A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2012 by Amy Greenberg

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Greenberg, Amy S., [date]

  A wicked war : Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. invasion of Mexico / by Amy S. Greenberg.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96091-7

  1. Mexican War, 1846–1848. 2. Mexican War, 1846–1848—Political aspects—United States. 3. Mexican War, 1846–1848—Influence 4. Polk, James K. (James Knox), 1795–1849. 5. Clay, Henry, 1777–1852. 6. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865. I. Title.

  E404.G79 2012

  973.6′2—dc23 2012019887

  Jacket image: Battle of Buena Vista, Feb. 23, 1847, by James S. Baillie (detail).

  Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  Jacket design by Wednesday Design

  Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.

  v3.1

  For Rich, Jackson, and Violet

  I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.

  —ULYSSES S. GRANT, 1879

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  LIST OF MAPS AND IMAGES

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE Polk’s Dream, 1844–45

  1 Valentine’s Day

  2 “Who Is James K. Polk?”

  3 The Upset

  PART TWO Mr. and Mrs. Polk’s War, 1845–46

  4 Speaking Cannon Fire

  5 “The Mischief Is Done”

  PART THREE The Crucible of Conscience, 1846–47

  6 A Tame, Spiritless Fellow

  7 Buena Vista

  8 Inscrutable Providence

  9 Needless, Wicked, and Wrong

  10 War Measures

  11 Duty and Justice

  PART FOUR Truth and Consequences, 1848

  12 To Conquer a Peace

  13 A Clear Conscience

  EPILOGUE Lineage

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Maps and Images

  MAPS

  7.m1 General Taylor and Colonel John J. Hardin in Texas and Mexico

  10.m1 Scott’s Advance to Mexico City

  13.m1 Annexing Mexico

  IMAGES

  1.1 Henry Clay, 1844

  1.2 Whig campaign ribbon, 1844

  2.1 James K. Polk, 1845

  2.2 Sarah Polk, 1829

  2.3 “Matty Meeting the Texas Question”

  3.1 John J. Hardin

  3.2 The United States of Mexico in 1847

  4.1 Polk’s cabinet in 1846

  4.2 Sarah and James Polk

  4.3 Ashland

  5.1 Nicholas Trist in 1835 by John Neagle

  5.2 Zachary Taylor

  5.3 John Quincy Adams

  6.1 Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico

  6.2 Lieutenant Colonel Henry Clay Jr.

  6.3 Heroic Defense of the City of Monterey

  6.4 General Wool and staff

  6.5 Congressman-elect Abraham Lincoln

  7.1 Major General Winfield Scott

  7.2 General Antonio López de Santa Anna

  7.3 Group of Mexicans with a soldier, 1847

  7.4 Samuel Chamberlain, Rackensackers on the Rampage

  7.5 Nathaniel Currier, Battle of Buena Vista

  8.1 Nathaniel Currier, Death of Col. John J. Hardin

  8.2 Butler and Lewis, Death of Lieut. Col. Henry Clay, Jr.

  8.3 E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, Scene in Vera Cruz During the Bombardment

  9.1 Ellen Hardin

  9.2 Yankee Doodle, “Going to and Returning from Mexico”

  10.1 “Capture of Gen. Santa Anna’s Private Carriage at Battle of Cerro Gordo, April 18, 1847”

  10.2 Carl Nebel, “General Scott Entering Mexico City, 1851”

  11.1 Rejon the Ranchero

  11.2 James Knox Polk

  12.1 “Mexican Family”

  13.1 Nicholas P. Trist, 1855–65

  13.2 Henry Clay, ca. 1850

  epl.1 Ellen Hardin Walworth, 1899

  Introduction

  THIS IS THE STORY of five men, four years, and one foreign war. Henry Clay, James K. Polk, Abraham Lincoln, John J. Hardin, and Nicholas Trist were bound together in unexpected political and personal battle during the years 1844–48 as America’s war against Mexico unfolded, then stumbled to an end. That conflict, which breached George Washington’s injunction to avoid entanglements abroad, was an act of expansionist aggression against a neighboring country. It reshaped the United States into lord of the continent and announced the arrival of a new world power. The U.S.-Mexican conflict also tipped an internecine struggle over slavery into civil war. Though both its justification and its consequences are dim now, this, America’s first war against another republic, decisively broke with the past, shaped the future, and to this day affects how the United States acts in the world.

  This is also a story about politics, slavery, Manifest Destiny, Indian killing, and what it meant to prove one’s manhood in the nineteenth century. It explores the meaning of moral courage in America, the importance of legacies passed between generations, and the imperatives that turn politicians into leaders. And it attempts to explain why the United States invaded a neighboring country and how it came to pass that a substantial number of Americans determined to stop the ensuing war.

