The Year of Decision 1846, page 66
Outside the capital, Scott again tried to negotiate a peace. (Neither he nor Trist knew it but both of them had by now been discredited at Washington. Malice, lies, politics, and bad communications had convinced Polk, who was longing to be convinced, that they were both out of sympathy with him, which made them traitors.) The negotiations broke down, for Santa Anna did not dare risk the domestic consequences of acknowledging the military situation, and after two weeks Scott terminated the armistice and prepared to attack the city. He first stormed a group of buildings known as El Molino del Rey, part of the fortifications based on Chapultapec. His information — which proved false — was that cannon for the defense of the city were being cast there. The action of September 8 was intense and the victory cost the Americans heavily, far more than it should have done if Worth, who was in charge, had learned the lessons in artillery which the whole war had been teaching. Five days later came the decisive battle, which has been known ever since as Chapultapec.
In proceeding against Mexico City, Scott had two alternatives. He could storm the heavily defended stone causeways that led to the city from the south across swamps, or he could storm a causeway that led from the west. This last was more lightly held but was much stronger naturally in that its defense could be based on the high hill known as Chapultapec. For once the reconnoissance and advice of Robert E. Lee were disregarded, in favor of a dissenting opinion by Pierre Beauregard, and Scott chose to attack Chapultapec. The hill was crowned by an immense stone palace, once the summer residence of the viceroys of Spain, now occupied by the Mexican Military College. Throughout September 12 Scott battered it with his heaviest guns. The cannonade accomplished little and the next day, September 13, assault groups from Worth’s and Twigg’s divisions of regulars set out to storm it. They clawed and shot their way up the almost vertical slope through a terrible musketry fire, climbed the palace walls with scaling ladders, and, after a savage bayonet action, drove the defenders out. (Among the Mexican troops were the young cadets of the Military College. Santa Anna had ordered them relieved but they would not go. Their stand richly deserved the monuments that commemorate it at Chapultapec.) The capture of the fortress opened the way to the city. Worth — Scott hoped to mollify his innumerable grievances by letting him finish the job — worked his way down one causeway. It was bitterly defended, Santa Anna commanding in person, but Worth got a little way into the city before digging in for the night. So did Quitman, down another causeway which was defended just as stubbornly. At daybreak of the fourteenth Quitman pushed on to the center of the city while Scott, Worth, and Hitchcock were talking to civilians who wanted to surrender on terms. There in the Plaza de Armas, at seven A.M., he raised the first American flag that ever flew above the capital of a conquered nation.
The five months’ campaign from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, with its six bloody victories, was a tremendous feat of arms. Between George Washington and the maturity of two subalterns who watched Scott enter the national palace two hours after Quitman raised the flag, there was no American general who could have come anywhere near doing it. It remains a classic of generalship succeeding against all but impossible odds. Also it gave Mr. Polk his desire: it put an end to opposition in Mexico.
That ending came on September 14, 1847. On February 2, 1848, Nicholas Trist, deprived of power to make a treaty and ordered home in disgrace, nevertheless memorably served his country by signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. On February 18, Scott — who for five months had kept an idle and increasingly rebellious army in check and had smoothly governed Mexico — received orders relieving him of command and summoning him also home in disgrace. Worth and Pillow had collaborated in a job. Mr. Polk was arranging to keep the conqueror of Mexico from heading the Whig ticket this summer. He was preparing to turn a court of inquiry, which had been convened to investigate the lying of Gideon Pillow, into a public repudiation of Winfield Scott.
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Through all this time the United States had been unable to provide a government for Oregon, which went on sustaining the unattached organization, like the free state of Franklin, which it had developed between 1843 and 1845. The United States had also been unable to provide governments for New Mexico and California, where the military organizations established by Kearny went on operating, or for Deseret, where Brigham Young was in no hurry for an exterior government.
