Scott declined the frontal attack the Mexicans expected. Instead, he sent part of his force to cut paths up either side of Cerro Gordo and attacked in a pincers movement, sending Santa Anna's troops into headlong retreat all the way to Mexico City. Scott took the kind of gamble Taylor would not have taken and boldly severed his rapidly pursuing army from its slower-moving supply lines. On September 13, Chapultepec Palace, the seemingly impregnable fortress guarding Mexico City, fell to Scott. (The Palace had been defended by a force that included teenage cadets from the Mexican Military College. These cadets are celebrated in Mexican history as "Los Ninos," the children.) On September 17, Santa Anna surrendered.
The Mexican War ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which was ratified by the Senate on March 10, 1848. Mexico ceded to the United States New Mexico (which also included parts of the present states of Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado) and California. The Mexicans also renounced claims to Texas above the Rio Grande.
God and Gold
The Mexican War was controversial. Citizens in the Northeast, especially in New England, saw the war as an unfair--somehow un-American--war of aggression, and they protested it. Southerners and Westerners, however, thrilled to the cause, volunteering to fight in such numbers that recruiting offices were overwhelmed and had to turn eager men away. Right, wrong, or somewhere in between, the war vastly expanded the territory of the United States.
A Trek
The force of war was not the only engine that drove "manifest destiny." The West likewise lured seekers of God and those who lusted after gold. In March 1830, a young Joseph Smith, Jr. published something he called The Book of Mormon. One month later, he started a religion based on the book, which relates how, in 1820, the 15-year-old Smith was visited by God the Father and Jesus Christ near his family's farm in upstate New York. Three years after this, young Smith was visited by an angel named Moroni, who instructed him to dig in a certain place on a nearby hill. There Smith unearthed a book consisting of beaten gold plates engraved with the words of Moroni's father, Mormon. The book told of a struggle between two tribes, one good, the other evil, which took place in the New World long before the arrival of Columbus. Moroni emerged as the sole survivor of the tribe of the good. Whoever dug up The Book of Mormon would be charged with restoring to the world the true Church of Christ.
The church Smith founded in April 1830 consisted of six members. By 1844, 15,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints--popularly called Mormons--were settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, the separatist community they had built. Persecuted wherever they went, the Mormons always lived apart. Particularly distasteful to "gentiles" (as Mormons called those outside of the faith) was the Mormon practice of polygamy (multiple wives).
Opposition to the Mormons often grew violent. On June 27, 1844, a "gentile" mob murdered Joseph Smith and his brother. Smith's second-in-command, the dynamic Brigham Young, realized that the Mormons would have to move somewhere so remote that no one would ever bother them again. Over the next two years, under his direction, a great migration was organized. The destination, which Young had read about in an account by John C. Fremont was near the Great Salt Lake in the present-day state of Utah.
Young planned and executed the Mormon Trek with the precision and genius of a great general in time of war. Hundreds of wagons were built, and a staging area, called Camp of Israel, was set up in Iowa. Emigrant parties were deployed in groups of a few hundred at a time and sent 1,400 miles across some of the most inhospitable land on the face of the planet. During the 1840s and 1850s, Saints--as Mormons called themselves--poured into the Salt Lake region. Young oversaw the planning and construction of a magnificent town, replete with public squares, broad boulevards, and well-constructed houses, all centered around a great Temple Square. In addition, Young and his followers introduced into the arid Salt Lake Valley irrigation on a scale unprecedented in American agriculture. By 1865, 277 irrigation canals watered 154,000 square miles of what had been desert.
All That Glitters
Johann Augustus Sutter had bad luck with money. Born in Kandern, Germany, in 1803, he went bankrupt there and, to escape his many creditors, fled to the Mexican Southwest, where he tried his fortune in the Santa Fe trade. Twice more Sutter went bust, before finally settling in Mexican California in 1838, where he managed to build a vast ranch in the region's central valley.
Presumably, January 24, 1848, started like any other day on the ranch. James Wilson Marshall, an employee of Sutter's, went out to inspect the race of a new mill on the property. He was attracted by something shiny in the sediment collected at the bottom of the mill race. It was gold.
