But the many newspapers around the nation that chose to report on Lincoln’s antiwar oratory suggested that John Jamieson was wrong and that the freshman congressman from the Hardin District was in fact upholding the tradition of patriotic service by recognizing that patriotism, in early 1848, required something other than mindless consent to an endless war; that perhaps conquering a peace required forthright action and considered dissent.
Lincoln’s speech received a surprising amount of publicity. Newspapers in Boston and Vermont printed Lincoln’s January 12 speech in full, and an Arkansas paper printed the preamble and resolutions of his speech.17 Papers in Boston, Virginia, Connecticut, and New Jersey offered descriptions of Lincoln’s speech as well as a detailed description of the man they all described as “Col. Hardin’s” replacement in Congress. He was “a tall, raw-boned, thin and spare, dark-complexioned man. He is six feet four or five inches high. He speaks with rapidity and uses a good deal of gesture, some of which is quite new and original. He was listened to, however, with great attention, and made a sound, sensible and manly speech.… Mr. Lincoln is probably about forty years old. He represents Col. Hardin’s old district; he who commanded the Illinois Regiment, and who fell at Buena Vista.”18 The Baltimore Patriot concluded that “evidently there is music in that very tall, Mr. Lincoln.”19
At least sixteen newspapers, from Augusta, Maine, to Augusta, Georgia, reported that “Mr. Lincoln, of Illinois,” delivered a speech “combating the idea that the war was commenced by the shedding of American blood on American soil,” some devoting a long paragraph to his speech, others a single sentence. The New Orleans Picayune reported on both of Lincoln’s antiwar addresses, not unfavorably, alongside their increasingly critical war correspondence.20 The “manly” Mr. Lincoln was speaking the truth, and a national audience was ready to sing his praises. The Missouri Republican lauded his speech as one “of great power” and “the strongest and most conclusive arguments.” Lincoln “commanded the attention of the House, which none but a strong man can do.”21
Lincoln’s antiwar activism brought him his first taste of the national renown he had long craved, but his words ignited a firestorm in Illinois. The state’s Whig press was largely supportive of Lincoln, but it was the Democratic press that evinced true enthusiasm for Lincoln’s Spot Resolutions, which were precisely the evidence they needed to tar Lincoln as a new “Benedict Arnold.” The Illinois Globe regretted that “a representative from our noble state, should thus disgrace her … Well may the patriotic people of the 7th district lament that they have not a HARDIN or BAKER to represent them at this important crisis! Alas, poor SPOTTY!”22
Borrowing language from the pulp fiction of the day, the Illinois State Register dubbed Lincoln the “Ranchero Spotty.” The paper reported on a public meeting held in opposition to Lincoln’s stance that resolved, “Henceforth will the Benedict Arnold of our district be known here only as the Ranchero Spotty of one term.” The Peoria Press predicted, “What an epitaph: ‘Died of the Spotted Fever.’ Poor Lincoln.” Illinois’s Democratic newspapers were unified in agreement that the “miserable man of ‘spots’ ” was following a “traitorous course in Congress.” The Democratic press in neighboring states also joined the chorus of disapproval.23
By tarring Lincoln as the Ranchero Spotty, the Illinois State Register suggested not just that Lincoln was siding with Mexico but also that Lincoln’s words were akin to the actions of Mexico’s irregular fighters. The journalists who referred to Lincoln as a ranchero were aware that guerrilla activity was an intractable problem for U.S. troops. Mexican rancheros terrorized U.S. troops by “picking off every one who ventured alone at any distance from the camp,” as one popular war novelette explained. Arguing by analogy that congressional critics of the war were endangering the troops with what they considered to be cowardly, vicious, and unmanly attacks, hostile journalists attempted to group those critics in the same category as Mexican partisans. President Polk had made a similar comparison early in the conflict when he publicly charged that any criticism of the war gave “aid and comfort” to the enemy. It was an accusation that Polk returned to repeatedly in private as well as in public.24
Nor was this solely the view of Democrats. William Herndon, for one, was openly critical of Lincoln’s behavior. He warned his law partner about the “extensive defections from the party ranks, and the injury his course was doing him.” His opposition to the war in Mexico was nothing less than “political suicide.”25
But Lincoln appeared not to care that his reputation in his own district was in “exceedingly bad repair” as a result of his antiwar agitation. On February 2, he wrote Herndon again, not to reassure his law partner but to praise an antiwar speech delivered by “a little slim, pale-faced, consumptive man” named Alexander Stephens of Georgia. Stephens declared that Polk’s abuse of power in prosecuting the war was “disgraceful and infamous,” and asserted that “the mark” of an “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally” begun war “is fixed upon him as indelibly as that stamped upon the brow of Cain by the finger of God.” He contrasted Polk’s craven acts to the brilliant success of Zachary Taylor, the presumptive Whig presidential candidate.26
But Stephens also talked about the precious lives lost at the Battle of Buena Vista nearly a year earlier, deaths that rested on Polk’s shoulders. In a moving tribute to the famous martyrs of the war, he mentioned McKee and Yell, as well as Henry Clay Jr., whom he described as having “a heart as pure, stern, inflexible and patriotic, as the great sire from whom he sprung.” But Stephens saved his final praise for a man whom Lincoln could not help but think a great deal about during his first months in office, “a Hardin, Mr. Speaker, well known to you and to me, and many of those around me, and of whom, I take this occasion to say, I never knew a truer, firmer, or nobler man.”27 The speech moved Lincoln to tears.
In his letter to Herndon, Lincoln declared it “the best speech, of an hour’s length, I ever heard,” and admitted that “my old, withered, dry eyes, are full of tears yet.” Alexander Stephens was the representative of a Georgia district at least as divided over the war as Lincoln’s. But he held nothing back in his blistering attack on Polk. His speech at once vindicated Lincoln’s course in Congress and provided a political path forward for the Whigs to condemn the war yet support a war hero, Zachary Taylor, as president. It also offered a moving tribute to the man who was still the most famous representative of Illinois’s Seventh Congressional District. It was a speech that placed Hardin’s heroism in a context of dissent against the president and the war he had begun. It connected Hardin’s bravery in supporting the war with Lincoln’s in opposing it.
Stephens’s speech linked Lincoln and his old rival in a manner that Lincoln himself had previously been unable to achieve. The next time Lincoln rose to the podium to discuss the war, he stated clearly that with the death of John Hardin, “we lost our best Whig man.” And he laid claim to part of the “proud fame” of those who fell in the war: “As an American I too have a share,” he asserted.28
The freshman Whig from Illinois determined to circulate “a good many copies” of Stephens’s speech in his district, to let “our people” see that he was not undermining Hardin’s accomplishments in opposing the war, but vindicating that loss by bringing the war to an end. Lincoln would let the people of Illinois see that dissent could be patriotic, that his route forward was the best for the country and for his party. He would show them that John Hardin was not the only hero from the Seventh Congressional District, that there was more than one way to be a conqueror.29
13
A Clear Conscience
LITTLE DID ABRAHAM LINCOLN know it, but he was not far from the mark when he described the president as finding himself “he knows not where” in the middle of January. Polk probably wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone but Sarah, but matters had spiraled out of his control. Trist was negotiating without authority, and with each day that passed, Polk felt more strongly than ever that Trist’s term
s were too generous to Mexico. Under the influence of the aggressive expansionists in his cabinet, the president had concluded that the ideal location for a boundary would fall somewhere along the twenty-sixth parallel, running directly west from Matamoros below the southern tip of Texas at the Rio Grande, including at least a portion of Baja California. This would have given the United States another 187,000 square miles, or about a third more of Mexico than in the terms of the treaty he had delivered to Nicholas Trist. On January 2, Polk informed his cabinet that at the very least, “we might accede to a cession of New Mexico, the two Californias, and the passage across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, paying for them a much less sum than Mr. Trist had been authorized to offer, and that we should in addition secure the port of Tampico.”1
But Polk had no idea what was happening in Mexico. “Neither General Scott nor Trist has written a line to the Government by the train that left Mexico on the 13th of January,” he fumed in his diary in early February. “There is a conspiracy” between Scott and Trist, he was sure, “to put the government at defiance and make a treaty of some sort.” Had Polk known the true condition of matters in the Mexican capital, he would not have been reassured. In the final weeks of January, wealthy Mexican supporters of American annexation offered General Scott $1.25 million to accept the presidency of Mexico and oversee the annexation of the country to the United States. Mexican annexationists invited other American officers, including Ulysses S. Grant, to meetings to discuss the issue. At the end of January, Manuel Zamorg, a major in the Mexican national guard, warned a member of the Mexican legation in Paris about the “lamentable” condition “into which our beloved country is drifting. Mexico is beginning to be erased for the catalogue of nations,” he wrote. “The Yankees are already in possession of two thirds of the country.… [A]ll the elements of a prompt and complete dissolution exist.” Britain’s minister to the United States wrote back to London that “there is a growing conviction in the minds of the people” that all of Mexico would be annexed.2
