Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Polk honestly tried to buy the Mexican claims to Texas and California. But a power struggle was at this late date inevitable; the Mexican government, weak as it was, was not prepared to accede to American predominance. The Mexicans were not just stubborn; they were intransigent. With the renewed discussion of annexation in 1844, Mexico immediately voided the truce with Texas. Perhaps with the mistaken notion that this would deter the United States, Mexico emphasized that it was still at war with the separated province. Mexico also began preparations for a larger war. Polk's emissary, John Slidell, was not even received in Mexico; the Mexican minister to the United States was recalled. The evidence is that President Polk, faced with these two events, decided upon a declaration of war.

  But Polk as President had to play his cards carefully. The South and Southwest, as always, were ready for war; these regions had become almost belligerent in their attitudes. But the rest of the nation was not, and a majority in Congress stood opposed to a war with Mexico, over Texas or anything else.

  There was nothing dishonorable about a war with Mexico at this time. In fact, Mexico had almost assured conflict by making it clear that the United States was inheriting the Texan struggle with the Mexican nation. If the United States, in its own interests, annexed Texas, a part of the dowry, unfortunately, had to be the Texas–Mexican quarrel. The more unfortunate Whig propaganda in the United States, that the conflict grew out of a Southern plot to extend slavery to the Pacific, not only tended to reinforce Mexican innocence but convinced millions of Americans as well. The American South, of course, happily viewed any extension of slave states westward: the more slave-state Senators, the better. But Polk and his dominant group saw this as only a side issue. And, finding Mexico unwilling to negotiate or even talk, Polk's Administration coolly and rather brilliantly outmaneuvered Mexico at the power-politics game.

  When it was apparent Texas would ratify annexation, but before the treaty was ratified, Polk sent General Zachary Taylor with a small U.S. army into Texas. This move was part of the negotiations, to protect Texas during the discussions, as agreed. Taylor, who was himself a Whig, arrived on the Nueces River at Corpus Christi in July 1845. Here he was supplied by sea and drilled for some nine months. Only when Polk clearly understood that the Mexican government would not negotiate, and his ambassador was rebuffed, did he send Taylor orders to march to the Rio Grande. Taylor moved south in April 1846.

  This country north of the river was seething with Mexican cavalry. The Nueces–Rio Grande region was claimed by both nations, and both under these terms had the right to send armed forces into it. Taylor fixed a base at Point Isabel, where the Brazos de Santiago pass permitted deep-water entry to the Texas coast. This was only a few miles above the Rio Grande. Then, he established a detachment under Major Jacob Brown in a bend of the river directly across from the Mexican city of Matamoros, ostensibly to keep the large Mexican forces there under surveillance. Each morning and evening, in full view of General Arista, Brown raised and lowered the Stars and Stripes to the fife and drum. His presence inflamed the landowners who lived in Matamoros, many of whom held grants north of the Bravo. Arista was pressured into action. He ordered some fifteen hundred cavalry across the river, then followed his lances with his main force. In this way, Polk used Zachary Taylor to precipitate the gathering crisis, and Taylor, Whig or not, was obviously ready and willing.

  The chaparral was filled with blue and gray coats; something was bound to strike fire. On April 24, sixty of Taylor's heavy dragoons, out on patrol, blundered into a Mexican cavalry trap and were snapped up by a full brigade. Then, the Mexican force opened fire on Fort Brown, as the barricade in the bend of the river came to be called, and laid siege to the breastworks. Arista did not attempt to smash Major Brown with his full force; he was playing strategy and laying a trap. Arista placed his main body in wait at the edge of the river brush, where it opened on the Sacahuiste Prairie facing Point Isabel some twenty miles away.

  Arista expected Taylor to move west from Laguna Madre, where he was camped on the edge of the bay.