The treaty of peace which the discredited Trist signed at Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, was ratified by the Senate on March 10. It was ratified in desperation, because the war had to be ended so that more serious business could, at last, be faced. The treaty confirmed the American possession of Texas, of California as it is today, and of New Mexico to the Gila River and down that river to the Colorado. (This last was ambiguous and unsatisfactory. The ambiguity was cleared up and the cession extended to include all of Cooke’s wagon road and a route for a Pacific railway by the Gadsden Purchase of 1854.) So the West of Mr. Polk’s original intention became American by treaty and was declared to be worth fifteen million dollars, here guaranteed to Mexico, above the costs of war and the assumption of the American claims.
And still there was no government for Oregon, New Mexico, California, and Deseret — for the West. Oregon was finally given Territorial status in August, 1848, and the first governor arrived there three years after Termination. New Mexico continued under military government till the great Compromise permitted it organization as a Territory in September, 1850. The same measure pared down Deseret from Brigham’s claims, renamed it Utah, and gave it Territorial status. California never was a Territory. The military organization established by Kearny had to govern it till the same Compromise made it a state of the Union.
The three preceding paragraphs record a beginning.
This narrative has remarked that a decisive turn was rounded at some time between August and December, 1846. On August 10, the First Session of the Twenty-ninth Congress adjourned while Senator Davis was discussing a measure, which had originated in the House and bore the name of David Wilmot, to exclude slavery from the territory to be acquired from Mexico. Senator Calhoun of South Carolina said that the first volume of our political history under the Constitution had been closed and the second opened, that a curtain had been dropped between the present and the future which was to him impenetrable. Prescience woke in the nerves of William Lowndes Yancey, however; he resigned his seat in the House and went back to Alabama; in the second volume of our political history he could predict no future under the Constitution for the Southern states. Likewise, when the Second Session of the Twenty-ninth Congress convened in December, John C. Calhoun was able to penetrate the impenetrable curtain for at least a little way. He was the last survivor of the first period of the Southern politician, and Yancey’s resignation is the signal that the third period of that politician was taking charge. The survivor of a period when there were clearer and more powerful minds, aware that the thing had happened in the intervening months, aware that a curtain had not been lowered but that at last a curtain had been raised — John C. Calhoun thought he saw one way of saving the United States. It was a tolerably desperate way: the United States must enter again into the womb and be born a second time. Since the summer solstice of 1788 when by a vote of 57 to 46 the New Hampshire convention brought the number of states ratifying the new Constitution to the nine necessary for adoption — from that June day on, the whole course of the United States had been wrong. In the opinion of Calhoun, we must go back to the preceding September, reconvene the Constitutional Convention that then adjourned sine die, and start all over.
“The United States will conquer Mexico,” Ralph Waldo Emerson had said, “but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”
The Second Session of the Twenty-ninth Congress convened in chaos and so accurately reflected the nation which, according to the provisions of the Constitution, it was to govern. That chaos was the reason why the United States could provide no government for Oregon till 1849 and none for New Mexico, Deseret, and California till 1850. When what is called the Compromise of 1850 was finally voted in Congress chaos had not been in the least resolved but a channel had been established which would contain it for just ten years.
Already in December of ’46 Congress, exactly tuned to the vibrations of its electorate, was more turbulent than any Congress before it had been. Seen against that turbulence, the human figures that expressed it do not matter much, and at this distance the patterns they wove, the passions that dominated them, the ideas and expedients and guesses and experiments and evasions they worked with are less than the overmastering fact itself. We need waste no effort in trying to determine whether war with Mexico was just or unrighteous. Even the long shadow which the war cast to the southward, a shadow which is only beginning to be dissipated after ninety-six years, is not within our purpose. The fact of the Mexican War is infinitely smaller to us than the fact, the complex of facts, which now had to be faced by the Congress and the people of the United States. And the facing of those facts is the basis of some other book than this one, which has endeavored to lead up to them and may now end with the statement that the West had been won.
