Such pessimistic views could be found in Mexico as well. A front-page editorial across all five columns of a February 1846 edition of the Mexico City newspaper El Tiempo said the United States had capitalized on infighting among Mexican politicians, lamenting that this internal focus came at a high price: “Texas has been lost: California is going to be lost: the frontier departments will be lost as well.”151
Taylor had spent the rest of 1845 around the Nueces River in Corpus Christi, where he set up camp. In January 1846, after Mexico rejected the U.S. deal, orders were sent to move the troops to the north bank of the Río Grande, where they put a fortification across from the Mexican town of Matamoros (near today’s Brownsville, Texas). Mexico considered this a provocation.152 Taylor and his men waited for the Mexicans to attack; Polk hoped this would make the whole enterprise more acceptable to the public.
The Mexican general Mariano Arista arrived on his side of the Río Grande on April 24, 1846, and ordered some of his troops across the river. The following day, Mexican soldiers attacked a scouting party, killing eleven U.S. troops. Mexico had acted first.153 Less than two weeks later, the United States and Mexico had their first significant battle, on May 8, 1846, in a field of prickly cordgrass at Palo Alto, about five miles from Taylor’s fort. The two thousand U.S. troops defeated Mexico’s six thousand, led by General Arista. After losing about two hundred men, Arista retreated five miles south to Resaca de la Palma, using the brush in a dried riverbed for cover. The following day, Taylor launched another attack on the Mexicans, this time killing twelve hundred men and forcing the remaining ones across the Río Grande to Matamoros. He followed them across the river, and by May 18 the town of Matamoros was under U.S. occupation.154
Between the opening shots at Palo Alto and the occupation of Matamoros, Polk went before Congress, explaining, in a May 11 speech, that “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil.” The annexation of Texas, he claimed, was behind the hostilities, and now “under these circumstances it was plainly our duty to extend our protection over her citizens and soil.”155 By May 13 Congress gave him the declaration of war he sought. Polk had been canny in putting forward the war bill, crafting it so that it sounded as if a war, started by Mexico, was already under way and so that the legislation authorized funding for troops. This left any opposition in a bind: vote against supporting the troops, an unpopular move; or vote for an unwanted war? Some politicians saw the game Polk was playing. A Kentucky Whig representative, Garrett Davis, declared on the floor that had the bill been written honestly, it would admit “this war was begun by the president.”156 The bill passed the Senate, 42 to 2.
Polk’s motives came under further scrutiny when, on August 8, he asked Congress for $2 million to pay Mexico for the land he expected to gain when the war was over. A first-term Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, moved an amendment to an appropriation bill that called for the banning of slavery in any new resulting territory. It set out that “as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States … neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory.” Wilmot’s maneuver also spoke to the growing Free-Soil movement, which had at its heart the idea that slavery undermined and devalued the labor of white people, and so any new state should be a free one. As Wilmot put it, he desired to preserve “for free white labour a fair country … where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with Negro slavery brings upon free labor.”157
The proviso passed the House and was tabled in the Senate. Voting was along regional—slaveholding—and not party lines, with most southerners, both Whig and Democrat, in the House voting against the amendment and those in the Senate in favor of tabling it.158 This reopened another round of debate over slave and free states, and Congress and the nation now stared straight at a question that would dominate the next two decades.159
Whatever the reasons proffered for war, the public had great initial enthusiasm for the conflict. Tens of thousands of men rushed to enlist from the east and west, with some seventy thousand of the seventy-eight thousand who fought in the Mexican-American War being volunteers.160 They were marched across the north of Mexico, some toward Monterrey and Saltillo, some to New Mexico and California, and still others were sent on an expedition to Veracruz.161 Battle news was followed with great interest on both sides, and U.S. papers or articles were read in Mexico, too.162 Beyond the headlines, the war had tapped a rich seam in the public imagination. A flurry of cheap “novelette” books, as they were called then, were printed with tantalizing titles such as The Mexican Spy: Or the Bride of Buena Vista and The Prisoner of Perote: A Tale of American Valor. The seemingly exotic backdrop of Mexico, coupled with the patriotic fervor around the conflict, proved to be a popular combination.163 Soldiers found inspiration by reading Massachusetts writer William Hickling Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico. Published in 1843, the weighty tome was a best-seller, and its detailed and romanticized account of the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlán helped fuel the imagination of eager volunteers who believed they were following in the footsteps of Cortés.164 Such a consequence horrified Prescott, and he later described the war as a “mad ambition for conquest” on the part of the United States.165
In northern Mexico, U.S. soldiers under the leadership of Stephen Watts Kearny marched into Santa Fe on August 18, 1846, and captured the city before heading west.166 The occupation lasted until January 1847, when a fierce revolt in Taos pitted New Mexicans against the regime of the territorial governor, Charles Bent. The U.S. troops managed to take back the territory and the plot’s organizers were later tried and hanged.167
