What Hath God Wrought (104 page)

Meanwhile, Britain had extorted by the Anglo-Chinese Opium War major trade concessions in East Asia, including a lease on Hong Kong. American (chiefly New England) shipowners and merchants worried that they would now be excluded from the lucrative China trade they had cultivated since 1784. To forestall any such development, Webster’s close associate, Caleb Cushing (from Newburyport, Massachusetts, historic center of the China trade) negotiated in 1844 the Treaty of Wanghai, by which the Chinese Empire accorded the United States most-favored-nation status in trade. But congressional approval for the China mission had had to be pushed through in 1843 by Whig majorities against opposition from the Democrats.
¹⁶
The China trade, it would seem, did not involve commodities that Democratic farmers and planters marketed.

The historian Amy Greenberg has suggested that rival versions of American imperialism corresponded to different conceptions of manliness: “martial manhood,” which endorsed expansion through violence, including private filibustering expeditions and war, and “restrained manhood,” which preferred nonviolent forms of national expansion through commerce and missionary activity. If she is right, the violence in the lives of working-class urban young men helps explain the popularity among them of imperialism through conquest.
¹⁷

Whether or how to pursue an imperial destiny was thus a matter of controversial public policy. The American empire did not come into existence “unconsciously,” as the poet Simms alleged, or simply through the westward migration of individual families into a vacant continent. If American expansion had been truly a manifest, inevitable destiny, then it could have taken place peacefully and automatically. In practice, however, like all empires, the American one required conscious deliberation and energetic government action to bring it into being, to deal with previous occupants and competing claims to ownership. Power politics, diplomacy, and war proved as much a part of America’s “manifest destiny” as covered wagons. Jacksonian Democracy, for all its disavowals of government agency, demonstrated eagerness to exploit the authority of government in expanding the American empire.
¹⁸

II

Characteristically, James Knox Polk did not reveal his full intentions in his inaugural address. No president has ever played his cards closer to his chest. Even in his diary Polk did not let his guard down. He confided the objectives of his presidency to only one person besides his wife: George Bancroft, the New England intellectual who shared his vision of America’s imperial destiny and whom he was about to name secretary of the navy. The new president slapped his thigh and avowed, “There are to be four great measures of my administration,” Bancroft recalled:

Judged by these objectives, Polk is probably the most successful president the United States has ever had. He stayed focused on these goals and achieved them all, two in foreign policy and two in domestic, while serving only a single term. Texas did not appear as a goal, for the incoming president regarded its annexation, while not yet implemented, as a fait accompli in policy. The most surprising item on the list, of course, was California. Though Texas and Oregon had been discussed in the election campaign, California had not. The president could at least claim, if not demonstrate, that he had a mandate for Texas and Oregon; certainly no mandate existed for the acquisition of California. Yet Polk’s ambition for California would shape U.S.-Mexican relations more than any other issue.

Remote as it was, California experienced significant change following Mexican independence. In August 1833, the Mexican Congress secularized the Franciscan missions that had dominated Alta California for half a century.
Federalista
anticlerical liberalism motivated the action, but the
federalistas
soon fell from power, and in any case Mexico City was too distant and the government’s control too tenuous for effective implementation of plans to replace the rule of the friars with self-governing Native American
pueblos
. The actual consequences varied from mission to mission. In some cases the newly emancipated inhabitants fled back to their ancestral homes and way of life; others wound up
peones
on the
ranchos
that quickly engrossed many of the former mission lands. Land speculators rather than Indians turned out to be the chief beneficiaries of secularization.
²⁰

Independent Mexico eagerly broke out of the old Spanish mercantile system and opened up Alta California to the commerce of the world. She also welcomed immigrants from overseas and made naturalization easy. After the demise of the missions, enormous free homesteads could be obtained in California by those with the right combination of political connections and luck. The successful men, either Mexicans or immigrants like Johann Sutter from Switzerland, set themselves up as patriarchal landowners. With transportation and communication slow, the
rancheros
perforce pursued a measure of economic self-sufficiency, grinding their own grain and employing a variety of artisans. They hired
vaqueros
and raised cattle. When ships called at California ports, they welcomed the opportunity to trade the hides and tallow from their cattle for the products of the outside world. Richard Henry Dana’s classic account of seafaring,
Two Years Before the Mast
(1840), is based on that trade; New England’s new shoe factories often used leather from California. The
ranchos
yielded a good living; the climate was attractive and malaria absent. Visitors pronounced the California way of life either idyllic or decadent, characterizations that many visitors to California would repeat over the generations to come.
²¹

In 1835–36, a number of outlying Mexican states rebelled against Santa Anna’s imposed
centralista
regime; Juan Alvarado and Mariano Vallejo led Alta California’s uprising. Their supporters included Indians and foreign immigrants as well as Mexican
rancheros
. Authorities in distant Mexico City, regarding Texas as the more serious challenge, chose conciliation with the
californios
. Alvarado and Vallejo received offices, and Alta California considerable autonomy. But the political situation remained unstable, with Monterey and Los Angeles rival power centers. The Mexican army maintained but a feeble presence in this remote region, its officers preferring assignments near the capital, where they could pursue professional advancement and exert political influence. Upgrading the defenses of distant California required money that the Mexican government could never find.

