Lincoln in the World (6 page)

In mid-April, Mexican forces quickened their calls for an American retreat. The Mexican commander demanded that the U.S. troops withdraw, or else “arms, and arms alone, must decide the question.” Taylor then blockaded the Rio Grande, virtually guaranteeing that the Mexicans would be forced to attack. On April 26, 1846, a unit of Mexican solders crossed the Rio Grande into disputed territory and ambushed the Americans, killing eleven soldiers and capturing many more. “Hostilities may now be considered as commenced,” Taylor declared.
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Polk seized his opportunity. He hastily put together a message to Congress asking for a declaration of war. “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil,” Polk insisted. (Many of
his countrymen—including Lincoln—would ultimately dispute that claim.) “As war exists, and, notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself, we are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interests of our country.”
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The war in Mexico coincided with a period of rising ambition in Lincoln. Herndon later remarked that his law partner’s drive was like “a little engine that knew no rest.” For years Lincoln had been angling for a spot in Congress. As tensions rose along the Mexican border, Lincoln flooded the region with letters making the case for his candidacy. “I wish you would let nothing appear in your paper which may operate against me,” he wrote to one editor in November 1845. “I now wish to say to you that if it be consistent with your feelings, you would set a few stakes for me,” he implored another acquaintance. The young lawyer insisted that after years of patiently supporting other Whig candidates for the congressional seat, he was now entitled to his own shot. “Turn about is fair play,” he implored potential allies. Lincoln’s main competition was John J. Hardin, a talented politician who had once helped to avert a duel between Lincoln and a man the young lawyer had insulted. Hardin shrewdly tried to tap into the increasingly bellicose mood over Mexico. He insisted to one correspondent in early 1846 that it was “the duty of all true patriots to strengthen the hands of the government by all means against all aggression and insult from foreign nations.” Ultimately Lincoln managed to secure the nomination, but only after severely straining his relationship with Hardin.
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Ten days after Lincoln’s nomination, Polk asked Congress for his declaration of war on Mexico. Americans immediately rallied around the flag. When Congress asked for fifty thousand volunteers, three hundred thousand answered the call. The prairie “blazed with martial spirit.” Illinois had long been one of the most hawkish states in the union. More young men asked to enlist than there were spaces in the state’s three regiments. Hardin quickly shipped off to the front lines. The new recruits, Herndon later recalled, included “some of
the bravest men and the best legal talent in Springfield.” Missouri ended up being the only state that sent more volunteers to Mexico than Illinois.
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Lincoln remained behind, plugging along with his campaign amid the tumult. He seems, at first, to have tried to avoid the issue of expansionism. The Democratic
Illinois State Register
hammered Lincoln, attempting to force him to define his positions on foreign policy. The paper particularly needled him about Oregon, which Illinoisans coveted even more than Texas. Hawkish Midwesterners had been insisting on a territorial concession from Britain reaching all the way up to the 54’40” line of latitude—a demand that many Whigs considered unnecessarily provocative. Was Lincoln for “ ‘compromising’ away our Oregon territory to England” like “his brother Whigs in Congress?” the
State Register
asked. “No shuffling, Mr. Lincoln! Come out square!”
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On Mexico, at least at first, Lincoln seemed to share the country’s sense of outrage. In late May he spoke at a war rally in Springfield, delivering what the local newspaper reported as a “warm, thrilling, and effective” appeal to support the troops. Herndon later recalled that his partner had “urged a vigorous prosecution” of the war and “admonished us all to permit our government to suffer no dishonor, and to stand by the flag till peace came and came honorably to us.”
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Regenerating the World

The war dominated news coverage throughout the summer. New technologies like the telegraph and the steam-powered printing press had revolutionized the American media during the 1840s. The first telegraph line was built two years before the war, and the Hoe rotary press, which used steam power to spin a series of cylinders, was patented in 1847. Both inventions spawned a new “penny press”—cheap newspapers that printed lurid war reports and egged
on the public and Congress. The Mexican War also heralded the birth of the modern war correspondent. The ink-stained adventurers sent their dispatches back from the front lines via telegraph. The whole apparatus worked to encourage the American thrust west and south. The new technology, notes historian Daniel Walker Howe, “proved a major facilitator of American nationalism and continental ambition.”
