Mexican holdings were also treated as fair game by the American settlers pouring into the new territories, and the courts struggled to puzzle through the complicated inconsistencies between Mexican and United States laws. Many Mexican landowners lost their title or were forced to sell to cover legal costs, and the poor people who worked for them were thrown off the land.
Hispanics found solace in stories of outlaws and bandits acting on behalf of the poor and besieged. There were numerous Mexican social bandits in the years following the conquest, but the most famous was Joaquin Murrieta, a semifactual hero who combined the exploits of at least five men. The Murrieta family, according to legend, had been attacked on their land by a group of Yankees. The invaders tied up Joaquin, flogged him, and raped his wife as he watched helplessly. Murrieta vowed revenge, and he and his outlaw band terrorized the Anglos. California’s governor offered a thousand-dollar reward for him, dead or alive. Bounty hunters brought back a head pickled in whiskey, claiming that it was Murrieta’s. The gruesome trophy went on tour and was viewed by thousands. But Mexican Californians claimed that their hero had escaped, a belief reinforced by a letter, supposedly from Murrieta, printed in the San Francisco Herald. “My alleged capture seems to be the topic of the day,” the letter read, but “I inform the readers of your worthy newspaper that I retain my head.” For the next half-century Murrieta’s accomplishments were celebrated in the ballad “El corrido de Joaquin Murrieta,” sung throughout communities on both sides of the border. Murrieta turned into an idea that could not die. “To the Mexicans he was a great liberator,” his cousin later wrote, “come out of Mexico to take California back from the hands of the gringos.”28
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