Foreign powers recognized California’s vulnerability. A French diplomat dispatched by his government to make a thorough inquiry reported back that California could be taken by “whatever nation chooses to send there a man-of-war and 200 men.”
²²
The
norteamericanos
provoked the most anxiety. In August 1841, Charles Wilkes’s Pacific expedition explored San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento River; locals wondered what six vessels of the United States Navy were up to. The following year Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones gave their fears substance. Jones had received an alarmist message from John Parrott, U.S. consul in Mazatlán, Mexico, stating “it is highly probable there will be a war between the two countries.”
²³
On October 19, 1842, acting in response to this misleading intelligence and a rumor that Mexico was selling California to Great Britain, Jones’s squadron demanded and received the surrender of the fort guarding Monterey, capital of Mexican California. Two days later, after going ashore to read the latest news available from Mexico City (dated August 22), the commodore realized no war existed and apologized for his mistake. His precipitous action, however, tipped the hand of the Tyler administration, which had been hoping to enlist British help in persuading the Mexicans to sell California (or at least the port of San Francisco, which was what interested Webster) to the United States. The administration relieved Jones of his command for the sake of appearances but left the provocative Parrott in post. From then on, Mexican policymakers and public,
centralistas
and
federalistas
alike, drew the conclusion that California was another Texas waiting to happen.

Besides the seaborne traders along the coast, Americans also came to California overland to settle in the interior valleys. Cheap, attractive land pulled them; hard times after 1839 pushed them. Beginning in 1841, hundreds of brave souls organized themselves into long caravans of wagons, led by professional guides. In 1842, an apprehensive Mexican Congress forbade further acquisition of California land by foreigners, but immigrants from the United States kept arriving; speculators would still sell to them, and many simply squatted. Their overland route followed the Platte River, then crossed southern Wyoming and penetrated the Rocky Mountains at South Pass. Typically, they traveled to the north of the Great Salt Lake and traced the Humboldt River across the Great Basin. The trip took months, and it had to be timed for crossing the Sierra Nevada into California before the snows came.
²⁴

A fast-talking adventurer named Lansford Hastings enticed some migrants to take what he claimed was a shortcut, going to the south of Salt Lake. Hastings would thus secure customers for his trading post on that route; in the longer term, he aimed to attract enough Americans to California to detach it from Mexico and, perhaps, rule it himself. “Hastings’s Cutoff” was in fact a longer, slower, and more arduous way to California than the conventional one, as the ill-fated party led by the Donner brothers learned at great cost. Delayed by Hastings’s misleading guidebook and false promises en route, they exhausted themselves in crossing the alkali desert west of Great Salt Lake, which took twice as long as he had assured them. Finally, having jettisoned many of their household goods, and with their food supplies running dangerously low, they encountered an early storm when crossing the Sierra in late October 1846. The snowbound emigrants then endured an epic of suffering, horror, death, and survival before rescue came—for some, this was not until the following April. On several occasions starving people in the last extremity had recourse to cannibalism. The worst crime occurred when two California Indians who had volunteered to help them were killed and eaten. Only forty-seven of the eighty-nine members of the party lived to reach their destination. Yet the statistics of death testify to sacrificial heroism: While more than two-thirds of the adult men perished, three-quarters of the women and children survived.
²⁵

III

On the Fourth of July 1836, a caravan of seventy people and four hundred animals (horses, mules, and cattle) entered the South Pass of the Rockies; it included nine wagons, for travelers had recently confirmed predictions that the pass would accommodate wheeled vehicles. Most of the party were traders representing the American Fur Company, but one group consisted of missionaries sent by the ABCFM, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Among the latter rode Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding, the first white women to cross the Continental Divide at that point. Two days later they arrived at Green River (in what is now Wyoming) for a
rendezvous
, a meeting with hundreds of trappers, traders, and Indians from several tribes for an annual orgy of commerce and festivities. There the female missionaries enjoyed the spectacle and the attention they received, before moving on, toward the lives of hardship and sacrifice they had chosen to spend in a remote wilderness.
²⁶
Traders and missionaries marked the way that farming families would soon follow, in the Oregon Country as in countless other nineteenth-century frontier areas.

Upon arriving in Oregon, the women and their husbands spent time as guests at Fort Vancouver, the bustling outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company, located not at present-day Vancouver, Canada, but near the junction of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers, in what is now the state of Washington. Founded in 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company had already become one of the world’s great business corporations, absorbing its chief competitor, the North-West Company, in 1821. The most powerful private organization in North America, HBC actually ruled most of Canada. The United States and Great Britain jointly occupied Oregon—which then extended all the way from California to Alaska—by an agreement first made in 1818 and extended in 1827. The British exerted their authority and influence in this vast territory almost exclusively through the Hudson’s Bay Company, and what interested that company was the fur trade, a big business that connected North America with both Europe and China. HBC’s Fort Vancouver had long since replaced Astoria (now deserted) as the center of the Oregon fur trade.
²⁷

In 1842, the medical missionary Marcus Whitman, Narcissa’s husband, visited the East Coast, where he pled with the ABCFM and the federal government to take more interest in Oregon. Although historians no longer subscribe to the view that Whitman single-handedly saved Oregon for the United States, his return to the Pacific Northwest in the fall of 1843 coincided with the migration there of almost a thousand American settlers, who benefited along the way from his knowledge and advice.
²⁸
The emigrants were fleeing economic depression and the endemic malaria of the Mississippi Valley; in the next few years more and more American farming families followed the same route. The Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri, coinciding much of the time with the pathway followed by migrants to California, became one of the legendary pioneer tracks across the continent. Francis Parkman further popularized it in a narrative of his 1846 journey,
The California and Oregon Trail
, serialized in the
Knickerbocker Magazine
beginning in 1847. A young New England intellectual in search of adventure, Parkman rendered a vivid account of his encounters with trappers, settlers (including Donners and Mormons), the landscape itself, and—most fascinating to him—the Ogallala Sioux.