Within a month and a half of the discovery, all of Sutter's employees had deserted him, in search of gold. Without a staff, Sutter's ranch faltered. Worse, his claims to the land around the mill were ultimately judged invalid. While everyone around Sutter (it seemed) grew instantly rich, Sutter himself was, yet again, financially ruined and would die, bitter and bankrupt, in 1880.
It was not Marshall or Sutter, but a Mormon entrepreneur who did the most to stir up the great Gold Rush of 1849. Sam Brannon was one of a very few Mormon men brash enough to challenge the authority of Brigham Young. In defiance of Young, Brannon had set up his own Mormon community in the vicinity of San Francisco--then called Yerba Buena (good herb). Brannon saw in the discovery of gold a chance to profit from serving the needs of hopeful prospectors and other settlers. Fresh from a trip to Salt Lake City, where Young had excommunicated him from the church, Brannon took a quinine bottle, filled it with gold dust, and ran out into the streets of his town. "Gold!" he yelled. "Gold! Gold from the American River!" For good measure, he covered the gold story in The California Star, a newspaper he owned. Within two weeks, the population of Yerba Buena plummeted from a few thousand to a few dozen, as men dropped their tools and left their jobs to prospect on the south fork of the American River.
From the West Coast, word of gold spread east. The scene played out in San Francisco was repeated in city after city. Employment was unceremoniously terminated, wives and children were left behind, and seekers set out on the long trek to California. The journey was characteristically filled with hardship and heartbreak, whether the traveler chose the tedious overland route, the treacherous sea passage around stormy Cape Horn, or the boat to Panama (and a trek across the disease-ridden Isthmus to meet another ship for the voyage to the California coast). For some, the trip was worthwhile; great fortunes were made. Most prospectors, however, found only hard lives, mean spirits, and barely enough gold to pay for meals, shelter, and clothing. Many didn't even find that much.
The fact was that most men made the mistake of looking for their fortune on the ground, while the real money was made by those, like Brannon, who sold groceries, hardware, real estate, liquor, and other necessities to the '49ers. Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins made a fortune in miner's supplies. Charles Crocker used the profits from his dry goods operation to start a bank. Leland Stanford parlayed his mercantile pursuits into a political career culminating in the governorship of California and the founding of the university that bears his name. Together--as the "Big Four"--Huntington, Hopkins, Crocker, and Stanford provided the major financing for the Central Pacific Railroad--the western leg of the great transcontinental railroad completed in 1869.
The California Gold Rush lasted through the eve of the Civil War. The rush populated much of California, and then, as gold was discovered farther inland in Nevada, Colorado, and the Dakotas, yet more of the frontier West was settled. But as the bonds of union grew stronger between East and West, those uniting North and South steadily dissolved. Still basking in the reflected glory of western gold, the American nation was about to enter its darkest hours.
The Least You Need to Know
While controversial, the war with Mexico greatly expanded the western territory of the United States.
In addition to agriculture, the promise of religious freedom and the promise of gold
lured many thousands out west in the years between the Mexican War and the Civil War.
Main Event
The Norman Trek was accomplished with great efficiency and very little loss of life. The church established a Perpetual Emigrating Fund to lend money to those lacking the means to finance their own way west. By 1855, the church realized that outfitting fully equipped wagon trains would soon break the fund. Brigham Young hit on a solution. He directed Mormon carpenters in Iowa to build handcarts as cheap substitutes for the horse-drawn prairie schooners. The emigrants would walk to Salt Lake City.
The small, boxlike carts looked like miniature covered wagons. They were equipped with only two oversize wheels, designed to roll easily over rough terrain. Approximately 500 handcart "Saints" left Iowa City on June 9 and 11, 1856. Although the trek took longer than anticipated (the emigrants did not arrive in Salt Lake City until late in September), the emigrants arrived safely, and Young was encouraged.
Departure of the next two "Handcart Brigades" was delayed until July and August because of a shortage of carts. Faced with a scarcity of seasoned lumber, the carpenters had to use green wood, which shrunk in the hot, and air of the plains. Filled to overflowing, the carts broke down or simply fell apart, supplies ran short, and, worse still, the delayed departure from Iowa put the emigrants in Wyoming during the first snows. Of the 1,000 emigrants in the second Handcart Brigade, 225 died.
