From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (34 page)

The United States by mid-1847 faced the grim prospect of a long and costly war. Annoyed that Taylor had not moved more decisively and alarmed that the general's martial exploits could make him a formidable political rival, the fiercely partisan Polk shifted his strategy southward, designing a combined army-navy assault against Veracruz, the strongest fortress in the Western Hemisphere, to be led by Gen. Winfield Scott and followed by an overland advance on Mexico City. Demonstrating the emerging professionalism of U.S. forces, Scott in March 1847 launched the first large-scale amphibious operation in the nation's history. After a siege of several weeks, he took Veracruz. In April, he defeated the ubiquitous Santa Anna at Cerro Gordo and began a slow, bloody advance to Mexico City. In August, five miles from the city, he agreed to an armistice.

Even this smashing success did not end the conflict. Fearing Scott as a potential political rival, Polk denied him the role of peacemaker, dispatching a minor figure, State Department clerk Nicholas Trist, to negotiate with Mexico. Shortly after his arrival, Trist fell into a childish and nasty spat with Scott that left the two refusing to speak to each other. The untimely feud may have botched an opportunity to end the war. More important, despite the imminent threat to their capital, the Mexicans stubbornly held out, insisting that the United States give up all occupied territory, accept the Nueces boundary, and pay the costs of the war. Santa Anna used the armistice to strengthen the defenses of the capital. With the breakdown of negotiations, Polk angrily recalled Trist, terminated the armistice, and ordered Scott to march on Mexico City.

The Mexican-American War was the nation's first major military intervention abroad and its first experience with occupying another country. Americans brought to this venture the ethos of the age, clearly defined notions of their own superiority, and the conviction that they were "pioneers of civilization," as contemporary historian William H. Prescott put it, bringing to a benighted people the blessings of republicanism. Given

the crushing impediment of racism they also brought with them, and the difficulties of living in a different climate and sometimes hostile environment, U.S. forces comported themselves reasonably well. There were atrocities, to be sure, and the Polk administration imposed a heavy burden on a defeated people by forcing them to pay taxes to finance the occupation. As a matter of military expediency, however, and to behave as they felt citizens of a republic should, the Americans tried to conciliate the population in most areas they moved through. Little was done to impose republicanism, and the impact of U.S. intervention on Mexico appears to have been slight. The areas occupied were briefly Americanized and some elements of American culture survived in Mexico, but the mixing of peoples was at best superficial and the gap between them remained wide. Ironically, the impact of intervention may have been greater on the occupiers, manifesting itself in such things as men's fashions and hairstyles
and the incorporation of Spanish words and phrases into the language and as U.S. place names. The experience of fighting in a foreign land exposed Americans to a foreign culture, challenging their parochialism and contributing to the growth of national self-awareness.
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The war bitterly divided the United States. Citizens responded to its outbreak with an enthusiasm that bordered on hysteria. The prospect of fighting in an exotic foreign land appealed to their romantic spirit and sense of adventure. War provided a diversion from the mounting sectional conflict and served as an antidote for the materialism of the age. In the eyes of some, it was a test for the republican experiment, a way to bring the nation back to its first principles. "Ho, for the Halls of the Montezumas" was the battle cry, and the call for volunteers produced such a response that thousands had to be turned away. This was the first U.S. war to rest on a popular base. Stirring reports of battles provided to avid readers through the penny press by correspondents on the scene stimulated great popular excitement.
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Like most U.S. wars, this conflict also provoked opposition. Religious leaders, intellectuals, and some politicians denounced it as "illegal, unrighteous, and damnable" and accused Polk of violating "every principle of international law and moral justice."
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Abolitionists claimed that this "piratical war" was being waged "solely for the detestable and horrible purpose of extending and perpetuating American slavery."
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Whigs sought to exploit "Mr. Polk's War." The young congressman Abraham Lincoln introduced his famous "spot resolution," demanding to know precisely where Polk believed American blood had been shed on American soil. Senator Tom Corwin of Ohio declared that if he were a Mexican he would greet the invaders "with bloody hands" and welcome them to "hospitable graves." Polk's own Democratic Party was increasingly divided, the followers of both Calhoun and Van Buren opposing him. The opposition to the Mexican War was not as crippling as that during the War of 1812. Anti-war forces were weakened by the extremism of people such as Corwin and by their own ambivalence. Many who fervently opposed the war saw no choice but to support U.S. troops in the field. Opponents of the war also recognized that the nation as a whole supported
the war. Remembering the fate of the Federalists, Whigs in Congress tempered their opposition. In any event, they lacked the votes to block administration measures. Until after the Whigs won control of the House of Representataives in the 1846 elections, they could do little more than protest and make life difficult for Polk.
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Pinched economically from the growing cost of the war and frustrated that an unbroken string of military successes had not produced peace, Americans by 1848 grew impatient. Divisions in both parties sharpened. When the Wilmot Proviso, banning slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico, was introduced in Congress in August 1846, it brought that explosive issue to the surface. Outraged by Mexico's continued defiance and excited by tales of vast mineral wealth, "All Mexico" Democrats pushed for annexation of the entire country. At the other extreme, critics urged Polk's impeachment "as an indemnity to the American people for the loss of 15,000 lives . . . in Mexico."
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A peace settlement emerged almost by accident. After two weeks of heavy fighting, Scott's army forced the surrender of the heavily defended capital. "I believe if we were to plant our batteries in Hell the damned Yankees would take them from us," a stunned Santa Anna remarked after the fall of the supposedly impregnable fortress of Chapultepec.
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Fearing a drawn-out war, Trist ignored Polk's orders to come home. Acting without authority, he negotiated a treaty that met the president's original demands. Mexico recognized the Rio Grande boundary and ceded upper California and New Mexico. The United States was to pay $15 million plus U.S. claims against Mexico.

