What Hath God Wrought (116 page)

Within sight of Molino del Rey stood the mount of Chapultepec with its castle atop it, originally built for the Viceroy of New Spain, now the Colegio Militar, the Mexican military academy. This strongpoint protected the southwest entrance to Mexico City, and Scott immediately turned his attention to its reduction. The castle loomed very formidable, and the Americans undertook its reduction with seriousness. A fourteen-hour bombardment on September 12 preceded an assault on the morning of the thirteenth. Santa Anna had not adequately garrisoned the position. The castle itself held only about two hundred Mexican soldiers, along with fifty-nine cadets, ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen, who had requested permission to participate in the defense of their college. About six hundred more Mexican soldiers occupied the hill outside the building. In the van of the U.S. assault came volunteers of Franklin Pierce’s brigade—although Brigadier General Pierce himself was laid up with an injury due to falling off his horse. (His absence from battle did not prevent Pierce from being elected president of the United States in 1852.) Participants in the assault included Captain Robert Anderson and Lieutenants Ulysses Grant, James Longstreet, and George Pickett, whose names would become familiar to all Americans in the coming years. With the aid of scaling ladders, the attackers climbed up into the fortress. The defenders resolved to sell their lives dearly. Those who died included six of the young cadets, who are remembered today in Mexico as Los Niños Héroes and memorialized in a monument near the Colegio Militar.

The raising of the Stars and Stripes over the castle was a glorious moment for the U.S. Army, but it sent a macabre message to thirty former
sanpatricios
captured at Churubusco and convicted by court-martial of desertion. Bound at their individual gallows, they were forced to stand and watch the castle on the skyline for four hours until the appearance of the U.S. flag signaled their execution. Twenty other
sanpatricios
had already been hanged. General Scott had, however, tempered justice with mercy when he reviewed the sentences of the court-martial. He had pardoned five of the seventy convicted and commuted the sentences of fifteen others to the lesser punishment of fifty lashes and branding with a
D
on the cheek. To the anger of many in the army, John Riley was among those whose lives the general spared. The most prominent turncoat had deserted before the declaration of war, and Scott noted that the death penalty did not apply to desertion in peacetime. Surprisingly, the well-publicized punishments meted out to the
sanpatricios
did not prevent about a hundred more U.S. soldiers from going over to the Mexicans during the remaining months of the war. Many deserters simply melted into the Mexican population; Riley himself reentered the Mexican army, wore his hair long to hide his branding scars, and after promotion to colonel retired. Neither he nor anyone else appears to have received the promised Mexican land grant. Although the U.S. Army and loyal Irish Americans in particular regarded the
sanpatricios
as a disgrace (for several decades in the later nineteenth century the War Department denied their existence), there is a monument to them, with annual commemorations, in Mexico.
¹⁰³

The Americans pressed on immediately to exploit their capture of Chapultepec, moving along two causeways and overcoming stiff resistance to seize two gates on the western side of the city, Belen and San Cosme, before nightfall on the thirteenth. After conferring with his officers, Santa Anna decided to spare the historic capital destruction in house-to-house fighting, and evacuated his remaining nine thousand soldiers to Guadalupe Hidalgo north of the city. At dawn on September 14, the municipal authorities surrendered, and the flag of the United States flew over the center of Mexico City by 7:00
A
.
M
. An hour later, Winfield Scott rode into the Zócalo, the grand plaza bordered by the National Palace, the city hall, and the cathedral, resplendent in his full dress uniform, a stark contrast to the ragged and dirty combat soldiers who lined up before him in parade formation. The conqueror, this new Cortez, dispatched a unit of U.S. Marines to secure the palace, which North Americans called the Hall of the Montezumas. (The anonymous lyrics of the Marines’ Hymn commemorate the episode.) In due course Scott took up residence in the palace himself, in quarters formerly occupied by the presidents of the Mexican Republic and the viceroys of New Spain, on the site where Aztec emperors had ruled. As military governor of the city, Scott named volunteer Major General John Quitman, who had experience as governor of Mississippi.

