Justin H. Smith - The Mexican-American War (Vol. 1&2)

As already has been suggested, however, there was in Congress a third party—John C. Calhoun, and for later as well as for present reasons it is desirable to understand his opinions. To him it seemed highly advisable to forestall European interference, and quite possible to avoid a conflict with Mexico, by adjusting the Oregon question before coming decisively to an issue in the Mexican difficulty, and therefore he thought the United States ought by all means to limit itself now to repelling invasion. Personal reasons also led him to deplore the prospect of a conflict in arms. The culmination of his fiery life, the fulfilment of his brilliant dream, had seemed in April to be drawing near. By his convenient method of bending facts and principles to his purpose, as the sparrow makes a nest for herself, he had found it possible to coöperate with the West in spending great sums on internal improvements, and expected in this way to make the Northeast a helpless minority; but he could easily see that war might empty the treasury and bring about new political alignments. For the same reason it looked as if his project of a low tariff also would vanish; and, as we have seen, contemplating the possibility of secession, he did not wish8 the youth of the southern states to expend their blood in Mexico.10

Before the news of Thornton’s encounter arrived he argued with Polk against sending to Congress the proposed Message on our relations with Mexico. During the excitement on that eventful Sunday he not only planned with his partisans in Senate and House to oppose war, but worked for the same purpose with leading Whigs, urging—for example—that Mexico should be given more time to consider the risk of a conflict, as if she had not already been speculating upon it for several years. Then in the Senate he gravely proclaimed the truism that border hostilities do not necessarily constitute war, and turned it into a sophism by applying it in the present case. To compare Arista’s attack upon Thornton to an unmeaning border squabble was truly, in view of the long series of preliminaries, ridiculous; and equally ridiculous was the endeavor to support this fallacy with another: that since Congress had not declared war, a state of war with Mexico could not lawfully exist at this time.9 “Is not Calhoun deranged?” exclaimed our minister at Paris on hearing of this.10

To be sure, Congress is the only branch of our central government that can legally declare war; but, for instance, other nations are not hampered by our Constitution, and might attack us in such a manner as to prevent Congress—for a time, at least—from acting. None the less we should fight, and it would be nonsense to describe our resistance as unconstitutional. As a matter of fact Congress did not declare war against Mexico, and on Calhoun’s theory we had no lawful war with that country. On that theory, not only our military men, Congress and the President, but our Supreme Court, which fully recognized the war, acted unconstitutionally. Indeed, he himself illustrated the untenability of his idea. In order to avoid the weakness of advocating purely defensive operations a Whig leader, Senator Crittenden, said that by repelling invasion he meant pursuing the enemy until we could be sure that no repetition of the outrage would occur. This programme would have involved substantially all that we did against Mexico. It would have meant a war without a declaration; yet Calhoun endorsed it. In short, even one so acute and so deeply interested as he could not find a real argument against the war bill, and his “friends” abandoned him on this issue. By an overwhelming majority Congress rejected his interpretation of the organic law. War existed. No American who recognized our claim to the intermediate region, formally made by national authorities and never withdrawn, and especially none who recognized the claim of Texas, could logically deny that it existed by the act of Mexico; and in the light of its antecedents, including Arista’s declaration of war and attack upon Thornton, the war bill committed the nation properly as well as completely.10

We were, then, under arms; but, after all, why? What was the cause of the war? It was not—as will plainly appear in another chapter, it is believed—an unholy determination to obtain California at the cost, if necessary, of fifty thousand lives. It cannot have been a difficulty as to the boundary of Texas, for two nations do not fight over an issue that exists for only one of them—and that one not the aggressor; and for Mexico the question between the Nueces and the Rio Grande had no international significance except when it could be used, as an argumentum ad hominem , to embarrass Americans.14

Nor was it a scheme to extend the field of negro servitude. Even a cormorant requires time for digestion, and in 1845 the acquisition of Texas appeared so powerful a bulwark for the peculiar institution, that no strong and widespread craving for additional areas can be supposed to have existed at the beginning of 1846. Besides, as pro-slavery Taylor, Calhoun and Polk, anti-slavery Webster and time-serving Buchanan agreed, free labor was practically sure to dominate California; and hence, in view of the slight probability that much cultivable territory could be obtained in the south against the stubborn opposition of the free states, the war seemed more likely to diminish than to increase the relative strength of slavery. Moreover, the soil south and west of the Rio Grande was unsuitable for cotton, sugar, rice or tobacco. Rich proprietors already owned the land, and had no thought of parting with it. The system of peonage was extremely economical, and it held the ground so firmly that negro slavery, though tried, had been unable to make headway against it. The free laborers of northeastern Mexico would have been, admitted the North American, particularly hostile to our southerners and their methods; and the colored population, it was pointed out, could have escaped gradually from its bonds by amalgamating with the natives. Now the leaders of the “slavocracy” doubtless inquired into the conditions; and, as most of our ministers and probably most of our consuls in Mexico were from their section, they could easily obtain information. Waddy Thompson and A. J. Donelson, for example, believed and said, that slavery would not thrive in northern Mexico.14

Polk’s diary and papers reveal no evidence that he seriously considered the interest of the peculiar institution in connection with our Mexican problem. The debates of Congress are equally barren. Soon after the war opened, as we shall discover, northeastern Mexico seemed ready to join the United States or accept our protection, and there is no sign that the slavocracy attempted to improve the opportunity. The politicians most eager to acquire Mexican territory were Dickinson of New York, Hannegan of Indiana and Walker, an anti-slavery man. A northern correspondent of Calhoun wrote that many in New York insisted on extending that way “to augment the strength of the non-slaveholding states,” while a Mobile correspondent said, “I would let the war continue forever before I would take 697,000 [square miles] of territory, which must be free territory.” A meeting in Ohio declared for taking all of that country, and this does not seem to have been paralleled in the South. South Carolina was preëminently the champion of slavery, yet Governor Aiken publicly opposed making acquisitions in that quarter. Calhoun, the leader of the southern ultras there and elsewhere, did the same. So did Waddy Thompson, Botts, Toombs, Lumpkin, Campbell and many other southerners. W. R. King said that while the South would insist—as a point of pride and right—upon sharing the benefit of any territory gained from Mexico, it was a gross libel to represent her as desiring to increase in that way the strength of slavery.14