A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico

by Amy S. Greenberg

  If the Lexington speech improved Clay’s standing in New England, it badly damaged it in the South. Southern Whigs concluded that Clay had “done himself great injury in his late speech” and that they would “not rally on Mr. Clay, or any Whig who swears by his Lexington resolutions.” Whigs in Georgia refused to hold a meeting to so much as discuss Clay’s resolutions. Of course, Clay knew before his Lexington speech that his chances of winning the presidential nomination without the support of southern proslavery Whigs were slim to none. He had taken a gamble with his speech. But he had always been a gambling man. If his words helped end a “frightful struggle,” then of course he hadn’t lost a thing. He was still the man who would rather be right than be president.46

  Clay’s words shook Washington, the nation, and beyond. In London, Britain’s foreign minister wrote approvingly about Clay’s speech “against an aggressive policy in the conduct of the Mexican War.” Clay asked his fellow citizens to join together against war in Mexico, and the people responded. Antiwar rallies inspired by Clay’s call to action bloomed from Indiana to New Jersey, Kentucky to Maine. Newspapers as far away as Mexico City reported that Clay’s call for meetings “is arousing the masses in all parts of the Union.”47

  Not surprisingly, the “views of Henry Clay were fully sustained” at a “great meeting” in Boston. A “peace” meeting held in the Broadway Tabernacle in New York was widely reported to be “one of the largest and most enthusiastic meetings ever held in that city.” In Philadelphia, “hundreds of the most respectable of the citizens” called for a “town meeting” in support of Clay’s resolutions, and “thousands went away who were unable to gain admission” when it occurred. The gathering was reported to be “one of the largest and most respectable public meetings ever called together.”48

  While it was primarily the Whigs of Trenton, New Jersey, who endorsed Clay’s resolutions by acclamation, citizens of all political parties turned out in Cincinnati to oppose “the causes and character of the Mexican War, as well as its further offensive persecution.” The first meeting in Cleveland opposing the war was such a success that antiwar protesters decided to hold another a week later. In New Orleans, agitation caused by the ex-senator’s oration was so great that one of the first things a returning soldier wrote about after his arrival in the Crescent City from Mexico was “Clay’s antiwar speech.” At meetings in cities around the country, thousands of people denounced the war, condemned Polk for starting it, and adopted Clay’s resolutions wholesale, “with a fervor of manner and earnestness of purpose that are rarely exhibited.”49

  The antiwar movement was no longer a New England phenomenon. The public meetings in the wake of Clay’s Lexington speech proved beyond a doubt that a peace movement was now national. Henry Clay didn’t create the movement, but his political stature, authority as a grieving father, and singular speaking abilities gave voice to masses of dissenters and offered a clear path to protest. It was a “great wave,” according to a Philadelphia reporter, which “rolled from Lexington, upheaved by the mighty voice of Henry Clay,” and now “goes onward from us with renewed and more overwhelming force.” And while Americans met in support of Clay’s “principles, more than to the man,” they appreciated Clay more than ever. “Henry Clay sat enshrined in their hearts—but they gloried in him most, because he had spoken forth the truth unshrinkingly.… They reverenced him because he had forgotten self in his love of country, and because he valued his country’s welfare more than his chances of gain.”50

  Abraham Lincoln bore witness to Clay’s courageous and principled speech, and to his dramatic gamble. When as a child he had pored over Clay’s biography, and as a young man committed Clay’s speeches nearly to heart, did he imagine the real thing would be like this? The oratorical brilliance he might have envisioned, but not the subject matter. Henry Clay had built his career on economic issues, and those issues had become Lincoln’s: internal improvements, a strong national bank, tariffs, and credit. These were the issues that Lincoln campaigned on, that inspired him, that drove him to Congress. They weren’t the issues that interested voters on the campaign trail in 1846, but still they were his issues. His issue was not the war, and it certainly wasn’t slavery. Before his trip to Lexington, Lincoln seemed generally unconcerned about the institution of slavery, viewing agitation to end the “peculiar institution” primarily as a nuisance that unproductively split the Whig Party.

