What Hath God Wrought (108 page)

Some people in the United States and elsewhere wondered what a U.S. military force was doing along the Rio Grande in the first place. The answer to this question went back more than a year. When Congress passed its joint resolution offering Texas statehood in March 1845, the president of the Lone Star Republic, Anson Jones, displayed distinct coolness to the action. Jones had an alternative vision of the Texan future; he dreamed of a powerful independent nation, stretching from sea to sea. In May 1845, the British brokered a deal by which Mexico finally offered Texas peace and recognition provided the republic remained independent. But the proposal came too late. Given the options of independence and U.S. statehood, the Texan Congress had no difficulty choosing annexation, a decision ratified by a convention in Austin on July 4, 1845. An American state constitution was approved at local community meetings throughout Texas in October; the U.S. Congress accepted it in December. But not until February 1846 would President Jones deliver a farewell address and turn legal authority in Texas over to officials of the new state government.

The Mexican minister to the United States had denounced the annexation of Texas as “an act of aggression,” and in response to the statehood offer severed diplomatic relations on March 6, 1845.
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Back in 1843, Mexico had warned the United States that annexation of Texas would mean war, but this threat was not actually carried out. Though the Mexican government considered attempting the reconquest of Texas in July 1845 after the rejection of their recognition proposal, they stopped short of it. Santa Anna’s irresponsible policies had left the Mexican government at the mercy of financiers who made short-term loans at high interest rates. The same financial straits that precluded adequately defending California made waging war for Texas unattractive. In August 1845, President José Joaquín Herrera, a moderate
federalista
who had inherited Santa Anna’s financial mess, let it be known that he would receive a U.S. emissary to discuss Texas. Herrera had a program of fiscal and domestic reform in mind, which could only be addressed if his country reconciled itself to the loss of Texas.
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“I regard the question of annexation as belonging exclusively to the United States and Texas,” Polk had declared in his inaugural address—thereby serving notice that he would not negotiate it with Mexico.
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But what constituted Texas? The boundary of Texas as a Mexican province had been the Nueces River, and this had remained the approximate limit of effective control by the Lone Star Republic. Nevertheless, as we have seen, Texans had repeatedly laid claim to the Rio Grande as their boundary. With annexation, the undefined boundary between Mexico and Texas became a problem between Mexico and the United States. And from the day of annexation, the Polk administration made clear to all that it considered Texas as extending to the Rio Grande.

Polk did not wait for the legal transfer of authority before trying to secure Texas, defined broadly, against Mexican reoccupation. The American diplomatic envoy to the Texan Republic, Old Hickory’s nephew Andrew Jackson Donelson, pestered President Jones with the importance of military preparations against Mexican attack. Nevertheless the Polk administration did not trust Donelson to press the Texans hard enough to occupy the disputed area beyond the Nueces (since he belonged to Van Buren’s faction), so they reinforced him with ardent expansionists like former Arkansas governor Archibald Yell to make the case more forcefully. In April 1845, Secretary of the Navy Bancroft ordered Commodore Robert Stockton’s naval squadron to Galveston. A zealous American imperialist, Stockton there set about recruiting Texans for a military expedition into the disputed territory. Texan president Jones put a stop to it. He had reason to believe Stockton acted at Polk’s direction and later complained that they had tried to “
manufacture a war
” between Texas and Mexico that the United States would then take over.
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Stockton may have exceeded his instructions, although his activities certainly did not lose him the confidence of the administration.

Having decided to place a U.S. military presence on the ground, on June 15, 1845, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor across the Sabine into Texas. Later he specified that Taylor should “approach as near the boundary line, the Rio Grande, as prudence will dictate.”
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But Taylor employed the prudent discretion permitted him and stationed his force, ultimately about four thousand strong, at Corpus Christi by the mouth of the Nueces, the southernmost point under Texan control. There he spent several months intensively training his soldiers. The administration would have liked a more aggressive posture but didn’t feel ready to overrule their field commander. In August, Polk’s secretary of war, William Marcy, instructed Taylor to treat any attempt by the Mexican army to cross the Rio Grande as an invasion of the United States and an act of war.
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Meanwhile, President Polk did not ignore President Herrera’s invitation to negotiate. Polk spent much of the fall of 1845 arranging a mission to Mexico City by Congressman John Slidell of Louisiana, a fluent Spanish-speaker who had been of great help to Polk in the last election. He instructed Slidell that the annexation of Texas was nonnegotiable; he should confine himself to purchasing California and/or New Mexico and to collecting the debts Mexico owed U.S. citizens. The claims of American citizens against Mexico were badly inflated; out of some $8.5 million presented, a mixed commission had found about $2 million justified. In 1844, the financially strapped Mexican government stopped making payments on this debt, although they did not repudiate it. Polk told Slidell that at the very least, he should obtain Mexican recognition of the Rio Grande boundary in return for U.S. assumption of these debts. Beyond this, Slidell had authority to pay $5 million for New Mexico and $20 million more for California.
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Since Mexico had already refused to sell any of its national territory, these instructions did not augur well for a resolution of outstanding differences. The United States did not occupy a strong moral position in getting tough when others fell behind in their debt payments, considering that several U.S. states had defaulted on larger sums to foreign creditors earlier in the 1840s. Complicating the mission further, Slidell’s number two, William Parrott, had already been declared personally offensive and unacceptable by the Mexicans. (Parrott, the brother of the troublemaking consul in Mazatlán, made $690,000 in claims against the Mexican government that a previous U.S. envoy had described as “exaggerated in a disgusting degree”; more recently he had been exposed as a spy.)
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Finally, although the Mexican authorities had offered to engage in negotiations over Texas, they made it clear they would not resume full diplomatic relations so long as a United States army occupied what they considered a substantial portion of their country. Polk appointed Slidell not an emissary with a particular assignment but a “minister plenipotentiary”—meaning that for Mexico to receive him would constitute a resumption of full diplomatic relations. In short, President Polk had so structured the U.S. mission that it would be extremely difficult for President Herrera even to meet the envoy, let alone negotiate with him.

