A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico
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The fact that Illinois sent more volunteers to Mexico than any other “free” state, indeed more than any other state except Missouri, may have had nearly as much to do with its coercive labor system as it did with the fact that it was a western state, full of believers in Manifest Destiny who themselves had moved west looking for opportunity. “Illinois … should not be numbered with the free states,” the Liberator declared in 1854. “It is, to all intents and purposes, a slaveholding state.” It is not surprising that many white men in Illinois had less of a problem with a war that could enlarge the area of slavery than did the white men of Massachusetts or Ohio.12
John Hardin was far from the only wealthy man in Illinois exploiting the state’s indenture statutes in order to provide his family with the comforts of servile labor. If anything, the Lincoln family’s unwillingness to employ black indentured servants set them apart from other upwardly mobile families in the southern half of Illinois. While there is no need to account for Abraham Lincoln’s unwillingness to engage in coercive labor, it is worth pointing out that Mary Todd grew up in a slaveholding family and certainly could have imported slaves from Kentucky as the Hardins did, had she wished. The fact that she did not may have reflected her father’s evolving antipathy for slavery, a view he shared with his good friend Henry Clay, as well as her husband’s.13
The embedded journalists who traveled to Mexico frequently condemned the country’s system of debt peonage, which produced an underclass trapped in lifelong involuntary servitude because of debt. But those journalists virtually never mentioned the ubiquitous servants of American officers unless they committed a crime or, as more often happened, deserted to Mexico. So many crossed the river when Taylor was camped opposite Matamoros that one Kentucky officer concluded, “If we are located on this border we shall have to employ white servants.” The image of the hearty American volunteer headed to Mexico in order to secure the honor of his country and to gain new territory for America’s free institutions left little room for the hundreds of employed and enslaved African Americans who served their needs. Nor did John Hardin mention Benjamin (assuming that the unnamed servant traveling with him was the same personal servant he had purchased fourteen years earlier) in any of his letters home. Just as slavery in Illinois remained invisible to most white Americans, so too were the black servants in Mexico “invisible” to the public.14
Even with Benjamin’s help, Hardin found his trip through the Nueces Strip quite a trial. The area was as foreboding as ever. Hardin kept a diary, noting that “after crossing the Nueces the quality of the soil & the appearance of the country changed very much for the worse … rattle snakes, wolves, and turkey abound. This land is worth nothing.” The area near the Rio Grande Hardin found particularly “desolate” and rightly attributed it to “the invasions of the Comanche Indians, who … drive off or killed the inhabitants.” He noted that “the Mexicans are very much afraid of the Indians & along the Rio Grande complain justly of their government that it affords them no protection against Indian incursions.” Hardin was traveling through a man-made “desert,” the product of ten years of devastating attacks by Indian warriors on the Mexican inhabitants of the region that depopulated settlements and inhibited economic growth. The easy conquest of northern Mexico by U.S. forces was in large part attributable to the power that Native American people held in the area; the Mexican residents had neither the energy nor the will to fight two wars at once, particularly since one of the wars was against a country that promised to protect them from their more immediate enemies, “the barbarians.”15
Water and grass were scarce, the soil parched. A greater contrast to the well-watered prairies, groves of trees, and fertile ink-black soil of central Illinois could hardly be imagined. And there was little to break up the monotony besides the men’s own hopes for adventure. On October 16, Hardin and his men marched twenty-four miles without locating water. It was a relief to reach the neatly laid-out mining town of Santa Rosa, which boasted an attractive central square. In this town of twenty-five hundred, Hardin purchased trinkets for his wife and children: a “Mexican blanket and cushion” and “a small hand bag … with a silver crop appended to it, & which was attached to a string around a Mexicans neck. It was very tasteful.” Three weeks and 150 miles after leaving San Antonio, they finally made it to Monclova in Coahuila, another orderly town that was home to eight thousand residents. And there they waited, again.16
Hardin was desperate to see action. Convinced that Wool preferred drilling to battles, he wrote directly to General Taylor, requesting a transfer to Taylor’s command. Taylor refused his request and admitted to Hardin that he himself was under orders from President Polk to stay put and remain on the defensive. The president had a new plan for achieving victory over Mexico, and it did not include Taylor, Wool, or the Illinois regiments.
