The US commander, Winfield Scott, had been appalled by the atrocities committed by the volunteers in northern Mexico. “Our militia and volunteers,” he lamented, “if a tenth of what is said to be true, have committed atrocities— horrors—in Mexico, sufficient to make Heaven weep.” Scott declared it had been “unchristian and cruel to let loose upon any people—even savages—such unbridled persons.” Scott cracked down on the liquor trade and issued an order creating military commissions to try both regulars and volunteers for war crimes. Scott would jail offenders, subject them to public whippings, and even hang a handful of murderers and rapists during his campaign but ultimately the atrocities could not be curbed.60
Despite his professed sensitivity to the “minds and feelings” of the Mexican people, Scott ordered a campaign of indiscriminate bombardment of Vera Cruz, a port city of 6,000 people. Rules of war forbade assaults on noncombatants yet Scott pummeled the city with “awful destructiveness.”61 About 350 soldiers and some 400 civilians died from the US artillery barrage in March 1847 compared to 13 US deaths. An army private recalled “the report of the bomb and then a heartrending wail of the inhabitants that was awful, the women and children screaming with terror.” The bombardment destroyed cathedrals and hospitals as “scenes of agony and blood follow one after the other.” “My heart bled for the inhabitants,” Robert E. Lee told his wife.
The Mexicans finally surrendered the city but irregular warfare roiled the surrounding countryside. Scott responded by branding all Mexican resistance as criminal behavior rather than wartime belligerence and thus authorized summary executions and collective punishment. As in the Vietnam War more than a century later, any dead Mexican was deemed a rebel just as any dead Vietnamese would be counted a “Viet Cong.” As Taylor had done, Scott levied “taxes” on Mexican towns as punishment for attacks by unidentified guerrillas. If they did not pay, the towns were summarily destroyed.
The merciless US response to irregular attacks only encouraged more Mexicans to take up guerrilla resistance. As Scott mobilized for an assault on the capital, a Mexico City newspaper warned that the Americans were coming to “burn our cities, loot our temples, rape our wives and daughters, and kill our sons.” Given the character of the US occupations, the Mexicans assumed that they had nothing to lose by fighting to the death.62
In September 1847, as Scott’s forces took Mexico City in a blood-drenched fight, the elite citizens of the capital city opted for an ambivalent collaboration with the US occupiers. They soon regretted the decision. The Americans strolled around Mexico City with their guns out “in order to strike fear into us,” one citizen recalled. “They entered homes and searched and looted at their pleasure, taking whatever they wished.”63
While elites tried to placate the invaders, the common people of the city fought back, as they cursed, stoned, shot, and stabbed the occupiers whenever they got the chance. Livid over sniping, assassination, and hit-and-run attacks, the Americans lashed back with extreme violence, sexual assault, and theft. The occupation “corrupted our men most fearfully,” Hill wrote in his diary. “Many of them were perfectly frantic with the lust of blood and plunder.” For months an “undisciplined and officially discountenanced war between soldier and civilian continued,” Clary points out, as “Scott’s army turned one of the great cities of the Western Hemisphere into a hellhole.”64
Guerrilla attacks prompted a boomerang of genocidal violence. The Texans again took the lead as on one occasion they slaughtered some 80 people in a two-hour shooting spree in response to the death of a single Texan, a revered figure known as “Cutthroat.” Similarly, Army General Joseph Lane ordered his men to burn the entire town of Huamantla after Major Samuel Walker, had been killed in battle (as opposed to an irregular assault). Unleashed on the town, the troops, “maddened with liquor,” proceeded to carry out “every species of outrage” including gang rapes, breaking into homes, and wanton slaughtering of people and animals.65
As both the press and the public had celebrated the volunteers as the heroic vanguard of Manifest Destiny, there was little cultural space for discourse on atrocities. As with Indian conflict, Americans rationalized the indiscriminate violence of the Mexican War, if acknowledging it at all, as the unfortunate consequence of the march of civilization and progress over racially inferior peoples. The antiwar press sometimes publicized accounts of the indiscriminate violence in Mexico but heroic narratives overwhelmed the few critical accounts. Americans ignored the indiscriminate killing and framed the aggression as a providentially sanctioned war of liberation. Polk and other proponents of the war exercised a chilling effect over war critics by questioning their patriotism and, as in future US wars, equating criticism of the war with undermining the troops in the field. Ambivalent anti-war sentiment existed and persisted throughout the war yet “Polk received almost everything he requested from Congress.”66
