Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
As Anson Jones concluded his farewell address: The Republic of Texas was no more.
Chapter 16
THE LONE STAR STATE
It is doubtful whether ten years' trading would give Texas a better bargain than she can now make.
THE LA GRANGE MONUMENT, ON THE NEW MEXICO BOUNDARY BILL, 1850
THE Mexican War is now generally seen by American and other historians for what it was: a Presidential war of dominant Administration policy, carried out for strategic reasons against the wishes of a considerable body of public opinion. The war was tremendously successful for two reasons: American arms were surprisingly and quickly victorious, and the goals, immense though they might seem, were limited to the acquisition of territory either useless to, or only under the nominal control of, Mexico. The American armies secured a treaty and evacuated Mexico before a popular uprising against occupation could commence, as the Spanish rose against Napoleon or the Mexicans would later rise against Maximilian, and the folly of annexing the millions of Mexico was avoided. The United States never wanted to own or control Mexico, but to assure its subordination: Mexico was removed permanently as a rival for the continent. The year 1848 marked the first time the American Republic was at last strategically secure.
The historic distaste for the war inside America rose mainly from the internal politics of the time, and the fact that Americans had a penchant for a crusade. The Mexican War was not a plot merely to extend slavery, but neither did it have a soul-satisfying ideological base.
The years between 1844 and 1848 marked the last great surge of the Jacksonian Democrats. Soon afterward, the Democratic Party was destroyed by sectionalism, and its stalwarts, from Sam Houston to Thomas Hart Benton, were destroyed with it.
Texas and the South fell into the very trap Sam Houston repeatedly warned against: the answering of Northern sectionalism with a responding parochialism. Andrew Jackson, Houston, Benton, and the whole group loosely known as "Jacksonians" and Jacksonian Democrats, of course had their own political views; they were Westerners, suspicious of Eastern ways. But above all they had a mystical view of the growth of the United States—a country grown so great that even fools could not completely destroy it. Their concept of national greatness had more to do with land and people than specific programs or forms of government. The Jacksonians as a group had no particular love for Negro slavery; many of them saw it as a national curse. The charge that the acquisition of Texas and California was part of a plot to extend slavery, apparently believed in the North, was specious. The Jacksonian view of the United States could accept that institution, or accept its disappearance. It was a concept that saw the nation itself as greater than its passing economic or political phases, which had to be worked out internally from time to time.
The Jacksonians succeeded before they disappeared. It was left to James Polk to cap the dream. Oddly, though Polk gained the United States more territory than any President before or since and made the nation finally strategically secure, he has never been given rank in the American pantheon of heroes. Apparently, there were several reasons: Polk, an able man, was always overshadowed by Jackson, whose man in the truest sense he always was. In the White House he carried out concepts and plans already conceived. And Polk seems to have had no real interest in the presidency, beyond the winning of the American West; he was not likely to catch the imagination of later generations who increasingly saw the White House in different terms.
There is no evidence that Polk wanted a war with Mexico for its own sake. He did want Texas and California and was willing to fight, if necessary, to get them. Part of this dream grew out of a natural desire for more territory, but the strategical vision must never be overlooked. The Rio Grande was, especially in those years, a formidable river, and it gave the United States a clearly defined southern boundary, which the Nueces could not do. The expansion to the western ocean prevented any other powerful nation from securing an enclave there, and it left the United States as the dominant power upon the North American continent. The frequently discussed "manifest destiny"—no nation ever had a true "manifest destiny"—was merely a popularization of these logical strategic goals.
Polk honestly tried to buy the Mexican claims to Texas and California. But a power struggle was at this late date inevitable; the Mexican government, weak as it was, was not prepared to accede to American predominance. The Mexicans were not just stubborn; they were intransigent. With the renewed discussion of annexation in 1844, Mexico immediately voided the truce with Texas. Perhaps with the mistaken notion that this would deter the United States, Mexico emphasized that it was still at war with the separated province. Mexico also began preparations for a larger war. Polk's emissary, John Slidell, was not even received in Mexico; the Mexican minister to the United States was recalled. The evidence is that President Polk, faced with these two events, decided upon a declaration of war.
But Polk as President had to play his cards carefully. The South and Southwest, as always, were ready for war; these regions had become almost belligerent in their attitudes. But the rest of the nation was not, and a majority in Congress stood opposed to a war with Mexico, over Texas or anything else.
There was nothing dishonorable about a war with Mexico at this time. In fact, Mexico had almost assured conflict by making it clear that the United States was inheriting the Texan struggle with the Mexican nation. If the United States, in its own interests, annexed Texas, a part of the dowry, unfortunately, had to be the Texas–Mexican quarrel. The more unfortunate Whig propaganda in the United States, that the conflict grew out of a Southern plot to extend slavery to the Pacific, not only tended to reinforce Mexican innocence but convinced millions of Americans as well. The American South, of course, happily viewed any extension of slave states westward: the more slave-state Senators, the better. But Polk and his dominant group saw this as only a side issue. And, finding Mexico unwilling to negotiate or even talk, Polk's Administration coolly and rather brilliantly outmaneuvered Mexico at the power-politics game.
When it was apparent Texas would ratify annexation, but before the treaty was ratified, Polk sent General Zachary Taylor with a small U.S. army into Texas. This move was part of the negotiations, to protect Texas during the discussions, as agreed. Taylor, who was himself a Whig, arrived on the Nueces River at Corpus Christi in July 1845. Here he was supplied by sea and drilled for some nine months. Only when Polk clearly understood that the Mexican government would not negotiate, and his ambassador was rebuffed, did he send Taylor orders to march to the Rio Grande. Taylor moved south in April 1846.
