What Hath God Wrought (109 page)

Throughout the early months of 1846, the Oregon crisis remained unresolved and impinged on the crisis with Mexico. It stiffened the resistance of Mexican public opinion against U.S. demands by encouraging false hopes of British support. Meanwhile, American public opinion focused chiefly on the danger of war with Britain; the possibility of war with Mexico attracted much less attention. Northern Democrats in Congress provided the president solid support in his strong stand against Mexico because they still expected him to support their point of view on Oregon. Thus the existence of another simultaneous international confrontation did not moderate administration policy toward Mexico (as one might expect) but had the opposite effect. Polk’s insistence that the compromise line he had secretly offered to the British in February must be publicly proposed by them first slowed down the resolution of the Oregon controversy in the spring. Perhaps he stalled on Oregon deliberately, knowing that it strengthened his hand in dealing with Mexico. Polk juggled two balls in the air at the same time. Depending on how the Oregon issue was playing out at any given moment, he slowed down or speeded up the confrontation with Mexico. In the end, the timing worked out just right for him. The British offered their Oregon compromise before learning of the fighting on the Rio Grande; Congress voted war against Mexico before northern Democratic expansionists had been disillusioned by the partition of Oregon.

In January 1846, having learned of the impending failure of the Slidell mission, the administration ordered Taylor to enforce U.S. claim to the disputed area beyond the Nueces by advancing to the Rio Grande. The nineteenth-century historian and legal scholar James Schouler called Polk’s insistence on the Rio Grande as the Texan boundary “pretentious,” and it has found few defenders among historians since. Even Justin Smith, the historian whose book
The War with Mexico
(1919) remains the account most sympathetic to Polk, recognized that his boundary claim was “unsound.” Polk’s twentieth-century biographer Charles Sellers called his insistence on the Rio Grande boundary “indefensible”—meaning it was
logically
indefensible.
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Militarily, however, Polk resolved to defend it. If the president intended Taylor’s advance simply to pressure Mexico into negotiating, it seems odd that he did not order it sooner. Coming when it did, the action was more likely to provoke hostilities. Thomas Hart Benton, who had consistently favored a peaceful resolution of both the Oregon and Mexican problems, disapproved of Polk’s order but did not go public with his views.
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The Whig press publicly deplored the advance as constituting aggression.

Taylor took his time marching into the disputed territory, part of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, for it contained some eight thousand local Mexicans. It was cattle-ranching country, with scattered villages (in the largest of which, Laredo, the U.S. Army counted 1,891 persons upon occupation).
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Some of these civilians sold produce to Taylor’s army; others fled before his coming. The
rancheros
had already suffered heavy losses to rustlers gathering herds to stock ranches up in the Texan Republic; in the coming war they would lose everything.
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At Arroyo Colorado a Mexican military force drew up across Taylor’s front, commanding him to halt; he proceeded across the arroyo anyway, and the Mexicans withdrew without firing. “Old Rough and Ready,” as the American soldiers called their gruff, informal general (who often wore casual civilian clothes instead of a uniform), set up a supply base on the coast at Point Isabel and reached the site of present-day Brownsville in late March. “We have not one particle of right to be here,” U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Ethan Hitchcock wrote in his diary. “It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses.”
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Across the Rio Grande lay the Mexican town of Matamoros. The U.S. commander built a fort and trained his guns on the town center. The Mexican commander in Matamoros, Pedro de Ampudia, demanded the American army withdraw from the disputed territory or face military action. Taylor responded by blockading the mouth of the Rio Grande on 12 April, preventing Ampudia from receiving supplies by water and legally an act of war. Meanwhile, U.S. naval squadrons hovered by Veracruz and Mazatlán, ready to blockade Mexico’s chief ports on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts respectively.