For a time it appeared that the drives of settler colonialism literally knew no bounds as most US citizens appeared to favor punishing Mexico’s insolent resistance to Manifest Destiny by seizing control of the entire country. As the Americans approached the fabled halls of Montezuma, the “All-Mexico” movement gained momentum with the press and public. “Your ancestors, when they landed at Plymouth” dealt with the Indians by “cheating them out of their land,” Sam Houston declaimed at an All-Mexico rally. “Now the Mexicans are no better than the Indians, and I see no reason why we should not go in the same course now and take their land.” The sentiment extended beyond the slave-holding South. Absorbing and democratizing Mexico was work “worthy of a great people,” the New York Herald averred.67
Relentless guerrilla resistance precluded the United States from securing battlefield gains much less extending its authority to “All Mexico.” The prolonged conflict had “sapped the morale and resilience of the invaders.” After torturous efforts owing to deep divisions between Polk, diplomat Nicholas Trist, and Scott as well as disputes on the Mexican side, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo brought a merciful end to the Mexican War in 1848. As with the movement for Indian assimilation (see next chapter), Article IX of the treaty invited Hispanic residents of the newly annexed US territories to become US citizens as long as they pledged not to “preserve the character of citizens of the Mexican Republic.” Mexican vulnerability to Indian depredations was not forgotten, as Article XI of the treaty required the United States to “forcibly restrain” incursions by the “savage tribes” into Mexican territory.68
Texans celebrated the victory over Mexico, which allowed them to resume the ethnic cleansing of Indians from the lone star state. In 1845, Texas claimed complete control over “all the vacant and un-appropriated lands” within the state as a condition of entrance into the Union. By dispossessing Indians, the Texans could retire debt through the sale of the newly seized land while carving out ranches and communities for slaveholding settlers. The Indians in Texas included not only the mobile and aggressive raiding cultures notably the Kiowa and Comanche, who continued to unleash brutal raids against white and Tejano settlements, but also more sedentary bands, including the Cherokee, Shawnee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Kickapoo, who had migrated after being removed from the east.
As the allure of cheap land catapulted the settler population from 140,000 in 1845 to 600,000 in 1860, Texans became increasingly intolerant of Indians. In the summer of 1847, “the state granted white speculators vast tracts of public land even though Indians resided there.” Texans seized the lands and hunting grounds of Indians, variously known as savages, barbarians, or more imaginatively as “Red Niggers” or “Red Vermin.”70 The Indians soon “recognized that Texans intended not only to take all their land, but to conduct a war to exterminate them,” Philip Weeks notes.71 The indigenes would not go quietly, however, as “Indian hostilities constituted the single most important factor in the development of Texas until the 1870s,” Jesus de la Taya points out.72
The Texans targeted ambivalent and non-hostile tribes as well as the Lipan Apa
che even though they had helped hunt down and kill their blood rivals the Comanche. During the 1850s the Rangers, settlers, and the US Army “struck randomly” against indigenes and killed indiscriminately, Peka Håmålåinen notes. “Ranger companies and spontaneously organized Texas militias killed all Indians they could find” in order to drive them from the path of settlement. By the late 1850s, Indians other than in the Texas panhandle had been driven onto reservations or otherwise were considered “hostile” and subjected to summary execution.73
Displays of colonial ambivalence by whites were not popular and on occasion proved lethal in Texas. In September 1859, Bureau of Indian Affairs agent Robert Neighbors, one of the few Texans who opposed the indiscriminate killing of Indians by “malicious white men,” was murdered by means of a shotgun blast in the back. By that time Texas had been cleansed of thousands of Indians from dozens of indigenous and immigrant tribes. While many Texas Indians would have accepted enclaves within the state, the Texans opted for ethnic cleansing over ethnic diversity. Though they “had many opportunities to end the violence,” the Texans instead pursued their campaign of murder and expulsion to its logical end.74
Freebooting Colonialism
