The Year of Decision 1846, page 19
Mr. Calhoun was trying to find leverage in Polk’s proposal for a secret fund to buy a treaty from Mexico. He blew hot and cold and persisted in mentioning it inadvertently when he called to suggest that the way out of the Oregon impasse was to have the foreign ambassadors propose a negotiation — which was suggesting that Polk admit defeat. The Whigs liked the tactics that circumstances had imposed on them; they would not dissent from Termination, which the country obviously wanted, but, to make sure of their position if it should beget trouble, they would put the entire responsibility for it on the President. Enough Democrats had factional axes to grind to help out, and as the debates reached climax, that was the shape it began to take.
The House resolution instructed the President to “cause notice to be given” to Great Britain. The Senate resolution advised negotiation in its preamble and declared merely that the President was “authorized at his discretion” to give the notice — a much weaker platform for him to dive from. The Senate resolution was passed first, on April 16, and went to the House for concurrence. The House amended it so that the vital clause read that the President was “authorized and directed,” and here for an anxious moment the whole thing seemed likely to stall. The first objective of the administration was imperiled for, Polk believed, the Senate was so divided on factional cleavage lines that it would, if given a chance, gladly let the resolution perish. His journal filled with intense, precise resentments, he hurried out the party chiefs in both Houses, sent his Cabinet cracking down, and labored with his own full strength. He yielded to the inevitable and let the Senate throw out the word “directed,” thus losing his last chance to present Termination as the united will of the country, and there he dug his heels in. His all-out effort succeeded. The House accepted the Senate’s modification and on April 23 the resolution “to abrogate the convention of 1827” passed both Houses. Polk signed it the next day, the notice of termination had already been prepared, and on April 28 Polk sealed it with the Great Seal of the United States and sent it by special packet to the sovereign of Great Britain. Joint Occupation of Oregon was over and Mr. Calhoun, the Whigs, and whoever might be interested, would now see who was bluffing.
It was a great victory. The President had put through the first of his measures, and he was confident that it would do the job, that Great Britain was the party running a bluff. The administration felt very good indeed but its exhilaration was premature. For though the hidden realities had not come to the surface during the Oregon debate they were on their way up, the inner tensions had been increased and half revealed, the opposition had found a tactic, and pressures were rising that must soon explode. He had won handsomely but he had almost lost, his party was breaking up and the wind was rising. One trouble with decisions is that they necessitate other decisions.
But, his Oregon position carried and the “Brittish” notified, he could turn to Mexico with a tranquil and cunning mind. We see him on April 30 amazed and touched by a delegation from the new school for the blind, twenty or thirty exhibiting their pitiful accomplishment, one “a female named Bridgman who had been taught by signs with the hands and fingers to understand and communicate ideas and to write.” Polk’s victorious month ended with that curiously symbolical note but it was five days earlier, on the twenty-fifth, three days before he dispatched the joint resolution, that it reached its climax. On April 25, after telling the Cabinet that the notice would go to Victoria in person on May 1, he announced that it was time to deal with Mexico. We must treat all nations alike, great or small, Great Britain had the gauntlet now and here was Mexico: Mr. Polk favored “a bold and firm course.” The Cabinet understood and the Secretary of State spoke the right phrase: the President should recommend a declaration of war. “The other members of the Cabinet did not dissent, but concurred in the opinion that a message to Congress should be prepared and submitted to them in the course of the next week.” Very well. The President would outline the points to be presented, and Mr. Buchanan would please collect the materials and sketch out a message.
That was April 25. On the same day the fuse that was burning at the Rio Grande reached powder.
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7th. Apr. General Taylor made me a long visit this a.m. He told me General Worth is to leave here tomorrow. He added that, on tendering his resignation, General Worth had asked a leave of absence as soon as his services “could be dispensed with,” but he determined to relieve Worth at once. So Worth leaves us while the very atmosphere is animated with rumors of attacks upon us, and he had just obtained from a spy of his own the most distinct threats from the other side of the river. I cannot help asking myself what would have been thought of the patriotism of a revolutionary officer who had abandoned his post in the presence of the enemy on an alleged grievance which, in the opinion of almost everybody, is without any proper or defensible foundation.