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A new national spirit of reform grew hand in hand with the telegraph and the penny press. The technology seemed to reinforce beliefs—particularly among evangelical Christians and many romantic transcendentalists—that the millennium was at hand. A Boston magazine declared it “a great blessing” for Mexico to be conquered, and looked forward to the day when America would “regenerate the world.” Supercilious volunteers wrote home from Mexico about the nation’s “national indolence” and “air of decay.” When a country “keeps a ‘disorderly house,’ ” the
Democratic Review
declared, “it is the duty of neighbors to interfere.”
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Although the war fervor was particularly intense in New York and the Midwest, enthusiasm cut across party and geographic lines.
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“We are now all Whigs and all Democrats,” declared one newspaper reporter, echoing Thomas Jefferson’s inaugural address. The whole war effort was draped in a kind of romantic gauze. Soldiers wrote home about the beauty of Mexican women. “Nearly all of them have well-developed, magnificent figures,” wrote one captain, and they “dress with as little clothing as you can well fancy.” American factory girls shamelessly flirted with young soldiers. Vigilant parents had to keep a tight leash on teenage boys, many of whom were eager to run off and join the fighting. Hacks churned out novelettes lauding the mission. In the books, notes historian Robert W. Johannsen, U.S. troops were “cast as redeemers, striving to free the people from the bondage imposed by government and Church, to regenerate the nation, and bring it to a state of true republicanism.”
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Lincoln was a cautious pragmatist and not given to swooning. Still, the young candidate found himself in a political quandary. On
the one hand, he remained wary of overthrowing the sectional balance. Still, it would have been impossible for Lincoln to completely ignore the popular enthusiasm at home. In July, Lincoln’s old friend (and sometime political foe), the British-born Edward D. Baker, received special permission to take a leave of absence from Congress and recruit an Illinois unit to follow him to Mexico. Thousands of Springfieldians poured into the streets, hoisting American flags and howling their approval. Baker marched his unit through the throng amid whistling fifes and pounding drums.
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Mary also watched her friends depart for Mexico. One childhood pal from Kentucky, Cassius Marcellus Clay, took command of a company of cavalry and set off for the Rio Grande. Clay—whom Lincoln would one day appoint minister to Russia—cut a dashing figure. With his strong features and thick black hair, Clay displayed, as one admirer put it, “the glory of a perfect physical manhood.” Still, detractors saw only a vainglorious buffoon. The
Boston Liberator
predicted that he would be “the first to perish on the Mexican soil, an ignoble death.” Lincoln’s allies, however, defended the Kentuckian. “Foreign nations,” declared the
Sangamo Journal
, to which Lincoln was closely tied, “will find Americans acting as one man, with one soul.”
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In the early days of the war, that statement was accurate enough. Both Lincoln and his opponent, a Methodist revival preacher named Peter Cartwright, appear to have supported the conflict, largely neutralizing it as a campaign issue. Throughout the summer of 1846, Lincoln spoke at least occasionally on the Mexico and Oregon questions. Yet Lincoln avoided making major news on the topic. The strategy seems to have worked. Lincoln trounced Cartwright in the August 3 election, winning the poll by a wide margin.
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The year that followed must have been maddening for Lincoln. Because the Thirtieth Congress was not due to convene for another sixteen months, the newly elected legislator could do little more than sit on the sidelines as the Mexican War unfolded. “Being elected to Congress,” he wrote to a friend in October 1846, “though I am very
grateful to our friends, for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.”
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An inveterate news junkie, Lincoln carefully followed developments as American forces pushed deeper into Mexico. (Newspapers, Herndon once reported, were Lincoln’s “food.”)