In California, before news of the war even arrived, there had already been a pro-U.S. uprising. On June 14, 1846, a group of settlers descended on the town of Sonoma, raising a flag emblazoned with a star and a grizzly bear. They captured the small barracks and imprisoned the Mexican general Mariano Vallejo. This rebellion was thought to have been encouraged by the adventurer John C. Frémont, though he claimed to have been on a scientific expedition north of Sonoma at the time and did not take part.168 Known as the “Bear Flag” party, the group declared California a republic, and Frémont became the group’s leader a short time later. Soon afterward, they were subsumed into the larger California Battalion, which included the frontiersman Kit Carson. By July, a U.S. Navy ship arrived, sending men ashore and raising the U.S. flag in Monterey on July 7, and by August U.S. forces had taken San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles, though that was not the end of the fighting.169
When Kearny arrived near San Diego on December 6 with around 120 men, he met with a surprise: a column of Californios, led by Andrés Pico, the brother of the Mexican governor, at the Battle of San Pasqual, where more than twenty U.S. soldiers were killed. The Californios managed to retake San Diego, as well as Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.170 By January 1847, however, the U.S. troops, in conjunction with Frémont and his men, fought back and forced them to surrender. On March 1, 1847, Kearny issued a proclamation that “hereby absolves all the inhabitants of California from any further allegiance to the Republic of Mexico, and will consider them as citizens of the United States.”171
As U.S. troops prevailed, Santa Anna was in Mexico planning his return to the front. He was now fifty-two years old and had seen decades of political and military battle. He had lost his left leg during a war with France in 1838, and even buried it—much to the disgust of his enemies—with full military honors.172 He had returned as president again after that conflict and, following a number of vacillations in office, found himself out of power and forced into exile in Cuba. By August 1846, however, he was again in Veracruz and was organizing troops—something Polk later claimed he allowed to happen because Santa Anna’s return would distract and weaken Mexico, supporting rumors at the time that a
secret deal between the two had been negotiated.173
Among Mexico’s enlistees was a brigade called the San Patricios, or St. Patrick’s Battalion, composed of Irish and other immigrant troops who had deserted the U.S. Army and joined forces with Mexico, fed up with anti-Catholic prejudice in the United States.174 Juan Seguín, the Tejano who helped secure Texan independence, also returned to battle, but this time on the side of Mexico. Living between two worlds, he felt he had little option but to change sides. After Texas had been established as a republic, he became the only Tejano and native Spanish-speaking member of its senate. Like many of the Anglos, he also started speculating in land, but he was left with debts and enemies. He left in 1840 to assist the Federalist Mexican general Antonio Canales, but his return to Mexico came at a high political price: once he was back in Texas, whispers arose that he had betrayed Texan plots to the Mexicans. This compelled him to return to Mexico, where he took part in the Anglo-Mexican skirmishes of 1842.175
Not everyone in the United States had been enveloped in a patriotic haze, and opponents of “Mr. Polk’s War” existed inside Washington and outside, not least among abolitionists who harbored deep fears about where the conflict would lead. Others were concerned about the political implications of this aggressive behavior. A July 1846 article in the American Review argued that the war “has been brought about in the determined pursuit of one principal object, and one only: that object was the acquisition of more territory,” explaining that the fifteen hundred miles of desired land had “several of the richest mines in all Mexico. … And if Upper California, with Monterey, and the fine harbor of San Francisco, could be clutched at the same time, no doubt the President has thought that his administration would be signalized as among the most glorious in the annals of the aggrandized republic.”176
Public opinion in the United States started to turn in 1847 as reports emerged of atrocities inflicted by soldiers on Mexican civilians. Morale was dropping. One colonel, John Hardin, wrote in a letter, “Although I was for annexing all this part of Mexico to the United States before I came here, yet I now doubt whether it is worth it.”177 He died at Buena Vista on February 23, 1847. That battle, which took place just south of Saltillo, in Coahuila, was particularly brutal, with both sides suffering significant losses in the freezing cold and rain. Mexican forces killed or injured seven hundred U.S. soldiers, while thirty-five hundred of their own were killed or wounded, or went missing.178 Among the U.S. dead in Buena Vista was Henry Clay’s son, and as the body count rose, public support plummeted. Santa Anna was putting up a fight, though he sustained huge losses, too, with around fifteen thousand of his men killed by March 1847.179 He later remarked that Polk and his allies were mistaken if they thought he would betray Mexico, saying he “would rather be burnt on a pyre and that my ashes were spread in such a way that not one atom was left.”180
The climax of the war came when General Winfield Scott planned an invasion of Mexico by water. Like Hernando Cortés, he sailed into Veracruz in March and his soldiers started by penetrating the walls of the city, bombing the residents, who refused to surrender, and using some 463,000 pounds of shot and shell in the process.181 Hoping to justify his actions, Scott published a proclamation addressed to the “wise nation of Mexico,” explaining that, despite the invasion, “the Americans are not your enemies” but rather “friends of the peaceful inhabitants of this land which we occupy.” He even went so far as to explain that “an American who raped a Mexican woman has been hanged. Isn’t this an indication of good faith and vigorous discipline?”182 He ended the awkward pronouncement by saying that the war would finish soon and Americans would be “counting themselves very happy to leave Mexico and return to their homeland.”183
