Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 11: Texas and slavery

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 10: Polk's strategy to provoke war

Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794-1876), Mexican general and President (several times)

Mexico - and its predecessor, the Viceroyalty of New Spain, had never been able to exercise effective control over its Texas province. It was far distant from the central power in Mexico City and it was parsely populated with Spanish colonists and later Mexican citizens and also with Indian tribes, some of whom like the Comanche who were not known for being especially friendly.

Josephina Zoraida Vázquez writes in "War and Peace with the United States" in The Oxford History of Mexico (2000):

It is possible that the loss of Texas [by Mexico] was inevitable. Certainly, Mexico did not have a good start in its independent life. Spain had left it financially devastated, and radical federalism had weakened the national government, which was unable to respond to foreign threats. The Mexican setback suffered at San Jacinto on April 21 [1836], when [Mexican General] Santa Anna was defeated and imprisoned, became a total disaster with the absurd obedience of Vicent Filisola, who, upon receiving an order from the imprisoned general, withdrew beyond the Rio Grande. His action sealed the loss of Texas because Mexico lacked the resources to dispatch another expedition.

After Texas declared its independence in 1836, Mexico was not in a position militarily to retake Texas. But Mexico opposed the annexation of Texas to United States, which would have given them a border with a much larger, stronger, expansionist nation than the Lone Star Republic was.

But despite Mexico's opposition, it's certainly credible to think that the Polk administration could have put through the annexation of Texas, in fact as well as law, without a war with Mexico. But Polk didn't just want Texas. He sent Congressman John Slidell to Mexico in 1845 to negotiate the sale of California and New Mexico territory, along with Texas.

James Knox Polk (1795-1849): US President(1845-1849)

Mexico's government at the time was not particularly stable and was not in any position to even negotiate over such an offer. So Polk derived a strategy of military pressure on the Texas-Mexican border. Walter LaFeber describes his approach in The American Age (1989):

The president's policy was both simple and devious. He slowly squeezed Mexico militarily until it struck back. He then misrepresented the evidence for the attack to obtain Congress's declaration of war. In July 1845. ten months before war began, Polk instructed the U.S. military commander in Texas, Zacharv Taylor, to move across the Nueces River into territory (between the Nueces and the Rio Grande) that was hotly disputed between Texas and Mexico. In January 1846, the president told Taylor to encamp on the Rio Grande itself. In April, the Mexican army demanded that Taylor move back. He responded by blockading the Mexicans and threatening them with starvation. On April 24, they tried to break the blockade, and blood was spilled. Back in Washington, Polk was becoming frustrated by Mexico's refusal to deal with Slidell. On May 9, he and his cabinet decided to settle the claims against Mexico and block British influence [on Mexico to sell California to them] by declaring war. Later that day, Polk received word of the attack on Taylor's forces. (my emphasis)

LaFeber also gives a good summary of how the territory acquired during the Mexican War turned up the pressure on the slavery question. In fact, it appeared when Polk asked for an appropriation of $2 million just after the declaration to war to use in negotiating a peace with territorial acquisitions. He describes the proposal attached to the appropriation by Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman David Wilmot, which became known as the Wilmot Proviso:

The proviso required the money not to be used to purchase any territory that would allow slavery. Democrats and Whigs from the South immediately condemned the measure. In the House vote, Polk's Democratic party splintered, but the proviso passed. Fifty-two northern free-state Democrats supported, and all fifty southern Democrats opposed, the measure. The Senate, where free- and slave-state representation was in balance, prevented the Wilmot Proviso from becoming law. Nevertheless, everyone involved understood that a political monster had appeared, one that could not be easily killed.

"Reappeared" would probably be more accurate here, since the slavery issue had become increasingly potent as a divisive political issue since the Compromise of 1820.

Continuing with LaFeber's account:

Polk could not understand what he had done. He denied that the great domestic issue had anything to do with foreign policy: slavery "was purely a domestic question" and "not a foreign question." In reality, of course, slavery had everything to do with foreign policy. Expansion, the central theme of the American experience since 1607, now raised the possibility of one side - either slave or nonslave - controlling vast new territories and, thus, soon controlling the government itself. Polk did see that "the slavery question ... is a fire-brand in the body," but he also believed that because slavery could not exist on the poor soils of northern Mexico, Congress was raising the issue simply to embarrass him. The president proposed to settle the rising argument by extending the 1820 Missouri Compromise line of 36°30' to the Pacific. But that compromise was no longer adequate. It could leave the vast Mexican territories south of the line open to slavery. Foreign policy and domestic concerns were so intertwined that each now threatened to strangle the other. (my emphasis)

