Read A People's History of the United States Online
Authors: Howard Zinn
A letter appeared in the
New York Journal of Commerce
introducing God into the situation: “The supreme Ruler of the universe seems to interpose, and aid the energy of man towards benefiting mankind. His interposition . . . seems to me to be identified with the success of our arms. . . . That the redemption of 7,000,000 of souls from all the vices that infest the human race, is the ostensible object . . . appears manifest.”
Senator H. V. Johnson said:
I believe we should be recreant to our noble mission, if we refused acquiescence in the high purposes of a wise Providence. War has its evils. In all ages it has been the minister of wholesale death and appalling desolation; but however inscrutable to us, it has also been made, by the Allwise Dispenser of events, the instrumentality of accomplishing the great end of human elevation and human happiness. . . . It is in this view, that I subscribe to the doctrine of “manifest destiny.”
The
Congressional Globe
of February 11, 1847, reported:
Mr. Giles, of MarylandâI take it for granted, that we shall gain territory, and must gain territory, before we shut the gates of the temple of Janus. . . . We must march from ocean to ocean. . . . We must march from Texas straight to the Pacific ocean, and be bounded only by its roaring wave. . . . It is the destiny of the white race, it is the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race. . . .
The American Anti-Slavery Society, on the other hand, said the war was “waged solely for the detestable and horrible purpose of extending and perpetuating American slavery throughout the vast territory of Mexico.” A twenty-seven-year-old Boston poet and abolitionist, James Russell Lowell, began writing satirical poems in the Boston
Courier
(they were later collected as the
Biglow Papers
). In them, a New England farmer, Hosea Biglow, spoke, in his own dialect, on the war:
Ez fer war, I call it murder,â
    There you hev it plain an' flat;
I don't want to go no furder
    Than my Testyment fer that. . . .
They may talk o' Freedom's airy
    Tell they'er pupple in the face,â
It's a grand gret cemetary
    Fer the barthrights of our race;
They jest want this Californy
    So's to lug new slave-states in
To abuse ye, an' to scorn ye,
    An' to plunder ye like sin.
The war had barely begun, the summer of 1846, when a writer, Henry David Thoreau, who lived in Concord, Massachusetts, refused to pay his Massachusetts poll tax, denouncing the Mexican war. He was put in jail and spent one night there. His friends, without his consent, paid his tax, and he was released. Two years later, he gave a lecture, “Resistance to Civil Government,” which was then printed as an essay, “Civil Disobedience”:
It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. . . . Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers . . . marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.
His friend and fellow writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, agreed, but thought it futile to protest. When Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “What are you doing in there?” it was reported that Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there?”
The churches, for the most part, were either outspokenly for the war or timidly silent. Generally, no one but the Congregational, Quaker, and Unitarian churches spoke clearly against the war. However, one Baptist minister, the Reverend Francis Wayland, president of Brown University, gave three sermons in the university chapel in which he said that only wars of self-defense were just, and in case of unjust war, the individual was morally obligated to resist it and lend no money to the government to support it.
The Reverend Theodore Parker, Unitarian minister in Boston, combined eloquent criticism of the war with contempt for the Mexican people, whom he called “a wretched people; wretched in their origin, history, and character,” who must eventually give way as the Indians did. Yes, the United States should expand, he said, but not by war, rather by the power of her ideas, the pressure of her commerce, by “the steady advance of a superior race, with superior ideas and a better civilization . . . by being better than Mexico, wiser, humaner, more free and manly.” Parker urged active resistance to the war in 1847: “Let it be infamous for a New England man to enlist; for a New England merchant to loan his dollars, or to let his ships in aid of this wicked war; let it be infamous for a manufacturer to make a cannon, a sword, or a kernel of powder to kill our brothers. . . .”
The racism of Parker was widespread. Congressman Delano of Ohio, an antislavery Whig, opposed the war because he was afraid of Americans mingling with an inferior people who “embrace all shades of color. . . . a sad compound of Spanish, English, Indian, and negro bloods . . . and resulting, it is said, in the production of a slothful, ignorant race of beings.”
As the war went on, opposition grew. The American Peace Society printed a newspaper, the
Advocate of Peace,
which published poems, speeches, petitions, sermons against the war, and eyewitness accounts of the degradation of army life and the horrors of battle. The abolitionists, speaking through William Lloyd Garrison's
Liberator,
denounced the war as one “of aggression, of invasion, of conquest, and rapineâmarked by ruffianism, perfidy, and every other feature of national depravity . . . ” Considering the strenuous efforts of the nation's leaders to build patriotic support, the amount of open dissent and criticism was remarkable. Antiwar meetings took place in spite of attacks by patriotic mobs.
As the army moved closer to Mexico City,
The Liberator
daringly declared its wishes for the defeat of the American forces: “Every lover of Freedom and humanity, throughout the world, must wish them [the Mexicans] the most triumphant success. . . . We only hope that, if blood has had to flow, that it has been that of the Americans, and that the next news we shall hear will be that General Scott and his army are in the hands of the Mexicans. . . . We wish him and his troops no bodily harm, but the most utter defeat and disgrace.”
Frederick Douglass, former slave, extraordinary speaker and writer, wrote in his Rochester newspaper the
North Star,
January 21, 1848, of “the present disgraceful, cruel, and iniquitous war with our sister republic. Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion.” Douglass was scornful of the unwillingness of opponents of the war to take real action (even the abolitionists kept paying their taxes):
The determination of our slaveholding President to prosecute the war, and the probability of his success in wringing from the people men and money to carry it on, is made evident, rather than doubtful, by the puny opposition arrayed against him. No politician of any considerable distinction or eminence seems willing to hazard his popularity with his party . . . by an open and unqualified disapprobation of the war. None seem willing to take their stand for peace at all risks; and all seem willing that the war should be carried on, in some form or other.