ANNEXING MEXICO This map illustrates potential annexations contemplated by the Polk administration in the fall of 1847 as well as the limited territorial cession initially offered by Mexican negotiators. Some Democratic expansionists hoped to take all of Mexico as spoils of war. Many Whigs, including Henry Clay, argued against taking any territory. (photo credit 13.m1)
Scott had no interest in becoming president of Mexico, nor did he want to see Mexico annexed to the United States. Grant wanted nothing more than to go home. However they might feel about the people of Mexico or prospects for annexation, the soldiers, to a man, wanted the war over. “I hope there may be peace,” one soldier wrote home to his family in New Orleans in February, “for I have not a hostile feeling against these Mexicanos tho’ I … believe they prove treacherous more than any people I know.” War had lost its appeal. Looking around at “some of the sad effects of war in the wasted forms of soldiers & others with loss of arms &c,” this soldier wondered, “how much misery and distress is caused in the beautiful world of ours by sin.”3
Scott understood the political divisions that were making it difficult for Mexicans to agree on a treaty, but the fact was that any day an officer might arrive from the United States with orders to physically remove Nicholas Trist from army headquarters. Clearly there was no more time for negotiation. Unless a treaty was signed immediately, Scott threatened, he would march his troops into the countryside and resume warfare against the Mexican people.
Provisional president Manuel de la Peña y Peña, recognizing the imminent danger to the continued existence of Mexico, gave his permission to the Mexican commissioners to sign a treaty of peace with Trist. His decision, the commissioners were told, was based on a number of factors, including “the extreme scantiness of resources,… the probability that the United States may prove every day more exacting in their demands,” and the “duty” of the government “to put an end to the calamities from which the country is suffering and of checking the projects of annexation to North America.”4
Trist and his Mexican counterparts met in the town of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The location was no accident. Guadalupe Hidalgo was considered by the people of Mexico “the most sacred” spot “on earth, as being the scene of the miraculous appearance of the Virgin for the purpose of declaring that Mexico was taken under Her protection.”5 Mexico, all the commissioners realized, had never been more in need of protection than at that moment.
On February 2, 1848, three Mexican commissioners and one recalled American signed their names to a treaty of peace in the “sanctuary” of the cathedral in Guadalupe Hidalgo. It was a solemn moment. Just before he picked up his pen, one of the men turned to Trist and said, “This must be a proud moment for you; no less proud for you than it is humiliating for us.” Trist replied, “We are making peace, let that be our only thought.” But he admitted to his family, “Could those Mexicans have seen into my heart at that moment, they would have known that my feeling of shame as an American was far stronger than theirs could be as Mexicans.” Trist had felt shame throughout the negotiations, but particularly “at moments when I felt it necessary to insist upon things that they were averse to. Had my course at such moments been governed by my conscience as a man, and my sense of justice as an individual American, I should have yielded in every instance.” But Trist knew full well that his vindictive president would find any opportunity to reject a treaty he had negotiated against orders, both out of anger at his betrayal and from the belief that a future treaty would bring more of Mexico into American hands.6
Trist did not yield. The terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo aligned closely with those Polk had specified in his original document, with the exception of the fact that Mexico kept Baja California. Trist was even savvy enough to authorize a U.S. payment of only fifteen million dollars in exchange for 525,000 square miles of Mexican land, when Polk had specified a maximum of twenty million. The United States agreed to recognize Mexican land grants and property rights, to provide a route to citizenship for those Mexican residents of the annexed territories who remained in what was now the United States, and to restrain raiding by Indian tribes over the border into Mexico, although none of these three promises would be fully met by the United States. Mexico relinquished all claims to Texas and recognized the Rio Grande as the border between Mexico and the United States.