Bill Bowen in Oregon could not be given citizenship, he could not even be protected from the Indians who on November 29, 1847, massacred Dr. Whitman and his missionaries — till it had been determined whether some abstractions called the Ordinance of 1787 and the line of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 ought to be effected on humble farmsteads along the Willamette River. There could be no Negro slavery in Oregon, and there could be none in New Mexico, Deseret, or California. But Bill Bowens of those territories could not be citizens till it had been decided whether or not boys who had died at Monterrey and Cerro Gordo had died to extend the political theory of a low-energy, gang-labor economy which was already altogether obsolete. Can Congress deprive any state of its right in any Territory? Can Congress forbid any citizen to take his property anywhere? Who shall decide whether California, Oregon, and New Mexico shall be free or slave? Who has the authority to decide? Who can constitute a Territory? Who shall make its laws? Can the citizens of a Territory exclude slavery? Can Congress exclude it from a Territory? Can Congress exclude it anywhere? Can any people exclude it anywhere?
In Oregon, California, New Mexico, and Deseret they broke the ground with plows. They tore out the sagebrush by the roots, felled the trees, brought water to the parched earth, bred their cattle, gathered honey, grafted slips on orchard trees, built wharves, set up water wheels, ground wheat and sawed timber. They built houses, sent the kids to school, gathered on Sunday to thank God for having brought them safe to a new land, and taxed themselves to prevent the curse of an illiterate ministry and to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity. But to the eastward, breaking through increasingly ineffective subterfuges, fighting the whole thing out on an unreal question, the United States at last was facing the paradox and quandary at its core. The West had made the United States a continental nation. But the continental nation was under the necessity of resolving its basic contradiction.
The theorem of squatter sovereignty, the theorem of Dred Scott — both announced before 1847 ran out. Resolutions from nine states that all territory added to the area of the United States shall be henceforth and forever free. Resolution by the legislative body of Virginia that Congress (or the people) has no authority over slavery. Voted: to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. Voted: to repeal the vote. Through the spring and summer of ’48, while James K. Polk, the last man of Yesterday, began to fade into the shadow of abandoned unrealities where, a good, small man, he has existed ever since, there went on a violent struggle for the control of two political parties which meant less than was yet realized. The election, fought in the collapse of subterfuges, was itself one more, desperate subterfuge. No logic could be imposed on the Democratic Party. All but one of its pressures might have been angled into another such forced harmony as had made Polk its candidate in the now faraway, now innocent and hopeful year of 1844. That one pressure was the Territories — the West — and it was invincible. Martin Van Buren and his following withdrew — and this meant that a portion of the Democratic Party had announced that the extension of slavery would be a moral curse. That settled the Democracy for this year, and after this year it would be a different party. It nominated the most sedulous, the loudest of its candidates, Lewis Cass — and the Whigs won. The Whigs won with a subterfuge candidate, Zachary Taylor, who was a war hero and had no convictions about slavery. That finished the Whigs forever.
They had already lost the “Conscience Whigs” — those who were not wrapped in the cotton thread which Emerson said held the nation together. In 1848 some of these joined a variety of small parties which suddenly seemed much less crackbrained, much more respectable than they had seemed last week. More, however, shaken to find themselves in such astonishing company, voted for Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams. It was an incredible vote for an unbelievable ticket and there it was, irrefutable evidence of what had happened since August of ’46. Van Buren and Adams stood for free soil in Oregon, California, and New Mexico, where soil could not possibly be anything but free. “Free soil,” their slogan said, “free speech, free labor, and free men.” Stripped to the actuality: free West. It had happened.
Well, how? By the sum of many small and a few great things.