Word for the Day
People who participated in the great California Gold Rush of 1849 earned the name '49er or Forty-niner. The 1849 rush was not the country's first, however; nor would it be the last. Western Georgia was the scene of the first rush would occur elsewhere in California and throughout the West during much of the 19th century. In 1896, the Klondike drew thousands of prospectors, and two years later, more came to Alaska in search of the yellow ore.
STRANGE FLAG OVER SUMTER (1859-1862)
In This Chapter
Lincoln's rise
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry
The fall of Fort Sumter and the early battles
Union military failures
Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin in Hardin (now Larue) County, Kentucky. In 1816, the family moved to Indiana and, finally, to Illinois in 1830. Largely self-taught, Lincoln tried various occupations and served as a militiaman in the Black Hawk War (1832). Although he had little appetite for military life, Lincoln took "much satisfaction" in having been elected captain of his militia company. That position opened new horizons for the young backwoodsman. Lincoln ran for the Illinois state legislature, losing his first bid but subsequently gaining election to four consecutive terms (1832-41). After setting up a successful law practice in Springfield, the state capital, he served a term (1847-49) in the U.S. House of Representatives but then returned to his law practice.
At this point, by his own admission, Lincoln "was losing interest in politics." Then came the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Its doctrine of popular sovereignty potentially opened new territories to slavery, and Lincoln saw the provisions of the act as immoral. Although he believed that the Constitution protected slavery in states where it already existed, he also thought that the Founding Fathers had put slavery on the way to extinction by legislating against its spread to new territories. Lincoln ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1855, then, the following year, left the Whig party to join the newly formed Republicans.
In 1858, Lincoln ran for the Senate against the Illinois incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln accepted his party's nomination (June 16, 1858) with a powerful speech suggesting that Douglas, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, and Democratic presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan had actually conspired to nationalize slavery. Declaring that compromise was doomed to fail and that the nation would become either all slave or all free, he paraphrased the Bible: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." For the fate of the country, it was as if he spoke prophecy.
John Brown's Body
Lincoln, a highly principled moderate on the issue of slavery, soon found himself transformed from an obscure Illinois politician to the standard bearer of his party. He challenged Douglas to a series of debates that captured the attention of the national press. Although Lincoln failed to win a seat in the Senate, he emerged as an eloquent, morally upright, yet thoroughly balanced embodiment of prevailing sentiment in the North. Radical Southerners warned that the election of any Republican, even Lincoln, would mean civil war.
While Lincoln and other politicians chose the stump and the rostrum as forums suited to decide the fate of the nation, others took more radical action. John Brown was born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut, but he grew to undistinguished adulthood in Ohio, drifting from job to job, always dogged by bad luck and bad business decisions. By the 1850s, however, Brown's life began to take direction, as he became profoundly involved in the slavery question.
Brown and his five sons settled in "Bleeding Kansas," where they became embroiled in the violence between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces for control of the territorial government. Brown assumed command of the local Free-Soil militia, and after pro-slavery forces sacked the Free-Soil town of Lawrence, Brown, four of his sons, and two other followers retaliated by hacking to death, with sabers, five unarmed settlers along the Pottawatomie River during the night of May 24, 1856.
Although he was not apprehended, Brown claimed full responsibility for the act and became increasingly obsessed with the idea of emancipating the slaves by inciting a massive slave revolt. The charismatic Brown persuaded a group of Northern abolitionists to back his scheme financially. He chose Harpers Ferry, Virginia (present-day West Virginia), as his target, planning to capture the federal small-arms arsenal there. Then Brown planned to establish a base of operations in the mountains, from which he would direct the slave rebellion as well as offer refuge to fugitives. On October 16, 1859, with 21 men, Brown seized the town and broke into the arsenal. Local militia responded, and within a day, federal troops under the command of Robert E. Lee arrived, attacked, and killed 10 of Brown's band. The wounded Brown was taken prisoner.
