A year later, Winthrop was still justifying his war vote. He was shocked to discover that a number of abolitionists, including Giddings, openly opposed his election as Speaker in the Thirtieth Congress, in large part because of his war vote in May 1846. They appeared willing to hand the Speaker’s position over to the Democrats before allowing Winthrop to have it. “There is no position more difficult to maintain,” he wrote to one friend, “either with satisfaction to one’s self or others, than that of a Member of Congress during the progress of a War to which he is opposed.” As for Sumner, Winthrop was done with him. “Abolitionism seems to destroy all sense of justice or truth in those who embrace it,” he complained to a mutual friend. As the war dragged on there seemed to be less and less room for men like himself, conservative Whigs who, in Winthrop’s words, “go for the policy by which war may be averted; but when it is at the doors … know no way but to defend the Country.” It was up to Winthrop to try to direct the energies of the divided factions of the Thirtieth Congress toward the peaceful resolution of the war.5
However abysmal his seat, Abraham Lincoln had no problem understanding the president’s address to Congress on its first day in session. Polk’s third annual message made no concessions to the fact that the House was now in Whig hands. If anything, Polk went on the offensive, intent on bending the will of the House majority to the greater cause of war. He reiterated his claim that Mexico had “involved the two countries in war by invading the territory of the state of Texas, striking the first blow, and shedding American blood on American soil.” He justified the progress of the war thus far, and argued for the “necessity” of taking territory from Mexico. In reference to Henry Clay’s Lexington address, Polk completely rejected “the doctrine of no territory.” Were the United States to withdraw from Mexico without taking any territory, as Clay demanded, it “would be a public acknowledgement that our country was wrong and that the war … was unjust and should be abandoned.” Such an admission would be both “unfounded in fact, and degrading to the national character.” It was “manifest,” Polk claimed, that Mexico would ultimately lose New Mexico and California, since these territories were “contiguous” to the United States. America’s destiny was clear: the war would end with a good deal of Mexican land becoming U.S. territory.
And at last dropping his pretenses to secrecy, Polk also gave an account to Congress of the failure of Nicholas Trist’s mission to Mexico. Trist was recalled, he said, because Mexico had failed to accept the terms that America offered. It was now up to Mexico to make overtures for peace; until then, no diplomat would be sent in Trist’s place. In the meantime, the president argued, America’s “national honor” required that the war be “prosecuted with increased energy and power” until a “just and satisfactory peace can be obtained.”6
What Polk intended to do, what he had argued for all along, was to “conquer a peace.” The Polk administration was inordinately fond of the phrase, and variations on the wording appeared repeatedly in official documents released by Polk and his cabinet during the years of the war. But what did it mean? The United States was conquering Mexico not in order to subdue and occupy it but to force Mexico into acknowledging American claims and agreeing to a “just” territorial settlement. How exactly this would be accomplished was no clearer in December 1847 than it had been in May 1846. Thus far the remarkable military victories of U.S. troops had failed to facilitate that elusive peace in the midst of a great deal of conquest. The behavior of America’s volunteer troops had in fact done the opposite, turning the people of Mexico against an occupying force in both northeastern and central Mexico that robbed, raped, and murdered with seeming impunity. Taylor’s army had burned down so many villages that it had utterly devastated northeastern Mexico. As one disgusted officer serving under Taylor put it, “They make a wasteland and call it peace.”7
But it was the only plan Polk had, and he intended to stick with it. The United States would continue to kill Mexicans and occupy their cities until Mexico’s political leaders came to their senses. With breathtaking self-confidence and the faith of a true believer, James K. Polk demanded congressional authorization for more troops, more funding for expenses, and unwavering support for a war that now threatened to carry on long into the future.
It was an audacious move, and the product of a great deal of consideration. For weeks, Polk had refused to see company so that he could revise problematic paragraphs of the speech. He had argued repeatedly with cabinet members, particularly the now radically expansionistic secretary of state, over the substance of important passages. Despite the explicit and repeated urgings of both Buchanan and Marcy, Polk did not call for the annexation of all of Mexico in his address. He held back. But for the newly empowered congressional Whigs, the president’s address was no less a call to arms. They would most certainly not support Polk’s war. Indeed, they would make it their business to bring the whole sordid business to an end.
Not that it would be easy. While national support for the war was on the wane, and the Whig Party felt empowered by its new majority to bring the war to a conclusion, there were plenty of Whigs and Democrats who believed, like Robert Winthrop, that it was wrong to condemn an American war while it continued. As the ambivalent reception of Henry Clay’s speech proved, opposition to an American war was tantamount to treason in the minds of many Americans. Furthermore, the war continued to be popular in some portions of the West and South.
