by Jill Lepore
Nearly as soon as the war with Mexico began, members of Congress began debating what to do when it ended. They spat venom. They pulled guns. They unsheathed knives. Divisions of party were abandoned; the splinter in Congress was sectional. Before heading to the Capitol every morning, southern congressmen strapped bowie knives to their belts and tucked pistols into their pockets. Northerners, on principle, came unarmed. When northerners talked about the slave power, they meant that literally.32
If the United States were to acquire territory from Mexico, and if this territory were to enter the Union, would Mexicans become American citizens? Calhoun, now in the Senate, vehemently opposed this idea. “I protest against the incorporation of such a people,” he declared. “Ours is the government of the white man.”33 And what about the territory itself: would these former parts of Mexico enter the Union as free states or slave? In 1846, David Wilmot, a thirty-two-year-old Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania who looked as meek as a schoolmaster, suggested that a proviso be added to any treaty negotiated to end the war, decreeing that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist” in any territories acquired through the war with Mexico.
In 1846, the Wilmot Proviso passed, 83–64, in the House, a vote that fell entirely along sectional rather than party lines. Massachusetts abolitionist and staunch opponent of the war Charles Sumner predicted that the proviso would lead to “a new crystallization of parties, in which there shall be one grand Northern party of Freedom.” Supporters of the Wilmot Proviso argued that slavery and democracy could not coexist. “It is not a question of mere dollars and cents,” said one Wilmot supporter in the House.
Zachary Taylor tries to balance the congressional scales between the “Wilmot Proviso” and “Southern Rights.” It is not a mere political question. It is one in which the North has a higher and deeper stake than the South possibly can have. It is a question whether, in the government of the country, she shall be borne down by the influence of your slaveholding aristocratic institutions, that have not in them the first element of Democracy.34
Members of Congress shook their fists. Southerners narrowed their eyes at northerners; northerners glared back at them. Men on both sides of the aisle stamped their feet. And the ground beneath the Capitol began to shake.
And yet, as different as were Wilmot’s interests from Calhoun’s, they were both interested in the rights of white men, as Wilmot made plain. “I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen,” he said. “I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”35
Americans who objected to the extension of slavery often pictured Texans (and Mexicans) as mixed-race and brutal. In this political cartoon, “young Texas,” whose tattoos read “Murder,” “Slavery,” and “Rape,” sits on a whipped and manacled slave. Protests against the war, as a war of aggression, and against the extension of slavery, as an injustice to black people, were sounded not from the elegantly carpeted floor of Congress but from pulpits and pews built of rough-hewn oak. Theodore Parker, a thirty-six-year-old Unitarian minister who had just returned from a tour of Europe, called on Americans to abolish slavery and disavow conquest. “Abroad we are looked on as a nation of swindlers and men-stealers!” he cried. “And what can we say in our defence? Alas, the nation is a traitor to its great idea—that all men are born equal, each with the same inalienable rights.” Parker called for a revolution in the name of the nation and in the name of God, in the spirit of the nation’s founding, and of its founding ideas.
“We are a rebellious nation; our whole history is treason; our blood was attainted before we were born; our Creeds are infidelity to the Mother church; our Constitution treason to our Father-land. What of that? Though all the Governors in the world bid us commit treason against Man, and set the example, let us never submit. Let God only be a Master to control our Conscience!”36
From the stillness of Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau heeded that call to conscience. He refused to pay his taxes, in protest of the war. In 1846, he left the cabin where he’d listened to whip-poor-wills sing Vespers, and went to jail. In an essay on civil disobedience, he explained that, in a government of majority rule, men had been made into unthinking machines, spineless, and less than men, unwilling to cast votes of conscience. (Of the democracy of numbers, he asked, searchingly, “How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.”) Prison, he said, was “the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor.”37 When Emerson asked him why he had gone to jail, Thoreau is said to have answered, “Why did you not?” But Emerson had his own misgivings:
Behold the famous States
Harrying Mexico
With rifle and with knife!38
With that rifle and with that knife, Americans would soon begin to carve up their own country.
