The Year of Decision 1846, page 29
Then word of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma arrived and, on the word of the Baltimore Patriot, speaking the words of a thousand other sheets, “Blood of the men of ’76 has not degenerated in our veins.” Lieutenant Grant meant these demonstrations that “every officer and every soldier behaved like a hero” when he made his remark about the stories in the newspapers. It was true, then, that the eagle’s children were irresistible, springing to arms from behind the stone walls of Concord Village, we were a nation of heroes, and “Look at the wounded! Look at the dead!” Farm boys and city clerks looked at them, from Maine to Florida, from Delaware to Missouri, and were off to the Halls of Montezuma.
The social militia put on their pink harem drawers and blue and scarlet swallowtails, eighteen-inch shakos, and epaulettes of Napoleon’s Guard — the Tigers, Grays, Rifles, Terrors, Hotspurs, and the like, metropolitan or Southern mostly. Flags went up in village squares and the volunteers came tumbling in. In Congress it was suddenly clear that the Academy at West Point, so lately a despotism undermining democracy, had vindicated itself on the Rio Grande. Everybody was putting it “above praise and above censure,” especially its graduates in engineering. In the House Representative Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, who looked like a statue of A. Lincoln done by Phidias, stood up to sing an aria about his alma mater. It got so bombastic that Mr. Sawyer rose to a point of privilege and reminded his colleagues that both Washington and Jackson had lacked the illumination of West Point training, but the orator swam on through swelling metaphors till he had found Jeff Davis in transfiguration. Then he resigned and was off to command the First Mississippi Rifles and, in exactly five days of action, to become the one military strategist whom Robert E. Lee was never able to defeat.
Even in New England the people were for this war, now it was here, and that made uncomfortable democracy’s loyal opposition in Congress. The Whigs, like the country, had drifted into war, making the most perfunctory opposition and caught in a cruel dilemma. Here was a Whig Congressman on the floor of the House, wearing a colonel’s uniform and shouting down his colleagues with a command which they knew their constituents would back up, that they vote the means of war. And “Mr. Webster told them how much the war cost,” Emerson’s journal remarked, “that was his protest, but voted the war [rather, the bill for volunteers and money], and sends his son to it [the son died in it].” That was both the easy and the immediate way out, for the most powerful of sentiments had been roused.… In 1861 one of the fourteen who voted against war in ’46 was in Congress again, after an enforced vacation in private life. Would he oppose war now, he was asked, in this greater crisis? No. He had voted against war once, he said, and had learned his lesson.
The Whigs had the bitter knowledge that most wars increase the power of the party that fights them. They cried out, taking the ground that the Executive had usurped the war-making prerogative of the Legislature. It was a poor abstraction to offer an exultant people, some of whose sons were now being listed as casualties. So perhaps it would be better to follow Webster’s lead: recognize the war, support it, and later blame the President. A. Lincoln took that stand, and it retired him from public life, even from politics, for six years. Then let us fight the war defensively, interpreting the defensive, if need be, as the right to chase the Mexicans all the way to their capital to prevent invasion, then later find out that the majority had deceived us. It was a time-serving, myopic policy, which offended even their supporters, who, though they were in no mood for analysis, were hardly to be seduced by legalities. The administration’s case, however, was on no higher intellectual level: in May we were making war to repel invasion, but by August we were making war to obtain indemnity for claims and injuries and to overthrow a government whose despotism menaced free institutions.
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By August, however, the aimless crosscurrents of pure emotion had subsided enough to permit certain elementary perceptions, and as this war, like all wars, was seen to be something other than its beginning had made out, realism began to take the place of evasion. It was a surprising realism. It exploded in Polk’s face and he felt that it was ominous. It was: far more ominous than he knew.
But meanwhile an exultant people had their glory, at little risk. They had drifted into war without understanding even their own assent, with a bland feeling that any war the Americans might want to fight was both an easy one to win and a righteous one in motive. They had doggedly evaded both its immediate and its collateral issues and had refused to look at its implications. But now the awareness that is the forerunner of realism began to disturb certain persons who would eventually find ways of making a nation look at facts it had refused to see and at necessary consequences.
Realism is the most painful, most difficult, and slowest of human faculties. Mr. Seward, who was some years short of discovering that there was a higher law than the statutes and that an irrepressible conflict was eroding the nation’s core, condemned the new war but was in favor “of plenty of men and supplies once it was started.” William Cullen Bryant found it “not practicable” to oppose the war, “though he detested its objects and tried to terminate it as soon as possible.” They and their kind lacked Ulysses Grant’s, and Ethan Allen Hitchcock’s, soldierly forthrightness — but there were those who didn’t. Something was beginning to get rearranged. A number who had loved the middle way, holding, they supposed, to the course of progress, were suddenly arm in arm with fanatics who, they had supposed, were impeding it. Men of goodwill who for a long time had been looking at a composite, a complex, of social irreconcilables were now beginning, a few of them, to understand what they saw. Human wills that had been divided by doctrine or theory found themselves blending. With eager or reluctant hearts they achieved understanding and hardened toward purpose.