  What Lincoln saw and heard that afternoon made him reconsider these positions. The Sage of Ashland, his Prince Hal, had described the horrors of the war with blinding clarity, struck down the president as a liar, and ordered the people to protest a war that they, and Lincoln, knew to be unjust. Speaking in a slave state, Henry Clay had condemned the expansion of slavery, and in no uncertain terms. He had linked the war in Mexico with the slavery issue in a way that few southerners dared. Lincoln could only guess at the reasons Clay had finally spoken out: those of a father still anguished at his son’s sacrifice, those of a patriot acting in what he felt were the best interests of his country, those of a righteous man choosing justice before ambition. But he understood the political consequences. By criticizing the war, Clay had jeopardized his political base in the South, which still largely supported it. By condemning slavery in a proslavery state, he had risked devastating voter backlash. It was a great act of political bravery. And Clay had right on his side.

  Clay had made it clear that Mexican land must not, and would not, become slave territory. Henry Clay had demonstrated to the assembled thousands, and the many thousands more who would read his words in their morning papers the following week, that he valued truth and justice more than political office. And in so doing, he had proven that he was no mere politician. He was a leader.

  Was this a revelation for Abraham Lincoln? He knew that the war and the extension of slavery were wrong. But had he understood that they were so very wrong that nothing else mattered? William Herndon later said that his law partner “stood bolt upright and downright on his conscience.” Was his conscience now alive to the moral wrong of the war? Lincoln saw clearly that his issues in Congress would not be economic ones. In this period of national crisis it was not the time to focus on tariffs. If Henry Clay could attack the war, the president, and the spread of slavery, so could he. Congressman Abraham Lincoln had a new mission.51

  Nicholas Trist received Polk’s recall order just two days after Clay’s speech, and the following day read about it in the Mexico City press. He knew nothing about Clay’s speech, of course, but he too understood that personal sacrifice would be necessary to bring this war to an end. Lincoln’s mission had changed, but Trist’s had stayed the same. There was much in Henry Clay’s speech that the diplomat would have agreed with. He too believed that the people of Mexico and those of the United States were incompatible socially and racially, and that the United States could never effectively govern large portions of Mexico’s territory. He saw the corrupting effects of service in Mexico on the morals of many U.S. soldiers. Young men who would never engage in such behavior at home drank, gambled, and visited fandangos. Some did much worse. Most of all, Trist had seen firsthand the violence done against Mexico. He knew the Mexicans were fighting to protect their homes and families. He had come to believe that the United States was at fault. And it made him “ashamed” to be an American.52

  Trist believed that Peña’s presidency offered the best opportunity to bring the war to an end without a total dismemberment of Mexico. Local papers were reporting that Polk was ready to annex the whole country, and Trist warned Mexico’s diplomats that “a strong public opinion” in the United States was demanding that “the U.S. should select a line of boundary as may suit themselves.” He had earned the trust and respect of the Mexican negotiators over the previous months. This was an opportunity that couldn’t be squandered.53

  “What is my line of duty to my government and my country, in this extraordinary position in which I find myself?” Trist wondered. He consulted with Gen
eral Scott and with another confidant, the British chargé d’affaires Edward Thornton. Scott encouraged him “to finish the good work he had begun.” Thornton begged for Trist’s “charity for this unhappy nation, to lend a hand toward the preservation of her nationality. I look upon this as the last chance for either party of making peace.” So too did James Freaner, an embedded journalist for the New Orleans Delta. “Mr. Trist, make the treaty!” he told him. “It is now in your power to do your country a greater service than any living man can render her. I know our country.… They want peace, sir. They pant for it. They will be grateful for it.”54 Scott, Thornton, and Freaner, three men with very different agendas, all argued for peace. The soldiers wanted peace. And Mexico deserved peace.