Where was popular opinion? It is hard to say. After the first rush, enlistments began to dwindle. The 1846 elections showed much anti-Polk sentiment, but who could tell how much of this was due to the war? In Massachusetts, Congressman Robert Winthrop, who had voted for the war, was elected overwhelmingly against an antiwar Whig. Schroeder concludes that although Polk's popularity fell, “general enthusiasm for the Mexican War remained high.” But this is a guess. There were no surveys of public opinion at that time. As for voting, a majority of the people did not vote at allâand how did these nonvoters feel about the war?
Historians of the Mexican war have talked easily about “the people” and “public opinion”âlike Justin H. Smith, whose two-volume work
The War with Mexico
has long been a standard account: “Of course, too, all the pressure of warlike sentiment among our people . . . had to be recognized, more or less, for such is the nature of popular government.”
Smith's evidence, however, is not from “the people” but from the newspapers, claiming to be the voice of the people. The New York
Herald
wrote in August 1845: “The multitude cry aloud for war.” And the New York
Journal of Commerce,
half-playfully, half-seriously, wrote: “Let us go to war. The world has become stale and insipid, the ships ought to be all captured, and the cities battered down, and the world burned up, so that we can start again. There would be fun in that. Some interest,âsomething to talk about.” The New York
Morning News
said “young and ardent spirits that throng the cities . . . want but a direction to their restless energies, and their attention is already fixed on Mexico.”
Were the newspapers reporting a feeling in the public, or creating a feeling in the public? Those reporting this feeling, like Justin Smith, themselves express strong views about the need for war. Smith (who dedicates his book to Henry Cabot Lodge, one of the ultraexpansionists of American history) makes a long list of Mexican sins against the United States, and ends by saying: “It rested with our government, therefore, as the agent of national dignity and interests, to apply a remedy.” He comments on Polk's call for war. “In truth no other course would have been patriotic or even rational.”
It is impossible to know the extent of popular support of the war. But there is evidence that many organized workingmen opposed the war. Earlier, when the annexation of Texas was being considered, workingmen meeting in New England protested the annexation. A newspaper in Manchester, New Hampshire, wrote:
We have heretofore held our peace in regard to the annexation of Texas, for the purpose of seeing whether our Nation would attempt so base an action. We call it base, because it would be giving men that live upon the blood of others, an opportunity of dipping their hand still deeper in the sin of slavery. . . . Have we not slaves enough now?
There were demonstrations of Irish workers in New York, Boston, and Lowell against the annexation of Texas, Philip Foner reports. In May, when the war against Mexico began, New York workingmen called a meeting to oppose the war, and many Irish workers came. The meeting called the war a plot by slaveowners and asked for the withdrawal of American troops from disputed territory. That year, a convention of the New England Workingmen's Association condemned the war and announced they would “not take up arms to sustain the Southern slaveholder in robbing one-fifth of our countrymen of their labor.”
Some newspapers, at the very start of the war, protested. Horace Greeley wrote in the New York
Tribune,
May 12, 1846:
We can easily defeat the armies of Mexico, slaughter them by thousands, and pursue them perhaps to their capital; we can conquer and “annex” their territory; but what then? Have the histories of the ruin of Greek and Roman liberty consequent on such extensions of empire by the sword no lesson for us? Who believes that a score of victories over Mexico, the “annexation” of half her provinces, will give us more Liberty, a purer Morality, a more prosperous Industry, than we now have? . . . Is not Life miserable enough, comes not Death soon enough, without resort to the hideous enginery of War?
What of those who fought the warâthe soldiers who marched, sweated, got sick, died? The Mexican soldiers. The American soldiers.
We know little of the reactions of Mexican soldiers. We do know that Mexico was a despotism, a land of Indians and mestizos (Indians mixed with Spanish) controlled by criollosâwhites of Spanish blood. There were a million criollos, 2 million mestizos, 3 million Indians. Was the natural disinclination of peasants to fight for a country owned by landlords overcome by the nationalist spirit roused against an invader?
We know much more about the American armyâvolunteers, not conscripts, lured by money and opportunity for social advancement via promotion in the armed forces. Half of General Taylor's army were recent immigrantsâIrish and German mostly. Whereas in 1830, 1 percent of the population of the United States was foreign-born, by the Mexican war the number was reaching 10 percent. Their patriotism was not very strong. Their belief in all arguments for expansion paraded in the newspapers was probably not great. Indeed, many of them deserted to the Mexican side, enticed by money. Some enlisted in the Mexican army and formed their own battalion, the San Patricio (St. Patrick's) Battalion.
At first there seemed to be enthusiasm in the army, fired by pay and patriotism. Martial spirit was high in New York, where the legislature authorized the governor to call fifty thousand volunteers. Placards read “Mexico or Death.” There was a mass meeting of twenty thousand people in Philadelphia. Three thousand volunteered in Ohio.
This initial spirit soon wore off. A woman in Greensboro, North Carolina, recorded in her diary:
Tuesday, January 5, 1847 . . . today was a general muster and speeches by Mr. Gorrell and Mr. Henry. General Logan received them in this street and requested all the Volunteers to follow after; as he walked up and down the street, I saw some 6 or 7, bad looking persons following, with poor Jim Laine in front. How many poor creatures have been and are still to be sacrificed upon the altar of pride and ambition?
Posters appealed for volunteers in Massachusetts: “Men of old Essex! Men of Newburyport! Rally around the bold, gallant and lionhearted Cushing. He will lead you to victory and to glory!” They promised pay of $7 to $10 a month, and spoke of a federal bounty of $24 and 160 acres of land. But one young man wrote anonymously to the Cambridge
Chronicle: