War as show business didn't begin with CNN or FOX News: the Mexican War as entertainment
Paul Bergeron in The Presidency of James K. Polk (1987) describes the role that slavery and related racial attitudes played in the campaign to annex Texas to the United States which culminated in 1845. He quotes historian Thomas Hietala saying, "The intensity and extent of white racism throughout the nation created a climate of fear that facilitated the addition of the lone star of Texas to the flag of the United States."
While I wouldn't quarrel with the factual accuracy of Hietala's comment, racism as we know it today exists in a very different context than that of the 1840s, a fact of which Lost Cause polemics make use in their defense of the Confederacy and Southern slavery. Racism in the North often included opposition to slavery, because, as William Freehling has described at length, many whites associated the presence of blacks with slavery.
With that in mind, Bergeron describes how how race was used by partisans of Texas annexation in the 1840s both in the North and in the South, where white supremacist attitudes tended to re-enforce the support for slavery and for its expansion:
Racial considerations were readily apparent on the part of most southerners who desired the Texas region in order to assure the expansion of slavery and thereby guarantee its preservation. Such advocates were understandably disturbed by rumors that British abolitionists were seeking to convince Texans to eliminate slavery in their republic. Meanwhile, various northern leaders were attracted to annexation. The appeal here was that Texas would function as a magnet to draw away slaves from the older states, those closest to the nonslave states; in the process, or so the argument went, free blacks would likewise follow the migration of slaves to the western region. The perpetuation of slavery there would assure northerners that they need not fear being inundated by slaves who would move into their states after gaining freedom as a consequence of the economic collapse of slavery. Hence, northern racial prejudice could be dealt with by the prospect of the removal of the possibility of having large numbers of blacks congregate in cities of that region. Senator Robert J. Walker of Mississippi did much to convince northerners of the validity of this view of Texas annexation.These sorts of complexities of white racism prior to the Civil War tend to be completely obscured in popular presentations on the Civil War. The Lost Cause pseudohistory partisans use that lack of understanding to spin a lot of nonsense about the cause and the results of the Civil War, e.g., Yankees were racists, too, so the war couldn't have been about slavery. Reality was very different.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2008, guerra de estados unidos a méxico, guerra mexicano-estadounidense, manifest destiny
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