  Move Taylor did. He notified Washington by packet that "hostilities may now be considered as commenced." Texas Ranger scouts kept him informed of Mexican movements. Taylor's position was that Mexican troops had entered U.S. territory and fired first; Arista seems to have acted almost as if he were following Polk's plan. Taylor now called upon the Governor of Texas for four regiments, two of foot and two of horse. He had already, rather to his disgust, found the half-wild Ranger companies he had accepted earlier for political reasons invaluable. They could ride country where his own heavy mounted infantry, or dragoons, maneuvered only with difficulty. Now, Taylor marched toward Fort Brown with 2,300 men, and his guns and wagons, at three on the afternoon of May 7. He was heavily outnumbered, but stated that if Arista opposed his route of march, "in whatever force, I shall fight him."

  The American vanguard struck the emplaced Mexicans at Palo Alto, a small rise on the coastal plain just beyond the chaparral. After a touch-and-go battle, Arista retreated. The two armies engaged again on May 9, at Resaca de la Palma, an oxbow lake a few miles from the Rio Grande. This time Arista was badly mauled by the superior American infantry, and he fell back across the river in disorder and with shattered morale. Both battles were American victories over great odds.

  Taylor then marched into Fort Brown. The flag still waved over the American breastworks, though Major Brown had been fatally wounded. (On this spot the future city of Brownsville would be built.)

  Now President Polk, armed with Taylor's dispatches, had what he wanted. He went before the Congress with the message that American blood had been shed on American soil. The Congress, North and South, dared not do anything but declare war.

  Polk had handled the situation shrewdly, confidently, and coolly—the mark of a man of the old frontier. Like Austin, Houston, and Andrew Jackson, he left his visible results on the land, a lasting heritage of soil; ironically, the admitted intellectual leaders of the day, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, left mostly rhetoric behind.

  The rest of the war, in which American armies marched into Mexico across the Rio Grande, and from Vera Cruz, and other forces swept the far West, was fought outside Texas. The American historian Lynn Montross perhaps put this war in its truest perspective:

  Of all American conflicts the one with Mexico has been most often condemned as dishonorable. This tradition may be traced to the rabid politics of the day, for the Whigs and Abolitionists came dangerously near to treason in their opposition. Such leaders as Clay and Webster denounced the struggle as a conspiracy to bring more slave-holding states into the Union; and a Whig newspaper declared it would be "a joy to hear that the hordes under Scott and Taylor were every man of them swept into the next world."

  That such strictures are not to be taken seriously is shown by the fact that both the victorious generals became Whig candidates for the Presidency. Nor is there any reason for accepting at face value the denunciations of American motives by Whig orators . . . the actual causes of the Mexican strife were obscured by the causes which would soon lead to Secession.

  An understanding of the background is necessary to dispel a commonly held belief that the United States crushed a weak and unprepared neighbor by overwhelming bulk. On the contrary, the actual odds in the field weighed heavily against the Americans. The northern army faced four times its own numbers in the principal battle; and as a triumph of skill over obstacles, Scott's campaign has no equal in the world during the half century after Waterloo. . . .

  Nor could it be said that the Mexicans were unworthy opponents. A generation of civil war had trained a hardy native soldiery which defended a formidable terrain with ability as well as courage. In the critical campaign the Americans found the enemy particularly strong in engineering and artillery—two arms which are not the resources of a military rabble.

  Significantly, European observers praised American military feats as prodigious. Ironically, it was Americans themselves, in a
war fought for the long-term interests of the American nation, who robbed themselves of glory. But, probably most significant of all, even the harshest critics of the war never proposed that the spoils be given back.

  By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ratified in July 1848, the United States purchased California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, and a part of Colorado, making a territory four times the size of France, from Mexico for $15,000,000 and the assumption of Mexican debts. Mexico relinquished all claims to Texas, and the boundary was set at the Rio Grande. All of this territory, except California and New Mexico, was only nominally Mexican, and in the last two regions the writ of the Mexican Supreme Government had already ceased to run. The Mexican Empire was not only static in the early 19th century; it had already fallen apart due to internal disorder.