The early days of the occupation proved harrowing even for hardened veterans. Although the city’s middle class and ruling elite had acquiesced in the surrender, the poorer people, perhaps having less to lose, rose up against the intruders as people in California and New Mexico had done. Those without weapons threw stones and imprecations. After several days of fighting the mob, the army imposed order by a combination of sternness and conciliation, but
yanquis
who wandered into unfamiliar neighborhoods always did so at some risk. For the next nine months, the U.S. Army occupied Mexico City. Gradually the businesses, cafes, bars, and houses of prostitution reopened and found the strangers from faraway farms and towns to be willing customers. As early as September 30, a soldier from western Pennsylvania could write in his diary, “In the evening we went to the Theatre Nacianal-De-Santa-Anna which is undoubtedly the finest building of the kind on this continent.”
¹⁰⁴
Reactions to Mexican culture, especially Catholicism, varied greatly. A lieutenant wrote to his sister, “You have no idea of the flummery that we see here every day, all of which the Mexicans call religion.” But a sergeant who visited the cathedral recorded feelings of awe in his journal. “Like the poor Indians who are kneeling around the altar, we are lost in amazement at the splendors around us.”
¹⁰⁵
Of course, the
norteamericanos
primarily perpetuated their own culture. Almost immediately, they began to publish two newspapers, the
American Star
and the
North American
, with sections in both English and Spanish.

By now widely blamed for his country’s defeat, Santa Anna resigned the Mexican presidency on September 16, retaining command of the army. He made a final attempt to dislodge Scott’s occupation of Mexico City by besieging Puebla, but as usual his artillery was not up to the task, and he failed to retake the city. On October 7, the new acting president, Manuel de la Peña y Peña, who as foreign minister in 1845 had tried to avoid the war, dismissed Santa Anna and ordered him to prepare for a court-martial. The
caudillo
fled and made his way to Jamaica. The Mexican government set up a temporary capital in Querétaro, some 125 miles northwest of Mexico City. The Mexican army no longer possessed the capability to conduct operations, but resistance by guerrillas continued, especially along the route between Mexico City and Veracruz, which the invaders relied on for reinforcements and the evacuation of their sick and wounded.

Winfield Scott had achieved one of the monumental military victories of the nineteenth century. He had successfully carried out a major amphibious operation, reduced the formidable fortress of Veracruz, and, overcoming shortages of heavy artillery and transportation, fought his way through difficult terrain to capture one of the world’s great capitals. Along the way he set an example that Grant and Sherman would follow in the Civil War by cutting himself off from his base of operations. The army he commanded consisted largely of novices, thousands of whom departed when their enlistments expired in the middle of the campaign. He managed despite the political hostility of his president and many of the officers whom that president placed around him. The duke of Wellington, who followed Scott’s campaign with close attention, called it “unsurpassed in military annals” and declared Scott “the greatest living soldier”—high praise coming from the victor of Waterloo. The military historian John Eisenhower, after reviewing Scott’s whole career in three major wars, has concluded that Scott “may well have been the most capable soldier this country has ever produced”—high praise coming from the son of Dwight Eisenhower.
¹⁰⁶

Yet the victor of Mexico City did not remain in command of his army much longer than did the vanquished. Gideon Pillow poisoned President Polk’s mind against Scott and inflamed his fear of a Whig military hero’s emergence. Meanwhile, General Pillow treated his commander with insolence and publicly claimed that most of the credit for the campaign’s success was due to his own efforts. Scott reminded officers in his command not to publish comments without his approval, and when Pillow and Colonel James Duncan defied the rule, he ordered them court-martialed. President Polk intervened and dismissed Scott on January 13, 1848, revoking the court-martial and setting up instead a “court of inquiry” to investigate Scott along with his subordinates. He also charged Scott with compromising military operations by an attempt to bribe Santa Anna into making peace—a peculiar accusation, considering Polk’s own record of relations with Santa Anna. “To suspend a successful general in command of an army in the heart of an enemy’s country, [and] to try the judge in place of the accused, is to upset all discipline,” declared the astounded Robert E. Lee. The army overwhelmingly sympathized with Scott in this situation. “No general ever possessed the hearts of his troops to a greater extent than does Gen. Scott,” asserted Captain George McClellan.
¹⁰⁷
The Mexicans, with their experience of military coups, were astonished that Scott dutifully obeyed the order to relinquish command of the army when it arrived on February 18.