  This is not a comprehensive history of the U.S.-Mexican War. Military tactics, minor battles, and General Stephen Kearny’s Army of the West receive limited coverage in these pages.1 Nor does this volume fully explore the Mexican side of the conflict.2 What this volume offers instead is a narrative history of the war that Ulysses S. Grant deemed America’s most “wicked,” as seen through the eyes of five men, their wives, and their children. Their views are in many cases radically different from our own, their justifications often impure, and the results of their actions sometimes at odds with their intentions. But all were forced to sacrifice what was dear to them in the name of something greater: justice, morality, and America’s destiny. Their experiences help us understand how the war and its unintended consequences shaped the meanings of American identity, ethics, and patriotism.

  Two of these characters will likely be unfamiliar. Colonel John J. Hardin was a congressman from Illinois and the first in his state to volunteer to fight Mexico. During his political career he was well known throughout Illinois and Washington, D.C., and an Illinois county seat was named in his honor. His obscurity today is largely the result of a tragic early death on a Mexican battlefield. Hardin has no published biography, and until now few historians have thought his life worth exploring.3 But his martyrdom at the Battle of Buena Vista made him a national hero, and in the mid-1840s he was Abraham Lincoln’s greatest political rival. His death removed a key obstacle from Lincoln’s rise to power.

  John J. Hardin commands attention not only fo
r his military fame and relationship with Abraham Lincoln but also because he was, in many ways, typical of the men who volunteered to fight Mexico. A self-described patriot, Hardin was both a warrior and a member of the opposition Whig Party from a western state where James K. Polk’s Democratic Party held the balance of power. Like thousands of other Whigs, he volunteered to fight despite distrusting both Polk and his objectives. He firmly believed that patriotism knew no party, and that it was the destiny of the United States to expand into Mexico. But like many other soldiers, Hardin lost his faith in America’s Manifest Destiny during the course of his service. Although his name is now forgotten, this study will reveal the surprising legacy of Hardin’s life and death, which lives on today.

  Nicholas Trist is somewhat better known. His name appears in most studies of the 1846 war, although few people know much about the man who defied his president and his party to bring the war to a close. Trist has not commanded much historical attention, but he was one of the best-pedigreed Democrats in America in the 1840s, grandson-in-law to Thomas Jefferson and an intimate associate of Andrew Jackson’s.4 He was an unlikely rebel. As the only man to single-handedly bring an American war to a close, he deserves recognition for his achievement. But his radical actions also demand explanation. This volume attempts to place Trist’s evolving perspective on the war in the context of both his experiences in Mexico and personal relationships that long predated his secret assignment to negotiate a treaty with that country.

  The literature on Polk, Clay, and especially Lincoln, by contrast, is vast. But the following pages offer a different portrait of each of these men than you are likely to find elsewhere. Relatively little has been written about the web of connections among the five main characters in this book. And with one exception, little has been said about the impact of the war on their lives and the lives of their families. That exception, of course, is President James K. Polk. The war was closely identified with the man who started it, so much so that at the time opponents called it “Mr. Polk’s War.” The war defined Polk as well. It was his great project, the culmination of his life’s work, and his legacy to the United States.

  James K. Polk tends to inspire strong reactions among his biographers, many of whom have difficulty remaining objective when considering his leadership style and actions. Even his supporters have had trouble justifying his tactics, and other biographers have concluded that familiarity does indeed breed contempt.5 This study neither deifies nor demonizes him. Polk was a complex character, a deeply conservative man in a surprisingly modern marriage, determined to micromanage a war despite having virtually no military experience, and in many ways an anomaly among southern Democratic politicians. His success was in large part due to his dependence on his wife, Sarah, who was truly his political partner. The childless couple worked harder than anyone else in Washington to advance what they believed to be America’s destiny. By placing Polk in the context of his most important relationships, above all his marriage, this study offers a different perspective on both a misunderstood president and a conflict that rightfully should have been known as “Mr. and Mrs. Polk’s War.”

  Henry Clay’s biographers have been almost unanimous in their admiration for the greatest American politician who never became president.6 Clay was widely adored in his own time, and even admirers of his archfoe Andrew Jackson have had difficulty remaining objective in the face of Clay’s personal magnetism and remarkable accomplishments.7 But most of the dramatic events in Clay’s political career took place prior to his loss to Polk in the presidential race of 1844. This study takes 1844 as the starting point for considering Clay’s accomplishments. Three years after his defeat by Polk, Henry Clay delivered what was perhaps the single most important speech opposing the war. It was an act of great bravery on his part, and an event that has rarely merited a single page in his biographies. Given the length of Clay’s career, the oversight is understandable, but the 1847 Lexington address not only changed the course of Clay’s career, it also had a dramatic impact on Lincoln, Polk, and the American nation.