At the same time, agitation for the annexation of all of Mexico continued to grow, even in some quarters where enthusiasm for the war had previously been flagging. The people of South Carolina, for example, had never evinced much enthusiasm for the fight against Mexico. Relatively few South Carolinians responded to the call for volunteers, and their leading Democrat, John C. Calhoun, had vocally opposed the war from its outset. Calhoun had become a thorn in Polk’s side, warning that an invasion of central Mexico would lead to a “war between the races” that would “end in the complete subjugation of the weaker power.” He also cautioned Polk that to annex large portions of Mexican territory to the United States would “subject our institutions [meaning slavery] to political death.”8
On October 13, 1847, the Georgetown, South Carolina, Winyah Observer declared the conflict “probably the most unfortunate and disastrous war” in American history. But three weeks later, after receiving news of Scott’s capture of Mexico City, the newspaper changed its tune, recommending that the United States annex the entire country and “make Mexico do us justice.” With Manifest Destiny seemingly vindicated by the conquest of Mexico, even many of Calhoun’s supporters believed that the no-territory position was madness. Aggressive expansionists were happy to endorse Polk’s plan to continue fighting if it brought the entire nation of Mexico under the American flag.9
Abraham Lincoln’s Illinois was the center of western pro-war fervor. His state sent more volunteers to Mexico than any except Missouri. And he was representing “John Hardin’s” district, as people annoyingly insisted on calling it. While there were western Whigs who were now willing to oppose the war openly, there were also some, such as George Grundy Dunn, a newly elected Whig representative of Indiana, who refused to speak out against the war because he believed it would cost him his seat. Lincoln knew what was at stake.
Yet Congressman Lincoln, the lone Whig in the Illinois congressional delegation, had been seated for less than three weeks when he was recognized by Speaker Winthrop and offered his first contribution to the antiwar movement. This was his first congressional resolution, a crucial moment in the political life of any representative, and he could have picked a different, less controversial topic. His entire career had been devoted to economic issues. No doubt as he yearned for that congressional seat over the years he had imagined himself addressing the august body about tariffs, or banking, or transportation.
But Lincoln chose not to discuss economics. With a confidence surprising in a newly seated freshman congressman, Abraham Lincoln chose instead, o
n December 22, 1847, to demolish Polk’s claims about the start of the war. He offered a brutally logical discourse on the spot where the war had begun. The boldness of his approach offered a clear rejoinder to Polk: Congress would no longer be bullied into submission.
Mary was most likely in the audience for her husband’s first congressional resolution, having left her children in the care of one of the enslaved black women who earned extra wages at Mrs. Spriggs’s in order to buy their own freedom. She would have been fashionably dressed, and at least as anxious as her husband. As Lincoln rose to the podium in the elegant red and gold galleries of the House, she would have had a better sense than Lincoln’s fellow representatives of what to expect. The other congressmen could hardly be blamed had they been misled by the stranger’s awkward frame and high-pitched voice.
But as Lincoln launched into his discussion of the Nueces Strip and offered a series of eight resolutions that called Polk on what was, in Lincoln’s eyes, an obvious lie, they no doubt listened more closely. Lincoln demanded to know the exact “spot” upon which Mexicans troops shed “American blood on American soil.” Acting every bit the lawyer he was, Lincoln offered a devastating rebuke to Polk and proved that it had been U.S. troops who began the war by making an unprovoked attack on Mexico. The land in question was Mexican, Lincoln proclaimed, both by historical fact and by occupancy at the time. In an accusatory tone, he asked rhetorically if “the people of that settlement, or a majority of them, or any of them, have ever submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas or of the United States, by consent or by compulsion, either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying tax, or serving on juries, or having process served upon them, or in any other way.” The answer, all knew, was no.
Lincoln went further. He reminded listeners that the residents of the “contested region” fled “from the approach of the United States army, leaving unprotected their homes and their growing crops.” Clearly, then, the “American blood” shed at the Rio Grande, the blood that belonged to “armed officers and soldiers, sent into that settlement by the military orders of the President, through the Secretary of War,” could not rightly be blamed on Mexicans. The president, not Mexico, was responsible for their deaths, and for the war.10
Lincoln’s Spot Resolutions were argued with clarity and delivered with conviction. But they were not particularly novel. Many of Lincoln’s ideas and phrases were drawn directly from Henry Clay’s Lexington address: that the “spot” in question was “within the very disputed district,” that the war resulted from Polk’s order that Taylor move his troops to the Rio Grande, and that Polk had never made the purpose of the war clear. Clay’s speech, of course, had echoed similar charges made by other Whigs in private and in public. Only the fiercest Democratic stalwarts in Congress ever accepted Polk’s claims about “American soil” at face value. Lincoln’s approach was unusually lawyerly, pointed, and eloquent, but the grounds of his attack were familiar by December 1848. Lincoln’s Spot Resolutions were tabled by Congress and never acted upon. But Lincoln’s debut congressional performance was by no means a failure.