Paul Bergeron in The Presidency of James K. Polk (1987) describes how the Wilmot Proviso became a focal point for opposition to Polk's war policies. Polk wrote in his diary, "what connection slavery had with making peace with Mexico it is difficult to understand." Bergeron observes:

Perhaps this was difficult for the president to comprehend, but it was not difficult for the antislavery elements in Congress and in the northern states to understand. From this point forward, Polk's opponents would utilize the Wilmot Proviso to harass his administration and to foster their conviction that the Mexican War was unconstitutional, corrupt, and, in fact, immoral. They henceforth waged an unrelenting war upon a beleaguered president, who continued to maintain that he wanted peace - nothing more and nothing less. (my emphasis)

Tags: confederate heritage month 2008, guerra de estados unidos a méxico, guerra mexicano-estadounidense, manifest destiny

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 8: Overview of the Mexican War

The Occupation of the Capital of Mexico by the American Army

The Mexican War of 1846-48, aka, la Guerra de Estados Unidos a México, la Guerra Mexicano-estadounidense, was a critical event on the road to the Civil War. The seizure of large amounts of Mexican territory by the United States immediately created a political battle over slavery, which eventually culminated in the Compromise of 1850. From that point onward until the 1860 election, Southern partisans gained progressively stronger control in the Executive Branch and insisted more and more intensely on imposing proslavery policies on the free states, most notoriously with the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision banning Congress from restricting slavery in American territories.

Slavery was a critical issue in the Mexican War, as well, as it also was in Texas' declaration of independence from Mexico in 1836.

The war with Mexico and the acquisition of Texas, California and the other territories acquired through that war were also part of a larger policy of Manifest Destiny. The politics of slavery came to predominate in considerations of territorial expansion. Yet it's important to consider that there were national security considerations involved in addition to the politics of slavery.

This is where my perspective differs from some left and "anti-imperialist" histories of the period that treat Manifest Destiny as expansion driven overwhelmingly by internal economic interests and downplay the international environment at the time.

Spain had been largely neutralized as a New World imperial power by the Napoleonic Wars and the Latin American independence movements of the first three decades of the 19th century. But Britain was very much alive and well as a colonial power, still present in Canada and aspiring to acquire Calfornia from Mexico in the 1840s. France's New World ambitions extended to inserting the Habsburg Maximilian I (Maximiliano I) as Emperor of Mexico in collusion with wealthy Mexican conservatives as late as the 1860s. Russia had made serious though small attempts to colonize California. Even Argentina had tried to do so!

American democracy in its 1840s form, which accepted chattel slavery on a large part of its territory, banned women from voting and still had property restrictions on voting in some cases, was hardly what we think of today as a model democracy. But, hopefully without pandering to any notion of American exceptionalism, American democracy particularly as it existed in the free states was arguably the most advanced democracy in the world at that time, though Britain could certainly make a credibile claim to that position in the 1840s.

But despite the notion that President Bush today takes as a truism that democracies don't go to war with each other, Britain did invade the United States during the War of 1812 and was preparing to go to war again over the Oregon controversy in 1845. (Exactly when Britain could be classified as a democracy is subject to discussion, but they obviously had parliamentary institutions.) American leaders and the general public were on solid ground in assuming that American national security in the broadest sense was incompatable with a continental stronghold of a European empire on the North American continent. Even during the Civil War, the differences in Northern opinion on the French-backed regime of Maximiliano I was not over whether it against America's interest to allow that arrangement to persist. It was over whether it was wise to try to apply military pressure against France in the middle of the American Civil War or to wait until it was over to drive them out of Mexico.

I wouldn't suggest that President Polk was pure of heart in his ambitions to acquiring Oregon, California, Texas and other southwestern territory. But there were sound strategic reasons for doing so.

Someday, I hope to see a credible case made that there was a possibility of a "happy ending" to the conflict between the United States and the native Indian tribes that populated the course of Manifest Destiny. I have some ideas along those lines. But my point here is that for the US, occupying the breadth of the North American continent was not a choice between doing so or simply leaving the territory to the Indians. If the US had developed such strong scruples on the matter that the country stopped its expansion before acquiring Texas in 1845, neither the French, the British, the Spanish, the Russian, nor the Mexicans (or even the Argentines!) regarded themselves as bound by such scruples.

Some European or European-derived empire was going to acquire those territories. The US understandably saw it as being in the national interest to be the acquirer. That some of those interests were commercial doesn't diminish the point. And, cynically as the notion is used now and was often used then, there is actually a strong argument to be made that the progress of democracy in the world was advanced by the US being the acquirer of those areas.

There's just no reason to pretend that it was all a grand, noble, benevolent process. It wasn't.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2008, guerra de estados unidos a méxico, guerra mexicano-estadounidense, manifest destiny