The eulogy and funeral were followed by a light meal served under a nearby grove of trees. A series of military speakers attempted to outdo one another in their tributes to Colonel Hardin. Many praised the valor of the soldiers in battle. All agreed that a monument to the memory of the Buena Vista dead should be built as soon as possible.31 As the crowd returned to the public square, Sarah Hardin invited the surviving members of the First Illinois to join her for dinner in their family home.
The writer for the Boston Courier who traveled with Lincoln through Illinois reported that the funeral was designed “to gratify a spirit of military ardor.” Like most citizens of Massachusetts, the journalist opposed the war, and he imagined that Illinois, which had sent more volunteers south than any state except Missouri, was still gripped by a “military mania” for Mexico. He noticed that Jacksonville, like St. Louis, was full of recruiting posters. “The fruit of to-day’s pageant,” he wrote of the funeral, “will be the enlistment of at least a thousand new victims to the insatiate ambition of our wicked and unprincipled government.”32
But this reporter never actually made it to Hardin’s funeral. He remained in the Jacksonville public square after the procession departed, and completely missed Yates’s conflicted eulogy. He never learned how similar Yates’s view of Hardin was to the antiwar views of New Englanders. That summer, a letter writer to the antislavery National Era also claimed that Hardin was a paragon of restrained manhood. He asserted that John Hardin opposed the war, and “confessed, from the outset, that the Mexican War was all needless, wicked, and wrong.”
While Hardin’s views of Mexico and Manifest Destiny evolved during his year of service, and by the time of his death he had come to question the wisdom of annexing Mexican land, by no means did Illinois’s first volunteer ever say that the war was “needless, wicked, and wrong.” He most certainly did not say this in 1846. But antiwar voices played fast and loose with the facts of Hardin’s biography in their attempt to turn Hardin’s death into a cautionary tale. Despite condemning the war, according to this account, Hardin foolishly let a misguided sense of patriotism, rather than his conscience, guide his actions. His decision to follow “that treacherous and illusive motto, ‘Our country, right or wrong,’ ” became the cause of his undoing. “From that hour, the wrath of heaven seems to have overshadowed him.”33
While Yates never went so far as to claim that Hardin thought the war needless, wicked, and wrong, his own views about the war were clear to everyone in the audience, and not far from those holding sway in New England. But because the Boston reporter missed Yates’s eulogy and focused only on the pre- and post-funeral celebration, he believed that the people of Illinois continued to embrace the war. Had he been privy to the conversations between Sarah Hardin and her husband’s men in the Hardin home after the funeral, he might not have claimed that the returning volunteers “express, at present, very little or no opinion at all as to their feelings.”34 But his assumption that the people of Illinois felt the same in the summer of 1847 as they had a year earlier was mistaken. The antiwar spirit that had moved Richard Yates was on the rise, even in the pro-war West. Yates hardly would have dared question the war otherwise. Abraham Lincoln would not have made the same mistake as his traveling companion. He knew there was a change in the air.