In Mexico City, the Paredes government faced a terrible dilemma. Popular sentiment and the governors of the northern states demanded a stand against what they considered a U.S. invasion. The new president had indulged these calls for firmness as his stepping stone to power. Now he realized all too well that the national treasury was bankrupt, the armed forces ill prepared for a major war, and hopes of European intervention illusory. Yet the fall of Herrera demonstrated that no Mexican government could temporize and stay in power. The
rancheros
living in the disputed area began to wage a guerrilla war of their own, ambushing U.S. soldiers who strayed too far afield. At length, on April 23, Paredes issued a proclamation blaming the United States for initiating hostilities and directing his new commander in Matamoros, Mariano Arista, to undertake “defensive” operations, yet adding that this was not a declaration of war. Paredes may have intended a resort to arms only if Taylor crossed the Rio Grande, but Arista considered the blockade sufficient provocation and notified Taylor on the twenty-fourth that “hostilities have commenced.” That day he sent sixteen hundred cavalrymen over the river, where they engaged Thompson’s dragoons on the twenty-fifth. Mexico drifted into war confusedly and indecisively. The Mexican Congress, with whom the constitutional power rested, never did declare war. The proclamation of resistance to invasion that Paredes finally issued on July 1 served as the functional equivalent of a war declaration.
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In Washington, Polk realized by early May that a compromise solution to the Oregon controversy was imminent and that when it occurred, it would hurt him with northern Democratic expansionists. A war with Mexico would help keep his party united on the basis of patriotism, but the war needed to come first, before the Oregon settlement. Northern Democrats were already asking the wrong kind of questions to suit Polk: “Why should we not compromise our difficulties with Mexico as well as with Great Britain?” demanded the
Chicago Democrat
. “If it is wicked to go to war with England for disputed territory, it is not only wicked but cowardly to go to war with Mexico for the same reason.”
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The latest reports from General Taylor indicated that he expected an attack at any time. But on Saturday, May 9, after finally having a chance to talk with John Slidell in person, Polk felt he could wait no longer. He persuaded his cabinet to support him in sending a war message to Congress immediately. (Only Bancroft voted to go on waiting for Taylor to be attacked.) The grounds on which Polk would ask Congress to declare war were refusal to receive Slidell and failure to keep up payments on acknowledged international debts. These did not constitute a strong case for war, even by nineteenth-century standards, the unmentioned real grounds being Mexico’s refusal to sell territory. The president adjourned his cabinet meeting about 2:00 p.m. Four hours later the adjutant general brought to the White House Taylor’s report of the fight on April 25. Now the president could compose a much stronger message:

When presenting this war message to Congress, Polk’s party managers did everything they could to stifle discussion, questions, and dissent. In the House of Representatives, they allowed only two hours for debate, then used up all but thirty minutes of this having presidential documents read aloud. The declaration of war (literally, an assertion that a state of war already existed by act of Mexico) was attached as a preamble to a bill appropriating $10 million for the troops at the front and authorizing the president to enlist fifty thousand more for defense against foreign invasion. The Whig opposition had wanted to be able to vote support for the troops without endorsing Polk’s claims that Mexican aggression was to blame and that war already existed. They conceded that the executive had authority to repel an invasion (in this case meaning that Taylor’s army would expel the Mexicans from the disputed area), but they wanted a thorough discussion by Congress before declaring a full-scale offensive war upon Mexico. However, with the support of the Democratic majority, the amendment attaching the preamble passed, 123 to 67. This vote reflects the actual extent of opposition to the war, rather than the tally on the combined bill, which carried 174 to 14, with 35 abstentions. “The river Nueces is the true western boundary of Texas,” declared the Kentucky Whig Garrett Davis during the brief debate. “It is our own President who began this war. He has been carrying it on for months.”
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Nevertheless, Davis and most of the Whigs felt obliged to vote for war in the form the Democratic leadership had packaged it. Twenty-two Democrats abstained, which was as far as any member of the party was willing to go in expressing doubts about the president’s methods. The fourteen irreconcilables, led by the venerable John Quincy Adams, were all northern Whigs with safe seats. “It is on Mexican soil that blood has been shed,” explained one of them, Luther Severance of Maine, and for their “manly resistance” to U.S. invasion, the Mexicans should be “honored and applauded.”
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In the Senate, opponents of the war included not only Whigs but John C. Calhoun. The politician who had done so much to make Polk president and to bring Texas into the Union now feared the consequences of more expansion. A striking figure in the Senate with his piercing eyes and shock of gray hair, Calhoun, now sixty-four years old, demanded time to study the situation and find out whether the Mexican government really intended war; he could not stomach Polk’s executive war-making. As he put it, Calhoun “could not agree to make war on Mexico by making war on the Constitution.” Fundamentally, Calhoun was not interested in territorial acquisitions unless they promised to strengthen the power of slavery. Texas certainly did, but not California and New Mexico, which the South Carolinian foresaw would provoke sectional conflict while offering little practical likelihood of slavery’s extension. He worried that war with Mexico might jeopardize relations with Britain, on which cotton-growers so heavily depended. He also feared to acquire a Mexican population of mixed race that, if enfranchised, would breach the virtual monopoly of political power enjoyed by white Americans.
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Repeated tests of strength between the war and peace parties all produced votes of about 26 to 20 (the minority consisting of eighteen Whigs and the two senators from South Carolina). On May 12, the combined military appropriation and war declaration measure passed 40 to 2; Calhoun and two Whig senators abstained. These figures hid considerable opposition even among the Democrats. Several Van Buren Democrats, including Benton and John Dix of New York, voted for war only with great reluctance and after hard political arm-twisting. Benton pointed out on the Senate floor that the Mexican Congress had not declared war and the Mexican president had undertaken only defensive military actions.
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The unwillingness of the Whigs to oppose the war any more forcefully reflected their reading of public opinion. Polk had assessed the feelings of the popular majority accurately, at least for the moment. He had decided that imperialism was a winner with the electorate, that he could stir it up and take advantage of it politically. The exciting news from Texas and the Rio Grande would play to feelings of bellicose nationalism even more successfully than had Oregon and the Columbia River. The Whigs remembered all too well how the Federalist Party had opposed the War of 1812 and been rewarded with permanent oblivion. They resolved not to repeat that mistake.