Yet the battle was hardly over. Arrested and tried for treason, Brown conducted himself with impressive dignity and courage. It was, in fact, his finest hour, and he succeeded in arousing Northern sympathy, eliciting statements of support from the likes of William Lloyd Garrison and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Brown's execution by hanging, on December 2, 1859, elevated him to the status of martyr. To many, the raid on Harpers Ferry seemed a harbinger of the great contest to come.
Bleak Transition
The brand-new Republican Party, with Lincoln as its presidential candidate, united remnants of the essentially defunct Free-Soil Party and the Liberty party, as well as the old Whigs and other anti-slavery moderates and radicals. Stephen A. Douglas, who had ,defeated Lincoln in the race for the Senate, sought the Democratic nomination in 1860. But having denounced the pro-slavery constitution adopted by Kansas, Douglas had alienated the pro-Democratic South. Although Douglas was finally nominated, he was the candidate of a splintered party; a breakaway Southern Democratic party emerged, with outgoing vice president John C. Breckinridge as its candidate. Yet another splinter group, the Constitutional Union party, fielded a candidate, further dividing the party and propelling Lincoln to victory with 180 electoral votes against 123 for his combined opponents.
News of the victory of a "black Republican" (as radical Southerners called Lincoln) pushed the South to secession. First to leave the Union was South Carolina, on December 20, 1860; Mississippi followed on January 9, 186 1, Florida on January 10, Alabama on January 11, Georgia on January 19, Louisiana on January 26, and Texas on February 1. Four days later, delegates from these states met in Montgomery, Alabama, where they wrote a constitution for the Confederate States of America and named Mississippi's Jefferson Davis provisional president. As the Union crumbled about him, lame duck President James Buchanan tem
porized, unwilling to take action.
Prior to his inauguration, President-elect Lincoln discovered that Jefferson Davis was not spoiling for war but offered to negotiate peaceful relations with the United States. And Senator John J. Crittenden (1787-1863) of Kentucky proposed, as a last-ditch alternative to bloodshed, the Crittenden Compromise--constitutional amendments to protect slavery while absolutely limiting its spread. Lincoln, determined to avoid committing himself to any stance before actually taking office, nevertheless let others attribute positions to him. The fact was that Lincoln's prime objective was to preserve the Union, and he was actually willing to consider protecting slavery where it existed, even by constitutional amendment. Lincoln also thought the Fugitive Slave Act should be enforced. Yet, by remaining silent during the period between his election and inauguration, lie conveyed the impression that he fully shared the radical Republican opposition to compromise.
April 12, 1861, 4:30 A.M.
With Lincoln in office and all hope of compromise extinguished, the Confederate president and Confederate Congress authorized an army and navy and set about taking control of federal civil and military installations in the South. Fort Sumter, which guarded Charleston harbor, was especially important. If the Confederacy could not control the key international port on the coast of South Carolina, it could not effectively claim sovereignty. Throughout March 1861, the Confederate government attempted to negotiate the peaceful evacuation of the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, but Lincoln remained adamant that the United States would not give up the fort. Yet, not wanting to provoke the Southerners, Lincoln delayed sending reinforcements.
Faced with South Carolina "fire-eaters" (ardent secessionists) who threatened to seize the fort on their own, Jefferson Davis decided that he had to take action. He assigned the mission of capturing the fort to Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, who laid siege to the fort, hoping to starve out post commandant Major Robert Anderson and his men. In the meantime, Lincoln and the rest of the federal government seemed to be sleepwalking. With great deliberation and delay, a ship was loaded with reinforcements and supply. But it was too late now. just before he was prepared to open fire, Beauregard offered Anderson, his former West Point instructor, generous surrender terms: "All proper facilities will be afforded for the removal of yourself and command, together with company arms and property, and all private property, to any post in the United States which you may select. The flag which you have upheld so long and with so much fortitude, under the most trying circumstances, may be saluted by you on taking it down." Anderson refused, and the first shot of the Civil War was fired at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1. 861. Edmund Ruffin (1794-1865), a 67-year-old "fire-eater," claimed credit for having pulled the lanyard on that initial volley-although the truth is that Captain George S. James fired a signal gun first. The ensuing bombardment lasted 34 hours before Anderson surrendered. Incredibly, this first engagement of the war resulted in no casualties. It would be the last bloodless battle of the war.
The Complete Idiot's Guide to American History Page 19