America Aflame (7 page)

While the Whigs and the Democrats wrapped their causes and candidates in the Shroud of Turin, the Liberty Party was the genuine article, America's first Christian political party. Its conventions resembled revivals, and its platform stressed the sacred obligation of state and national governments to promote equality and free labor. Its spokesmen urged citizens “to vote the Liberty ticket as a religious duty.” One of its leaders recalled years later the excitement of the 1844 campaign: “The Liberty Party, unlike any other in history, was founded on moral principles—on the Bible, originating a contest not only against slavery but against atheistic politics from which Divine law was excluded.” Others called the party “intolerant and denunciatory.”
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The country was not ready for a major Christian political party, especially one with a partisan anti-slavery agenda. But after polling a paltry 7,000 votes in the 1840 presidential election, the Liberty Party won 62,300 votes in 1844 and peeled off enough disaffected Whigs in New York and Michigan to swing those states and the election to Polk. For increasing numbers of northern voters—but not yet a critical mass—the two major parties offered no purity on moral issues, especially on slavery. The Democrats and the Whigs invoked faith in campaigns but ignored it in governance. On the campaign trail, the whiskey flowed as freely as quotes from Scripture. The Liberty Party offered a salutary alternative to such hypocrisy.

The slavery issue, which provoked the denominational schisms, loomed over the 1844 election campaign for an even more salient reason: the proposed annexation by the United States of the Texas Republic, the Holy Ghost of the Democratic trinity. By 1844, the annexation of Texas seemed to many Americans like a natural progression of the country's territorial expansion, the God-inspired sweep of ideals and citizens across a continent. Those who led the revolt of the Texas province from the Mexican government in 1836 were former Americans, so annexation would complete the crusade to restore to them the blessings of democratic government and Protestant Christianity.
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Few Americans clamored for the annexation of Texas initially. The onset of a severe economic downturn in 1837 that lasted into the early 1840s focused Americans' attention on matters closer to home. The penny presses and pulp paperbacks regaled their growing audiences with tales of the Far West, not Texas. Besides, the Mexican government had never recognized Texas independence. The Mexicans had made it clear that they would perceive any move on the part of the United States to annex this province as an act of war. President Andrew Jackson, not one to shrink from a fight, nevertheless muttered a few platitudes about self-determination and let Texas alone, as did his successor, Martin Van Buren.

In the meantime, Texas president Sam Houston, like a boy hopping up and down at his school desk for attention, openly entertained proposals from Mexico and Great Britain. Mexico intimated that Texas could enjoy the status of a free state within a loose Mexican confederation. Rumors circulated that the British had promised to protect the independence of Texas in exchange for the compensated abolition of slavery, a plausible deal given Sam Houston's indifference to the institution. Houston did not seriously entertain the Mexican offer, and, although a British official visited Texas with such a scheme in mind, neither the British government nor Houston discussed it formally.

Houston was much less interested in striking dubious deals with foreign governments than in raising the profile of the annexation issue in Washington. The Whigs had always been cool to annexation. They worried about the expansion of the country beyond the means to govern it, and they worried about the probability of a war with Mexico. The big Whig, President John Tyler, was not really much of a Whig at all. Placed on the ticket as the vice presidential candidate in 1840 as a sop to southerners whose major attraction to Whig philosophy was that Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren were Democrats, Tyler suddenly found himself president when William Henry Harrison succumbed to the rigors of the job after only one month in office. Tyler, a thin, sour-faced Virginian, was genial enough to intimates and held the usual graces one associates with the Old Dominion. The fact that Tyler was an accidental president bothered him not in the least, and he proceeded to chart his own course, much to the dismay of mainstream Whigs.

As a nationalist, Tyler worried about Sam Houston's dalliances with the Mexicans and especially with the British. So he sent Abel P. Upshur, his secretary of state, to sound out Houston about a possible annexation treaty in October 1843. However, while Upshur was inspecting a navy vessel, one of its prize guns blew up, destroying a good deal of the ship and Upshur as well. Tyler compounded the accident by appointing John C. Calhoun as his new secretary of state. Calhoun was brilliant, but he was not a diplomat. With a face and ideology seemingly chiseled from rock, Calhoun had the appearance of an Old Testament prophet who should not be messed with. Like Tyler, more a Whig by convenience than by conviction, Calhoun had some specific ideas about how the United States should handle the annexation issue.

For Calhoun, annexation made sense only as a measure to save slavery from destruction. History and prevailing wisdom dictated that the institution, like a vampire, required periodic infusions of fresh blood—territory—to survive. Cotton cultivation depleted the soil. The abundance of fertile land lulled planters into a security that abjured principles of conservation. The slave population, which, despite the closure of the overseas slave trade, increased twofold during the first half of the nineteenth century, would soon overrun the white population. Too many slaves on too little land raised security concerns and could ruin the value of a planter's investment, eventually destroying the institution itself.