Colonel Hitchcock, who was confined to his tent, thus interrupted his notes on Swedenborg to criticize Brevet Brigadier General William Jenkins Worth, veteran of Chippewa, Niagara, and Lundy’s Lane, conqueror of the Seminoles, and victim of Marcy’s order which had reversed Scott’s ruling and given the line priority over brevet rank. Worth’s long quarrel with Twiggs was thus settled unfavorably, and he now went home in almost Aztec splendor. He would be back again before long, making more trouble. He was an excellent commander in battle and did some of the best fighting of the war, but he suffered from ego, malice, and purple prose. He sowed letters broadcast, explaining the jealousy of his successive commanders, and at last Scott had to order him, at the war’s end, into well-merited arrest — and so gave Polk an opening and produced one more unhappy turbulence in the military biography of Winfield Scott.
Taylor had crudely fortified Point Isabel, at the mouth of the river, but the bulk of his force was in the vicinity of Fort Brown, a set of textbook field works which he had built opposite Matamoros, on a site no textbook would have approved. Hitchcock calls it a cul-de-sac, it commanded nothing but a stretch of river, it was open to enfilade from three sides, and any competent enemy could have pinched it off from the rear. All that prevented its capture now and hereafter was a Mexican incompetence as resplendent as Taylor’s own. Hitchcock was too feeble from disease to undertake the security of an army but wrote gloomily that if Taylor were to succeed it must be by accident. Taylor had not yet received the young engineers who had learned an alphabet at West Point and were eventually to save him at the extremity. Worth and Twiggs, who had some mental life, were too busy fighting over rank to take thought of war, but it is hard to see why Bliss did not do something about the camp site.
It gratified Taylor, however, and he sat down to his principal enjoyment, letter writing. He shared that taste with all our other generals (Kearny is the exception), and if the campaigns of this war were inactive for long stretches, there was never a pause in the correspondence. It had two departments. One stream of letters flowed back home, to Congressmen and newspaper editors, impugning the motives and competence of all rivals and superiors and presently giving Polk, no small-time resenter himself, one of the most serious problems of the war. The other stream inundated the enemy with addresses, proclamations, and manifestoes, and drew from them an equally resounding counter-barrage. Neither side really won, but it is only simple justice to say that Taylor’s proclamations were no sillier than those his opponents published.
The enemy won some points at the very beginning. On both of the two days preceding his remarks about Worth, Hitchcock notes that American deserters had been shot while crossing the Rio Grande. Probably they were just bored with army rations but there was some thought that they might be responding to a proclamation of General Ampudia’s which spies had been able to circulate in camp. Noting the number of Irish, French, and Polish immigrants in the American force, Ampudia had summoned them to assert a common Catholicism, come across the river, cease “to defend a robbery and usurpation which, be assured, the civilized nations of Europe look upon with the utmost indignation,” and settle down on a generous land bounty. Some of them did so, and the St. Patrick Battalion of American deserters was eventually formed, fought splendidly throughout the war, and was decimated in the campaign for Mexico City — after which its survivors were executed in daily batches.… This earliest shooting of deserters as they swam the Rio Grande, an unwelcome reminder that war has ugly aspects, at once produced an agitation. As soon as word of it reached Washington, the National Intelligencer led the Whig press into a sustained howl about tyranny. In the House J. Q. Adams rose to resolve the court-martial of every officer or soldier who should order the killing of a soldier without trial and an inquiry into the reasons for desertion. He was voted down but thereafter there were deserters in every Whig speech on the conduct of the war, and Calm Observer wrote to all party papers that such brutality would make discipline impossible. But a struggling magazine which had been founded the previous September in the interest of sports got on a sound financial footing at last. The National Police Gazette began to publish lists of deserters from the army, and the War Department bought up big editions to distribute among the troops.