It started long before the funeral. David Davis commented on the decline in war spirit in Illinois in December 1846: “Everyone around here was anxious to enlist in June last. Nothing was before the eyes of the young men then but the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of war. Now the drums might beat for a week & not a single man fall into line.” Martial ardor cooled as the war dragged on, scores of volunteers died of disease, and reports of bad behavior on the front diminished the glory of volunteering. Recruiting meetings began to be met with indifference, or worse. When opponents of the war turned out for a “war meeting” in Chicago in February 1847, they vigorously debated the virtues of the war with the military speakers who hoped to drum up enlistment. A correspondent for the antislavery Liberty Party reported that one audience member introduced a resolution “declaring that all war is sinful and anti-Christian,” while another “made some very sensible remarks on the iniquity of the war, notwithstanding a wild buffalo of a fellow attempted to bellow him down.” The few recruits convinced to volunteer “made the tour of the grog shops before retiring to rest,” the journalist reported. “One of them showed his bravery by kicking a small boy who happened to stand in his way. By the time he gets to Mexico he may be prepared to kill women and children. So much for volunteering in Chicago.”35
It was obvious in the spring of 1847 that the new recruits were less impressive in terms of their character and accomplishments than the first men to turn out had been. One letter writer declared them to be “young and ignorant, some of them are utterly abandoned and worthless.” Fifty “raw” recruits waiting to descend the Mississippi from Peru, Illinois, were so “excessively noisy and drunk” that a steamship captain refused to let them on board. As the twelve-month volunteers returned to Illinois in the summer of 1847, apathy toward the war turned into something closer to distaste.36
The returning volunteers, for the most part, looked terrible, even their officers. William Weatherford, who succeeded Hardin as colonel of the First Illinois, appeared on the streets of Jacksonville the week of Hardin’s funeral, “very much emaciated by sickness, and darker colored than most Indians.” His shirt was dirty, his pants “worn through in holes,” and his shoes “nearly worn out.” Worse yet, he seemed uninterested in conforming his appearance to the norms of civilized society. He wore his shirt “open in front, like a common frock coat,” with no collar or necktie. The Boston reporter noted that descriptions “of the uncouth appearance of the Mexican officers” hardly compared to “such a poverty-stricken and miserable specimen of a commander” as Lieutenant Colonel Weatherford.
“Going to and Returning from Mexico.” This antiwar cartoon, published in the popular New York humorous periodical Yankee Doodle in late 1846, contrasts a new volunteer (who seems to be reconsidering his enlistment) with ragged and maimed soldiers returning from Mexico. Critiques of the appearance and behavior of the veterans were common by the summer of 1847, and many states struggled to fill their quotas of new volunteers. Yankee Doodle 1, no. 6 (Nov. 14, 1846): 71. (photo credit 9.2)
What use did America have for such a “broken-down man, unfit for further service, and without much hope for the future”? The reporter predicted that “with scores of others in similar situations,” Weatherford would probably become “a violent politician, an office-seeker and a demagogue.” Critics of the war suggested that the returning veterans, corrupted by their military service, would, in turn, corrupt the political process.37
Lincoln had the opportunity of witnessing the growing antiwar sentiment in his state firsthand when one of Springfield’s most eminent ministers, Albert Hale, of the Second Presbyterian Church, preached two sermons critiquing the war as “unjust” on the Sunday before John Hardin’s funeral. Not content to simply elaborate on the waste of the war in human life, the “barbarous and inhuman cruelties” committed by both sides, and the “wicked” character of this war in particular, Hale also condemned the returning veterans. Those once upright and moral young men had returned to Illinois defiled. “When the war is over,” Hale intoned, “the multitudes that remain—that have been schooled amidst its immoralities, its cruelties and its crimes—will operate, like a moral pestilence, over the length and breadth of the land.”38
Albert Hale was a prominent figure in Springfield. Forty-seven years old, he had been educated at Yale, and moved to Illinois at the same time as Hardin and Lincoln in order to perform missionary work among the Sac, Fox, and Pottawatomie tribes. In 1839 he became pastor of Springfield’s Second Presbyterian.39
But his sermons against the war did not sit well with many in the capital, and particularly not with the delegates to the constitutional convention who knew Hale from his official duties mi
nistering to the assembly. All the delegates left for a week for Hardin’s funeral immediately after Hale’s sermons, but the controversy continued after their return. Lincoln and the delegates were back in Springfield on Monday morning, July 19, when Reverend Hale was scheduled to deliver a prayer to reopen the convention.