Polk stacked the composition of his “court of inquiry” in favor of Pillow and against Scott. Sorting through the complicated charges and countercharges, the inquiry’s inconclusive findings in July 1848 “whitewashed” Pillow and took no position on Polk’s charge against Scott. The protracted hearings served Polk’s political ends. They kept the conqueror of Mexico under a cloud during the critical period when the Whig party was choosing a presidential candidate for 1848. Congress, more appreciative of Scott’s achievement than the president, passed a joint resolution on March 9, 1848, thanking Old Fuss ’n’ Feathers for his services and directing the president to award him a medal for “his valor, skill, and judicious conduct.” It was Gideon Pillow, however, who dined at the White House.
¹⁰⁸

When news of an uprising in Paris arrived in New York on March 18, 1848, Americans learned that it had broken out—appropriately, they thought—on the twenty-second of February, George Washington’s Birthday. America’s sense of mission, of being an example to the world, appeared justified. New York’s penny press, which had celebrated manifest destiny, now sensationalized the tidings coming across the Atlantic. Within weeks, other revolutions broke out across much of Europe, promising to overthrow authoritarian regimes in the name of a variety of liberal, democratic, and ethnic-minority movements. “The finger of revolution points to us as its example, its cloud and pillar of fire!” crowed the
New York Sun
in vivid rhetoric typical of Jane Storm, the “mistress of manifest destiny,” who had returned from her secret mission in Mexico. “The great principles of popular sovereignty which were proclaimed in 1776 by the immortal author of our Declaration of Independence, seem now to be in the course of rapid development throughout the world,” President Polk wrote to his emissary in Paris.
¹

Like their president, most Americans assumed the United States did not need another revolution of its own. Margaret Fuller, foreign correspondent for the
New York Tribune
, drew analogies between Europe in 1848 and American political issues: “I find the cause of tyranny and wrong everywhere the same,” she reported. “I listen to the same arguments against the emancipation of Italy that are used against the emancipation of our blacks; the same arguments for the spoliation of Poland as for the conquest of Mexico.”
²
But only a perceptive minority of Americans saw things the way Fuller did. A “Great Demonstration” held in New York City during April typified the early, naive American enthusiasm for the European revolutions, celebrating German, French, and Italian uprisings with speeches and songs, often in the ancestral languages of the immigrants who participated.
³
Besides confirming liberal ideology and the ethnic loyalties of immigrant groups, the revolutions overseas also provided religious omens for many Americans. Some millennialists jumped to the conclusion that the outbreaks heralded the overthrow of the papacy and the ultimate divine vindication of the Protestant Reformation. A Presbyterian minister named Alexander McGill recalculated biblical prophecies of the final destruction of Antichrist and determined that 1848 would be the year. Not surprisingly, leading American Catholics expressed a sharply different perspective on events. The country’s most prominent Catholic lay theologian, Orestes Brownson, joined with New York’s Bishop John Hughes to condemn the European uprisings, distinguishing them from the rational and responsible American Revolution of 1776.
⁴
On the other hand, the most significant attempt by Americans to intervene in Europe involved Irish Americans and the abortive Irish rebellion of 1848. A “Young Ireland” movement in New York encouraged the expectation that the Continental revolutions would spread to Ireland. Those arrested after the failure of the attempted Irish uprising included several Irish Americans. The United States had to give the British an apology to secure the release of these citizens.
⁵

The two major American political parties diverged from each other in their response to the European revolutions. The Democrats’ party platform, adopted in May 1848, invoked their favorite principle, “the sovereignty of the people,” welcomed the erection of new republics “on the ruins of despotism in the Old World,” and tendered “fraternal congratulations to the National Convention of the Republic of France” in particular.
⁶
Such effusive rhetoric seemed like inexpensive appeals to the immigrant voters on whom the Democratic Party relied. The Whig Party regarded the revolutions with more ambivalence. On the one hand, humanitarian reformers and supporters of universal education, strong within the party, naturally sympathized with their counterparts in Europe; the Whig
New York Tribune
displayed this attitude. Nevertheless, the Whigs felt a strong attachment to legal order, and mob rule dismayed their middle-class constituency; the Washington
National Intelligencer
reflected this side of the Whig outlook.

