American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Then events seemed to take command:

  March 28, 1846: The American regulars camp on the Rio Grande.

  April 12: The Mexican command warns that Taylor’s is a hostile action.

  April 15: Taylor blockades the mouth of the Rio Grande.

  April 24: Arista arrives and orders the Mexican forces across the river.

  April 25: Arista’s troops trap one of Taylor’s cavalry patrols and kill or capture sixty Americans. Taylor reports the situation to Washington and urgently requests reinforcements. The Mexican and American armies begin to maneuver for battle, as both commanders act on the assumption that war has begun.

  Now Washington: May 9: Polk convenes the Cabinet and gains their approval for an immediate declaration of war. Only later that evening does Taylor’s message, describing the Mexican attack, arrive from the Rio Grande. The President spends the Sabbath drafting his speech, which is delivered two days later. “A cynic might have felt that Polk’s war message sounded as if it had indeed been written on Sunday, for it combined the self-righteous wrath of the Old Testament with the long-suffering patience of the New,” David Pletcher wrote. It “epitomized Polk’s whole policy toward Mexico since his inauguration, by assuming what was not yet proved, by thrusting forward to throw his adversary off balance, and by maintaining a show of reluctance and sweet reason to placate moderates and pacifists at home.…”

  A few Whig congressmen called for time to consider the mass of evidence that accompanied Polk’s message, but heavy majorities in the House and Senate voted for war at once. Suddenly the War Department found itself without a war plan, despite the fact that hostilities had been predicted for months. A strategy was hastily improvised. General Taylor would conduct the main offensive across the Rio Grande into the lightly populated northern reaches of Mexico. The Navy’s Pacific squadron, which had standing orders to capture the port of Monterey if war broke out, would seize as much of the California coast as possible. General Stephen W. Kearny would launch an expedition into New Mexico and then California. Later General Winfield Scott would strike at Mexico City itself by way of Veracruz. The plan and its execution turned out to be a curious repetition of the War of l812-15: attacks along the northern border, battles in western waters and coastlands (in this case California), amphibious invasion from the eastern ocean, capture of the enemy’s capital. But this time the United States struck at the enemy heartland—and there was no Battle of New Orleans.

  While Taylor, without even waiting for the congressional declaration of war, pushed the Mexicans back across the river with artillery barrages and bayonet attacks, General Kearny moved out toward Santa Fe. Another long march brought his small force to San Diego and Los Angeles, where it linked up with shore parties from the U.S. Pacific squadron and a group of local Americans led by the flamboyant Captain John C. Fremont.

  In late September, Taylor drove the Mexican’s out of Monterrey after a four-day siege and stout opposition. Lieutenant Sam Grant was moved to pity by the plight of the conquered Mexicans: “Many of the prisoners were cavalry, armed with lances, and mounted on miserable little half-starved horses that did not look as if they could carry their riders out of town. The men looked in but little better condition.” The bankrupt Mexican government could not even begin to match the millions of dollars appropriated in Washington. The Americans did suffer from inadequate supplies, primitive provisions for sanitation and health, and other failings of a makeshift, volunteer army, but few American soldiers missed a meal or lacked a working gun; few Mexicans ever received either.

  After Monterrey fell, Taylor concluded a local armistice with Santa Anna, subject to being disclaimed by either government. Polk promptly did disclaim it and added a reprimand. Now that Taylor was being mentioned by Whigs as a presidential possibility, the general suspected Polk was intriguing against him. His suspicions hardened when he heard that Scott would lead the attack on Veracruz. Acting largely on his own, Taylor pushed south toward a showdown with Santa Anna. At Buena Vista a vastly superior Mexican force attacked the 5,000 men under Taylor. Once again the Mexican soldiers fought valiantly but were let down by their leaders, who hesitated in the face of repeated charges by Jefferson Davis’ Mississippi volunteers. When Santa Anna tried to disengage, the battle was converted into a rout. Taylor’s success, however, only earned him another reprimand from Washington, so the general gave up his command and returned to the United States—where he gained a hero’s reception.