Just last summer Charles Sumner had found a career by committing, on July 4, a windy oration on universal peace. There was wind enough now when he chanted “Blood! Blood! is on the hands of representatives from Boston. Not all great Neptune’s ocean can wash them clean” and “unquestionably the most wicked act in our history” — but even fastidious hearers got his point. Greeley’s language was clearer: “unjust and rapacious,” “a curse and a source of infinite calamities.” Thus virtue’s eternal tabernacles, but less neurotic integrities felt that something momentous and unworthy had come upon us. There was no one to describe the tides of the sun’s pull — no one to say that the nation was bent out of shape not only by unsolved conflicts within itself but also by the explosion of forces new to the earth. There was no one, even, to call Mr. Polk’s war the military phase of the Oregon trail. They could not, and no one blames them, dissect out causes. So, as they began to see effects they attributed them to personal devils no more credible than those which Polk was trying to exorcise. One of these was the slavery conspiracy: the idea that this war had been produced for the extension of slave territory. Speaking as Hosea Bigelow and speaking for a good many besides himself, James Russell Lowell was voicing this notion within a few weeks after Congress voted the war. He probably got it from Theodore Parker — and Parker, better able than most to define the effects he saw, was, like most, withheld from separating out their causes. He did not understand that the slavery crisis, which he now saw sharpening to a point, was one of the effects, had been produced by the tidal forces. Still, Parker could give effects a name.
It was a great speech that Mr. Parker made at the Melodeon on June 7, just five months after the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society of Boston, believing that the city was entitled to hear a man whom the churches feared, had installed him there as their minister.
I maintain that aggressive war is a sin; that it is a national infidelity, a denial of Christianity and of God.… Treason against the people, against mankind, against God, is a great sin, not lightly to be spoken of. The political authors of the war on this continent, and at this day, are either utterly incapable of a statesman’s work, or else guilty of that sin. Fools they are, or traitors they must be.… Considering how we acquired Louisiana, Florida, Oregon, I cannot forbear thinking that this people will possess the whole of this continent before many years, perhaps before the century ends.… Is it not better to acquire it by the schoolmaster than the cannon, by peddling cloth, tin, anything rather than bullets?… It would be a gain to mankind if we could spread over that country the Idea of America — that all men are born free and equal in rights, and establish there political, social, and individual freedom. But to do that we must first make real those ideas at home.…
When we annexed Texas we of course took her for better or worse, debts and all, and annexed her war along with her. I take it everybody knew that, though some now seem to pretend a decent astonishment at the result. Now one party is ready to fight for it as the other.… The eyes of the North are full of cotton; they see nothing else, for a web is before them; their ears are full of cotton and they hear nothing but the buzz of their mills; their mouth is full of cotton and they can speak audibly but two words — Tariff, Tariff, Dividends, Dividends.… Now the Government and its Congress would throw the blame on the innocent and say war exists “by the act of Mexico!” If a lie was ever told, I think this is one. Then the “dear people” must be called on for money and men, for “the soil of this free republic is invaded,” and the Governor of Massachusetts, one of the men who declared the annexation of Texas unconstitutional, recommends the war he just now told us to pray against, and appeals to our “patriotism” and “humanity” as arguments for butchering the Mexicans, when they are in the right and we in the wrong!… I am not at all astonished that northern representatives voted for all this work of crime. They are no better than southern representatives, scarcely less in favor of slavery and not half so open. They say: Let the North make money and you may do what you please with the nation … for though we are descended from the Puritans we have but one article in our creed we never flinch from following, and that is — to make money, honestly if we can, if not, as we can!… How tamely the people yield their necks — and say “Take our sons for the war — we care not, right or wrong.”…
Focusing Theodore Parker’s intelligence on some effects, the Americans thus clearly observed a relationship among them. Emerson confirmed Parker: “Cotton thread holds the union together; unites John C. Calhoun and Abbott Lawrence. Patriotism for holidays and summer evenings, with music and rockets, but cotton thread is the Union.” The seer found that fact leading to a conclusion he had reached by many avenues before: “Boston or Brattle Street Christianity is a compound of force, or the best Diagonal line that can be drawn between Jesus Christ and Abbott Lawrence.” The cold judgment seemed infertile, useless, and Emerson’s mind restlessly probed the relationships he had perceived. He had to feel, for sight would help him no farther. The Marcys, Buchanans, Walkers — the President’s Cabinet — they were village attorneys, saucy village talents, not great captains. America seemed to have immense resources, land, men, milk, butter, cheese, timber, and iron, but was still a village littleness. Village squabble and rapacity characterized its policy.… Here, quite suddenly, the antennae of that restless mind, whipping the dark, touched something solid. “It is,” he said, “a great strength on the basis of weakness.” There, for a time, he stood.