During the first month of the session, other Whig congressmen offered resolutions of their own, some of which came to a vote. Two weeks after Lincoln, George Ashmun proposed a resolution affirming that “the war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the president.” Lincoln voted in favor, and the Ashmun Amendment passed, 85 votes in favor, 81 against.11
Neither Lincoln’s Spot Resolutions nor his vote in favor of the Ashmun Amendment went over well in Illinois. Western Democrats, as well as some Whigs, were inclined to agree with Robert Winthrop about the demands of patriotism in a time of war. William Herndon chastised Lincoln, lecturing his law partner that it was the president’s “duty … if the country was about to be invaded and armies were organized in Mexico for that purpose, to go—if necessary—into the very heart of Mexico and prevent the invasion.” Herndon warned Lincoln that his positions not only were wrong but would be politically costly back home. Indeed, they might leave Lincoln unelectable in the future.12
Lincoln dismissed Herndon’s concerns and justified his actions not in terms of political expediency but in terms of the demands of truth. “If you had been in my place you would have voted just as I did,” he wrote Herndon. “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. I can not doubt which you would do.”13
Lincoln refused to lie. He would not back down, he would not “skulk” the issue. In short, the occupant of seat 191 was no tame, spiritless fellow. This was a man who had determined to tell the truth and to bring the war to an end. Rather than back down, Lincoln decided to throw himself further into the controversy that was engulfing his country.
On January 12, Lincoln returned to the podium for his first full-length congressional speech. Once again the packed galleries most likely included an anxious and excited Mary Todd Lincoln. Lincoln began his address by revisiting the question of the spot where American blood was shed, elaborating on his Spot Resolutions, and holding the president to his own standards of truth. Polk, he ordered, must “attempt no evasion—no equivocation” on the issue, since “a nation should not, and the Almighty will not, be evaded.” Was the spot in the United States, or was it not?
As he warmed to his subject, Lincoln’s gestures and voice became more animated. The larger issue, he insisted, was Polk’s moral stature. What was the state of the president’s conscience and soul? As he wrote his address out for publication, he savaged both the president and the man’s address to Congress. Polk, Lincoln intoned,
is deeply conscious of being in the wrong—that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him. That originally having some strong motive—what, I will not stop now to give my opinion concerning—to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood, that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy—he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where—How like the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream, is the whole war part of his late message!14
In Lincoln’s account, Polk was a coward, hiding behind his office in order to wage war against an unoffending neighbor. In the process he had been seduced by “military glory,” the chance, at last, to link his own name to war and killing, as had so many prominent Jacksonian Democrats of his generation. Worse yet, the president had seduced thousands of ordinary American men with the “attractive rainbow” of patriotism, revenge, and victory of arms that military service seemed to offer. And it had driven him to a state of madness. Now he could only repent the vast loss of life for which he, alone, was responsible.
Lincoln’s condemnation of the president was total, his attack on the man blistering, but other aspects of his speech were more cautious than either Clay’s Lexington address or many of the addresses made by Giddings, Adams, Ashmun, or half a dozen other congressional Whigs over the previous year and a half. Lincoln was careful to praise the troops, and he avoided entirely the divisive question of territorial annexation.
At least this was true about the version of the speech he recorded for posterity. Lincoln may have been carried away while delivering the second half of his speech. According to the Democratic Illinois State Register, Lincoln actually claimed that “God of Heaven has forgotten to defend the weak and innocent, and permitted the strong band of murderers and demons from hell to kill men, women, and children, and lay waste and pillage the land of the just.” It seems highly unlikely that Lincoln would have referred to U.S. soldiers as “demons from hell,” but perhaps the influence of Joshua Giddings and other antislavery Whigs at M
rs. Spriggs’s and in Congress led him to issue a more sweeping condemnation of the war than he preferred to see in print. Perhaps also, stories of American volunteers scalping Mexican civilians at Agua Nueva brought the horrors of the Black Hawk War to his mind. As a young captain he witnessed wartime atrocities against women and children, and made the unpopular choice to prevent a revenge killing by his own men. He upheld the sanctity of civilian life even when American volunteers accused him of cowardice. Lincoln knew something about “defend[ing] the weak and innocent.” He had, perhaps, earned the right to pass judgment about morality during wartime.15
“Mexican Family.” According to a Democratic paper in Illinois, Congressman Lincoln referred to Mexico as the “land of the just” in his January 12 congressional speech, and to U.S. soldiers as a “band of murderers and demons from hell” permitted “to kill men, women, and children.” Daguerreotype, ca. 1847, 2⅞ × 313/16 inches. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, P1981.65.18. (photo credit 12.1)
Lincoln’s stinging account of the president’s “sheerest deception” raised an immediate response. Democrat John Jamieson of Missouri rose after Lincoln, and proclaimed that a patriot never questions his president. “Whether we are in a war that is right or wrong,” he argued, wasn’t even “a debatable question.” All American wars should be upheld by all Americans. And he chastised Lincoln—or, as he called him, the gentleman “from the Hardin and Baker district”—for insulting the memory of his military forebears. “Yes, sir; look back and see what your Hardin did. He was a Whig, to be sure … and fell nobly at Buena Vista. You have a Baker, too, from your district, and that Baker went along under Gen. Scott, and he too was in the bloody battle, and at Cerro Gordo commanded.… Coming from the district that had thus been represented, both here and in Mexico, it is astonishing to me how the gentleman could make the speech here which he has.”16
A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico Page 32