  In February 1847 Scott struck at Mexico’s east coast in what would become a great military saga of the war. The soldiers in the small American armada faced the powerful fortress of Veracruz and, towering behind it, the mountain of Orizaba, whose white summit appeared to them “like a great liberty cap suspended in the air.” On March 9, as the setting sun dyed the snowy liberty cap blood-red, 10,000 soldiers streamed ashore in the first massive amphibious assault ever launched by Americans. As one lieutenant in the first wave wrote home with delight, all went smoothly. “As fast as they got in, the boats fell behind the frigate Raritan and held on her till the signal should be given to land. This, I think, was the most beautiful sight I ever saw, as the boats fell in their places, the colors flying, the bands playing, etc. When the signal was made to land, as the boats cast off and stood for shore the navy and the 2nd and 3rd lines sent up cheer after cheer that might have been heard for miles.” After five days of skillful maneuver and bombardment, the Americans forced the surrender of the fortress.

  Then began the long advance to the west. In the midsummer heat Scott’s men moved through lowlands and trudged up through towering mountain passes to the central Mexican plateau. Though a heavy force of Mexicans stood at the canyons around Cerro Gordo, Scott’s young engineering officers—Joe Johnston, George McClellan, and the brilliant Major Robert E. Lee—found or built paths around the Mexican positions, flanking and routing the defenders. Scott pressed on to Jalapa and Perote, where the invasion ended in May. Disease and the departure of hundreds of men whose short-term enlistments had expired left Scott with only a few thousand effectives, and he had to pause for several months while reinforcements arrived piecemeal from the United States.

  After the fall of Veracruz, Polk dispatched Nicholas P. Trist, chief clerk of the State Department, on a secret peace mission to Mexico. At first Trist had more difficulty parleying with the suspicious Scott than with the enemy, but after achieving an armistice with the general he negotiated a temporary one with the Mexicans. This effort soon collapsed, and Scott resumed the offensive. He had already routed the enemy in Contreras and overpowered them at Churubusco, with heavy losses on both sides. Mexico City lay just over the next rise: “The mists disappeared and there, before them, lay what Cortez’s lieutenants had seen…a great garden, dotted with bright lakes, fields of emerald and the white domes and glittering spires.…A valley fifty miles wide, dotted with six large extinct volcanoes far to the south, gleaming with snow—tiny Mexican lancers moving slowly among olive groves and straggling villages.”

  Scott faced a hard choice between storming the heavily fortified stone causeways that led into the city across swamps from the south or using a route from the west defended by a height called Chapultepec. Though Lee recommended the former, Scott chose to assault Chapultepec and the fortress-palace that topped it. After a day of cannonading, assault groups clambered and shot their way up almost vertical slopes, through heavy musket fire, to a point where they could climb the palace walls with scaling ladders. Inside, “Los Niños,” the young cadets of the Military College, disregarded Santa Anna’s order that they be relieved, and stood their ground with the other defenders. The Americans could not be stopped. General Scott watched the assault with pride and wonder: “I am an idiot to bring artillery so far…when I have such soldiers.” A savage bayonet charge brought the fall of the fortress. Next day, Mexican troops in the rest of the city gave in after more heavy fighting, and the invading forces took control of the capital. Soon United States Marines were guarding th
e “halls of Montezuma.”

  Although Trist had been ordered back to Washington, with the fall of Mexico City he stayed on without authorization. By the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico surrendered all claims to Texas above the Rio Grande and ceded California and New Mexico to the United States. Washington agreed to pay $15 million for the almost 1,200,000 square miles comprising those two states and Texas, and parts of what would become Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. Considering the length and daring of the military expedition, the price was not unduly high: 15,000 casualties out of about 120,000 men in the total force, of whom about 45,000 were regulars and Marines. Considering the Mexicans’ advantage of numbers and position, and the constant interference by Polk and other political luminaries, it was an unusually well-conducted war. Perhaps the principal reason was the quality of American military leadership that emerged among the officers in the field. Men like Lee, Sherman, Bragg, Longstreet, Meade, McClellan, and a score of others won their spurs in the battles with the Mexicans. Indeed, some of these West Point graduates regretted seeing the war end; Brevet Captain Ulysses S. Grant, for one, lamented that “there goes the last chance I ever shall have of military distinction!”