  Fortunately for the American nation, internal disorder enveloped the Hispanic southland first. Had the American internal conflict developed earlier, the Jacksonian dream—that the nation and its people were mightier than their ideology or passing internal quarrels, and that the nation could be glorious either with slavery or without it, as it had been in the past—might have had a very different end. The Republic of Texas, not the United States, might have battled Mexico in a long and mutually disastrous war for the West, while the former nation split the continent into three separate, weak, and hostile English-speaking states.

  If the Mexican War was eventually recognized by both the North and South as a national war, the issue of slavery had already poisoned the peace. The Wilmot Proviso, repeatedly put before Congress, tried to prohibit slavery in any territory gained through the war. This was construed by some to mean not only California but also the disputed lands in south Texas and New Mexico east of the Rio Grande. In all this sound and fury, North and South, there was no real understanding that slavery, based on cotton agriculture, had reached its natural limits. It had no future west of the 98th meridian; where the Balcones Scarp began in Texas, the rainfall, and the plantation system of the 19th-century South, abruptly ended. From the middle of the state, on a line almost even with Austin, the rainfall dribbled away from 30 inches annually to 15 or less across the vast plateaus. The farm line halted in crippled agony roughly along the San Antonio and Nueces rivers toward the south. The Spaniards had failed to plant vast haciendas here, not because they were fools but because the country was suited under the technology of the times mainly for wild Indians. The land of the numberless buffalo, and the arid mesas of the far West, was a Comanche paradise, but a nightmare vista to men who earned a living with the hoe, and whose whole history had never had to cope with a lack of wood and water.

  The sincerity of the men who battled each other in the Senate of the United States, arguing whether the Southwest should be slave or free, cannot be doubted. Their intelligence concerning the land itself was extremely faulty.

  The slave territory question, which was to tear the nation apart, immediately embroiled the State of Texas in a new boundary dispute—this time with the United States. Texas had claimed the Rio Grande not only as its border in the south, but westward as far as Colorado. This included half of New Mexico, with the capital, Santa Fe, in Texan territory. The claim was just as specious, but no more so, than the claim for the land south of the Nueces. Neither in the far south nor the far west was it supported by Spanish or Mexican history. Polk, however, and his Secretary of State, James Buchanan, supported the Texan rights to both areas.

  But if Polk could involve the United States in war by executive action, he could not define internal boundaries except by action of Congress, and this was a subject on which the Congress would not be stampeded. The land south of the Nueces was never in serious dispute, but New Mexico had Spanish-speaking settlers, Northern American traders, and a history of its own.

  It was separated by many hundreds of miles from the populated portions of Texas, across Indian country. There were geographic, economic, and social reasons why New Mexico should not be part of Texas, but the territory was separated more for emotional than logical reasons by what seems to have been a genuine conspiracy against Texan sovereignty by certain Americans.

  When General Stephen Kearny's Army of the West occupied Santa Fe in 1846, Kearny helped organize an interim local government, which paid no attention to Texan pretensions. This infuriated the Texas Legislature and Governor, who were assured, however, by Polk and Buchanan that Texas's claim would not be prejudiced. But the argument of whether slavery was to be allowed in this territory, which it would be automatically if it became part of Texas, paralyzed all official action in Washington. Buchanan was unable to deliver.

  Meanwhile, two events occurred. In New Mexico, sentiment against the Tejanos was stirred up by American interests, mostly traders who had come in from the north. It was not hard to alienate the thoroughly Mexican population against Texas, and this was done both by speeches and by newspaper. United States Army officers abetted and assisted in this work. Then, again with the cooperation of the Army, a political convention assembled at Santa Fe in November 1848. This convention sent a petition to the United States government, requesting territorial status, and asking that slavery be kept out of New Mexico. New Mexico had its own labor institution, peonage, but this was not understood or acted upon by Congress until ten years later. Meanwhile, the State of Texas took the bull by the horns in early 1848, even before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified. The legislature created "Santa Fe County," which conveniently included all of New Mexico east of the Rio Grande. A Texas magistrate, Spruce Baird, was dispatched to New Mexico to take control.

