El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  Not everyone shared these views, however. An 1847 pamphlet, Peace with Mexico, by the Swiss-born former politician Albert Gallatin, rebuked such notions, writing:

  It is said, that the people of the United States have an hereditary superiority of race over the Mexicans, which gives them the right to subjugate and keep in bondage the inferior nation. This, it is also alleged, will be the means of enlightening the degraded Mexicans, of improving their social states, and of ultimately increasing the happiness of the masses. Is it compatible with the principle of Democracy, which rejects every hereditary claim of individuals, to admit an hereditary superiority of races? … Can you for a moment suppose, that a very doubtful descent from men, who lived one thousand years ago, has transmitted to you a superiority over your fellow-men?199

  Gallatin had a long memory, arriving in the United States when it was still fighting for its independence, and later serving as the fourth secretary of the treasury, in Congress, and as a diplomat. He published the tract shortly before his death in 1849, decrying the annexation of Texas, castigating the United States for not being a model to other nations, and lamenting that “nothing can be more injurious, more lamentable, more scandalous, than the war between the two adjacent republics of North America.”200

  As senators continued to debate the taking of Mexico, the U.S. emissary Nicholas Trist was negotiating with the provisional Mexican president, Manuel de la Peña y Peña. Trist was doing this despite being recalled, in part because Polk did not trust him to execute orders and felt Trist may even have been conspiring against him.201 However, he managed to produce a deal with Mexico, with the initial agreement negotiated at a villa in Guadalupe Hidalgo, near the spiritual home of the national symbol, the Virgin of Guadalupe. The February 2, 1848, treaty involved Mexico recognizing the Río Grande border in Texas and giving the United States Alta California and New Mexico in exchange for $15 million. Peña y Peña reluctantly agreed to it, fearful that further negotiation, delay, or refusal would lead to the loss of even more land.202 After the two parties concurred, they went to Mass at the basilica there.203 Polk had turned the deal down at first, and then reconsidered, realizing that he could placate the anti-expansionist Whigs by showing that he paid for the territory.204

  The war and its aftermath caused political problems for Mexico, too. Liberals wanted to keep fighting and not sign the treaty. Peña y Peña was forced to point out that “whoever wants to describe the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as dishonorable by the extension of the ceded territory will never resolve how to end this disgraceful war.”205 After heated debate, the chamber of deputies voted 51 to 35 to accept the treaty, while the Mexican senate passed it 32 to 4.206

  In Washington, a young first-term Illinois congressman, Abraham Lincoln, criticized the government over the whole debacle in December 1847. In what became known as the “spot resolutions,” Lincoln demanded to know if the “particular spot on which the blood of our citizens was so shed was or was not at that time our own soil,” a question to which he was given no answer. Two months later, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ceding 51 percent of Mexico’s territory to the United States, with the Río Grande set as the border. Besides California, Texas, and New Mexico, the 525,000 square miles would later become part or all of the states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming.

  It was a bitter episode for Mexico. As the Mexican officer Manuel Balbontín later reflected, the problems facing the nation were many, but it was not aided by a “misunderstood national pride and an inconsiderate contempt for our neighbors.”207 A Mexican history of the conflict published soon afterward concurred but laid much of the blame on “the spirit of aggrandizement of the United States of the North, having used its power to conquer us.”208

  A year later, in his December 1848 annual message, Polk told Congress that “we may congratulate ourselves that we are the most favored people on the face of the earth,” adding that “the United States are now estimated to be nearly as large as the whole of Europe.”209 He went on to reveal even better news regarding California: there were gold mines in this new territory, and one “is believed to be among the most productive in the world.”210 By the time Spaniards colonized and then lost California, the early conquistadores’ dreams of the Seven Cities of Cíbola had long since faded, but its wealth had been sitting in the ground all along.