From Calhoun's political standpoint, the South had already lost the national population competition by the early 1840s. Representatives from nonslaveholding states easily outnumbered those where slavery yet existed. The Senate was the South's last bastion of influence in the federal legislature. Regardless of population, each state sent two senators to Washington. It did not take a clairvoyant to see that the migration westward to the Pacific Coast would, eventually, result in an avalanche of free states that would make the South forever beholden, a slave if you will, to the power and whims of the free states.

Calhoun drafted an annexation treaty and laid it before the Senate in April 1844 with a cover letter urging passage because British abolitionists were poised to abolish slavery in Texas. That no such plot existed was beside the point. The association of slavery and annexation effectively doomed the measure, even among southerners who wondered why the slavery issue even entered the picture when an argument for annexation in the name of manifest destiny might have drawn a majority of the votes. But Calhoun hoped to educate Congress that annexation was a matter both of national patriotism—the British threat—and of southern equality within the Union, a cause to which he dedicated his life. Calhoun was no disunionist. What he worked for was a Union of equals. He raised the fundamental issue of a democratic society: how to protect the rights of a minority in a political system predicated on majority rule.
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Although Calhoun lost the vote, he gained an election issue. Northern vilification of Calhoun, the Tyler administration, and the South itself irritated southerners, especially in the Lower South, where slaveholding was more prevalent. If equality was a great principle of the Union, then why were northerners hell-bent on relegating the South to a permanent minority? All white southerners understood the implications of dependence, a term synonymous with slavery in the national lexicon.

The Democratic Party platform cannily linked Texas with Oregon (where the British and Americans held conflicting claims), rendering the acquisition of both a matter of national security and honor rather than sectional greed. Polk, despite his southern origins, perceived Texas as a way station on the road to his ultimate goal of a Pacific empire, not as a safety valve for excess slaves. The Whigs chose party loyalty over Texas, recognizing that advocacy for annexation would split the party irrevocably. Northern Whigs perceived annexation fever as a symptom of a larger disease, a conspiracy among slave states to undermine basic American ideals. Henry Clay focused on promoting his American System, fearing that agitation of the slavery issue threatened his beloved Union. But Texas and Oregon had gotten the patriotic juices flowing, and voters perceived Clay as soft on the foreign menaces and as hostile to the interests of slaveholders. He lost every Lower South state, barely broke even in the border states, and faltered in the North, where Polk and the Democrats convinced voters that the party wanted Oregon and California as badly as it longed for Texas.

John Tyler interpreted Polk's victory as a mandate for annexation. Three days from the end of his presidency, on March 1, 1845, Tyler signed the Texas annexation bill after it passed both the House and the Senate by narrow party-line votes. The Lone Star Republic entered the Union as a slave state. When Polk took office on March 4, he confronted two pressing issues: Mexico had made it clear that annexation meant war, and the British were girding for battle if Polk attempted to make good on his pledge to throw them out of Oregon. Destiny would not wait.

CHAPTER 2

EMPIRE

EMIGRANTS STREAMING TOWARD OREGON
and California and settlers already established in Texas believed themselves agents of destiny. The British, Mexicans, and Indians who inhabited or claimed all or parts of these lands felt differently. President Polk hoped that a combination of negotiation, compensation, and the incessant flow of migrating Americans would convince these parties to withdraw gracefully. A well-placed threat was not out of order either.

The British blinked first. The facts on the ground—the daily arrival of American settlers—moved them to offer Oregon to the United States up to the 49th parallel. Polk rejected the deal outright. In his first message to Congress in December 1845, what today we call the State of the Union Address, Polk gave the British a geography lesson as to why the Oregon territory belonged to the United States all the way up to the 54th parallel. “Oregon is part of the North American Continent, to which, it is confidently affirmed, the title of the United States is the best now in existence.… The British proposition of compromise … can never for a moment be entertained by the United States.”
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As crowds gathered around railroad depots in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York to see the message transmitted almost instantaneously by a remarkable new invention, the telegraph, a murmur and then a hurrah burst forth: “Jackson is alive again!” Back in March, when Andrew Jackson was still clinging to his first life, he had advised his protégé not to mind the British; they would protest giving up all of Oregon “to alarm us … and give strength to the traitors in our country.… England with all her boast dare not go to war.”
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Steadfast against the British, Polk turned a sharp eye toward the Mexicans. In June, he ordered the United States Army under General Zachary Taylor to take up a position south of the Nueces River. The Mexicans considered the Nueces their northern boundary; the Americans and Texans claimed the Rio Grande, much further south, as the correct border. Sending General Taylor into disputed territory was obviously a provocation. The president felt a show of force would convince Mexicans of the rectitude of American geography. The Mexicans, however, were unimpressed and refused to hear what the president's minister, John Slidell, had to offer in the way of settlement. Slidell left Mexico in a snit, reporting to Polk, “Be assured that nothing is to be done with these people until they have been chastised.” Mexicans, he said, were “ignorant Indians, debased by three centuries of worse than colonial vassalage … a semi-barbarous people.”
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Zachary Taylor was a good soldier and expert farmer, owning a large plantation in Louisiana populated by over two hundred slaves. He had given a daughter to a young, well-connected Mississippi planter by the name of Jefferson Davis, but the daughter died shortly after the marriage, and the general never forgave his former son-in-law. Taylor's dual career as a farmer and a soldier spoke volumes about the regular army, only seven thousand strong scattered among various western outposts. Their major role to date had been moving Indians to barren lands and, occasionally, shooting them when they resisted. But politicians, not soldiers, make war.