  Trist did something unheard of in American diplomacy: he refused to come home. He was, he knew, the only man who could make a treaty. He owed it as a “solemn duty to my country” to at least try. As a nervous Buchanan asked British diplomats to help deliver a second copy of the recall notice, which he suspected may never have arrived, Trist composed a sixty-five-page letter explaining why he refused to be fired. He was convinced the president was unaware of the true state of affairs in Mexico. Continued occupation was unwise, annexation of the whole impossible, he asserted. It offered “incalculable danger to every good principle, moral as well as political, which is cherished among us.” A conquered Mexico would ultimately corrupt and destroy America. Furthermore, Polk’s treaty terms would strip Mexico of half of her land. “However helpless a nation may feel, there is necessarily a point beyond which she cannot be expected to go under any circumstances.”55 The United States could not ask Mexico to go further. He would not ask Mexico to go further.

  Then he continued negotiations. The fictional Trist in The Mexican Ranchero faced down guerrilla partisans. But the real Trist faced down a president. The most creative novelist would have had difficulty coming up with a more heroic plot line.

  Polk received Trist’s letter mere weeks after the Thirtieth Congress convened. The president had been “much fatigued” with his “long and close confinement & constant labour.” Now the news left him dumbstruck. Thousands of miles from his president, Nicholas Trist pressed his negotiations. The man was not naive: he knew he was risking his career. But as he later wrote, his course was now “governed by my conscience.” His “sense of justice” directed him to end America’s “abuse of power.” The people of Mexico deserved justice. He would deliver it to them. And, just as important, he would protect the people of America from the impossible burden of annexing Mexico.56

  Polk saw the matter differently. “I have never in my life felt so indignant,” he wrote in his diary. “He has acted worse than any man in the public employ whom I have ever known. His dispatch proves that he is destitute of honour or principle, and that he has proved himself a very base man. I was deceived of him.”57 He wanted Trist physically thrown out of army headquarters.

  Late one evening, two weeks after Clay’s speech, the exhausted Lincoln family finally arrived in Washington and checked into Mrs. Spriggs’s boardinghouse, on Carroll Row, just across from the Capitol Building. Mrs. Spriggs’s came well recommended. Both Baker and Hardin had lodged there during their congressional terms. It had been more than a month since the Lincolns left Springfield, and in three short weeks Lincoln and six Democrats were to represent Illinois in the lower house of Congress. “During my whole political life,” Lincoln later wrote, “I have loved and revered [Clay] as a teacher and leader.” As Lincoln pondered his path in the Thirtieth Congress, Clay’s speech and lesson were firmly in mind. “As you are all so anxious for me to distinguish myself,” he wrote to William Herndon, “I have concluded to do so before long.”58 Congressman Lincoln would live up to his promise.

  Would you have voted what you felt you knew to be a lie? I know you would not. Would you have gone out of the House—skulked the vote? I expect not.… You are compelled to speak; and your only alternative is to tell the truth or tell a lie.

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO WILLIAM HERNDON,

  FEBRUARY 1, 1848

  12

  To Conquer a Peace

  SEAT 191 WAS one of the very worst in the entire House of Representatives, and starting on December 6, 1847, it was occupied by Congressman Abraham Lincoln. He was relegated to the middle of the back row in a section off to the left of the Speaker. Fortunately, Lincoln was tall. While his seat was hardly conducive to catching the eye of the newly elected Speaker, Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts, it did allow him an excellent view of his colleagues. Lincoln sat on the Whig side of the house. One row ahead of him sat his messmate at Mrs. Spriggs’s boardinghouse, the irascible abolitionist Joshua Giddings of Ohio. Forty-four-year-old George Ashmun of Massachusetts, a second-term congressman with bright black eyes and a shining bald head, sat in the same row, almost exactly in front of the new Illinois congressman.

