American History Revised (36 page)

But to finance the debt, even if only the interest, requires income taxes. The first income tax was not, as most people believe, in 1913 when Congress ratified the Sixteenth Amendment, but during the Civil War. The Union government imposed high tariffs, excise taxes, and the first income tax. In 1872 the income tax was eliminated, but the high tariffs and excise taxes remained. In the 1880s under President Rutherford Hayes, the United States undertook a major military buildup. In 1913, on the eve of World War I, Congress enacted an income-tax law. During the war, Congress jacked up the first-bracket rate from 1 percent to 6 percent, and the top-bracket rate from 7 percent to 77 percent. In World War II, Congress raised the first-bracket rate from 4.4 percent to 23 percent, and the top-bracket rate from 81.1 percent on income higher than $5 million to 94 percent on income higher than $200,000. Payroll withholding of personal income taxes was instituted, and the population liable for income-tax payments increased more than threefold. Whereas fewer than 15 million individuals filed income tax returns in 1940, by 1945 the number had escalated to nearly 50 million.

We have had only two presidents who seemed to worry about the impact of the cost of war on America’s economy and society. The first was Thomas Jefferson: “The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.” The second was James Madison. In 1792 he wrote an article, “Universal
Peace,” in which he suggested that if every generation had to bear the expense of its own wars, fewer wars would be fought. His article is written in heavy colonial English and makes for difficult reading, but is worth the effort:

Today, as the U.S. winds down its presence in Iraq, that message is abundantly clear. Not even an economy as enormous as the United States’s can absorb the costs of a long, drawn-out war costing a potential $3 trillion.

1836
Martin Van Buren does not belong on anybody’s list of great presidents, but he certainly belongs at the top of a sublist ranking presidents for diplomacy. Not only did he keep America out of war, but he did it twice, first with Mexico and then with England.

Historians tend to glorify strong presidents, and nothing makes a president stronger than being a wartime leader. In a 1961 collection of scholarly articles on “America’s Ten Greatest Presidents,” for instance, half the presidents were men who had led the country into war. Yet managing to keep out of war can sometimes be an even greater achievement than rattling the war drums. No one understood this better than the man who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. In 1941, upon being congratulated for his brilliant attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto demurred: “A brilliant man would have found a way not to fight a war.”

Fortunately for America in 1836, the man who was president was a man whose previous jobs had been secretary of state and then vice president. In addition, he was a consummate politician, saying one thing and doing another, constantly making deals. No thundering bellicosity here, just a man who, as Daniel Webster famously said, “rowed to his object with muffled oars.” Another nickname for him was “the little magician.”

It took a magician to deal with the Texas mess. In 1836, American settlers in the Mexican province of Texas declared their independence and sought annexation by the United States. Mexico refused to recognize the Texas Republic, and threatened war. Van Buren, despite his eight years of service under the expansionist Andrew Jackson, was less than
thrilled about Texas because it was a slaveholding territory and could be the cause of even greater problems. In pursuing sectional peace, he rejected the Texans and upset a lot of Americans salivating at the prospect of a big territory. After a two-year period of diplomacy and patience, he agreed with the Mexican government to accept arbitration. Under the terms of the arbitration, Texas would remain a semi-autonomous entity. Years later, after he had left office and Texas became an issue again, Van Buren explained his reasoning. “We have a character among the nations of the earth to maintain,” he said. Whereas “the lust of power, with fraud and violence in the train, has led other and different constituted governments to aggression and conquest, our movements in these respects have always been regulated by reason and justice.”

More difficult problems occurred on the northern border of Van Buren’s home state, New York. It was as if the War of 1812 had never ended. There, on the Canadian border, rebel “patriots” and anti-British sentiments made for several deadly incidents with the British forces occupying Canada. “Surely war with England was unavoidable,” wrote the
New York Herald.
Van Buren quickly issued two proclamations of neutrality, ordered militias in New York and Vermont to enforce them, and sent his lead general, Winfield Scott, on a peace mission to the border to calm things down. But in the meantime an even worse situation erupted in nearby Maine, where Canadians refused to leave a disputed area and Maine called out the state militia. The state’s governor sent a letter to the president that must rank as one of the most insolent ever received by the White House: “But should you go against us upon this occasion,” threatened the Maine governor, “or not espouse our cause with warmth and earnestness and with a true American feeling, God only knows what the result will be politically.” Congress jumped into the fray with a bill authorizing $10 million and fifty thousand volunteers, and people in Bangor, Maine, burned the president in effigy. So began the war nobody’s ever heard of: the Aroostook War.