His friend Henry would stroll in from the Walden cabin, these summer evenings, walking eastward against his needle’s natural set, and they would talk in Emerson’s garden while the light died on Revolutionary Ridge and Mr. Alcott’s elms. The earth’s longest diameter stretched between this green bottomland with its white houses and the chaparral of Resaca de la Palma, but the ether between was a continuum, the two Yankees were ligatured to Zachary Taylor’s dead.… The state, the government that was the “unscrupulous and energetic” Polk’s instrument — yes, what about the state? Emerson was not sure. The state was “a poor, good beast who means the best: it means friendly. A poor cow who does well by you — do not grudge it its hay. It cannot eat bread, as you can; let it have without grudge a little grass for its four stomachs. You, who are a man walking cleanly on two feet, will not pick a quarrel with a poor cow. Take this handful of clover and welcome. But if you go to hook me when I walk in the fields, then, poor cow, I will cut your throat.” So the elder friend counseled Henry Thoreau. For we do not impeach Polk and Webster but supersede them by the Muse. To know the virtue of the soil, we do not taste the loam, but we eat the berries and apples.
Precisely. Loneliness in the resinous, still air of Emerson’s pinewoods on the Walden shore had sharpened Henry’s perception beyond his counselor’s. Precisely there the point stood out. It was not the loam these two had been tasting but the proof, the berries and apples that sprang from it — and Henry’s teeth were set on edge. He was of the opinion that the poor good cow had gone to hook Henry Thoreau when he was walking in the fields.
In the Presidency of Polk, Henry watched a war between red ants and black ones on the sandy ground upward from Walden water. He picked up a chip on which three ants were fighting to the death, took it in a cabin and put it under a tumbler, watched it through a reading glass, and “the dark carbuncles of the sufferer’s eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite.” At the end he had seen “the ferocity and carnage of a human battle before my door.” It must be thought about in the forest silence.… Hoeing the beanfield back of his cabin, he could look up from labor and see the small imps of the air laying their eggs, hawks soaring on motionless wings, spotted salamanders coming out of stumps, or wild pigeons going by “with a slight, quivering, winnowing sound.” And sometimes borne to his beanfield on the summer air other sounds came up from the far end of town, faintly as if a puff ball had burst or as if somebody’s bees had swarmed and the neighbors were beating on the most sonorous of their domestic utensils to call them down into the hive. Hoeing his beans, Henry knew that on July Fourth the village of Concord had fired its big guns to celebrate the birth of Liberty, and that on another day its militia had mustered — for war on Mexico. “I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping.” Sometimes there was music. “It was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and I felt that I could spit a Mexican with a good relish — for why should we always stand for trifles? — and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon.”
That savage and noble sneer moves on the momentum of the new realism that was beginning to well up here and there in America. What is momentous in it is not only the realism but the intensity. For it was a long while since anyone but fanatics had so passionately desired to renew the definition of human freedom. What, Henry wondered, what is the price current of an honest man and patriot today? The rich man, he saw, is always sold to the institution which made him rich. There was talk of the Spirit of ’76: a relevant subject, and just what was that Spirit? Was it the citizen who fell asleep after reading “the prices current along with the latest advices from Mexico”? If not, just what and where? And, pointedly, what was its duty to that poor good beast whom Waldo called a cow? Good? no; poor? yes. Or poor but less a beast than a machine — a machine, he was constrained to think, which organized oppression and robbery. It had not “the vitality and force of a single living man.” He pressed the image farther, into a clear, unmistakable perspective — and was beginning to move from effect to cause: “it is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves: and, if ever they should use it in earnest as a real one against each other, it will surely split.” … Omen of Biela’s comet.
In those noon woods and beside those midnight waters, hour by hour of patient thought slowly pulled Henry Thoreau nearer causes. And nearer decision. This poor good cow, this wooden gun, this government, “It does not [will not] keep the country free. It does not settle the West.… The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done something more if the government had not sometimes got in its way.” And its abettors were not far off, “not a hundred thousand politicians at the South but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may.” Suddenly he was over the edge: to him personally came the realization that “you must squat here or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon.” It was up to Henry Thoreau: the cow had hooked him while he was walking in the fields. “When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be a refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by [our] foreign army and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”2