  Lincoln also had a good view of eighty-year-old John Quincy Adams, seated in the center of the action. Adams, a fixture in the House of Representatives since 1831, was one of the few congressmen with a proper home in Washington. Virtually all elected representatives in both houses lodged in boardinghouses like Mrs. Spriggs’s, a tacit acknowledgment of the transient nature of national political office, even among those with “safe seats,” such as Winthrop, Ashmun, and Giddings. They led, for the most part, a bachelor’s existence. Most left their wives at home, and Mary Todd Lincoln quickly realized why. Boardinghouse life was remarkably unpleasant for a woman with children. Mary was the only wife at Mrs. Spriggs’s, and the male camaraderie shared by Lincoln and his partisan messmates made few concessions to women’s interests and concerns. Dinner conversation was inevitably about politics, and after-dinner jokes too raw for a lady’s ears. Robert was uncontrollable, Eddie still nursing. Mary had few social outlets. She reveled in Abraham’s entrance into the national political scene but found life in D.C. intolerable. She lasted only a few months before returning to Lexington with the children.

  There was nothing transient about John Quincy Adams. He had moved to Congress after his single presidential term, and there he remained, his wife, Louisa, by his side. The Whig leader was as alert and outraged as ever, but physically on the decline. He was still the public face of congressional antislavery activism, but he had recently relinquished control to Giddings, whose energy, fearlessness, and physically intimidating bulk (he was six foot two and close to three hundred pounds) made him better suited to parrying the thrusts of proslavery extremists. “It is the curse of our Country and our party that northern men are too Craven hearted to maintain their own rights,” Giddings declared at the start of the war. The Ohio representative had no problem sticking up either for his own rights or for the rights of those without a voice in Congress, particularly slaves, but also, increasingly, the people of Mexico.1

  Giddings, Ashmun, and Adams were proud members of the Immortal Fourteen, the representatives brave enough to vote against Polk’s declaration of war. All three had continued their assault against Mr. Polk’s war in the seventeen months since. Giddings repeatedly warned the House that the war would lead to a “flood of vice and immorality” and that patriotism demanded dissent from the “aggressive, unholy, and unjust war” engineered by the president for the conquest of Mexico. “In the murder of Mexicans upon their own soil, or in robbing them of their country,” he asserted. “I can take no part either now or hereafter. The guilt of these crimes must rest on others.”2

  Speaker Robert Winthrop was not one of the Immortal Fourteen. He had voted in favor of declaring war on Mexico in May 1846, and had come to regret it. Although he had a staggering record of public service for a man still in his thirties, plus an impeccable family name, the people of Massachusetts were not pleased with his endorsement of the war. Abolitionists were particularly enraged, and lashed out at Winthrop with a vehemence that he had difficulty understanding. His seat was safe, but he was condemned in local papers and rebuked in a public meeting at Faneuil Hall by fellow Whigs
.

  Thirty-six-year-old Charles Sumner, a rising antislavery activist in Boston and close friend of Winthrop’s since childhood, was among his harshest critics. Sumner not only chastised Winthrop in public but also admitted to writing an anonymous assault on Winthrop in the Boston Courier. He believed his actions were justified because, as he told Winthrop in an extremely self-righteous letter, “the War Bill was the wickedest act in our history.”3

  Winthrop was flabbergasted by the betrayal. Had such an attack on a man’s character occurred in the South, it might well have resulted in a duel. These two Massachusetts men chose to settle their differences with words. Winthrop privately voiced to Sumner his anger at “the intentional offensiveness of these articles, & their obvious design, not to sustain a principle or vindicate the truth, but to rob me personally of that spotless reputation, which is the dearest treasure mortal times afford.” Sumner was unmoved by Winthrop’s appeal. “Towards yourself personally I have no feeling, except of kindness,” he wrote him. “But the act, with which your name has been so unhappily connected is public property. Your conduct is public property.” Just to make his outrage at Winthrop’s actions crystal clear, Sumner concluded, “I would have cut off my right hand, rather than utter such a sentiment” as Winthrop had, “setting country above right.” Even in seemingly unified Massachusetts, the war was fracturing personal relationships and political alliances.4