This country north of the river was seething with Mexican cavalry. The Nueces–Rio Grande region was claimed by both nations, and both under these terms had the right to send armed forces into it. Taylor fixed a base at Point Isabel, where the Brazos de Santiago pass permitted deep-water entry to the Texas coast. This was only a few miles above the Rio Grande. Then, he established a detachment under Major Jacob Brown in a bend of the river directly across from the Mexican city of Matamoros, ostensibly to keep the large Mexican forces there under surveillance. Each morning and evening, in full view of General Arista, Brown raised and lowered the Stars and Stripes to the fife and drum. His presence inflamed the landowners who lived in Matamoros, many of whom held grants north of the Bravo. Arista was pressured into action. He ordered some fifteen hundred cavalry across the river, then followed his lances with his main force. In this way, Polk used Zachary Taylor to precipitate the gathering crisis, and Taylor, Whig or not, was obviously ready and willing.
The chaparral was filled with blue and gray coats; something was bound to strike fire. On April 24, sixty of Taylor's heavy dragoons, out on patrol, blundered into a Mexican cavalry trap and were snapped up by a full brigade. Then, the Mexican force opened fire on Fort Brown, as the barricade in the bend of the river came to be called, and laid siege to the breastworks. Arista did not attempt to smash Major Brown with his full force; he was playing strategy and laying a trap. Arista placed his main body in wait at the edge of the river brush, where it opened on the Sacahuiste Prairie facing Point Isabel some twenty miles away.
Arista expected Taylor to move west from Laguna Madre, where he was camped on the edge of the bay.
Move Taylor did. He notified Washington by packet that "hostilities may now be considered as commenced." Texas Ranger scouts kept him informed of Mexican movements. Taylor's position was that Mexican troops had entered U.S. territory and fired first; Arista seems to have acted almost as if he were following Polk's plan. Taylor now called upon the Governor of Texas for four regiments, two of foot and two of horse. He had already, rather to his disgust, found the half-wild Ranger companies he had accepted earlier for political reasons invaluable. They could ride country where his own heavy mounted infantry, or dragoons, maneuvered only with difficulty. Now, Taylor marched toward Fort Brown with 2,300 men, and his guns and wagons, at three on the afternoon of May 7. He was heavily outnumbered, but stated that if Arista opposed his route of march, "in whatever force, I shall fight him."
The American vanguard struck the emplaced Mexicans at Palo Alto, a small rise on the coastal plain just beyond the chaparral. After a touch-and-go battle, Arista retreated. The two armies engaged again on May 9, at Resaca de la Palma, an oxbow lake a few miles from the Rio Grande. This time Arista was badly mauled by the superior American infantry, and he fell back across the river in disorder and with shattered morale. Both battles were American victories over great odds.
Taylor then marched into Fort Brown. The flag still waved over the American breastworks, though Major Brown had been fatally wounded. (On this spot the future city of Brownsville would be built.)
Now President Polk, armed with Taylor's dispatches, had what he wanted. He went before the Congress with the message that American blood had been shed on American soil. The Congress, North and South, dared not do anything but declare war.
Polk had handled the situation shrewdly, confidently, and coolly—the mark of a man of the old frontier. Like Austin, Houston, and Andrew Jackson, he left his visible results on the land, a lasting heritage of soil; ironically, the admitted intellectual leaders of the day, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, left mostly rhetoric behind.
The rest of the war, in which American armies marched into Mexico across the Rio Grande, and from Vera Cruz, and other forces swept the far West, was fought outside Texas. The American historian Lynn Montross perhaps put this war in its truest perspective:
Of all American conflicts the one with Mexico has been most often condemned as dishonorable. This tradition may be traced to the rabid politics of the day, for the Whigs and Abolitionists came dangerously near to treason in their opposition. Such leaders as Clay and Webster denounced the struggle as a conspiracy to bring more slave-holding states into the Union; and a Whig newspaper declared it would be "a joy to hear that the hordes under Scott and Taylor were every man of them swept into the next world."
That such strictures are not to be taken seriously is shown by the fact that both the victorious generals became Whig candidates for the Presidency. Nor is there any reason for accepting at face value the denunciations of American motives by Whig orators . . . the actual causes of the Mexican strife were obscured by the causes which would soon lead to Secession.
An understanding of the background is necessary to dispel a commonly held belief that the United States crushed a weak and unprepared neighbor by overwhelming bulk. On the contrary, the actual odds in the field weighed heavily against the Americans. The northern army faced four times its own numbers in the principal battle; and as a triumph of skill over obstacles, Scott's campaign has no equal in the world during the half century after Waterloo. . . .
Nor could it be said that the Mexicans were unworthy opponents. A generation of civil war had trained a hardy native soldiery which defended a formidable terrain with ability as well as courage. In the critical campaign the Americans found the enemy particularly strong in engineering and artillery—two arms which are not the resources of a military rabble.
Significantly, European observers praised American military feats as prodigious. Ironically, it was Americans themselves, in a war fought for the long-term interests of the American nation, who robbed themselves of glory. But, probably most significant of all, even the harshest critics of the war never proposed that the spoils be given back.
By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ratified in July 1848, the United States purchased California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, and a part of Colorado, making a territory four times the size of France, from Mexico for $15,000,000 and the assumption of Mexican debts. Mexico relinquished all claims to Texas, and the boundary was set at the Rio Grande. All of this territory, except California and New Mexico, was only nominally Mexican, and in the last two regions the writ of the Mexican Supreme Government had already ceased to run. The Mexican Empire was not only static in the early 19th century; it had already fallen apart due to internal disorder.