The most conservative of American political factions, John C. Calhoun’s southern Democrats, expressed grave reservations about the European revolutions from the start. “France is not prepared to become a Republic,” Calhoun warned. Where others heard echoes of Jefferson’s Declaration in 1848, he could only see dangerous defiance of constituted authority: “neither more nor less than Dorrism”—a reference to the Rhode Island uprising to which Chief Justice Taney refused legal recognition in a case argued before the Supreme Court in 1848. The Second French Republic’s emancipation of the slaves in the French West Indies confirmed Calhoun’s suspicions. His
Disquisition on Government
(written 1846–49) reflected his revulsion at the European revolutions. When German liberals, probably unaware of Calhoun’s pessimism regarding their undertaking, asked his opinion on a draft constitution, the South Carolinian cautioned them to preserve state rights.
⁷

Apart from its republican sympathies and sense of mission, the United States had important commercial and financial ties to Europe. Americans participated prominently, as they had ever since the restoration of international peace in 1815, in the Atlantic market economy. American business interests in Europe tended to be quite different from American ideological inclinations. Slave-grown cotton constituted the leading U.S. export to Europe. Demand for American cotton plunged in the spring of 1848 when European buyers became uncertain of the availability of credit facilities during times of turmoil. Financial markets, like the cotton market, experienced a dip during the revolutions. The American investment banking firm of Corcoran & Riggs had already found difficulty selling in Europe the U.S. government bonds issued to finance the war against Mexico. When the European revolutions broke out, demand for American securities dried up altogether. Corcoran & Riggs managed to sell only $3 million worth of bonds out of a stock of $14 million that they had acquired for resale. Only a temporary postponement of the settlement date granted by the U.S. Treasury saved the firm from bankruptcy.
⁸

Before the year 1848 had run its course, however, authoritarian regimes crushed most of the European revolutions, and the promise of reform gave way to prolonged reaction. In France the moderate regime inaugurated by the February Revolution managed to survive a little longer, until the Empire of Napoleon III put an end to the short-lived Second Republic in 1851. As the authoritarian governments reasserted their control, business confidence returned and the demand for cotton soared. On November 5, 1849, the
New York Herald
aptly commented that although Americans could not condone the brutalities of either the revolutions or their subsequent suppression, “we can console ourselves with a rise in the cotton market, [creating] as great a sensation in Wall Street and in New Orleans as the recent revolutions did among speculators in the destiny of the human race.” Likewise, British and Continental financial markets rebounded as soon as the postrevolutionary reaction set in. Soon Corcoran & Riggs had no difficulty disposing of their American bonds, not only the Treasury notes but state and corporate obligations as well.
⁹
Whigs, always concerned for European investment in the United States, feared that the Democrats might meddle in the revolutions to cater to immigrant (especially German) voters. They need not have worried; the Democrats had enough stake in the cotton trade not to care to jeopardize it. The behavior of financial and commercial markets vindicated the decision of the United States to avoid involvement in the European revolutions and to confine expressions of sympathy to rhetoric. At least in the short run, the United States had a greater tangible stake in European stability than in European liberty.
¹⁰

Meanwhile, 1848 would transform America in ways more lasting than the transitory revolutions in Europe. By the treaty of that year ending the war against Mexico, the United States acquired an empire on the Pacific. Along with this vast domain came the people who lived in it, many of them Hispanic in culture and Catholic in religion. The discovery of gold in 1848 produced an influx of people into California from all over the world, from Asia and Latin America as well as Europe and the eastern United States. Simultaneously another group of Catholics, even larger and exerting a greater immediate impact, was arriving in the United States: the refugees from the Irish potato famine. The presence of these diverse peoples would complicate the ethnic relationships in American society and test its commitment to democracy for generations to come. The Catholics in particular initiated a profound and prolonged transformation of America from a generically Protestant society into a religiously pluralistic one. In all these ways, 1848 marked a pivotal year for the development of American history. In the immediate future, of course, the consequences of the Mexican War were precisely what Calhoun and the Whigs had foreseen: The North and South fell to quarreling over the spoils of war. Both major political parties and many religious denominations would divide, and within a dozen years the nation tore itself apart in a Civil War. The republic as known to Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun was irreversibly changed by the revolutionary developments of 1848.