In part by this … He was a good boy. You remembered how he had laughed and chattered. You remembered being harsh to him, in the unforgivable stupidity of parenthood. One day he was playing with a tin sword or, with a wooden gun, shooting imaginary Indians round a corner of the barn. A day or two later his voice was not treble any more and it was not a wooden gun that was on his shoulder when the fifes shrilled and he marched off behind the silk banner which the ladies of the church had made. You saw his face when he waved to you at the curve in the road, and you wouldn’t see it again. He had died of fever at Matamoros or of thirst on the way to Monclova, or a Mexican lance had done for him at Buena Vista or he had got halfway up the slope at Chapultapec. No children would spring from his loins as he had sprung from yours. So in Georgia you watched the upland where he had hunted squirrels turn brown with autumn, or in Ohio you saw the cows come in at milking time in still evening with someone else whistling to his dog. For what? For New Mexico and California. What did those three words mean? As day was added to day, slowly, insensibly, it was borne in on you that you had better find out.
But that is simple, easily dramatized, and too slight. Georgia or Ohio, as day was added to day, you were tugged at by forces subtler, more complex, more powerful, and more lasting than personal grief. A steelyard’s arm had been lengthened and the counterpoise had moved out along it. Imperceptibly, the nation’s consciousness was shaping to a new orientation, as the logic of geography, now acknowledged by the map, became the logic of economics. As, at a different level, the logic of desire achieved became the logic of daily expectation, and the logic of time became the logic of time continuing. The lines ran east and west more firmly than before, old constraints were broken through, new bonds were formed. Yesterday poised on the brink of disappearance. The center of gravity had been displaced. Imperceptibly, with an uncomprehending slowness, the nation began to answer to its new conditions.
But too slowly. On March 4, 1861, not enough Americans knew what the new President was talking about. “Physically speaking we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this.… Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon you.”
So Abraham Lincoln (who might have been governor of Oregon) had learned in the old West, and so, now that the counterpoise was at the far end of the lengthened steelyard, the old West and the new West were prepared to prove. Mr. Lincoln was telling his countrymen that the achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire, and he was telling them that Yesterday must not be permitted to Balkanize it.
Too late. At some time between August and December, 1846, the Civil War had begun.
* * *
They had done that, the people of this book: they had brought in that empire and made that war inevitable. The soldiers who followed Kearny to Santa Fe and on to California, Doniphan’s farm boys and the Mormons slogging along with Cooke under their canopy of dust and miracle, Brigham Young’s dispossessed people, and Owl Russell, Edwin Bryant, Jessy Thornton, the Donners. The wagon trains pulling out from Independence in the mud and coming finally to the Willamette or the Sacramento. They had shifted the center of gravity of the nation forever.
From August ’46 until the murky dawn of April 12, 1861, the war progressed through political and social phases. Then in that dawn Edmund Ruffin, the most honored Virginia secessionist, pulled the lanyard of a cannon on Morris Island that was trained on a fort in Charleston Harbor, and the military phase began.
The book ends here, for we are not dealing with Western history. That history exists, one may remember, and its spectacle might be touched upon almost anywhere. Already in 1847 Asa Whitney, the dreamer of railroads, was by no means the figure of cloud-cuckoo land which he had been a year before — precisely as the abolitionists had, in that year, somehow ceased to be madmen. The spectacle of Western history might begin with the railroads, or with the stagecoaches that preceded them, or the pony-express riders — or with tall masts coming into the Bay of San Francisco, taller masts than any seen there before, and a jubilant crew singing to Stephen Foster’s tune, “Oh Susanna! Oh please take your ease, for we have beat the clipper fleet, the Sovereign of the Seas.” Or it might begin with spectacle’s curiosa: the airship that was to cross to California in three days but somehow didn’t, or a nester waking at midnight to see against the copper circle of the Arizona moon the silhouettes of Lieutenant Beale’s camels. Or with the wagons that kept on coming year after year till Asa Whitney’s dream took flesh, and very little difference between any of them and those we have followed here. Or agony giving a name to Death Valley. Or the mines in the canyons where the Forlorn Hope starved, or the mines anywhere else in the ranges of the West. Or the Long Trail and its herds, its ballads, and its too much advertised gunfire. Or the vigilantes, the Sioux and the Cheyenne rising, the army on the march. Or anything else from an abundance of spectacle.