Polk’s snub of Taylor was deliberate. Envious of the general’s growing political prestige, and furious that Taylor had agreed to an armistice with Mexico, the president stripped Old Rough and Ready of four-fifths of his troops, including almost all the veteran forces, and transferred them to the new commanding general of the army, Winfield Scott. Taylor lost his closest advisors and skilled officers: Ethan Allan Hitchcock, Ulysses S. Grant, and other men who had been with him since they first marched into Texas.
Scott had an audacious campaign plan: he would invade the very heart of Mexico. The navy would transport U.S. troops to the Gulf Coast port of Veracruz. They would storm the strongest fortress in the Western Hemisphere and then march directly to the capital. It was the same route that Hernan Cortés had taken in 1519, on the way to conquering the Aztec Empire, although Montezuma lacked Mexico’s artillery and garrisons.
Taylor would play no role in any of it. Polk had slapped Taylor down, in no uncertain terms. Taylor was certain that the intention behind the “outrage” of pulling his troops was “that I would at once leave the country, in disgust & return to the U. states which … would have been freely used by them to my disadvantage” politically.17 Polk might only serve one term himself, but he was determined to keep a Whig from inheriting the White House. His orders to Taylor had the merit, in his eyes, of discrediting Taylor both as a general and as a political candidate.
Not that General Scott was any great friend of the president’s. Yet another presidential hopeful from the Whig Party, Scott was almost six and a half feet tall, of enormous girth, and remarkably patronizing. None of this endeared him to the diminutive president. As Polk fumed in his diary, “These officers are all whigs & violent partisans, and of having the success of my administration at heart seem to throw every obstacle in the way of my prosecuting the Mexican War successfully.”18 But at the moment Scott was the lesser of two evils.
Major General Winfield Scott at Vera Cruz, March 25, 1847. Lithograph by Nathaniel Currier, 1847. “Old Fuss and Feathers” looks neither old nor fussy in this heroic representation of his siege of Veracruz. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. (photo credit 7.1)
Taylor, humiliated and angry, was left with the shell of an army holding a defensive position outside Monterrey. Polk’s need to micromanage everything, and the disrespect he showed to General Taylor, won him no friends in the army. Henry Clay Jr., serving on Taylor’s staff while he recovered from his riding accident, expressed the feelings of most of Taylor’s junior officers about the transfer of troops when he wrote home to his father, “This Army sympathizes with him. For one I must confess I consider the manner of the thing very improper to say the least.”19
Colonel Clay didn’t know it, but his father had dined with General Scott in New Orleans while Scott was en route to Mexico. Clay fled Ashland for the winter, in search of warm sun and some distance from his crushing familial commitments. The tubercular flare-ups that Clay referred to as his chronic “colds” and his son John’s continuing mental struggles left him incapacitated at the close of 1846, and both he and Lucretia worried incessantly about young Henr
y in Mexico. Clay sought a geographic cure in New Orleans. He always felt better in the Crescent City.
Clay stayed, once again, at the home of Dr. William Mercer, and while the doctor’s high-ceilinged mansion was as comfortable as ever, New Orleans seemed somehow washed-out. The weather was terrible. Clay wrote Octavia LeVert that the city seemed “less gay” than usual, and he attributed it to the war. But certainly Clay was less gay than he had been in the past. The optimism and overwhelming self-confidence of candidate Clay just before Valentine’s Day in 1844, when he strolled the streets of New Orleans convinced the presidency was in hand, were gone. “This unhappy War with Mexico fills me with anxious solicitude,” he wrote not long after arriving in New Orleans. “When is it to terminate? How?”20
The commanding general’s visit provided Clay a singular opportunity to assuage his fears. They dined at the Mercer home, and given the love of elegant dining, fine food, and wine that Clay and Scott shared, it was no doubt a lavish repast. Almost certainly the two men discussed Henry Clay Jr.
