Into this season of welcome and instructive Lincoln-mania comes an evidently political-dividing history of a war that Abraham Lincoln opposed when he was still a congressman. Using the words of Ulysses S. Grant, who termed the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, a “wicked war,” for her title, historian Amy S. Greenberg’s, “A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 Invasion of Mexico,” brings our attention to an often ignored aspect of an early United States “war of choice.” Mexicans called it then, and call it now, “The American Invasion.”
The primary objection of U.S. Whigs (who would soon to be called Republicans) to the war was that James K. Polk was bent on creating a “chosen” war, just as George W. Bush “chose” the war in Iraq, which he falsely declared was a major player in the 9/11 attacks on America. And like the Iraq “adventure,” the 1846 invasion of Mexico resulted in a perfect cluster of disastrous unintended consequences.
And some “maverick” historians suggest that it was unnecessary. Anyone with much knowledge, or someone merely observing Mexico’s constantly shifting and amazingly mismanaged politics in the 1800s, could have foreseen the future. If land hungry American Democrats would wait a bit, the U.S. could scoop up the Mexican territory they coveted without the cost of life and fortune. For the governing structure and the military leadership of Mexico continued to go through – even seemingly to cultivate – a prolonged spasm of internal, childish and self-wounding chaos. Even under a rational leader such a Benito Juarez, Baja California was to be offered to Lincoln for a pittance. The U.S. Congress declined.
Which prompts the question: Why was Polk in such a hurry to expend American lives and fortune for something that could have been easily acquired at much less cost merely through the exercise of patience?The year that polkism manipulated the U.S., the population of Texas was about 142,000 non-indigenous people. About 39,000 of these were black slaves.
The influx of U.S. settlers into Texas was not an “American idea.” It was originally initiated by the royal government of New Spain, just before it fell in 1821. Making a crucial mistake, it granted generous enticements to North American colonists to settle in Tejas. Land was offered for ten cents an acre and a seven-year exemption from paying Mexican taxes. This was not totally unusual. Spain had allowed scores of U.S. immigrants to cross the Mississippi and settle the Missouri territory. Officials of Nueva España, whose citizens had settled in more inviting northern Tejas, sought a buffer against marauding Apache, Kiowa and most distinctly the Comanches indians.
If elected in the 1844 election, Polk promised to aggressively push the British for a bountiful “division” of the Oregon territory – which in his mind extended all the way to the southern border of Russian-possessed Alaska. Actually, it eventually was not at all that extravagant, though it did include today’s states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of the states of Montana and Wyoming. Cunningly Polk campaigned for president on the acquisition of the larger northern extension, with the slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight,” though he never intended to fight and his true target was the Texas territory and California. Though a dark-horse candidate, his stumping for an extension of the U.S. to the north, south and west – and his shrewdly veiled campaign tactics – overwhelmed Whig candidates Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren.
Polk had been born in Meckienburg County, North Carolina, but moved to, and represented Tennessee. His family had a history of slave ownership. When his father, Samuel Polk, died, James eventually inherited 20 slaves, and purchased more. The average number of slaves owned by Polk is said by historians to be around 50. The slaves included children, men and women. And, as president, he bought more. He foresaw the Texas annexation as an important boost not only to slave territory but to the vigor of the pro-slavery South. And it was.
Polk was in the slave business principally for financial self-interest. Some historians, drawing on previously unexplored records, explore Polk’s plantation and the personal histories of his slaves. One reviewer of this material wrote, “Life at the Polk estate was brutal and often short. Fewer than one in two slave children lived to the age of fifteen, a child mortality rate even higher than that on the average plantation. A steady stream of slaves temporarily fled the plantation throughout Polk’s tenure as absentee slave master. Yet Polk was in some respects an enlightened owner, instituting an unusual incentive plan for his slaves and granting extensive privileges to his most favored slave. Startlingly, (the author) shows how Polk sought to hide from public knowledge the fact that, while he was president, he was secretly buying as many slaves as his plantation revenues permitted. Shortly before his sudden death from cholera, the president quietly drafted a new will, in which he expressed the hope that his slaves might be freed – but only after he and his wife were both dead. Yet the very next day, he authorized the purchase, in strictest secrecy, of six more very young slaves. By contrast with Senator John C. Calhoun, President Polk has been seen as a moderate Southern Democratic leader. But new research suggests that the president’s political stance toward slavery – influenced as it was by his deep personal involvement in the plantation system – may actually have helped precipitate the Civil War that Polk sought to avoid.”
Ulysses S. Grant would later write that he felt that the war was a wrongful one and believed that territorial gains were designed to spread slavery throughout the nation. In 1883, Grant wrote, “I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day, regard the war which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
Yet he and fellow West Point graduates such as William Tecumseh Sherman, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, among many more, fought bravely and resourcefully against superior – if often poorly trained and poorly led – Mexican forces.
Amy Greenberg is a good writer. Her smooth narration and deft probing and refreshing sources do well in tracing the invasion, both by Zachary Taylor from Texas and by Winfield Scott from Veracruz. But, predictably, reviews of her book from conservative sources, including the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times, are critical of many of her claims – and her picture of Polk as an unwavering Manifest Destiny expansionist who would have fit sleekly into Jefferson Davis’ Confederacy. One of her claims is that Lincoln would not have opposed the war if he had not heard Henry Clay denounce it. Or that Polk’s wife, Sarah, was also his alter ego: “Were it not for her political skills, James Polk might never have won office ...” possesses “perhaps a touch of hyperbole,” writes one sympathetic, veteran historian, James M. McPherson, author of numerous texts on the Civil War, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “For Cause and Comrades.” Was Sarah Polk really “one of the most powerful First Ladies in history?” he asks. And then warns, “... the reader should be be wary of her penchant for sweeping declarations that sometimes seem to go beyond the evidence.”
But overall, it’s quite clear that Greenberg places her work “in a setting that helps explain why another war that almost destroyed the United States came in 1861, in considerable part because of what happened in Mexico from 1846 to 1848,” says in summing up. And he adds a piece of advice, “If one can read only a single book about the Mexican-American War, this is the one to read.