On May 13, 1846, the president issued a proclamation announcing the state of war. The secretary of state suggested he also issue a statement that the United States had not gone to war to acquire territory; Buchanan thought this would reassure Britain and France, which might otherwise intervene to preempt the United States taking California. Polk immediately rejected the advice, as he described in his diary:

On the first of May 1846, before word of fighting had even reached Washington, General Taylor pulled most of the Army of Occupation (as it had been named) out of Fort Texas and, leaving only a small garrison behind, fell back toward Port Isabel to protect his supply base from the advancing Mexicans. General Arista had intended to encircle Taylor’s smaller force, but a shortage of boats delayed his crossing the river until the Americans had got away. He then besieged Fort Texas and, with his main body, blocked Taylor’s return to relieve it. A young U.S. second lieutenant arriving at Port Isabel on May 2 heard his first hostile gunfire, the distant booming of the Mexican cannon starting to bombard the fort. Ulysses Grant never forgot his reaction: He “felt sorry” he had joined the Army.
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Zachary Taylor had been born into the Virginia plantation gentry; his family were related to both James Madison and Robert E. Lee, and his daughter married Jefferson Davis of Mississippi (overcoming her father’s doubts that it was a suitable match). But Taylor grew up in Kentucky, where his father had moved. He had earned his nickname, “Old Rough and Ready,” during many years of service in the remote frontier areas where the Regular Army mediated between settlers and Native people. He had served with credit in the War of 1812, Black Hawk’s War, and the Seminole War, and no one doubted his courage, but some wondered whether he would really be up to his present assignment. His adversary, Mariano Arista, a handsome, red-haired man who had lived in the United States, enjoyed the respect of both friend and foe.

After taking several days to strengthen the defenses of Port Isabel, Taylor commenced his return to Fort Texas with 2,288 soldiers. On May 8, at a place called Palo Alto, he encountered Arista’s force of 3,270 barring his way, its flanks secure, daring him to attack. An artillery duel ensued, in which the U.S. guns inflicted heavy casualties while the Mexican ones had too short a range and lacked high explosive shells.
²
This forced Arista to do the attacking. The dense chaparral between the armies, which he had intended to hinder the
yanquis
, now deterred him from advancing his own infantry. So he repeatedly ordered his cavalry to charge. But the horsemen could not break the “hollow square” formation assumed by the U.S. infantry, and they suffered heavy losses from the surprisingly mobile U.S. field guns. At the end of the day neither army had broken through. The Mexicans had suffered worse, but the brilliant U.S. Major Sam Ringgold, who had designed the “flying artillery” that proved so successful, lay mortally wounded.

Arista decided to pick a different position and again try to force Taylor to attack him. So he withdrew a few miles and regrouped behind a
resaca
, a dry riverbed with more thick chaparral before it. The new location protected his troops from the kind of artillery fire they had endured the day before. Taylor’s solution was to attack with a mixed force of infantry, cavalry, and mobile artillery, concentrating firepower at short range on the center of the Mexican line. Meanwhile, Taylor’s light infantry turned Arista’s left flank and got across the
resaca
. Arista himself led his lancers in a final desperate charge but could not overcome U.S. firepower. Fearing now that their line of retreat would be cut, his soldiers took off down the road. When they reached the Rio Grande, many swam across without waiting for boats, some drowning in the attempt. The Americans captured a hundred prisoners, field guns, small arms, and much ammunition the Mexicans could ill afford to lose. Taylor now relieved Fort Texas and renamed it Fort Brown, in honor of its commander, Major Jacob Brown, who had been killed during the siege. On May 18, the Americans crossed the Rio Grande and occupied Matamoros while the Mexican army silently withdrew, accompanied by a thousand women and children, to Monterrey. Matamoros became the place where Taylor received the volunteers who came streaming in during the months to come.
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Taylor’s victory in the first major battle demonstrated a superiority in U.S. firepower that would remain a conspicuous feature of the entire war. (The Americans named each day a separate battle—Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma—and counted them as two victories.) As at New Orleans in 1815, the Americans owed their success in large measure to their artillery—the superior range of their guns, the quality and quantity of their ammunition, and the expertise with which the gunners handled their technology. The infantry too had better equipment than their Mexican counterparts, carrying weapons that fired farther, faster, and more accurately. Though most infantrymen bore muskets, some had rifles. Samuel Colt’s revolver, patented in 1835, became a commercial success a dozen years later when the inventor got a wartime contract from the U.S. Army for an improved version. What later generations would recognize as the characteristic American mode of warfare, emphasizing industry, engineering, and technological proficiency, was already appearing.
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Though rural America, in the person of the Jacksonian President Polk, made the war, industrial-technological America won it.

War highlighted a great disparity between the economic and human resources of the combatant nations. The United States census of 1840 counted a burgeoning population of 17 million. The population of Mexico, by contrast, had declined by 10 percent during the prolonged disorders of her revolution against Spain and then leveled off; the government’s calculation of 1842 (not an actual enumeration) showed 7 million Mexicans.
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The economies of the two countries displayed an even greater inequality. The years since 1815 had not been kind to the former New Spain; plagued by political instability, independent Mexico had not realized the economic potential of her natural resources. Fierce localism and poor transportation hindered the emergence of an integrated nationwide economy even more than they did in the United States. Independent Mexico received little European immigration and had even expelled its Spanish-born people, losing their talents and skills. Mexico’s gross national product fell to less than half the peak attained in 1805; not until the 1870s did it exceed that level. In the absence of financial rationalization, the Mexican government became the prisoner of foreign and domestic creditors: By 1845, 87 percent of its revenues went for debt service.
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The republic’s financial weakness severely restricted its war-making potential; the Mexican army found it easier to raise troops than to feed, clothe, arm, and pay them. Across the vast northern borderlands, tribal Indians counterattacked against Mexican settlements made in earlier generations, wreaking havoc almost with impunity. The inability of the Mexican nation to defend these areas against the Comanche, Navajo, and Kiowa encouraged watching U.S. imperialists to judge that it would not be able to defend them against an invading army either.
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The war of the United States against Mexico has been called a “rehearsal” for the Civil War that began thirteen years later.
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This is true not only in the sense that many senior officers in both Union and Confederate armies got their first experience of combat as junior officers in Mexico. In a strategic sense as well, making war on Mexico presented problems analogous to those of the Civil War. Like the Union in that later conflict, the United States needed to invade and conquer a vast country in the face of determined resistance. As in the Civil War, the U.S. Navy played a major role by blockading ports and preventing the enemy from importing munitions. Mexico, like the South later, enjoyed the benefit of interior lines of communication, which Santa Anna would exploit in the largest battle of the war, Buena Vista. Like the Confederates, the Mexicans strove to gain foreign intervention to preserve their national integrity. Finally, like the Confederacy, Mexico hoped to prolong the conflict until the invaders tired and went home without getting what they came for.

Women played a more conspicuous role with the armies in the U.S.-Mexican War than they did in the Civil War. In Mexico, the armies on both sides had women with them. For generations, armies on campaign had included women in noncombatant positions such as nurses, laundresses, and cooks; in the U.S. Army some were on the payroll, others simply drew rations. Spanish had a word for them,
soldaderas
; in English, they were called “camp followers.” Traditionally, officers brought their wives with them, although the U.S. Army followed this custom only occasionally in the Mexican War. Many camp followers, however, married enlisted men. In the Revolution, camp follower “Molly Pitcher” famously took over serving a cannon when her husband was killed; the British army carried its women all the way across the Atlantic. The camp followers in Taylor’s army included six-foot-tall Sarah Borginnis, admired for her strength and courage under fire.
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Even more than their U.S. counterparts, Mexican soldiers relied for logistical support on their
soldaderas
, who sometimes brought their children. In desperate situations, women with the Mexican army assumed combat roles; a woman who led a cavalry charge by the lancers against the Americans at Monterrey earned praise from her enemies as “a second Joan d’Arc.”
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Because some camp followers were prostitutes, the international evangelical revival of the nineteenth century discouraged armies from employing them. However, the presence of male civilians with the army, such as sutlers, teamsters, and newspaper reporters, continued into the Civil War.