Taylor hardly looked the part of a commander; he appeared as if he had just exited a cotton press and was only awaiting twine to be shipped to some textile mill up north. Squat, with a face that had more ridges than most mountain ranges, he rarely wore anything that would indicate his rank. One of his lieutenants, Ulysses S. Grant, hardly a fashion plate himself, commented, “In dress he was possibly too plain.” More important to Grant, though, Taylor “was known to every soldier in his army, and was respected by all.”
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The Mexicans and the British were part of the same problem, according to Polk. The British had negotiated with Sam Houston, president of Texas, trying to lure the Lone Star Republic away from the United States. Now the Mexicans were conspiring to give the British a stronger foothold in California. To counter that purported threat, the president, in October 1845, ordered United States Consul Thomas Larkin at Monterey, California, to take advantage of any unrest. Unrest conveniently materialized in the person of Captain John C. Frémont, who had explored the West on behalf of the U.S. Army. He now commanded a band of about sixty army irregulars; no one knew for certain if they were officially American soldiers or an assortment of mountain men looking for work and adventure. They rode into California supposedly scouting for better trails into that territory.

The movements in California and Texas (or Mexico, depending on one's perspective) received close attention in Mexico City. General Mariano Paredes, riding a wave of anti-American sentiment, led a group of army officers into the capital and deposed President Joaquín Herrera after firing a few perfunctory shots and coaxing the priests to ring the church bells. Paredes held the same view of Americans that many in the United States held of Mexicans: they were stupid and cowardly.

On January 13, 1846, Secretary of War William Marcy sent the following message to General Taylor at Corpus Christi: “Sir: I am directed by the President to instruct you to advance and occupy, with the troops under your command, positions on or near the east bank of the Rio del Norte [Rio Grande].… You will not act merely on the defensive.” Taylor dutifully broke camp and moved to the Rio Grande, but the last sentence of Marcy's order puzzled him.
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Three hundred yards across the Rio Grande, the citizens of Matamoros clambered to their rooftops, waving good-naturedly to the four thousand or so Yanks, who waved back. American soldiers enjoyed the view of the young, dark-skinned Mexican women who, without inhibition, disrobed along the riverbank and plunged in for a bath. Several soldiers waded into the river to get a closer look, but Mexican guards warned them away.

President Paredes made clear to the Polk administration that he considered the presence of American troops on the banks of the Rio Grande an act of war. To affirm his position, he refused to meet with John Slidell, the oft-rejected emissary from Washington who now hoped to arrange an agreement with the new and financially strapped Mexican government to buy New Mexico and northern California. But no Mexican government could sell those territories at any price and remain in power.