II.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS SAT for his first photograph in 1841. He was twenty-three. He wore a dark suit with a stiff white collar and a polka-dotted tie. His skin was sepia, his hair black, his expression resolute. He stared straight into the camera. Born in Maryland in 1818, Douglass had taught himself to read and write from scraps of newspaper and old spelling books, and studied oratory on the sly. He escaped from slavery in 1838, disguised as a sailor. Living in New England, he began reading William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. Three years later, he spoke for the first time at an antislavery meeting, on Nantucket. “Have we been listening to a thing, a piece of property, or to a man?” Garrison had asked, when he took the stage after Douglass finished speaking. “A man! A man!” came the cry from the crowd.39 But Douglass provided his own testament, sitting for a daguerreotype, the ocular proof, eyeing the camera: I am a man.40
Frederick Douglass, the most photographed man in antebellum America, believed photography to be a democratic art. In the 1840s, Douglass became one of the nation’s best-known speakers. In 1843 alone, he had more than one hundred speaking engagements. He spoke with force and eloquence. His bearing rivaled that of the greatest Shakespearean actors. Garrison wished Douglass would make himself humbler, and talk plainer, to appear more, that is, like Garrison’s notion of an ex-slave. Bristling at Garrison’s handling, Douglass told his own story and made his own way. In 1845, he published an autobiography that, by revealing details of his origins, exposed him to fugitive slave catchers and imperiled his life; he left the country. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was translated into French, German, and Dutch. Douglass, speaking in Europe, became the most famous black person in the world.41 After buying his freedom, he returned to the United States in 1847 and started a newspaper, the North Star. Its motto and creed: “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.”42
In the North Star, Douglass called for an immediate end to the war with Mexico. “We beseech our countrymen to leave off this horrid conflict, abandon their murderous plans, and forsake the way of blood,” he urged. “Let the press, the pulpit, the church, the people at large, unite at once; and let petitions flood the halls of Congress by the million, asking for the instant recall of our forces from Mexico.”43 Douglass, who had faith in the power of photography, had faith in other technologies, too. Douglass believed that the great machines of the age were ushering in and accelerating an era of political revolution, of which protest of the war formed only one small part. “Thanks to steam navigation and electric wires,” he wrote, “a revolution cannot be confined to the place or the people where it may commence but flashes with lightning speed from heart to heart.”44
Other observers expected technological forces to work different miracles. As the nation split apart over the war with Mexico, many commentators came to believe that mighty machines could repair the breach. If the problem was the size of the Republic, the sprawl of its borders, the frayed edges of empire, couldn’t railroads, and e
specially the telegraph, tie the Republic together? “Doubt has been entertained by many patriotic minds how far the rapid, full, and thorough intercommunication of thought and intelligence, so necessary to the people living under a common representative republic, could be expected to take place throughout such immense bounds,” said one House member in 1845, but “that doubt can no longer exist.”45
Samuel Morse’s 1844 demonstration had proven that communication across even so great a distance as the width of the continent could be had in an instant. What hath God wrought? He had wrought, among other things, a wire service. Lawrence Gobright, the Associated Press’s clear-eyed Washington correspondent, determined to use the new wire service to inform Americans of goings-on in Congress: “My business is to communicate facts,” Gobright wrote about his barebones style. “My instructions do not allow me to make any comment upon the facts which I communicate.”46 But, for all the utopianism of Douglass and for all Gobright’s worthiness, even Americans with an unflinching faith in machine-driven progress understood that a pulse along a wire could not stop the slow but steady dissolution of the Union.
In February 1847, Taylor’s forces defeated a Mexican army commanded by Antonio López de Santa Anna near Monterrey. By summer, Mexico was prepared to negotiate a peace. Even as negotiators were tackling the matter of the border between the two nations, U.S. forces led by General Winfield Scott invaded Mexico City. By September, they had occupied the city. With the Americans wielding this tremendous bargaining power, an “All Mexico” movement arose, its adherents taking the position that the United States ought to acquire all of Mexico. Michigan senator Lewis Cass was among those who opposed this plan, on the grounds that it would be difficult to integrate the citizens of Mexico into the United States. “We do not want the people of Mexico either as citizens or subjects,” Cass said. “All we want is a portion of territory, which they nominally hold, generally uninhabited, or, where inhabited at all, sparsely so.”47
Polk’s ambition seemed limitless. He considered trying to acquire all of Mexico, from 26˚ north all the way to the Pacific. In the end, the line was set at 36˚ north. Mexico held onto Baja California, Sonora, and Chihuahua but, in exchange for $15 million, ceded to the United States more than half of its land. Mexican nationals who remained in that territory were given the choice to cross the new border back into Mexico, retain their Mexican citizenship, or become American citizens “on an equality with that of the inhabitants of the other territories of the United States.” Some 75,000–100,000 Mexicans chose to remain, largely in Texas and California, where, although promised political equality, they faced a growing racial animosity and economic losses, especially as their existing economy—trading and ranching—was replaced by prospecting, commercial agriculture, and industrial production.48