The violence of the siege elicited condemnation in the United States though Mexicans in the capital were gripped by their own civil crisis and were not prepared for what was to come. While Santa Anna was taken by surprise by the Veracruz landing, in Mexico City there was a storm brewing between two political factions, with the moderates, or moderados, trying to overthrow the radical, or puro, government of Valentín Gómez Farías, in part because he was going to appropriate Church property to pay for the war: this intention had angered the moderados, who counted senior clergymen among their ranks. For almost two weeks at the end of February and the beginning of March 1847, these two groups battled on the capital’s streets, and Gómez Farías even sent in regular troops to fight against the moderado militia. This conflict became known as the Revolt of the Polkos. The origins of the name are unclear: it may have been a derisive reference to the moderados’ wealth, alluding to the fashionable polka dance, or it could have its origins in those who favored the actions of U.S. president Polk.184 In the end Santa Anna was forced to replace Gómez Farías that April with a moderado, Pedro María de Anaya. One Mexican officer, Manuel Balbontín, reflected decades later on the advantage that the unrest had given the United States, writing that Mexico’s “civil war was a powerful help to the invaders … the national resistance did not present the greatest energy.”185
A brief armistice between the two sides was negotiated in August but it soon broke down after Mexico rejected a U.S. plan under which the United States would gain Texas, New Mexico, all of California, and part of Sonora in exchange for cash and the waiving of any reparations payment.186 The U.S. campaign resumed in September, culminating in the Battle of Chapultepec, at the hilltop castle in the capital that was being used as a military academy. Troops stormed the building on September 13, 1847, and the U.S. flag was flying over it a couple of days later. The United States had not only humiliated Mexico at the frontier but pierced its ancient Mexica heart. Even the historian William Prescott, no fan of the war, was swept up by its conclusion, writing to one colonel that the victory was “as brilliant as that of the great conquistador himself.”187 Scott even invited Prescott in July 1848 to write the history of the “Second Mexican War,” but the author declined.188
Others remained less impressed by these events. At the Concord Lyceum in January 1848 Henry David Thoreau gave a lecture—later published as part of his essay “Civil Disobedience”—in which he pointed at the “present Mexican war” as indicative of the worst type of governance, “the working of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.”189
In Washington, war fever raged as some cabinet members tried to convince Polk to take all of Mexico, or at least everything north of N 26°.190 Most of the ardent supporters of this All-Mexico Movement were Democrats, though some prominent slave owners, such as John C. Calhoun, resisted such annexation in part because they didn’t think slavery could be extended, but also because they did not believe millions of Mexicans could be absorbed into the United States.191
Throughout this period, ideas about Anglo-Saxon superiority crystallized, bolstered by a racialized field of scientific inquiry that would end up placing Anglos at the top of the evolutionary pile but also building on the foundation of prejudices laid by Anglos in Texas. Whiteness in the United States became bound up with the idea of manifest destiny and the providence that the Anglo-Protestants were somehow chosen to spread themselves across the continent. Victory against Mexico was but one more step along that road.192 Accordingly, the long-running anti-Mexican rhetoric intensified. The American Review, a Whig publication, parodied this point of view in one article, saying that the pro-war contingent had been inspired by the idea that “Mexico was poor, distracted, in anarchy, and almost in ruins—what could she do … to impede the march of our greatness? We are Anglo-Saxon Americans; it was our ‘destiny’ to possess and to rule this continent. … We were a chosen people, and this was our allotted inheritance, and we must drive out all other nations before us.”193
Humor cut close to the truth when, in December 1847, Congress started to debate the “all-Mexico” idea. Polk, however, was looking west, not south—his eyes were on California, which he wanted to obtain by treaty as soon as possible.194 Other politicians, incl
uding Clay, thought the United States should end the whole disgraceful episode and withdraw with no land at all. John C. Calhoun continued to warn that taking the entire nation meant the United States might “find ourselves … with eight or nine millions of Mexicans, without a government, on our hands, not knowing what to do with them.”195 He elaborated his concerns to the Senate, saying:
To incorporate Mexico, would be the first departure of the kind; for more than half of its population are pure Indians, and by far the larger portion of the residue mixed blood. I protest against the incorporation of such a people. Ours is the Government of the white man. The great misfortune of what was formerly Spanish America, is to be traced to the fatal error of placing the coloured race on an equality with the white.196
The newspapers chimed in as well—Calhoun had noted that “you can hardly read a newspaper without finding it filled with speculation upon this subject”—with some arguing that it would be of great benefit to Mexico if it became part of the United States.197 Many Whigs opposed “all-Mexico” on the grounds not that Mexico was a sovereign nation but rather that Mexican culture rendered the people too “inferior” to be part of the United States, along with the subtext that the Mexicans could potentially make common cause with the Irish and other Catholics.198
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