  THE GEOMETRY OF BALANCE

  The Mexican War had slashed through the body of the nation’s politics like a bayonet through a man’s belly, leaving severed connections and inflamed wounds. During the war Northerners and Southerners alike, it seemed, had been less concerned over the eventual land settlement with Mexico than over the status of slavery in the lands coming to the United States as territories and later as states. No sooner had Polk requested $2 million from Congress to negotiate peace with Mexico than a Pennsylvania Democrat, David Wilmot, had risen in the House to move that slavery be barred from any territory received from Mexico. Though the Wilmot Proviso never passed Congress, Wilmot kept pressing for it and in the process he united the South against its northern adversaries. Large planters sought more slave states in the Union to balance the North. Small southern farmers wanted this—they also wanted assurance that someday, if need be, they could take their slaves with them to serve as cheap labor if they migrated into the big open country of the Southwest.

  But the war did more than sharpen North-South animosities. Its implications for the extension of slavery put heavy pressure on the delicate balance between Whigs who wanted to continue to be a national party, embracing a coalition of moderate supporters North and South, and those who shrank further and further from any involvement with “slave power.” The Democratic party too was increasingly divided over the slavery issue, but less so than the Whigs, for the national Democracy was more securely based in its old coalition of northern and southern Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and Van Burenites.

  The deepening polarization reached into the states, into the grass roots. The complex internal politics of New York, ordinarily revolving around mundane questions of taxation and trade and manufacture, was drawn into the vortex of national discord. The cleavage was even deeper in Massachusetts, where John Quincy Adams remarked on two divisions, “one based upon public principle, and the other upon manufacturing and commercial interests.” Adams himself would not be around to lend his national stature to moral leadership in the antislavery cause. While listening in the House to the reading of fulsome resolutions expressing the gratitude of Congress to various Mexican War generals—and preparing to oppose them—“Old Man Eloquent” suddenly collapsed at his desk. He died two days later.

  In his own lifetime, having moved from the Federalist party into the Republican orbit and then into the Whig, having moved from high-minded disapproval of slavery to ardent hostility to it, but always short of abolitionism, having maintained ties with most party and factional leaders but always able to transcend them, Adams personified the shifting but sinewy bonds and balances that held the Union together. These came under enormous strain from the disruption of the war with Mexico and its settlement.

  These elements of equipoise were constitutional, institutional, sectional, economic, philosophical, forming a complex geometry of balance. The provision in the Constitution for apportionment of southern representation based on the three-fifths rule may have seemed to John Quincy Adams “that fatal drop of Prussic acid in the Constitution, the human chattel representation,” but the provision nevertheless helped balance southern and northern power in Congress. Northern states held a clear majority in the House but only half the Senate seats, and the South would gain representation in both chambers from the new states carved out of the farmlands and deserts and mountain lands of the Southwest. If a northern majority should take over the Senate, Southerners could filibuster there. There were still warm memories of the fourteen-day filibuster against the United States Bank bill in 1842. And the Southerners had other built-in safeguards—their strength in the Supreme Court, for example, and, in Democratic national conventions, the two-thirds requirement for presidential nominations.

  If the Supreme Court was not a southern court, it had a strong tilt toward Virginia republicanism of the old Jeffersonian school. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, appointed by Jackson partly in reward for Taney’s heroic aid in the fight against Biddle’s bank, presided over a court that had shifted markedly from the Federalist bias in favor of property rights and national power. In the Charles River Bridge case, he held that rights granted by charters must be construed narrowly. “While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded,” the Chief Justice pronounced for the court, “we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and well being of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation.” In a series of rulings on federal power he led the court in narrow interpretations that recognized the claims of “sovereign” states. In Luther v. Borden he used the doctrine of political questions to deny his court’s jurisdiction over a case that emerged from Dorr’s Rebellion in Rhode Island and involved rival claims to the government of the state. Abolitionists feared the day when this “southern Marylander” and his “southern court” would rule on a central question over slavery.