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In February 1847, the Mexican general Santa Anna launched a major offensive targeting the forces of U.S. General Zachary Taylor at Buena Vista in northern Mexico. Rain poured down on the clashing armies as Taylor’s men met the advance. The death tolls, for the time, were huge. More than 270 Americans fell on the battlefield, along with twice as many Mexicans. But Taylor and his men ultimately held their ground, and the Battle of Buena Vista entered the annals of great American military victories. Taylor’s laconic request during the fighting—“A little more grape, please, Captain Bragg”—was turned into a slogan. Americans thrilled at the news. Shows about the victory at Buena Vista played to sold-out crowds on the Bowery in New York.
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For Springfield, the victory turned out to be bittersweet. Among the dead: John Hardin, Lincoln’s old friend and recent competitor. Hardin had fought heroically, leading a force of Illinois troops into the fray and snatching a Mexican battle flag before he was killed.
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The news of Hardin’s death reached the Illinois capital in March. Even the politician’s Democratic rivals lauded the local martyr. “Beloved by all who knew him, and without a personal enemy on earth, his fate will cast a gloom, not only over this whole state but throughout the nation,” wrote the
Illinois State Register
. At a memorial a few days later, Lincoln graciously offered a resolution celebrating the victory and praising Hardin.
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Hardin’s funeral later that summer reignited Illinois’s martial flame. A friend of Lincoln’s remembered the ceremony as a “gala day.” Still, it also somehow lacked dignity. Jacksonville, the Illinois town where the funeral was held, was a dry town, but revelers managed to smuggle in plenty of liquor. Noisy, drunken teenagers caroused, and soldiers paraded through the town to Hardin’s house. The central square, observed Lincoln’s friend, “is overrun with mounted
marshals, dressed with enormous white sashes, who are curvetting and galloping about in every direction, apparently with no other object in view than to show themselves off.” At the burial, buglers from Hardin’s regiment played taps, and local legislators wore black crepe armbands in his memory.
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The war euphoria began to take on a circus atmosphere in Springfield. At the Battle of Cerro Gordo, troops from the Fourth Illinois captured Santa Anna’s wooden leg, and hauled the prosthesis back to the state capitol. The American forces sometimes seemed intoxicated by their victories. Volunteers returned home from the battles amid “a veritable frenzy of robberies, murders, and rapes.” At least one mother of a Mexican girl begged for help recovering her missing daughter, who had run off with an American soldier. In Springfield, a local Presbyterian preacher complained that returning veterans had become “a moral pest to society.” Still, the clergyman’s views were by no means universal. During one appearance he was threatened and shouted down by local politicians.
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American troops finally punched through to Mexico City in September 1847. Earlier that year, General Winfield Scott had landed a force of American troops in the Gulf Coast city of Vera Cruz. Scott steadily pushed west toward the capital while Taylor’s men surged south. Now, under the scorching September sun, columns of Scott’s men poured into Mexico City’s central square through clouds of still-dissipating gunpowder fumes. Mexicans, perhaps impressed by the gold-braided figure of General Scott on horseback, found themselves bursting into applause. At Chapultepec, the hilltop Mexican palace, ecstatic soldiers plunged an American flag into the ramparts, and then swarmed around their victorious commander. The Duke of Wellington ultimately praised Scott as the “greatest living soldier.”
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The United States was still vibrating with enthusiasm in the fall of 1847, as Abraham and Mary Lincoln prepared to leave Springfield for Washington. Lincoln, by his thirty-eighth birthday, had achieved an admirable degree of success in his home state. A reporter who traveled with Lincoln throughout the district found himself amazed
at how the gangly lawyer seemed to know everyone he met. He had clearly charmed his local Whig newspaper. “Mr. Lincoln, the member of Congress-elect from this district, has just set out on his way to the city of Washington,” reported the
Illinois Weekly Journal
in late October. “His family is with him; they intend to visit their friends and relatives in Kentucky before they take up the line of march for the seat of government. Success to our talented member of Congress. He will find many men in Congress who possess twice the good looks, and not half the good sense, of our own representative.”
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