Transcript
The Castle
September 13, 1847
September 13, 1847. American soldiers climb a hill outside Mexico City. Mexican soldiers and cadets hold the castle on top.
Lieutenant James Longstreet falls, wounded, still holding his regiment's flag. Lieutenant George Pickett takes it over the wall.
Remember these names. In 1863, at Gettysburg, Longstreet will send Pickett's men across an open field.
Three months later, in Washington, a new congressman asked a simple question. Where, exactly, did this war begin?
Spotty Lincoln
December 1847; 1836 – January 1846
December 22, 1847. Abraham Lincoln, thirty-eight, has been a congressman for just over two weeks.
In May 1846, Polk told Congress:
James K. Polk Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil.
Abraham Lincoln …whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed was or was not our own soil…
He wanted Polk to name the spot. Back home, his critics gave him a name: Spotty Lincoln.
The spot mattered because of two rivers. Under Spain, then Mexico, Texas ended at the Nueces.
When Texas broke away in 1836, it claimed everything to the Rio Grande. Even Santa Fe, a city it never ruled.
Mexico never recognized Texas's independence, and warned that annexation would mean war.
In 1845 the United States annexed Texas, claim and all. Polk also wanted California.
Plan A: buy it. Polk's envoy, John Slidell, carried an offer of up to twenty-five million dollars. Mexico wouldn't even receive him.
Plan B. In January 1846, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor's troops to the Rio Grande.
Their official name was the Army of Occupation.
The Strip
March – May 1846
In March 1846, about three thousand soldiers marched 150 miles south, across grassland with almost nobody in it.
Ulysses S. Grant Mexico showing no willingness to come to the Nueces to drive the invaders from her soil,
Ulysses S. Grant it became necessary for the "invaders" to approach to within a convenient distance to be struck.
They dug a fort on the riverbank, facing the Mexican city of Matamoros. Its guns pointed across the water.
Lincoln's resolutions asked eight questions about this ground. Go and find the answers.
The news reached Washington on the evening of May 9. Two days later Polk's war message went to Congress.
American Blood
May 1846 – January 1848
The war bill opened with a claim: war existed 'by the act of the Republic of Mexico.'
Many Whigs doubted that. But the same bill paid for the troops. The House passed it 174 to 14, the Senate 40 to 2.
Mexican writers gave their answer in 1848.
Ramón Alcaraz and the Mexican writers of the Apuntes …the true origin of the war… the insatiable ambition of the United States, favored by our weakness, caused it.
In July 1846, Concord jailed Henry David Thoreau for one night. He had stopped paying his poll tax to protest slavery.
Henry David Thoreau Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Someone paid the tax. Next morning he led a huckleberry party up a hill.
In Rochester, Douglass's North Star called Polk 'our slaveholding President.'
Frederick Douglass Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion.
Frederick Douglass If any oppose the President's demands, it is not because they hate the war, but for want of information…
Lincoln questioned how the war began. He still voted to pay the soldiers.
On January 3, 1848, Whig George Ashmun amended a vote of thanks to General Taylor's army:
…in a war unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States. It passed by a few votes. Lincoln voted yes.
Lincoln attacked how the war began. Douglass attacked why it was fought.
Polk's Plans
May 1846 – April 1847
Plan C: take Mexico's north, and Mexico will sell. Taylor won in May and took Monterrey in September.
Taylor, a Whig, became the war's first hero. Polk, a Democrat, noticed.
James K. Polk He is evidently a weak man and has been made giddy with the idea of the Presidency.
Taylor won the presidency in 1848.
In the West, General Kearny took Santa Fe in August without a fight.
In California, American settlers raised a homemade grizzly-bear flag at Sonoma. They jailed Mariano Vallejo, a Californio general who had welcomed American rule.
Californios fought back. They retook Los Angeles, then beat Kearny's dragoons at San Pasqual.
In January 1847, New Mexicans and Taos Pueblo men killed the new American governor, Charles Bent. Cannon broke the revolt at the pueblo's church. About 150 defenders died.
Plan C failed. Mexico still would not sell.
Plan D: send Santa Anna home. Mexico's exiled general had let Polk's agents think he wanted peace. The Navy let him through its blockade. He took command and fought.
Before Veracruz, General Winfield Scott put his own army under martial law. His volunteers had been robbing and killing Mexican civilians.
Plan E: take the capital. In March 1847, Scott landed about ten thousand men at Veracruz in a single day.