  Political balances strengthened governmental ones. Both major parties had their roots in the South and North; both appealed to a variety of economic, social, sectional, and other interests besides the slavery and antislavery groups; both saw the need for building North-South coalitions if they were to realize their great objective—winning presidential elections. Hence each party was a big noisy machine for devouring, morselizing, and blending sharp ideological and local attitudes that otherwise might become indigestible. Each big party machine was a cluster of countervailing state and local parties, interests, classes. Inevitably such equipoises had a static, conservative bias toward the status quo. “Balance was organic,” for leaders like Webster, in Robert Dalzell’s words. “Its roots lay in the past. It grew and developed over time; continuity was its vital force.”

  This nationwide equilibrium of rival and conflicting interests, delicately balanced in national institutions and state and local constituencies, was ordinarily flexible and durable, but it was vulnerable too, especially to the single overriding, highly controversial moral cause that, unlike the ordinary conflicts the system devoured, could not be morselized. That kind of moral conflict rather threatened to shred the machine. Other powerful forces could shock the system—wars, migration of population, severe economic depression. Two great forces, however, ordinarily provided elements of continuity and stability and predictability to the system of balances—the major parties; and the quadrennial presidential elections, which forced even the more extremist politicians to moderate their causes and their tongues, broaden their platforms, build coalitions with rival interests, and offer a candidacy of national appeal. Such an election seemed to be approaching in 1848.

  1848! The equilibrium of Europe, at least, was sorely threatened as commotions and rebellions swept through Paris, Vienna, Prague, Venice, Milan. Suddenly established authority on the Continent was demonstrating its impotence. Louis Phili
ppe abdicated; Emperor Ferdinand I escaped to Innsbruck, and then abdicated; Pius IX fled to Gaeta. New leaders were emerging, like Lajos Kossuth in Hungary and Louis Napoleon in France. And in London two men, little known except within international left-wing movements, put out a document called the Communist Manifesto. All this was a lesson to Americans that even the most venerable and seemingly stable institutions were open to change. But Americans were hardly listening, save for a fringe of humanitarians who focused their reform activism on the campaign against slavery.

  Abolitionists had been agitating against slavery for decades; in the 1840s many resolved that the time had come for political action. It was not an obvious or easy decision. Purists in the movement had argued for years that the Constitution and the government themselves must be considered the enemy, that to take part in electoral and party battle was to be fatally compromised by the proslavery system it defended. And if antislavery militants did lead their movement into political action, further harsh strategic questions arose: Should antislavery men fight for abolition of all existing slavery, or simply for restrictions on the extension of slavery? Should they pursue the tactic of “one-ideaism”—concern themselves only with slavery—or work with reformers pursuing other and sometimes related causes, such as free education, temperance, women’s rights, penal reform? Should they form their own party, or work within one or both of the major parties? This last was perhaps the hardest question, for antislavery leaders knew of some Democrats and even more Whigs who were as hostile to slavery as they were.

  By 1840 at least some antislavery leaders were ready for political action, if only because their nonpolitical activity had proved so unrewarding. Meetings of abolitionists organized a loose-knit “Liberty party” and nominated James G. Birney for President. Birney epitomized the problems and progress of antislavery. A onetime slave owner himself, he had moved to Alabama, entered politics, and advocated the use of legislative power to emancipate slaves and prohibit their interstate sale. Later he sold his plantation and slaves and became an agent for the American Colonization Society. Increasingly convinced that colonization would expand the slave trade, he returned to Kentucky, freeing his last few slaves, helped form the Kentucky Anti-Slavery Society, and called for united action against the evil. As an activist who favored working within the political system, he was a logical candidate for President in 1840. The Liberty-ites, however, polled barely 7,000 votes, and had minimal effect on the outcome. Four years later the party won almost ten times as many votes, but ironically it may have given the election to Polk by cutting into Clay’s Whig support in the crucial New York race.