It was not the most generous treaty Trist could have negotiated, but it was perhaps the most generous the president would accept. He hoped Polk would accept it. But Trist had no sense of what would happen, either to the treaty or to him. That his career in Washington was over was clear. The day before he put his signature on the document, he wrote his wife, Virginia, “I will live on bread and water before I will again hold office of any kind.”7 He had no idea how close to the mark this prediction would be. But he knew with absolute certainty that he had done the right thing, both for Mexico and for the United States. His “conscience as a man” was clear.
James Freaner, the New Orleans correspondent who had advised Trist to continue negotiating the treaty after his recall, rushed the treaty to Washington in just seventeen days, a record for any war correspondence. He arrived at James Buchanan’s Washington home after dark, looking every bit like a person who hadn’t bathed or slept in days. Buchanan immediately brought the treaty to the White House, and at 9:00 p.m. on February 19 began reading it out loud to an incredulous president. They discussed it together, and then Buchanan returned home.
Polk was left alone with the treaty of peace that he had so long wished for but was unsure he could accept. He stayed up late into the night reading it over. He was keenly aware of the country’s war fatigue. Nothing he did or said seemed to diminish it. Though Democrats would not stop calling for the annexation of all of Mexico, he knew full well that the antiwar movement was in the ascendancy. “Mr. Trist had acted very badly,” he wrote in his diary before going to bed, “but notwithstanding this, if on further examination the Treaty is one that can be ac
cepted, it should not be rejected on account of his bad conduct.”8
After lengthy and animated cabinet discussions the next day, Polk concluded that he had to accept Trist’s treaty. He didn’t want to accept it, and Buchanan and Walker insisted he reject it and demand more land from Mexico. “If the treaty was now to be made,” he fumed, “I should demand more territory, perhaps to make the Sierra Madre the line.” Sonora, Chihuahua, and Coahuila were relatively unpopulated, and legendary for their mineral wealth. The acquisition of that territory would also ensure good land for a southern transcontinental railroad route, an objective fervently desired by the businessmen of the South. The coastal territory of Baja California offered access to both the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California. It didn’t take a visionary to see that this land could be valuable to the United States, and that the United States would make good use of it.9
But given the hostility of Congress, Polk felt he had little choice but to submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification. Because were he to reject Trist’s treaty, what would be the “consequences”? “A majority of one branch of Congress is opposed to my administration; they have falsely charged that the war was brought on and is continued by me with a view to the conquest of Mexico,” Polk wrote. “If I were now to reject a treaty made upon my own terms … the probability is that Congress would not grant either men or money to prosecute the war … and I might … lose the two Provinces of New Mexico and Upper California, which were ceded to the United States by this treaty.”10
Trist’s treaty was far from perfect, but it was the best option open to him. At least it guaranteed the acquisition of California. Polk had entered office intent on bringing California into the Union. Trist’s treaty ensured that America’s destiny on the Pacific would be fulfilled. Polk’s destiny, as the agent of American empire, was also fulfilled. At noon on February 21, the president called his cabinet together and announced his decision to submit the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the Senate for ratification. When James Buchanan tried to talk him out of it, insisting on the need for a greater territorial cession, Polk chastised him, reminding the presidential hopeful that at the start of the war Buchanan had been opposed to taking any territory from Mexico at all. Polk’s mind was made up; the last thing he needed now was politically motivated antagonism in his own cabinet. “No candidate for the Presidency ought ever to remain in the Cabinet,” he sighed to his diary later that night.11
A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico Page 33