The conclusion of the Mexican War dimmed neither the broad appeal of the Manifest Destiny fantasy nor the desire for new frontiers of American settler colonial expansion. As the budding sectional crisis curbed state-sponsored expansionism, filibusterism stepped into the breach. Filibusterism—the word derived from French and Spanish versions of the Dutch term freebooter—had long been closely connected with the drives of settler colonial expansion. Aaron Burr and interested followers, Andrew Jackson among them, had considered the prospects of forging a separate nation of squatters between Spain and the United States early in the century. A few years later George Mathews had launched a covertly US-backed filibustering expedition in Spanish Florida. The seizure of Texas, as Robert May notes, might be considered “the most successful filibuster in American history.” Similarly, Fremont’s proclamation of the Bear Flag Republic in California was tantamount to a filibustering expedition.75
Though often dismissed or overlooked because of the strange character and frequent futility, antebellum filibusterism reflected mainstream Manifest Destiny and settler colonial expansionist drives. Much like squatters, filibusters routinely violated the US Neutrality Law of 1818 as well as international law yet thousands of Americans could not have cared less as they eagerly joined these expeditions. Many more thousands of Americans—and not just Southerners—cheered them on and grieved over their failures.
The discovery of California gold at Sutter’s Mill only nine days after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo accelerated settler colonialism. Streams of Americans crisscrossed the continent, dreaming of riches but soon wracked with disappointment. As most of these were young men, the gold rush left in its wake “a pool of latent filibusters.”76 Moreover, the rush across the continent had highlighted the need for a trans-isthmian canal in Central America while exciting renewed American covetousness of Baja (“Lower California”), Cuba, and Mexico.
In 1851, Spanish officials in Cuba captured and executed by means of the garotte Narciso Lopez, a Venezuelan who had landed a small army in an effort to claim the Caribbean island for the United States.77 Manifest Destiny fantasists mourned the demise of Lopez through pronouncements, paintings, songs, and poetry decrying the evil Spanish Dons (“Ten thousand soldiers in a moment rise, To drive the harlot Spain from her Cuban prize”). President Millard Fillmore condemned filibustering but he and other Whigs perceived the popularity of the freebooters and the widespread view that Baja and other areas of Mexico should have been annexed during the late war. Even some of those wary of filibusterism still supported the end if not the means to achieve it. “We can philosophically ‘bide our time’ and patiently wait the unfolding of the ‘Manifest Destiny’ whose strides are so gigantic, so certain, so rapid and so wonderful,” the editors of the Alta California rhapsodized.78
William Walker, the most famous or infamous among the filibustero, launched separate attempts to seize Baja and Sonora from Mexico. All failed and one of the invaders, a former California state senator named Henry Alexander Crabb, ended up with his head on display in a jar of mescal in the Mexican village of Caborca.79 Walker, a bright and charismatic but unstable Tennessean, recruited financial backers and followers for an assault on Baja, which his small invasion force proclaimed they had carried out after killing a handful of Mexicans. Apparently attempting to emulate Fremont’s Bear Flag revolt, Walker fashioned a crude new flag, hoisted it, and proclaimed the new “Republic of Lower California” in 1853.80
Like most Americans Walker exalted the superior Anglo-Saxon race and pledged to liberate the “wild, half savage and uncultivated” colonial space for American settlement. The New Orleans Daily Creole declared Walker would bring “Anglo-American institutions” to the “feeble descendants of the once haughty and powerful Spaniard.” But the small invasion force lacked basic necessities such as food, water, and medicine, all of which prompted a characteristically irrational move by Walker—an extension of his invasion into Sonora. Although the would-be conquistador crossed the Sea of Cortez and proclaimed a new Republic of Sonora in 1854, everywhere they went the Yankee invaders “met with hostility by officials, peasants, and even bandits.” The expeditionary force barely limped back across the border to San Diego whereupon federal officials had Walker arrested. However, “Popular sentiment so favored Walker that a jury declared him innocent of filibustering after just eight minutes of deliberation.”81
Frustrated by Mexican resistance, Walker focused on Nicaragua where colonial ambivalence created the prospect of a successful extension of American settler colonialism into the Central American isthmus. The Liberal political faction in Nicaragua initially encouraged Walker to establish a US colony in their country, not only to help overcome their Conservative rivals amid Nicaragua’s civil tumult but also to usher in Yankee commerce and know-how that they hoped would uplift their impoverished nation. These same ambivalent visions of modernity had prompted Nicaraguans to sign a contract with Cornelius Vanderbilt’s transit company, which required it too to establish agricultural colonies along the transit route. Above all, the Nicaraguans wanted to see the Americans build a canal through their country, as they expected prosperity to follow. These Nicaraguans badly misjudged Walker, however, and would bitterly regret it.