Outraged by Trist's disobedience, Polk would have liked to take more territory to punish Mexico for its insolence. Ironically, the very racism that drove the United States into Mexico limited its conquests. "We can no more amalgamate with her people than with negroes," the former president's nephew and namesake Andrew Jackson Donelson observed. "The Spanish blood will not mix well with the Yankee," Prescott added.
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Concern about the absorption of an alien population and the prospect of peace took the steam out of the All Mexico movement. Facing sharpening divisions at home, Polk felt compelled to accept the treaty negotiated by that "impudent and unqualified scoundrel." Some Whigs opposed it because it
gave the United States too much territory, others because the price was too high. In the final analysis, peace seemed preferable to more bloodshed. The treaty passed the Senate on March 10, 1848, by a bipartisan vote of 36 to 14. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in Philip Hone's apt phrase, was "negotiated by an unauthorized agent, with an unacknowledged government, submitted by an accidental president to a dissatisfied Senate."
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For Trist, the diplomat who had taken peace into his own hands, the reward was abuse from a vindictive boss. He was fired from his State Department post and not paid for his service until some twenty-five years later, shortly before his death.

For Mexico, the war was a devastating blow to the optimism that had marked its birth, perhaps the supreme tragedy in its history. When Santa Anna was shown maps of his country making clear for the first time the enormity of its losses, he wept openly. Mexico plunged deeper into debt. With half its territory gone, war raging in Yucatán, agrarian revolts sweeping the heartland, and Indian unrest in the north, the nation seemed near falling apart. Military defeat brought despair to leadership groups. Liberals questioned Mexico's capacity for nationhood. Conservatives concluded that republicanism was tantamount to anarchy and that they should look to Europe for models, even to monarchy. It was the "most unjust war in history," Alaman lamented, "provoked by the ambition not of an absolute monarchy but of a republic that claims to be at the forefront of nineteenth century civilization."
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For the United States, the war brought a vast bounty, adding 529,000 square miles to the national domain, coveted outlets on the Pacific, and the unanticipated boon of California gold. If Texas is added, the booty totals about 1.2 million square miles, one-third of the nation's present territory. All of this for thirteen thousand dead, an estimated $97 million in war costs, and the $15 million paid Mexico. North Americans saw the war as a great event in their own and indeed in world history. Success against Mexico demonstrated, Polk insisted, the "capacity of republican governments to prosecute successfully a just and necessary foreign war with all the vigor usually attributed to more arbitrary forms of government."
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For a people still unsure of their bold experiment, the war confirmed their faith in republicanism and seemed to earn them new respect abroad. Some Americans even saw the European revolutions of 1848 as extensions

of the great test between monarchy and republicanism that began on the battlefields of Mexico. "The whole civilized world resounds with American opinions and American principles," declared Speaker of the House of Representatives Robert Winthrop in a victory oration on July 4, 1848.
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The celebration of victory obscured only momentarily the war's darker consequences. It aroused among Latin Americans growing fear of what was already commonly labeled the "colossus of the North." Most important, acquisition of the vast new territory opened a veritable Pandora's box of troubles at home. From the Wilmot Proviso to Fort Sumter, the explosive issue of extending slavery into the territories dominated the political landscape,
setting off a bitter and ultimately irreconcilable conflict. Polk's victory thus came at a huge price, setting the nation on the road to civil war.
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Rising with each word to new heights of exuberance, Secretary of State Daniel Webster proclaimed in 1851 that it was America's destiny to "command the oceans, both oceans, all the oceans."
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Some of the same forces that drove the United States across the continent in the 1840s propelled it into the Pacific and East Asia. Trade, of course, was a major factor. The Panic of 1837 and growing concern with surplus agricultural productivity heightened the importance of finding new markets. Whigs like Webster saw commercial expansion as essential to domestic well-being and international stability. Democrats viewed it as essential to sustain the agricultural production that would safeguard the nation from the threats of manufacturing, economic distress, and monopoly. The lure of East Asian trade played a crucial role in the quest for Oregon and California; their acquisition, in turn, quickened interest in the Pacific and East Asia. "By our recent acquisitions in the Pacific," Secretary of the Treasury Robert Walker proclaimed in 1848, "Asia has suddenly become our neighbor, with a placid intervening ocean inviting our steamships upon the trade of a commerce greater than all of Europe combined."
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It was no accident that in the 1840s the United States began to formulate a clear-cut policy for the Pacific region.