Can Polk have really expected the Slidell mission to achieve a satisfactory resolution of the outstanding issues? Surviving evidence indicates that he and his advisors entertained some hope of success. From the standpoint of Mexican authorities, to sell California was as unthinkable as it would be for any U.S. administration to sell Michigan to Canada. But Polk and his circle felt no empathy with their Mexican counterparts. On the other hand, Polk did recognize the sensitive nature of Slidell’s appointment as minister plenipotentiary, and he did not submit it to the Senate for confirmation.

Polk’s strategy toward Mexico was precisely the converse of his strategy toward Britain. On Oregon, he wished to appear uncompromising but achieve a compromise. Regarding the issues with Mexico, however, he wished to seem reasonable and open to discussion while pressing uncompromising demands that would probably lead to war. Polk’s insistence on the exaggerated Texan boundary claim, in the words of his modern biographer, “is the clearest indication of the administration’s anxiety to complete annexation not only at the earliest possible moment, but also as offensively to Mexico as possible.”
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The area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande had significance not only for its own sake but also as possible cause for war with Mexico.

What lay behind Polk’s provocative Mexican policy is not too difficult to discern: the acquisition of more territory, especially California. The administration’s official newspaper, the
Washington Union
, proclaimed the goal as early as June 1845. “The road to California” beckoned Americans: “Who will stay the march of our western people?” Of course, the
Union
not only presented administration policy but sought to rally public support for it. If Mexico should resist the U.S. takeover of California, the paper predicted, “a corps of properly organized volunteers (and they might be obtained from all quarters of the Union) would invade, overrun, and occupy Mexico.”
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Both publicly and privately, Polk avowed a strong geopolitical interest in California, in particular a determination to deny the area to Britain. Historical investigation of the papers of the Foreign Office in London has discovered no intention to take over California, though the British would have preferred it to remain Mexican. Nevertheless, informants like Duff Green and Oliver Larkin warned Polk to fear the California ambitions of the superpower of the time. Polk portrayed himself as defending the principles of the Monroe Doctrine in California. No doubt the president also shared the characteristic Jacksonian desire to extend the area of white American agricultural settlement; his territorial ambitions, after all, included much besides California. Finally, Polk valued California for its opening onto the Pacific. “The possession of the Bay and harbor of San Francisco is all important to the United States,” he instructed Slidell. “If all these [advantages] should be turned against our country, by the cession of California to Great Britain, our principal commercial rival, the consequences would be most disastrous.”
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Ironically perhaps, the congressional Whigs representing maritime New England demonstrated less eagerness than the Democratic president to obtain “an empire on the Pacific.” Sometimes Democratic imperialists invoked the commercial advantages of expansion simply as a tactic to win support, as Walker had done in arguing for Texas. But Polk really does seem to have wanted to expand American power and commerce in the Pacific, manifesting once again that solicitude for American overseas trade that the Democratic Party had displayed ever since the Jackson administration.
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President Polk was fully prepared to persuade the Mexicans to cede California by whatever means it took. Perhaps their financially strapped government would sell territory for money, which is why Polk told Slidell to press the issue of Mexico’s foreign indebtedness so hard. Jackson had done this too when he wanted to buy Texas. But in all probability, only military defeat could force this cession upon them. Such a defeat could come in either of two ways: war with the United States or a revolution in California analogous to what had happened in Texas.

Polk pursued all the possible routes to California—purchase, revolution, and war—simultaneously. Slidell’s instructions included detailed specifications of various purchases of territory and the amounts the United States would pay for each. In October 1845, while Slidell waited in New Orleans, Polk sent Commodore Stockton off to California via Cape Horn, issued secret orders to the U.S. consul in Monterey to encourage disaffected Californians to seek U.S. annexation, and communicated these plans to Captain John C. Frémont’s overland military expedition to California. Earlier orders had directed the navy’s Pacific Squadron to be ready to seize San Francisco at the outbreak of war. The effect of these coordinated messages would be felt in California the following spring. But also in October, the
Washington Union
(the administration’s organ) announced that on the question of whether the Mexican government would receive Slidell hung the issue of peace or war.
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If Mexico did not rise to the challenge of the Rio Grande boundary dispute, the Slidell mission itself could provide a casus belli. Buchanan instructed Slidell, in case of failure, to let Washington know right away, while Congress was still in session, so that “prompt and energetic measures may be adopted on our part.”
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Slidell would know that meant a congressional declaration of war.

When Slidell arrived in Mexico City on December 6, 1845, he posed an excruciating difficulty for the government there. Once the terms of his appointment as plenipotentiary became known, Mexican public opinion reacted with outrage. The
federalistas
themselves divided, with
moderados
supporting President Herrera while the
puros
, left-wing populists, denounced his temporizing with foreign aggressors. Herrera’s moderate foreign secretary, Manuel de la Peña y Peña, told his chief that although justice called for resistance to U.S. demands, their country’s weakness counseled concession.
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But the political left and right agreed in repudiating any willingness to negotiate with the insulting
yanquis
. Herrera fell from power before the end of the year without having received Slidell. Mariano Paredes, a
centralista
and a professional soldier, replaced him. Slidell vented his anger in his reports to Polk. “A war would probably be the best mode of settling our affairs with Mexico,” he wrote.
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After confirming that the Paredes administration would not receive him either, he sailed for home. In later years Slidell would embark on another famous diplomatic mission, to persuade France to help the Southern Confederacy; that too would fail.