The Mexicans and the Americans watched each other warily across the river. The only troop movement occurred among some of Taylor's Irish Catholic soldiers. In the early spring of 1846, they began to cross over to the other side of the river, responding to Mexican pleas of religious brotherhood and a bounty of 320 acres. The Mexicans asked them to weigh the bigotry they encountered in American cities against the full citizenship and the grant of land they would enjoy in Mexico. After fourteen Irish Americans swam over one night, General Taylor issued shoot-to-kill orders. When two more attempted desertion shortly thereafter, they were shot. Desertions declined but not before at least two hundred Irish Catholics joined the Mexican army, forming the San Patricio Battalion.
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On the Matamoros shore one April morning, a solemn file of priests appeared, sprinkling holy water on the cannons aimed at American troops. When Colonel Truman Cross, the quartermaster, did not return from his usual morning horseback ride, Taylor sent out a patrol. The patrol encountered sixteen hundred Mexican soldiers, who easily overwhelmed them. That evening, an American soldier wrote home: “All idea of there being
no fight
has ceased.
War has commenced
, and we look for a conflict within a few days.” Taylor reported to the president in his usual terse style: “Hostilities may now be considered as commenced.”
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No telegraph line existed between Texas and Washington, so it would be three weeks before the president submitted his message to Congress requesting a declaration of war. The message, like most of Polk's writings, was long and larded with legal jargon citing “grievous wrongs perpetrated upon our citizens throughout a long period of years.” The United States had maintained a remarkable forbearance through these insults. But, with the Mexican invasion of American soil, the nation must defend itself. That Mexico claimed this territory and that the lengthy oppression of American citizens was an overwrought assertion did not faze the Congress. The House of Representatives took all of thirty minutes to debate Polk's message and then voted for war. It took a bit longer in the Senate—John C. Calhoun put forth the novel idea that perhaps it might be best to wait and see if the Mexican government would repudiate the ambushers—but who could vote against punishing Mexico for killing Americans?
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War fever erupted. Crowds thronged city streets shouting “Mexico or Death!” Posters plastered public buildings and businesses. In Illinois, three regiments were called for and fourteen regiments volunteered; Tennessee was forced to hold a lottery as thirty thousand men volunteered for three thousand places. The young editor of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
, Walt Whitman, joined the war whooping: “Mexico must be thoroughly chastised … with prompt and
effectual
hostilities.… Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not spoiling for a quarrel, America knows how to crush as well as how to expand.”
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It was the idea of expansion that so intrigued the young editor, as it had motivated President Polk and tens of thousands of other Americans. Predestined, sanctified, and inevitable expansion. Celebrating the war declaration, Whitman wrote, “The daring, burrowing energies of the Nation will never rest till the whole of this northern section of the great West World is circled in the mighty Republic—there's no use denying that fact!” Like the Indian, the Mexican was no worthy steward of the New World: “What has miserable, inefficient Mexico,” Whitman asked, “with her actual tyranny by the few over the many—what has she to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?”
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Whitman spoke the unbounded optimism of youth. With his parents, he had joined the great migration to the cities, greater than that of the westward movement and enveloped in the same spirit of hope and success. What these emigrants, both to the West and to the cities, held in common was a faith in America, that they and the country were traveling on an unstoppable arc of progress. They identified with their country as they identified themselves. As a saga of empire unfolded on the Rio Grande, its underpinnings could be found on the trails to the Pacific and in the streets of the burgeoning cities.

When Whitman was a boy of six, in 1825, the marquis de Lafayette visited Brooklyn to lay the cornerstone for the Apprentices' Library Building. The young republic put great stock in education, for an educated populace was both a requisite for and guarantor of democratic government. A crowd of schoolchildren followed the French general's procession as he rode up Fulton Street in an open carriage. The construction site was a hole in the ground bounded by piles of dirt, and men lifted youngsters on their shoulders to take in the scene. The marquis descended from the carriage and waded through the crowd. Suddenly, young Walt found himself whisked into the general's arms for a better view. The encounter made a lasting impression on Whitman. The incident also underscored how close Americans were to the hallowed Revolutionary generation.
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Yet the Revolutionary generation was gone. A distance had set in. The living had to carry on and interpret a most uncommon legacy. George Bancroft, a historian, politician, and writer, set about to write the history of the United States in the 1830s. His task would take him ten volumes and forty years to complete. How presumptuous it seemed to Europeans that a country barely more than a half century old could think that it had a history. Bancroft's history was as unique as the nation he wrote about, a sweeping chronicle of providential will and virtuous statesmen coming together to create a unique experiment whose ultimate destiny still awaited. The Founders had become gods and the nation a new Israel.
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Whitman, like so many other Americans of that era, held a sense of obligation to that first generation, not only to honor their work and ideals but also to fulfill their vision. When Whitman assailed the Mexicans and trumpeted the destiny of America, it was not the bloody yawp of a mindless warmonger but an essay of belief that all of this, pain included, would make the world a better place.

Whitman believed, as did many other Americans, that almost anything was possible in this new land, just because it was new. As with the person, so with the country—work hard, overcome obstacles, and attain success even at a price. Such was the credo of Young America. In James K. Polk, Young America had a president, and Young America would soon have its poet. And Young America would have a war, and then an empire.

Polk had little in common with Whitman, but they both shared the optimism of a nation beyond history, a country that would reach the Pacific, build great cities, and lead the world to salvation. When Polk sent Zachary Taylor and the “tan-faced children” of Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Louisiana to that contested patch of ground, it was with the same confidence with which Whitman strode the streets of New York, that this was our land and by right it will be.

When word reached New York of Congress's declaration of war on Mexico in May 1846, a boisterous multitude filled the streets shouting hurrahs. The theme of '76 played across the land. For this generation of Americans, here was an opportunity to honor the Founders' legacy and extend the experiment across the continent. The United States Army was God's sword, whose “every cannon ball is a missionary; and every soldier is a Colporteur [a traveling salesman of religious literature].”
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