The war formally ended on February 2, 1848, with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, under which the top half of Mexico became the bottom third of the United States. The gain to the United States was as great as the loss to Mexico. In 1820, the United States of America had spanned 1.8 million square miles, with a population of 9.6 million people; Mexico had spanned 1.7 million square miles, with a population of 6.5 million people. By 1850, the United States had acquired one million square miles of Mexico, and its population had grown to 23.2 million; Mexico’s population was 7.5 million.49
As the United States swelled, Mexico shrank. Most of the land along the border between the two countries was barren and featureless. When the Joint United States and Mexican Boundary Commission began the work of surveying, its members found it hard even to stay alive: most died by starvation. But the scale of the territory the United States acquired by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was staggering. The Louisiana Purchase had doubled the size of the United States. In gaining territory from Mexico, the United States grew by 64 percent. The Superintendent of the Census, charged with measuring its extent, marveled that the territory comprising the United States had grown to “nearly ten times as large as the whole of France and Great Britain combined; three times as large as the whole of France, Britain, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, and Denmark, together; one-and-a-half times as large as the Russian empire in Europe; one-sixth less only than the area covered by the fifty-nine or sixty empires, states, and Republics of Europe; of equal extent with the Roman Empire or that of Alexander, neither of which is said to have exceeded 3,000,000 square miles.”50
Had the United States, an infant nation, become an empire? And in its imperial reach, would it fall, like Rome? “The United States will conquer Mexico,” Emerson had predicted, “but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which brings him down. Mexico will poison us.”51
These dismal fears were on the mind of eighty-year-old John Quincy Adams, hobbled and infirm, who objected to the war, and to the peace, with his dying breath. On February 21, 1848, the day Polk received the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Quincy Adams collapsed in the House of Representatives, very nearly in the middle of giving a speech, a last gasp of opposition to the war and all that it stood for. He died two days later. Young Abraham Lincoln, who’d been there when Quincy Adams fell to the floor, was among the men appointed to make arrangements for the funeral, held in the House of Representatives. Calhoun served as a pallbearer. Until the death of Lincoln, the death of no other statesman was so closely reported, followed, and witnessed, a national pageant. Telegraph lines had only just been completed between Portland, Maine, and Richmond, Virginia, and as far west as Cincinnati; word of Quincy Adams’s death spread faster than the wind. His glass-covered coffin traveled five hundred miles by train, stopping in one city after another, where thousands of Americans lined up to view it in an unprecedented, steam-powered parade of grief. The nation fell into mourning, pondering the awful matter of political poison, and the dread question of disunion.52
III.
HORACE GREELEY HIRED Margaret Fuller as an editor at the New York Tribune in 1844. Fuller, thirty-four, nearsighted and frail, was the most learned woman in the United States, as comfortable writing literary criticism as she was discussing philosophy with Emerson. “Her powers of speech throw her writing into the shade,” Emerson once wrote in his journal.53
Rebukes by the likes of Catherine Beecher, who condemned any woman who spoke in public, had silenced a great many women but not all, and certainly not Fuller or prominent abolitionists like the Grimké sisters. Angelina Grimké, raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and expelled from her church for speaking out against slavery, had written a reply to Beecher, an essay called “Human Rights Not Founded on Sex.” She said, “The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own.”54 Her sister Sarah made the argument historical: “The page of history teems with woman’s wrongs, and it is wet with woman’s tears.”55
Sentiment was not Fuller’s way; debate was her way. She was a scourge of lesser intellects. Edgar Allan Poe, whose work she did not admire, described her as wearing a perpetual sneer. In “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” Fuller argued that the democratization of American politics had cast light on the tyranny of men over women: “As men become aware that all men have not had their fair chance,” she observed, women had become willing to say “that no women have had a fair chance.” Meanwhile, abolition—“partly because many women have been prominent in that cause”—had made urgent the fight for women’s rights. In 1845, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller argued for fundamental and complete equality: “We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.”56 The book was wildly successful, and Greeley, who had taken to greeting Fuller with one of her catchphrases about women’s capacity—“Let them be sea-captains, if you will”—sent her to Europe to become his newspaper’s foreign correspondent. Fuller was in Rome, where she fell in love and gave birth to a son, when the women’s rights movement was born in earnest in the United States, as part of the political mayhem of the revolutionary year of 1848, a presidential
election year.57
The leading 1848 presidential candidates race to the White House by telegraph (Lewis Cass) and railroad (Zachary Taylor); Henry Clay tries to gain on them in a rowboat; laggard Martin Van Buren follows on a skinny horse; and a black man, representing abolition, lies facedown in the dirt, defeated. Polk had pledged to serve only one term. Democrats struggled to name a replacement. By now, finding a candidate to run for president had become all but impossible; the parties were national, but, given that politics had become sectional, what man could attract voters in both the North and the South?