Once again Van Buren sought compromise and sent General Winfield Scott on another mission to seek “peace with honor.” He made it abundantly clear to the people of Maine that they could expect no aid from the federal government if its militia were to provoke an incident. He got the full support of Senator (later President) James Buchanan, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee: “If there must be war,” said Buchanan, “let it be a national war.” Most important of all, Van Buren had his own son personally deliver a note to the British foreign secretary in London, Lord Palmerston, stating that he would not countenance being drawn into war by a single state and that peace would be easy “if the wishes of the men in power in both countries were alone to be consulted.” Palmerston responded by praising Van Buren’s
“wise and enlightened course” and conceding that all negotiations be held in Washington. The result, several years later, was a formal treaty with Britain bringing all major questions to a peaceful conclusion.

Going against the wishes of people in New York and Maine cost Van Buren reelection in 1840. A few of his closest advisers even went so far as to advise him to start a war to win back the war vote and distract public attention from the administration’s difficulties, but Van Buren refused. In his inaugural address he had stated that while he was ready to resist “any invasion of our rights,” he was equally prepared to stay out of the affairs of other nations, domestic or foreign, and to preserve “a strict neutrality in all their controversies.”

1846
Anytime a soldier gets called up to go fight in a war, the first question that crosses his mind is the odds of his getting killed. (If he doesn’t think about it, certainly his girlfriend or mother will.) The last place he would want to be shipped off to would not be Britain or Nazi Germany or Korea—but much closer to home. For sheer carnage, the worst of our wars was the Civil War: 558,000 deaths out of a population of 40 million is equivalent to 4 million deaths today at our current population of 300 million. Or, put another way, suppose Vietnam had produced the kind of carnage the Civil War did: the result would be almost 2.8 million deaths (at
a population of 200 million). Only the passing away of an entire generation over forty years could heal the wounds of such a war.

Yet there was a war even more deadly, a footnote in the history books because it was so small and comparatively short: the Mexican War. Although the odds of getting killed are virtually identical in the Mexican and Civil Wars (one out of six and one out of seven, respectively), in fact the Mexican War was far deadlier. The average length of service in the Mexican War was thirteen months, or 66 percent of the twenty-month war, whereas in the forty-eight-month Civil War it was seventeen and a half months, or 36 percent of wartime. Being exposed to fighting during two-thirds of the time obviously incurs greater danger than fighting slightly over one-third of the time. The key statistic is “fatality ratio per year of service.” For the Mexican War it was 15.4 percent (based on 7,980 deaths and 51,750 enrollees during an average twelve months). In the Civil War it was 9.8 percent. Put another way, in a year of fighting the odds of getting killed in the Mexican War were one out of six and a half; in the Civil War, one out of ten.

Waiting for the battle to start, counting the odds

History celebrates the Mexican War because we won it, we won it quickly, and we won a big prize: much of Texas and all of California. But the Mexican War also has a dark side. “One of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker nation,” said Ulysses Grant. “An instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”

Continued Grant, “The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”

Wars are fought utilizing the lessons of the most recent war, especially tactics and weaponry. Had it not been for the Mexican War, the Civil War would not have inflicted so much carnage. As America learned when financing the anti-Communist Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s who subsequently became an enemy fifteen years later, war is the best possible training ground for future combat, and there is the ever-present danger that yesterday’s fighters will be tomorrow’s enemy (a danger now occurring in Iraq, where insurgents are learning how to fight more effectively in the future). The Mexican War was the training ground for the Union and Confederate generals whose newfound skills enabled a Civil War expected to last a year to become a five-year bloodbath. The Mexican War also spurred the development of deadly weaponry that outstripped the ability to develop proper tactics. At the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, Confederate soldiers with their swords and pistols marched out onto an open field, only to be picked off by Union sharpshooters armed with long-range rifles.