Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (icecream ebook reader txt) 📗

South had been anxious to resolve the question then, because in 1820 most of the old Louisiana Purchase looked like it was going to fall into the hands of free-state settlers. Now, in 1848, the Mexican War had brought the United States the other half of the far West—the southern half, running in a clear straight line from Louisiana to the southern California coast—and this time it appeared that these new territories would surely develop into slave states. In fact, there was no reason to assume that the United States might not want to keep pecking away at Mexico, or at the Spanish-held island of Cuba or even Central America, and obtain still more territory, which would obviously come under the wing of the old slave states. Robert Toombs of Georgia boldly warned Congress, “in the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people… thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half the states of this Confederacy, I am for disunion.”11

What Toombs did not reckon with was the feeling of many Americans that the Mexican War had been something less than a source of national pride. In Congress, Southern Whigs such as Alexander Stephens of Georgia repeatedly assailed Polk’s war as “an aspersion and reproach.”

The principle of waging war against a neighboring people to compel them to sell their country, is not only dishonorable, but disgraceful and infamous. What, shall it be said that American honor aims at nothing higher than land—than the ground on which we tread?… I have heard of nations whose honor could be satisfied with gold—that glittering dust, which is so precious in the eyes, of some—but never did I expect to live to see the day when the Executive of this country should announce that our honor was such a loathsome, beastly thing, that it could not be satisfied with any achievements in arms, however brilliant and glorious, but must feed on earth—gross, vile, dirt!—and require even a prostrate foe to be robbed of mountain rocks and desert plains!12

Even in the army, young lieutenants out of West Point such as Ulysses Simpson Grant acknowledged that “the Mexican War was a political war,” and nearly 7,000 American soldiers (of the 115,000 mustered into service) actually deserted.13

The most unpopular aspect of the war was the realization that slavery stood to gain a political windfall from it. To the disappointment of Northerners, Polk had negotiated a fairly timid treaty with Great Britain, which surrendered most of the bolder American claims to northern territory and put what amounted to a geographical cap on northern expansion; but Polk had grabbed nearly 1.5 million square miles of Mexican territory to the south, with no certainty that slaveholders might not go on from there to destabilize other Latin American republics, transplant slavery there, and claim them for admission to the Union. As it was, the size of just the newly acquired western lands offered enough material to create so many new states below the 36°30′ line that slaveholders might at last acquire a decisive numerical advantage in the Senate, if not the House as well. With that prospect before him, Frederick Douglass denounced the war as “this slaveholding crusade” from which “no one expects any thing honorable or decent… touching human rights.” Lieutenant Grant could hardly avoid the conclusion that everything from the Texas annexation onward had been “a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.” John Pendleton Kennedy, an angry Whig who had lost his congressional seat over the Texas annexation, was convinced that “at the bottom of this scheme” was “an ultimate purpose to form a new Confederacy, of which it shall be a prominent feature that no free State shall come into the League.”14

As early as August 1846, four basic political agendas took shape for dealing with the Mexican Cession (the territory in the far West surrendered by Mexico). The first of these was proposed on August 8, 1846, when President Polk, admitting publicly for the first time that “a cession of territory” by Mexico was a possible result of the war, asked the House to approve $2 million in negotiating funds. A first-term Democratic representative from Pennsylvania named David Wilmot rose to move an amendment to the appropriations bill that added a deadly proviso: “As an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico… neither slavery not involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime.”15

The Wilmot Proviso was, like the Tallmadge Amendment in 1819, a paraphrase of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, whose sweeping ban against slavery Wilmot now wanted applied to the southwestern territories of the Mexican Cession. More than just a frank declaration against slavery, it was an even franker assertion that Congress (based on Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution) had the authority to make judgments about the future of the territories. Just as in 1820 with the Tallmadge Amendment, Congress quickly fractured along sectional rather than party lines. The Northern Whigs and all but four Northern Democrats in the House overrode Southern votes in the House and sent the appropriations bill with its lethal proviso to the Senate, where Polk and the Southern Democrats killed it.

Polk was particularly mortified by the Wilmot Proviso, since the blow had come from a member of his own party. “If the Wilmot Proviso was engrafted on the appropriation or any other Bill and was made to apply to any portion of the acquired territory lying South of 36°30′, the Missouri compromise line,” Polk promised, “I would certainly veto it, be the consequences what they might.”16 As it was, the administration had its own plan ready to launch: extend the Missouri Compromise line all the way through the Mexican Cession. This does not seem like a particularly imaginative proposition,