Officers in both armies could take personal servants with them. In the U.S. Army, this meant officers from the South brought slaves. Occasionally these slaves seized an opportunity to desert to freedom on the other side.
¹¹
Free black men were not allowed to enlist in the army, though many of them served in the U.S. Navy, as they did in the civilian merchant marine.

The outbreak of warfare along the Rio Grande underscored the need for faster communication in North America. While Andrew Jackson had won the Battle of New Orleans after the treaty of peace had been signed, Old Rough and Ready won his victory before war had been declared, and long before any of the assistance Congress had so hastily authorized could reach him. At this time only 120 miles of telegraph wire had been strung in the United States, none of it south of Richmond. The war brought Professor Morse’s experiment to rapid maturity; his Washington-Baltimore line hummed for two and a half hours transmitting President Polk’s war message to Congress on May 11. The eagerness of both the government and the press for news from the front stimulated rapid expansion of the telegraph system. By June 1846, the wires connected Washington with Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. War news collected at New Orleans, where the
Picayune
published it. The
Picayune
’s star reporter, George Wilkins Kendall, defined the new occupation of war correspondent. A pony express system transmitted copies of the
Picayune
to the closest telegraph line. By the end of the war the telegraph reached as far south as Charleston, and New Orleans news had been brought within three days of Washington. Even so, only one message at a time could be sent over the early wires, so bottlenecks developed. To pool telegraphed news, in 1848 six New York City papers formed the first wire service, the Associated Press.
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Because they underestimated the difficulty of the undertaking, President Polk and his advisors had not hesitated to force a war upon Mexico. They knew that the Mexican armed forces were poorly equipped, and California and New Mexico weakly held, and that the Mexican government, essentially bankrupt, had no prospect of remedying these deficiencies. As a result, the U.S. administration anticipated that a war would be short, easy, and inexpensive. But this reflected little knowledge of Mexican geography, of the hazards of disease to an invading army, or of the Mexican people’s resolve. The war had been under way only a few months when the Polk administration began trying to negotiate a peace treaty, assuming that its adversaries would quickly recognize the futility of resistance. Ironically, the winning side in this war was the side more eager to end it; bringing the Mexicans to the peace table proved difficult.

Except for one company of Texas Rangers, the small army that won at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma consisted of regulars, that is, professional soldiers. (The lieutenants included future Civil War generals George Gordon Meade, Ulysses Grant, and James Longstreet.) Most of the volunteers who arrived afterwards to reinforce Taylor’s army came from the South and West, at first because of their proximity to the theater of operations, later because enthusiasm for the war cooled rapidly in the Northeast. Although the volunteers quickly swamped the regulars in numbers, their usefulness was limited not only by their lack of training and discipline but also by their enlistment for just one year, at the end of which they were free to leave and often did. Volunteer units were often raised by local politicians authorized to do so; they might prefer to recruit politically loyal men and close their eyes to others willing to serve. Taylor quickly concluded that the whole system of recruiting volunteers was inappropriate.
¹³
The short enlistment term helped fill the ranks and reflected the overconfidence of the American public and the Polk administration; eventually, however, the government realized it should ask volunteers to serve for the duration of the war. The experience of the war with Mexico revealed the value of a professional army, especially the professional officer corps; talk of abolishing the military academy at West Point ended.

The president did not welcome the improved image of the Regular Army. Most career army officers were Whigs. They expected the peacetime army, like internal improvements, to benefit from Whig strong government; indeed, the Corps of Engineers, then as now, played a prominent role in constructing internal improvements. In addition, Democratic Party Indian policies—the Removal and the Seminole War—had become unpopular with army officers who witnessed their effects at first hand.
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Polk needed victories, yet feared they might create another Whig military hero like William Henry Harrison. As one who knew wrote sarcastically, the president wanted “a small war, just large enough to require a treaty of peace and not large enough to make military reputations dangerous for the presidency.”
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The two most successful generals in the war, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, became subject to intense jealousy and suspicion by the president because of their Whig political connections; once they had served his purposes he did all he could to disparage their accomplishments and derail their careers. Polk sought to counteract the party affiliation of the regulars in his appointments of “generals of volunteers.” Every one of the thirteen generals Polk made was a Democrat, most of them former officeholders. (Other officers for the volunteer units were chosen by state governors or elected by the men they commanded.) The president even proposed that overall command of the army go to Democratic senator Thomas Hart Benton, though Congress never approved the Missourian’s commission as lieutenant general, and Benton, like most Van Buren Democrats, eventually fell out completely with Polk.
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