Taylor sat in his field works writing prose. Ampudia’s patrols reconnoitered the camp and occasionally perpetrated an annoyance. Taylor badly needed the Texas Rangers, a mobile force formed for frontier service in the Texas War of Independence and celebrated ever since. It was not yet available to him, however, and he was content to send out a few scouts now and then. So Colonel Truman Cross, the assistant quartermaster general, did not return from one of his daily rides. He was still absent twelve days later, and Lieutenant Porter, who went looking for him with ten men, ran into some Mexican foragers and got killed.
Meanwhile another proclamation from Ampudia was brought to camp and Taylor found himself under twenty-four hours’ notice to take his army back to the Nueces. He elegantly replied that “the instructions under which I am acting will not permit me to retrograde from the position I now occupy.” Nothing happened, and on April 19 it occurred to him to have the brig Lawrence and the revenue cutter St. Anna close the mouth of the Rio Grande to Mexican supplies. This was a blockade, as Ampudia instantly designated it in a moving protest which ended “God and Liberty!” but Taylor saw it, like all his earlier steps, as “a simple defensive precaution.”
Paredes, however, looked on it as king’s pawn to king’s fourth. Two days before Polk’s Cabinet discussion, he announced that the United States had begun hostilities — remarking also that American troops were threatening Monterey (news of the Gavilán tableau thus acknowledged) — and ordered the defense of Mexican territory to begin. That was April 23. The next day General Arista, who had reached Matamoros and outranked Ampudia, crossed the Rio Grande to catch Taylor between two forces. He also sent Taylor a private letter full of the courtliest expressions.
That day at the American camp they were burying Colonel Cross, whose body had at last been found. The ceremonial volleys clattered over the river, and by nightfall there were rumors that the enemy was coming. The next morning, April 25, the rumors persisted and Taylor sent out Captain Thornton with some sixty dragoons to see what they were all about. (The second in command was that Hardee who would later write a treatise on cavalry tactics.) Thornton rode up the river some twenty-five miles and was told by a native that General Anastasio Torrejon with his command was near by. Knowing the Mexicans to be liars, Thornton determined to verify the information at the first rancho. He led his horsemen into a chaparral-walled inclosure, knocked courteously at the door — and the better part of Torrejon’s sixteen hundred cavalry opened fire on him. Thornton was wounded and Hardee charged to the riverbank, where he surrendered. Sixteen dragoons were killed or wounded, the rest were prisoners of war, and, as Taylor wrote to Polk, hostilities had begun.
On the day before, Frémont had started north from Lassen’s and Gillespie, posting after him, had reached Yerba Buena. On the day of Thornton’s capture Polk told the Cabinet he must lay the Mexican affair before Congress, Buchanan agreed to draft a war message, and the President summarized in a thousand words a talk he had had with Allen of Ohio about a rumored intrigue to restore Francis Preston Blair, who did not admire him, to the editorship of the administration newspaper. At the foot of the Sierra Jim Clyman and Hastings decided to wait a few days before “we attact the region of all most Eternal snow and ice.” Francis Parkman was at St. Louis, waiting for the Radnor, Edwin Bryant was ahead of him, six days short of Independence, and the Donners, the Breens, Lillburn Boggs, Jessy Quinn Thornton, and Owl Russell were moving across Missouri. Lieutenant Colonel Hitchcock, invalided home, had reached New Orleans, bought passage on the steamer Louisiana, and begun to read a manuscript translation of Spinoza’s Tractatus.