Scott's guns shelled Veracruz for four days, and the city surrendered. Civilians died in the shelling. Estimates run into the hundreds.
At Cerro Gordo in April, an engineer captain named Robert E. Lee found a path around Santa Anna's lines.
Santa Anna escaped so fast he left his artificial leg in his carriage. Soldiers from Illinois took it home. It's still in Springfield.
Grasshopper Hill
August – September 1847
By August 1847, Scott's army had reached the Valley of Mexico.
At Churubusco, some of the fiercest defenders were U.S. Army deserters.
Many were Irish Catholic immigrants. Mexico was Catholic, and it offered deserters land.
The U.S. Army hanged fifty of them. On the morning of September 13, thirty stood on wagons at Mixcoac, facing the castle.
Colonel William Harney made them wait until the American flag rose over Chapultepec.
The castle held Mexico's military college, and some of its defenders were teenage cadets.
Ramón Alcaraz and the Mexican writers of the Apuntes …some of the students still fired, and who were the last defenders of that Mexican flag which was quickly replaced by the American.
Six cadets died. Mexico remembers them as the Niños Héroes, the boy heroes.
That afternoon · the San Cosme gate
Lieutenant Grant had a small cannon carried up a church bell tower. It worked so well his general offered a second.
Ulysses S. Grant I could not tell the General that there was not room enough in the steeple for another gun, because he probably would have looked upon such a statement as a contradiction from a second lieutenant.
General Worth's messenger was Lieutenant John Pemberton. In 1863, Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg to Grant.
The city fell the next day. Years later, Scott credited West Point:
Gen. Winfield Scott …but for our graduated cadets, the war… might, and probably would, have lasted some four or five years…
The next time those graduates fought a war, they fought each other.
The Man Who Wouldn't Go Home
October 1847 – March 1848
Plan F. Polk recalled his negotiator, Nicholas Trist, chief clerk of the State Department. Trist ignored the order, stayed, and sent Washington sixty-five pages explaining why.
Polk's diary, January 15, 1848:
James K. Polk His despatch proves that he is destitute of honour or principle…
On February 2, 1848, in the town of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the fired negotiator signed a peace treaty.
Mexico accepted the Rio Grande as the border and gave up California, New Mexico and the land between. The United States paid fifteen million dollars.
Counting Texas, Mexico lost more than half its territory.
Nine days before the signing, gold was found at Sutter's Mill. Nobody at the table knew.
Polk sent Trist's treaty to the Senate. That same week he wrote in his diary:
James K. Polk Trist has proved himself to be an impudent and unqualified scoundrel.
Some Democrats had wanted to take all of Mexico. Senator John C. Calhoun objected, because of who lived there.
Sen. John C. Calhoun Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.
The treaty promised Mexicans who stayed citizenship, in time, and protection for their property.
The Senate struck out Article Ten, which protected their land grants.
Whose Soil?
1848 – 1859
The border moved. The people didn't. About 80,000 Mexicans, and far more Native people, now lived inside the United States.
Mariano Vallejo, jailed by the Bear Flaggers, sat in California's first state senate. Then came the Land Act of 1851.
Californios had to prove their titles in federal hearings. The average claim took seventeen years.
Lawyers took land as fees, and squatters took the rest. Vallejo lost most of his.
For California's Native peoples, the Gold Rush was a catastrophe.
A state law let settlers hold Native people, even children, as unpaid laborers. California paid militias to raid Native villages.
Peter H. Burnett That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected.
Historians estimate 150,000 Native people lived in California in 1846. By 1870, about 30,000 were left.
Juan Cortina's family had ranched the Rio Grande since Spanish times. In 1859 he rode into Brownsville, Texas, with armed men. Five people died.
Juan Nepomuceno Cortina …a multitude of lawyers, a secret conclave… for the sole purpose of despoiling the Mexicans of the lands and usurp them afterwards.
Put them side by side. Both say American newcomers took Mexican land that wasn't theirs.
Vallejo worked through the courts and legislature. Cortina took up arms, yet claimed his rights as an American citizen.
Mexico Will Poison Us
1846 – 1885
In August 1846, Congressman David Wilmot proposed a rule: no slavery in any land taken from Mexico.
The House passed it more than once. The Senate never did.
Rep. David Wilmot I plead the cause and the rights of white freemen.
Wilmot wanted the West for white workers. Douglass wanted slavery ended everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn.
“Mexico will poison us.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson Mexico will poison us.
Every acre of the Cession now asked one question. Slave soil, or free?
Ulysses S. Grant The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war.