Three days later the elder Clay was invited to deliver a toast at a dinner in the company of several military men. Attempting to make a joke out of a very serious matter, the Sage of Ashland admitted that he “felt half inclined to ask for some little nook or corner in the army, in which I might serve in avenging the wrongs to my country.” The applause of his listeners encouraged him. He announced to even greater whoops and cheers that “I have thought that I might yet be able to capture or to slay a Mexican.” Of course the aged Clay was not about to join the army; he was referring, with apparently indiscernible sarcasm, to the early enthusiasm for volunteering. Clay concluded his toast with his sincere hope that “success will crown our gallant arms, and the war terminate in an honorable peace.” Clay’s remarks were reprinted in the New Orleans Picayune the following day and were quickly picked up by newspapers of every persuasion.21
While Prince Hal’s spontaneous and thoughtless remarks hardly reflected his true feelings about the war, this toast was the first public statement he had made about Mexico, and almost no one got the joke. Not that it was very funny. “What will some of his friends in Congress say?” asked the Democratic Mississippian. What they said was that it appeared the great Henry Clay was pandering to public opinion, inflaming bloodlust at the very moment that the nation appeared to be tiring of the war. “Poor stuff,” pronounced the Journal of Lowell, Massachusetts, while the Quaker-edited Worcester Spy conceded, “If Henry Clay is possessed of the blood-thirsty spirit therein shadowed forth, then he is not the man we have ever taken him to be.”22
Democrats reveled in the gaffe. “The Federal [Whig] papers of New England continue to throw out their bitter denunciations on account of the present war with Mexico,” one Vermont Democratic paper crowed. “Their slang seems to correspond poorly with the views of the great ‘HENRY’ … at a late dinner at New Orleans.” Abolitionists pointed to the gaffe as evidence that they had been right to forsake Clay in 1844. “The whole history of his life,” the Emancipator wrote, proved “that he was too demon-like for any christian man to support without sin.”23
Papers were still debating Clay’s toast on Valentine’s Day of 1847. Clay had imagined what it would be like to be on the front, but on that day many of the volunteers found their minds wandering in a very different direction. Twenty-seven-year-old Thomas Tennery mused in his diary, “This being Valentine’s day no doubt the young folks at home are employing it in making love, or visiting, or receiving company, and making merry.” This was as it should be, since “it is the duty of all nature to enjoy the time as well as possible.”24
The state of Coahuila was full of Americans desperate to kill a Mexican, and it seemed that most of them were fuming in the Army of Chihuahua. Hardin blamed General Wool for the fact that he hadn’t seen a battle, but in fact Wool was just as anxious to fight as his men were. He was still waiting for orders. In late November 1846, Wool wrote Taylor requesting a move from Monclova to the village of Parras, 125 miles west of the colonial town of Saltillo. “Inaction is exceedingly injurious to the volunteers,” Wool wrote Taylor, “I hope the general will not permit me to remain in my present position one moment longer than it is absolutely necessary.”25 The subtext would have been clear to Taylor: the volunteers were out of control, and Wool feared for the safety of local residents.
The volunteers needed to move on, and gathering the greatly diminished army in the five-thousand-person town of Parras, a spring-fed oasis in the semidesert of Coahuila, made sense. The climate was “unsurpassed in the world,” according to one volunteer, with air “so pure that flies and mosquitos are unknown.” Famous for its wine and women (“Such enchanting glorious eyes! and black glossy hair! What little feet and hands and divinely graceful shapes!”), Parras may not have been the safest place to house the troops.26 But it both fit within Taylor’s plan to control northern Mexico defensively and also guarded against a possible attack by Mexican forces, which were now under the command of the charismatic General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the one man who could unify, inspire, and lead his diverse and fractured country to victory. And it was all James K. Polk’s fault.