  Nor will you read much in other volumes about Lincoln and the war with Mexico. Abraham Lincoln’s “Spot Resolutions” opposing the U.S.-Mexican War were the signature position he took during his single congressional term. But scholars have never evinced much interest in Lincoln’s early political career. There is exactly one full-length study of Lincoln in Congress, which concluded that his congressional term was a “failure.”8 Historians have debated whether opposing the war cost Lincoln his seat, and if the victory of a Democrat in the 1848 race “could only be interpreted as a repudiation of ‘Spotty’ Lincoln’s views on the Mexican War.”9 They have also differed over why Lincoln adopted his antiwar position in the first place. But scholars have never considered the larger impact of the U.S.-Mexican War on Lincoln’s life, or noted that events in Illinois, including his service in the Black Hawk War, may have galvanized him to join the national movement to end the war with Mexico. No one has previously documented how extensively Lincoln’s antiwar statements were reported around the nation. The Spot Resolutions brought Lincoln his first taste of the national political acclaim that he deeply craved. And his stance on the war with Mexico ultimately shaped him as a politician and a leader.

  This book is the tale not just of five men and their families but also of the rise of America’s first national antiwar movement.10 The fact that there was a national antiwar movement in the 1840s will come as a surprise to most readers. Histories of the U.S.-Mexican War have almost always focused on the conflict’s dramatic battles rather than the home front. Although one of the very first histories of the war was written by an antiwar activist (William Jay, the son of Federalist Papers coauthor John Jay), much of the twentieth-century scholarship on the war followed the lead of Justin Smith, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1920 for his two-volume The War with Mexico.11 While meticulously researched, Smith’s celebratory history of the war was suffused with racism and his desire to justify America’s part in the war. For decades before Smith’s publication, historians and the public had ignored the war, their ambivalence caused by their inability to fit a war for territory into the history of a freedom-loving people. Smith not only vindicated the war but also drew a lasting and unfair portrait of antiwar opponents as irrational radicals deeply out of step with their nation.

  Those few volumes that have examined the home front in detail have focused on the widespread initial enthusiasm for the war and agreed with Smith that, outside New England, Americans were united in their support for the cause. The single monograph to consider the antiwar movement in detail concluded that it “had little effect on the war’s duration, outcome, or final terms.”12 With a few exceptions, most scholars continue to agree that antiwar criticism was limited because even opponents of the war in some way “accepted” its inevitability. Mexico was weak, the United States was strong, and it was destiny that the American republic would take a continental form.13

  This volume makes a very different argument. Looking closely at the writings of politicians, soldiers, embedded journalists, and average Americans watching events in Mexico from a distance, it contends that the war was actively contested from its beginning and that vibrant and widespread antiwar activism ultimately defused the movement to annex all of Mexico to the United States at the close of the war. This volume gives voice to the views of peace activists and credit to them for their successes, revealing how politically risky agitation by politicians—including freshman congressman Lincoln and three-time presidential loser Clay—both moved public opinion in the direction of peace and prevented President Polk from fulfilling his territorial goals in 1848.

  Nor was antiwar sentiment limited to Polk’s political opponents. A Wicked War reveals how frequently volunteer and regular soldiers, as well as their officers, expressed their own ambivalence toward the conflict. This was particularly true for those who witnessed the many atrocities against Mexican civilians committed by U.S. troops. America’s men volunteer
ed to fight in overwhelming numbers, but once they arrived in Mexico their enthusiasm flagged. America’s war with Mexico had the highest desertion rate of any American war, over 8 percent. Some of those deserters chose to fight for the enemy, joining the San Patricio Battalion. Their ambivalence came to be shared by the American people, even in western towns such as Springfield, Illinois, where support for the war once had been overwhelming.14

  The ultimate annexation of half of Mexico, lands that became California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, seems inevitable only in retrospect. Indeed, in 1845, Polk’s dream of taking California was so audacious he didn’t dare share it with the public. The land came at a great price. The U.S.-Mexican War had the highest casualty rate of any American war. Over 10 percent of the seventy-nine thousand American men who served in the war died, most from disease. Mexican casualties are harder to estimate, but at least twenty-five thousand, most civilians, perished in the course of the war.15

  The war against Mexico did not take place in a vacuum. The narrative that follows reveals just how crucial history, both personal and national, was to the events of the 1840s. A warrior tradition, forged in battle against Britain and the Indian inhabitants of North America, and honed through chattel slavery, set the stage for America’s invasion of Mexico and provided the context through which these five characters understood their personal and national destiny. The war between the United States and Mexico was in many ways a predictable development, given the nearly uninterrupted series of wars against Indian peoples fought by the United States government from its earliest days. Widespread racism led many Americans to equate Mexicans with Indians and to conclude that the former were no more deserving of their own land than the latter.