Hale’s entrance into the convention hall was uneventful, but as he rose to the dais and began to address the assembly, he was interrupted with “hissing and clapping of hands” by a Democratic delegate outraged by Hale’s critique of the war. Ignoring the outburst, Hale finished his prayer. The incensed delegate accosted Hale and, making sure he was clearly heard throughout the hall, warned the minister that “if he did not wish to be hurt, he must not come there again.”40
The Sangamo Journal reported this exchange directly below a long article about John Hardin’s funeral. The newspaper found the proceedings at the convention hall outrageous, “totally at variance with our free institutions,” and a clear infringement on Hale’s right to free speech, ultimately deciding to publish Hale’s antiwar sermons in pamphlet form so that “the community may be able to form a correct opinion in the case.” Starting in the summer of 1847, anyone in Illinois who wished to consider the “inequity” of the war needed only to pick up a copy of this pamphlet.41
Or they could simply read a newspaper. The embedded journalists traveling through Mexico with the army were, on the whole, as pro-war as any group in America. Most, if not all, felt antipathy for the people of Mexico, grounded in Americans’ perceived racial superiority. William Tobey, the correspondent for the Philadelphia North American, traveled as a soldier with the Pennsylvania volunteers. He repeatedly informed his readers that they had no concept of how “different” the people of Mexico were from Americans. “The mass are ignorant, indolent, barbarous, treacherous and superstitious, given to thieving, cheating, [and] lying,” he wrote. Sharing in the day-to-day sufferings of U.S. troops, embedded journalists closely identified with them. Witnessing the results of Mexican resistance firsthand, the dead bodies of U.S. soldiers killed by local guerrilla fighters, they were not wholly unsympathetic to reprisals against the civilian population.42
And so at first they largely overlooked robberies, rapes, and even murders committed by soldiers. Reports of murders by American volunteers that appeared in print in 1846 were generally drawn from letters written home by enlisted men, and quite often only antislavery papers were willing to print them. The Ashtabula Sentinel of Ohio claimed that not “a hundredth part of the crimes committed by our troops are published, or ever come to the knowledge of our people.” A few journalists, including Christopher Mason Haile, writing for the New Orleans Picayune, condemned the “disreputable conduct” of some of the volunteers, including numerous “outrages against Mexican citizens” such as “robbing, assaulting the women,” and breaking into houses. These offenses had been “too long neglected” by the press, and Haile admitted it gave him “great pain” to condemn the soldiers he traveled with.43
But by and large, antiwar reporting in the first year of the war was limited to abolitionist papers and mainstream Whig papers in New England. This followed the model of war coverage set in the War of 1812. That war was wildly unpopular in the Federalist stronghold of New England, the region most likely to suffer economically from a disruption of trade with England. Federalist papers in New England loudly opposed the War of 1812, critiquing it in searing terms as an offensive war, thus immoral, and likely to corrupt America’s men by exposing them to the horrors of war.44
But Federalist papers outside New England were more circumspect. Editors had to sell papers, and charges of disloyalty could have devastating effects not only on sales but also on the health and welfare of the editors themselves. When Baltimore’s Federal Republican opposed the War of 1812 in the nation’s most pro-war city, retribution was quick. A mob destroyed the offices of the paper not once but twice over the course of the war, beating and torturing both the editor and his supporters. Federalist editors in Savannah, Alexandria, Richmond, and New York City were also silenced by the threat of mob action. Outside New England, opposition to the war was viewed as treasonous.45
The Federalist Party was ultimately destroyed by its opposition to the War of 1812, of course. While abolitionist papers such as William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator of Boston condemned the war with Mexico from its inception, Whig papers tended to be just as patriotic as Whig congressmen in 1846. Because of its economy, relatively strong antislavery sentiment, and Whig majority, New England continued to be the one region in which it was safe to express opposition to American war, whether against England in 1814, Native American tribes in the 1820s and 1830s, or Mexico in 1846, and mainstream Whig papers in New England proved more willing to oppose America’s invasion of Mexico, and the behavior of U.S. troops, than papers elsewhere.
But by the summer of 1847, even hardened journalists from outside New England found themselves forced to report on and condemn American atrocities that left them questioning their assumptions about American morality. It appeared that “the harsh treatment and privations the men are subjected to soon make one callous to all but his own feelings and interests,” one journalist explained.46
The February massacre at Agua Nueva, when the Arkansas Rackensackers killed at least twenty-five Mexican civilians in a cave, was a key turning point in the reporting of the war. Few soldiers who had witnessed the event and scalped corpses could refrain from discussing it, and some of those who died at Buena Vista, including John Hardin, described the murders in the final letters they ever wrote home. Nonetheless, the New Orleans Picayune originally dismissed General Santa Anna’s report of the slaughter as “exaggeration.” But when a correspondent to the St. Louis Republican reported the story in “horrible detail,” the Picayune recanted and printed the Republican letter in full. “It is impossible to excuse the conduct of our volunteers on any plea of retaliation and it is wrong to conceal the facts of the case,” the paper admitted. News of the “American atrocities” at Agua Nueva was reprinted from Milwaukee to Texas.47
The witness to the slaughter who wrote to the St. Louis Republican on Valentine’s Day of 1847 concluded, “Let us no longer complain of Mexican barbarity—poor, degraded, ‘priest ridden’ as she is. No act of inhuman cruelty, perpetrated by her most desperate robbers, can excel the work of yesterday, committed by our soldiery.” As it became increasingly difficult to differentiate the barbarity of U.S. soldiers from that of the Mexican people, journalists wondered if perhaps the war really was degrading the American character. William Tobey wrote from Veracruz in April, “I daily witness painful spectacles of human degradation and selfishness that before seemed impossible to our nature.” Reverend Hale’s critique of the corrosive effect of the war on America’s men was not so different from the reports that had been coming from Mexico for months.48
John E. Durivage, the correspondent for the New Orleans Picayune stationed with Taylor near Monterrey, was another embedded journalist whose reporting changed over the course of the war. A Polk supporter with little love for the Mexican people, he was initially highly defensive of American actions. When two U.S. soldiers were “charged with having committed a rape upon a Mexican female,” Durivage was dismissive. “I hardly think it is a possible case in this country, but the accused will be tried for the offense nevertheless.” Durivage never reported the outcome of the trial.49
But despite his unwillingness to believe that an American soldier would rape a Mexican woman, he became increasingly concerned with the behavior of the troops. By April 1847, he too openly wondered at the “outrageous barbarity” perpetrated “by persons calling themselves Americans.” He reported the “melancholy, incontrovertible fact” that another slaughter, similar to that at Agua Nueva, had taken place in the town of Guadalupe. “An American was shot two or three weeks ago, and his companions and friends determined to revenge his death. Accordingly a party of a dozen or twenty men visited the place and deliberately murdered twenty-four
Mexicans.… Under pretext of revenging the death of a comrade, the inoffensive (for all we know) inhabitants of a rancho, who have been assured that they should be respected and protected, have been willfully murdered in cold blood.” Durivage realized that “such foul deeds as these cannot but be revolting to every good citizen,” but he reported them anyway. And he continued to report similar occurrences, such as the hanging of “upward of forty Mexicans” by the Texas Rangers, which appeared in a Matamoros paper in May. His final letters from Mexico openly discussed depredations against Mexicans and the futile attempts of Taylor and other officers to keep the volunteers in line.50 These accounts, the prime source of war news, were summarized and reprinted in papers across the country.
As the war dragged on, rumblings of protest began to spread. The fourteen congressmen who had voted against Polk’s declaration of War in May 1846, including John Quincy Adams and Ohio’s antislavery firebrand Joshua Giddings, never ceased to speak out with vehemence against the war. Some of the most explosive rhetoric emerged from the Senate. The spellbinding fifty-two-year-old orator Thomas Corwin of Ohio shocked the nation when he rose in the Senate in February and offered that “if I were a Mexican, I would tell you, ‘Have you not room in your country to bury your dead men? If you come into mine we will greet you with bloody hands, and welcome you to hospitable graves.’ ”51
Polk considered his opponents guilty of treason, and said so in his annual message to Congress six months into the war. “A more effectual means could not have been devised,” he warned, “to encourage the enemy and protract the war than to advocate and adhere to their cause, and thus give them ‘aid and comfort.’ ” Polk’s reduction of dissent to treason outraged many Americans, including some war supporters. The mobilized antislavery forces of New England were joined by increasing numbers of dissenters to “Mr. Polk’s War.” In February antiwar protesters held a mass meeting in Boston where Charles Sumner bitterly attacked Congressman Robert Winthrop for voting for the war. The Massachusetts legislature, which had already refused to outfit its volunteer regiment, declared in April that the war in Mexico was “so hateful in its objects, so wanton, unjust and unconstitutional in its origin,” that it “must be regarded as a war against humanity.”52
A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico Page 25