  IN THE GROUNDS of the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville, there is a modest tomb sheltered by a small roof supported by four Doric pillars and ringed by flowers, accessible to any inquisitive passerby. On one side, the tomb of James K. Polk and his wife, Sarah, bears an inscription that “by his public policy he defined, established and extended the boundaries of his Country.” It was moved there in 1901 from the city cemetery, and while this seems like an idyllic resting spot, it is eclipsed by another nearby monument, one to Andrew Jackson, who sits tall upon a rearing iron horse. The entire site is on a hill, so Jackson—waving his hat in triumph—can see the city of Nashville, and by extension the South and the nation, below. Polk’s tomb is off to the side, under the shade of two trees.

  Despite adding millions of acres to the United States and in the process working himself to an early death in 1849, Polk remains an unpopular—or, worse, forgotten—president. His war was overshadowed by the civil conflict to come, and his mentor, Jackson, had died in 1845. This period is often cast as the warm-up to, or sometimes the cause of, the Civil War that started in 1861. Indeed, many of the military leaders in the Mexican-American War would participate, including Scott, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis.211 Grant, reflecting on the Mexican war in his memoirs, called it “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker nation.”212 The two conflicts between Mexico and the United States defined the first half of the nineteenth century and finally set a physical boundary between the two republics, but also established cultural and emotional divisions.

  In the wake of the violence that washed over the borderlands, a scattering of heroes and monuments remains. Of all of these, the Alamo continues to loom far larger in myth than the diminutive structure itself. Its legend was planted at the time, with letters like the one William Barret Travis wrote while in the fort, addressed to “the People of Texas and all Americans in the world.” In the brief missive he merged the Texian struggle with the future of the United States, calling on those who read it “in the name of Liberty, of patriotism and every thing dear to the American character, to come to our aid.” He also established the heroic status of those involved in the battle, ending the letter, “I am determined … to die like a soldier who never forgets what is due his own honor and that of his country. Victory or death.”213 At the Alamo, which remains the “shrine of Texas liberty” and where the heroism of the defeated is much discussed, the slavery that underpinned these events receives scarcely a mention.

  Despite the fact that San Jacinto was the site of a Texan victory, it receives far fewer visitors. The road that leads there from Houston is dotted with oil refineries and lined with train tracks, though the large obelisk marking the battlefield is set in an oasis of green space facing a rectangular pool, and resembles the Washington Monument. Construction on the memorial started in 1936, on the centenary of Texan independence, and it opened three years later. An engraving on one side of the plinth describes San Jacinto as “one of the decisive battles of the world.” In an even more remote site, on the Brazos River, Stephen Austin, seated on a marble base, looks out over the settlement he founded, where the episode began. San Felipe remains small, with a population of around 760.

  Much smaller still is a memorial to Juan Seguín. After the war, he returned to Texas and its turbulent politics. He published a memoir in 1858 defending his actions and trying to clear his name, reminding readers: “I embraced the cause of Texas at the sound of the first cannon. … I now find myself exposed to the attacks of scribblers and personal enemies.”214 He stayed in Texas for many years before moving to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, wh
ere one of his sons lived. A 1887 interview with him in the Clarksville Standard described the then eighty-year-old as looking young enough to “easily pass now for a man of sixty,” except for his white hair, with a “countenance indicating firmness and gentleness of heart.”215 He died a few years later, in 1890. His remains were returned to Texas and reinterred with honors on July 4, 1976, in Seguin, where his headstone describes him as a “Texas patriot.” A painting of Seguín, dated around 1838, hangs in Washington, D.C., at the National Portrait Gallery, where the accompanying tag describes him as the only survivor of the Alamo and a “hero of the Texas War of Independence” before explaining his change in fortunes and his return to Mexico “where the government forced him to fight on its side” in the Mexican-American War.