General Antonio López de Santa Anna. Photographic print on carte de visite mount. General Santa Anna held the rank of president of Mexico on eleven separate and nonconsecutive occasions between 1833 and 1855. He was fifty-two years old and living in exile in Cuba when the United States declared war on Mexico. Polk, believing him willing to negotiate with the Americans, allowed him transit back to Mexico. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (photo credit 7.2)
Like so many Americans, Santa Anna’s first important military service was against Indians, in his case in the land that would eventually become the American Southwest. He quickly rose through the ranks in the army of New Spain, joined the rebels in the independence movement, and became a towering personality in the history of early national Mexico.
After his failed 1836 campaign against Texas (it was Santa Anna who led the charge against the Alamo, ordered captured Americans shot at Goliad, and signed a treaty of Texas independence), he retired in disgrace to his estate, Manga de Clavo, on the road between Veracruz and Mexico City. Manga de Clavo was Santa Anna’s Hermitage, a showpiece property (eventually boasting forty thousand head of cattle) that provided not only a convenient location for meetings of his friends and allies but also physical proof of his status. At 483,000 acres, however, Manga de Clavo was vastly larger than Jackson’s domain. One could travel thirty miles along the main road between Veracruz and Mexico City without leaving Santa Anna’s property.27
But an imposing estate can only do so much to repair a reputation. In 1837 it appeared unlikely that the people of Mexico would ever forgive Santa Anna his incompetence, or forget how quickly he had turned despot a year earlier. Another international crisis soon returned him to his countrymen’s good graces, however. In 1838 the French landed in Veracruz in an attempt to force repayment of Mexican debt. Santa Anna rode to the port from his estate, led Mexican forces against the French, and lost a leg in the process. He appealed to the people of Mexico to forgive his mistakes and grant him “the only title I wish to leave for my children: that of a good Mexican.” Santa Anna’s heroic self-sacrifice in the “Pastry War” catapulted him back into power. But after another dictatorial stint as president, Santa Anna was imprisoned, then banished to Cuba in June 1845.28
To Americans raised on stories of the Alamo, Santa Anna was as pure a devil as walked the face of the earth. But Polk saw things differently; he believed he could manage Santa Anna. Thomas Hart Benton later wrote about the Polk administration that “never were men at the head of a government less imbued with military spirit, or more addicted to intrigue.” From his initial directions to Slidell before the war through the closing days of the conflict, Polk repeatedly demonstrated his faith that secret dealings could bring Mexico to terms. Given Polk’s assumption that Mexicans were cowardly and corrupt, it isn’t surprising th
at he thought the deposed leader corruptible. U.S. envoys persuaded him that Santa Anna was so desperate to return to power that he would settle on almost any terms the United States might dictate. The president of the United States allowed Santa Anna, Mexico’s greatest leader, free transit from Cuba back into Mexico in August 1846.29
Polk’s faith that the war would be a brief one may have stemmed from his belief that Santa Anna would sell California to the United States once he was back in power. Polk repeatedly asserted, “I am strongly inclined to believe that Santa Anna desires peace, and will be prepared to re-open negotiations as soon as he feels himself secure in his power.”30
Polk operated under the assumptions that Santa Anna was an opportunist and that he was addicted to power. Both were true. But the general was also a patriot, or as he himself had put it, “a good Mexican.” Once safely in Mexico, Santa Anna evinced no interest in negotiating with the United States, and instead promised to avenge the loss of Texas. At first Polk refused to believe it. “Though I have reason to think that he is disposed to make peace, he does not yet feel himself secure in his position, and is cautious in his movements,” he wrote in October. “I have but little doubt but that he will ultimately be disposed to make peace.”31
But in November Santa Anna started organizing troops to confront Taylor’s small army. “Ten thousand rumors reach us that Santa Anna is marching with a large force, some say 20,000 on this place,” Henry Clay Jr. wrote his father. If an army of this size was really marching north, Taylor recognized that their best chance to defeat it was to gather the combined forces of his and Wool’s troops near Parras.32