Though only a few hundred in number, Walker’s “American Phalanx” won a quick victory in 1855 over the Conservative forces in Granada, thus briefly solidifying his reputation as a conquering hero. Americans back home hailed the glorious triumph of Manifest Destiny, prompting some 10,000 additional settlers and adventurers to flock to Nicaragua. While Conservatives took up guerrilla resistance in the countryside, Walker quickly alienated his ambivalent Nicaraguan supporters as well. The Liberals and the Nicaraguan peasantry soon discovered that Walker’s plans to siphon off all of the good land to the US migrants mimicked the neo-feudal policies of the Conservatives. Moreover, the “Daring Grey Eyed Man of Destiny” viewed all Nicaraguans as “mongrels.” As nations characterized by an “amalgamated race” were bound to fail, Walker decided to legalize slavery as a means of separating and clarifying the racial formation in Nicaragua. Horrified, the Liberals saw their country become the only one in Latin America to reinstitute slavery. After a fraudulent election in 1856, in which Walker proclaimed himself the new president of Nicaragua, other Central Americans and especially Costa Ricans rallied to drive Walker and his “Immortals” into the sea and back to the United States.82
This bizarre chapter in the history of American colonialism had in common with the Indian and Mexican wars indiscriminate violence and destruction. “For two long years, Walker and his troops waged a brutal war against Nicaraguans and other Central Americans as they tried to create an American empire in the region,” Michael Gobat explains. Walker’s followers—an amalgam of true believers, racial
purists, and violent adventurers reminiscent of the Mexican War volunteers— “brought great destruction to Nicaragua” as they left “thousands of dead” in their wake. Walker infamously and gratuitously put Grenada to the torch, igniting a fire that lasted for ten days and left one of oldest cities on the continent in smoldering ruins. “Walker’s intoxicated men looted and raped as they torched house after house, working from the suburbs toward the city’s center.”83
Enthusiasm for providentially destined expansion was so great that the nation invariably rallied behind the filibustering expeditions no matter how futile or irrational. Walker became a celebrity—feted in New York City, sitting for a Matthew Brady daguerreotype, and the focal point of demonstrations, parades, and torchlight processions for the martyred American heroes of the battle for Nicaragua. The administration of Democrat Franklin Pierce had even briefly recognized his claim to represent the legitimate government of Nicaragua.84
Walker had no regret of the violence in Nicaragua, explaining, “Whenever barbarism and civilization … meet face to face, the result must be war.”85 Walker returned three times until his capture by the British navy, which turned him over to Honduran authorities. Suddenly a keen supporter of international law, Walker claimed protection as a prisoner of war but the Hondurans ignored the pleas and had him summarily executed by firing squad on September 12, 1860.
The Crisis of American Settler Colonialism
The American Civil War was a crisis provoked by settler colonialism. Like many of the prior Indian wars (see Chapter 2), the Civil War was in essence a borderland conflict over slavery albeit on a more massive scale than anyone imagined. The expansion of settler colonialism into the new western territories in the wake of the Mexican War ignited the internecine conflict. The Civil War thus ultimately flowed from the incomplete progress of nation building as exacerbated especially by slavery or more accurately by the politics (as opposed to the morality) of slavery.86
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 19