  Heroes were not restricted to the United States. Inside the rambling Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City is a room devoted to the events of 1846–48, complete with depictions and explanations of the battle there. Among those memorialized are Colonel Felipe Santiago Xicoténcatl, who died defending the castle’s entrance, while inside were six young men, all cadets at the military school. They ranged in age from just out of childhood—Francisco Márquez (thirteen) and Vicente Suárez (fifteen)—to young adulthood: Fernando Montes de Oca (eighteen), Juan de la Barrera (nineteen), Agustín Melgar (eighteen), and Juan Escutia (twenty). These young heroes, los niños héroes, died with valor when the U.S. troops stormed the castle. According to one legend, Escutia did not want the flag to fall into U.S. hands, so he wrapped himself in it and jumped off the side of the hill to certain death. In the room, commemorative portraits of the young men in their uniforms, with solemn faces and knowing eyes, are arranged along two sides with the flag of the Battalion of San Blas centered behind them. Outside the building, and at the bottom of the hill, sits an obelisk, erected in 1884, with the date of the battle and their names carved in the marble, with the castle hovering high above. Elsewhere in Chapultepec Park is a much grander twentieth-century memorial, ordered after the centenary of their death and completed in 1952. Six thin, white columns, arranged in a semicircle, reach into the air, while a statue of a woman in the center depicts her standing next to one young man and holding another, who is limp in her arms. The words “A los defensores de la patria (To the defenders of the country), 1846–1847,” are inscribed underneath.216

  * This Colorado River runs only through Texas and is not to be confused with the other Colorado River, which flows from Colorado to the Gulf of California.

  ** He was not successful this time. Mexico was his final venture, and he died in Mexico City in 1825.

  * He also brought back with him a bright red plant that flowers in the winter, the traditional Christmas flora known in the United States as the poinsettia.

  * His book was published in Paris in 1834, but the work did not appear in Mexico until 1846.

  * Though in the end there was a compromise and it was set at N 49°.

  Chapter 10

  Mesilla, New Mexico, ca. 1850–77

  THE MESILLA THAT German artist Carl Schuchard depicted in 1854 seemed like a forlorn place. His lithograph, published in 1856, shows a tiny hamlet positioned on a plain in southern New Mexico in front of the distant white-capped Organ Mountains, under a blue-gray sky. The scene is one of winter cold, with the trees bare and the ground yellowed. In Schuchard’s portrayal, the village had around thirty small adobe dwellings, most with straw roofs, and no plaza or church in sight. Two women bundled against the winter huddled in the left corner of the work, while in the center, on a main street devoid of a general store or saloon, was a lone Mexican man, identifiable by his sombrero. Schuchard’s other lithographs told a similar story—abandoned missions, such as that of San José de Tumacácori, or silent villages, like the former Spanish presidio of Tubac, where all that remained was a scattering of buildings and no sign of human habitation.

  Schuchard was part of an 1854 survey for the Texas Western Railroad Company, from San Antonio to San Diego along the thirty-second parallel and winding into and out of northern Mexico. The survey’s aim was to examine the feasibility of laying tracks through the region, and his resulting images gave the impression that there was little in this desolate landscape to prevent trains from barreling through. The Mesilla that Schuchard drew appeared to be a poor village struggling to thrive, yet the numbers tell a different story: its population reached an estimated two thousand the year before the surveyors arrived.1

  Mesilla’s past and future were inseparable from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, when, for a brief time it was the center of the larger territorial adjustments taking place. The treaty had left many people upset and perplexed, and many Mexicans did not want to live in the United States. “Mexicans were reduced to the humiliating state of being strangers in their own land,” was the feeling General José Mariano Salas expressed around this time, and thousands agreed. There is a saying in parts of the West that “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” and so some people elected instead to recross the border.