II

On December 6, 1847, the Thirtieth Congress that President Polk dreaded finally met, with its House of Representatives narrowly dominated by an antiwar Whig majority. The president greeted the Congress with his Third Annual Message, a lengthy document that traversed once again the causes of the war and asserted that the Mexicans had “commenced the war,” “shedding the blood of our citizens upon our own soil.” To refute the Whig position that the United States should take no territory from the war, Polk argued that Mexico owed the United States an “indemnity,” not only for its prewar debts but also as partial compensation for the costs of having to wage the war Mexico had started, and that the only way Mexico could pay such an indemnity was in territory. Furthermore, the weakness of Mexico’s control over its northern provinces implied danger that if the United States did not take them over, some other power might do so. Thus the principle of the Monroe Doctrine, Polk claimed, dictated a substantial territorial transfer as part of any peace treaty.
¹¹

Polk’s Annual Message justified taking territory from Mexico as an indemnity for Mexican aggression. Whigs, who wanted No Territory, responded by questioning his assertion that Mexico had in fact started the war. They held but a precarious majority in the House of Representatives: 115 Whigs, 108 Democrats, 4 others. It took three ballots to elect as Speaker the moderate Whig Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts because two northern radical and three southern imperialist Whigs refused to support him.
¹²
Leadership in opposing the president’s rationale for the war and the territorial gains he wanted from it appeared in the unlikely person of a lanky congressman from Springfield, Illinois, named Abraham Lincoln. On December 22, having been in Washington only three weeks, Lincoln introduced a set of resolutions challenging Polk’s claim that the war began on U.S. soil. With the logical organization characteristic of him, this freshman representative ticked off his points: The “spot” where the armed clash took place had been an acknowledged part of New Spain and Mexico since the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, the local population recognized no allegiance to the United States and fled before Taylor’s approach, and the U.S. citizens whose blood the Mexicans shed were soldiers in an invading army. The House did not adopt Lincoln’s lucid “spot resolutions,” but on January 3 a party-line vote of 85 to 81 amended a resolution thanking General Taylor for his services with a statement that the war had been begun by President Polk “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally.”
¹³
(Of course, the Democrat-controlled Senate did not agree to the amendment.)

By other actions too, the House served notice on the president that he would find it difficult to prolong the war. It refused to pass the excise tax and land-sale measures that Polk hoped would raise some money to prosecute the war, and it never acted on his two requests for more troops. The House also authorized a lower ceiling on federal borrowing than he requested. On the other hand, a radical Whig motion to call off the war unilaterally and simply bring the troops home gained support from only about half the Whig membership and went down to defeat, 41 to 137. Meanwhile, the administration pursued its own policy: the exertion of pressure on Mexico to sign a treaty yielding substantial territory by occupying the capital and the ports, depriving the Mexican government of its tariff revenues. The occupying power collected the duties but confiscated the money and used it to offset the costs of occupation. Congress had not authorized the practice; the president simply ordered it in his capacity as commander in chief of the occupying army. So far about half a million dollars had been realized this way—less than hoped, because during wartime the Mexican people did not consume as many imported goods as usual. Daniel Webster called it sheer “pillage and plunder.” But making the occupation of Mexico pay for itself, at least in part, helped the administration fend off the argument that the recently lowered U.S. tariff should be raised again to generate more revenue.
¹⁴

The administration hinted broadly that the longer the Mexicans delayed signing an acceptable treaty, the more punitive their occupation would become and the stiffer the price in territory they would have to pay as indemnity. Indeed, Polk’s appetite for Mexican territory grew as time went on. By the fall of 1847, his ambitions included Baja California (invaded in July) and a right of transit to construct a canal across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
¹⁵
His envoy had already negotiated in 1846 such an agreement for the Isthmus of Panama with the government of New Grenada (today’s Colombia), which then owned Panama. As late as April 29, 1848, when peace with Mexico had been almost finalized, the president sent a special message to Congress advocating intervention in Yucatán. There the Mayans had rebelled against the white minority. Ostensibly Polk had in mind protecting the whites and forestalling any British interference, but Democrats hoped and Whigs feared that resumption of war and the annexation of Yucatán might be on the executive agenda. In the event, the Mexican government reestablished its control over Yucatán.
¹⁶