  Judge Baird made the hazardous journey to Santa Fe only to be informed coldly by the commander of U.S. forces there that the local regime would be sustained against Texas by the army "at every peril," unless ordered otherwise by Washington. The army was on safe ground. Polk's Administration was ending; the new President, Zachary Taylor, was a Whig and favored statehood for the "conquered" territories. Taylor died in office, but he was succeeded by Millard Fillmore, who was even more adamant, and who was prepared to use force against Texas if it pressed its claim. Slavery and free soil advocates were again stalemated in Congress. Frustrated, Baird had to return to Texas—significantly, by way of Missouri. There was no safe passage to Santa Fe, except through Mexico or U.S. territory.

  When Baird reported this federal interference, there was great indignation in Texas government circles. Governor Wood, and his immediate successor, Hansborough Bell, proposed to send state troops to Santa Fe. Other politicians demanded secession from the Union. On the record, this was a betrayal of faith, because Texas had been specifically promised the disputed territory, first by Major Donelson in 1845, and the map attached to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo showed the Texas boundary following the Rio Grande to its source.

  Mirabeau Lamar's old argument against annexation—that Texas would be made subject to the interminable conflicts and irreconcilable prejudices of other Americans in other states—had come true.

  Now, starting in 1849, there began several lasting trends in Texan–Washington relations. These were to continue in some degree for a century, and for the first thirty years of statehood, the crisis was acute. Texans tended to resent all national interference, even when there was a national consensus, in their own affairs, whether the matter was a question of boundaries, finances, or internal politics. The dominant Texan view of the American Union was that it was composed of sovereign states. The federal apparatus was seen primarily as a convenient tool to do those difficult or expensive things the people of the state could not, or would not do for themselves: frontier defense, postal and diplomatic services, harbors and roads. The problem of frontier defense, in fact, had been paramount in the decision for annexation; Texas could never be secure so long as it had a border quarrel with ten million hostile Mexicans to the south. Texans expected the state and federal governments to remain approximately coequal, each in its own sphere. If this was a simplistic view of national government, it was not sp
ecious: it was almost exactly the dominant view of Americans in 1789. The people who had marched southwest from Appalachia had not left the 18th century; they still held to "strict construction of the Constitution," with no erosion of state powers in favor of the central government. The mystique of the "nation," a 19th-century notion, had not replaced their own mystique of race, blood, and soil, based on the battle for the ground on which they stood.

  Intensely touchy about national interference in local matters, Texans were equally certain that the national government was niggardly toward them, and never did enough. There was one genuine basis for this growing belief: in 1845 Texas disbanded its army and turned the problem of its frontiers over to the federal authorities, who were constitutionally bound to protect national borders. The federal authorities handled the frontier problem, which at most times men in Washington only dimly understood, quite poorly. In the 1840s and 1850s, neither the War Department or the U.S. Army had much understanding of the Plains Indian frontier. No state had ever come into the Union with more than half its territory unsettled, and with at least 20,000 extremely warlike Amerinds living within its borders. And these were Indians of a type the army had not fought before.

  For long periods, between 1845 and 1875, and even later, the federal government tried to make peace with Indians and Mexicans, or failed to act, along a frontier where warfare and bloodshed was already endemic, a way of life. Some two hundred Texans were killed by Indians or carried off into captivity in the year 1849 alone. The U.S. Army kept only a few thousand soldiers in the state, and these were heavy infantry—mounted only occasionally on mules. They provided no defense against the wide-ranging Comanches, while Washington refused to push a war with the Comanches home. People were still being killed on the outskirts of Austin, where the state capital was fixed again in 1850. The Texas people grew increasingly bitter, and the Governor, over the objections of the local army commanders, again and again ordered state troops, the Rangers, into the field.