  Under the terms of the treaty, Mexicans had a year to decide whether they wanted to keep their Mexican citizenship or automatically become U.S. citizens. Overall, around 150,000 decided to stay, but thousands left, a migration that had in fact started even before the war.2 As early as the end of the Texas rebellion in 1836, local campaigns had driven out Mexican families in places such as Goliad.3 Reports reached the Mexican consulate that people living near the town were being warned off by a U.S. general, who told the Tejanos to leave, unless they wanted to be “put to the knife.” Around 100 families fled, arriving in New Orleans in July 1836.4 After 1848, this type of behavior started to spill into the other territories ceded after the war, though it was less pronounced in New Mexico, owing in part to the smaller Anglo population. Of the 60,000 people in New Mexico around the time of the transfer, around 90 percent were Mexican, 5 percent Native American, and 5 percent Anglos and European immigrants.5

  Some New Mexicans living near the Río Grande wanted to stay in Mexico, and so, using the boundaries stipulated in the treaty, they established a small town on what was now the Mexican side of the river and called it Mesilla. A few hundred people turned into a few thousand as the town grew, with its residents believing they were in Mexico—but they were about to have the map pulled out from underneath them.

  The U.S.-Mexico border is not a straight line but rather a story of two halves. The first part of the boundary is Mexico’s eastern edge with the United States, outlined by the Río Grande. The river then turns north at El Paso, reaching modern Colorado. Article V of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty stipulated that to the west, the boundary would run along “the western line of New Mexico, until it intersects the first branch of the River Gila” and from there follow the Gila until it joins the Colorado River, and then run along the division between Baja and Alta California. This was all based on the 1847 Map of the United Mexican States, as Organized and Defined by Various Acts of Congress of Said Republic, and Constructed According to the Best Authorities, by J. Disturnell. Although Disturnell’s map was recently published, much of its data came from an 1822 map by Henry S. Tanner in Philadelphia, or even older sources. In addition, Disturnell was more a publisher than a cartographer, producing the map in response to public interest in the Mexican-American War, eventually releasing seven editions of it in 1847.6 On the ground, no one was sure where the United States ended and Mexico began.

  The surveyors of the Joint United States and Mexican Boundary Commission soon discovered mapping errors as they began their trek to draw a dividing line in 1849. These men had been charged with surveying and marking the border in line with the treaty, but heat, hostility from some Native Americans, logistical obstacles, and financial shortfalls made it impossible to demarcate the border in one trip. Progress was also slowed by the discovery of cartographic discrepancies. The Río Grande was more to the east than depicted on the Disturnell map, and, even worse, El Paso, the surveyors calculated, was off by
34 miles to the south and 130 miles to the west.7 Fixing this problem meant either ceding land to the United States, which would anger Mexicans, or following the treaty and what the existing map showed, which would leave the Mesilla valley in Mexico. Surveyors met in the middle in an agreement called the Bartlett-García Conde Compromise in 1850, making calculations based on a point on the Río Grande that allowed Mexico to keep a bit of land to the north and the United States to gain some to the west.8 The commission finished in 1855—almost seven years later—after surveying 1,952 miles, and authoritative maps soon followed.9

  Mesilla, for the moment, remained in Mexico, but the situation could not continue for long, because the flat Mesilla valley, created by the flood plain of the Río Grande, was an ideal place to lay train tracks. Pressure to expand the railways was mounting, fueled by the discovery of gold in California and the pressing need for quick transcontinental travel. In addition, there was a great deal of interest in copper and silver mining around the Santa Rita Mountains, also in Mexico. President Franklin Pierce dispatched James Gadsden to negotiate with Mexico over the valley a short time later.

  Gadsden was an early railroad baron who had connections across the southern United States, from California to Florida. He had served in the military under Andrew Jackson, fighting the Seminoles in Florida, and was charged with building what became Fort Gadsden on the site of the destroyed Negro Fort. After leaving the military, he moved to South Carolina and became involved with railways. Gadsden’s dream involved running his lines to California on a southern route to San Diego, linking the slaveholding South to the new territories. Gadsden and his allies, including future Confederate president Jefferson Davis, made their case to President Franklin Pierce, who became convinced of the merits of the scheme, not least because it had the potential to appease southern states.10