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Polk had lost the mid-term elections and the House was Whig when, on December 22, 1847, the gangling Representative from the Seventh District of Illinois stood up at his desk, number 191, in the back row, to move eight resolutions which called on the President to inform the Congress about the first hostilities. They were more than a shade canny but had some points to make, and the fifth of them asked “Whether the people of that settlement [where Thornton was attacked], or a majority of them, or any of them, have ever submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas or of the United States, by consent or by compulsion, either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying tax, or serving on juries, or having process served on them, or in any other way.”4 And on the twelfth of the following month A. Lincoln stood up again to explain his now tabled resolutions and to give the President what-for. It was quite a speech, and — with the rest of his war record — it retired Lincoln to private life. In the course of it he again called on Polk to locate the first bloodshed geographically. If Polk, Lincoln said, “can show that the soil was ours where the first blood of the war was shed — that it was not within an inhabited country, or if within such, that the inhabitants had submitted themselves to the civil authority of Texas or of the United States, and that the same is true of Fort Brown — then I am with him for his justification.”
He was gratuitously offending the Seventh District, which by then had lost some sons in war, and he might have been content to stand on his party’s record. For nine days before, on January 3, 1848, by a strict party vote and a majority of one, the House of Representatives had adopted another resolution, by George Ashmun of Massachusetts, which formally decided that war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.”
INTERLUDE
Doo-Dah Day
ON April 27, ’46, the Virginia Minstrels of Edwin P. Christy played in New York for the first time, at Palmo’s Opera House. The date will do as well as any to fix a fact: that American drama had matured its first native form. For at least four years now such companies as Christy’s, or the Kentucky Minstrels, the Congo Melodists, White’s Serenaders, the Sable Harmonizers, Campbell’s Minstrels, with such artists as Daddy Rice, Dan Emmett, Cool White, Master Juba, Dan Bryant, had been appearing in the full-length, standardized variety performance in blackface known as the minstrel show. It was already universally popular and its popularity was to increase for nearly a half century and to decline only slightly before the twentieth century was well along.
The minstrel show was a species of vaudeville, a succession of gags, dances, and songs, interspersed with acrobatics, dramatic sketches, and what are now known as blackouts. It rested solidly on the awesome convention of the stage Negro and developed out of a full quarter century’s elaboration of that caricature. Already such songs as “Jump Jim Crow,” “Ol’ Dan Tucker,” and “Such a Gittin’ Upstairs,” from that convention, had impressed themselves permanently on the national memory. They in turn had come — a rather long way — out of the genuine singing of uncaricatured Negroes, who also contributed to democracy’s new art form a rich variety of dances and songs — levee songs, work songs, jubilees1 — all of them turned to caricature by the minstrels. But many other kinds of music went into this flowering. “The Sacred Harp,” just now being printed for the first time, contributed its characteristic melodies and harmonies. The kind of fiddling called folk music, such as foxhunting keens, “The Arkansas Traveler,” and “Frog Went a-Courting,” was incorporated, and any tune detective can untangle innumerable airs from the balladry which we still know in “Springfield Mountain,” “Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane,” “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” “Weevily Wheat,” “Rosin the Bow,” and a thousand others. Moreover the lush pathos from England, where the Queen’s taste was refining sentiment, was breaking over us in a great wave at this very hour, and, joined to the music of acrobatic trills and cadenzas typified by Ole Bull, found welcome and transposition on the minstrel stage. The world’s most musical people had a sudden focus for their music.2
A Tin Pan Alley had arisen to give the minstrels songs, and the best of the songsmiths was only two years away from the beginning of his service to Christy and the others. In March of ’46 a twenty-year-old Pittsburgh youth failed of appointment to West Point, and so at the end of the year he went to keep books in his brother’s commission house at Cincinnati. He took with him the manuscripts of three songs, all apparently written in this year, all compact of the minstrel-nigger tradition. One celebrates a lubly cullud gal, Lou’siana Belle. In another an old nigger has no wool on the top of his head in the place whar de wool ought to grow, and you heard your grandfather, as your children’s grandchildren will hear theirs, telling the chorus to lay down de shubble and de hoe for poor old Ned has gone whar de good niggers go. And in the third American pioneering was to find its leitmotif for all time: it was “Oh Susanna!”
