Six months later, in February 1846, Polk told Taylor to move his army 150 miles farther south, to the northwest bank of the Rio Grande, across from the city of Matamoros, and if anybody attacked him—or even looked like they were about to attack him—to repel them and press on into Mexico. This was of course deep into the disputed territory, and the Mexicans had already threatened war so many times it was beginning to sound hollow. Polk fully expected an attack, although he cautioned Taylor that “it is not designed, in our present relations with Mexico, that you should treat her as an enemy.” To the Mexicans, the mere shift of Taylor’s army was tantamount to war, since in their quasi-schizoid concept of diplomacy following their defeat in the Texas independence uprising, they continued to insist that they still owned all of Texas, while at the same time accepting that the border between Texas and the rest of Mexico was the Nueces River, some 150 miles north of the Rio Grande.
To mollify the Mexicans, Polk had earlier dispatched an emissary—the suave, urbane, Spanish-fluent former Louisiana congressman John Slidell—to Mexico City with instructions to offer Mexican president José Herrera up to $40 million for all the lands north of a line beginning where the mouth of the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico, then westward to the present site of El Paso, Texas, and thence continuing westward to the Pacific.
President Polk thought he had a good shot. First, the New Mexico and California territories were wild, raw land, most of it uncharted, much even unknown, and inhabited mostly by savage tribes. That was about as much as they knew. Second, Mexico was almost beyond bankrupt, and Polk’s $40 million was worth somewhere between $500 billion and a trillion dollars in today’s money, depending on the calculation method. And third, in the brief twenty years since gaining independence from Spain, Mexico seemed reduced to a state of eternal war and instability, having fought half a dozen civil conflicts and changing governments no fewer than thirty-eight times in twenty-three years. In Polk’s view, his was a fair offer: Mexico was broke and barely able to govern itself, let alone care for her far-flung northern territories.
It turned out he was wrong—at least about his offer having a good shot. By the time Slidell arrived in Mexico City in the autumn of 1845 the mood had changed. President Herrera was about to be ousted in favor of President Mariano Paredes, who was not only unsympathetic to the idea of parting with Mexican lands but was decidedly anti-gringo.b One good reason was that Slidell’s mission somehow had been leaked to the Mexican press, which published stories complaining, as one paper did, that in “a few months more, we shall have no country at all.”
So Slidell’s reception was not exactly cordial. In fact he had little to do but wait around all day and write letters such as his final one to Polk on March 12, 1846, when he informed the U.S. president that “nothing is to be done with these people, until they have been chastised.”
This was not long in coming. As Polk had surmised, Mexican soldiers could not resist the temptation to attack U.S. soldiers along the Rio Grande. They did this barely a month after Slidell departed Mexico, on April 24, when a thousand-man detachment of Mexican cavalry crossed the river and massacred a sixty-man U.S. patrol, killing eleven, wounding others, and taking twenty-six prisoners.
That was more than enough for “Old Rough and Ready” Taylor, who sent a dispatch to Washington on April 15, 1846, announcing, “Hostilities may now be considered as commenced,” and straightaway pitched into the main Mexican army at Matamoros. Communications were still fairly primitive in those times, Taylor’s dispatch being first sent by horse courier to Matamoros, then put aboard a steamboat bound for New Orleans, where it was relayed more than a thousand miles and, two weeks later on large sailing ships around the tip of Florida by what were called “fast mails,” to President Polk at Washington City, which is what the District of Columbia was then called.
Polk had already decided to declare war on Mexico, even before Taylor’s message arrived, but, unquestionably, at least in his own mind, it gave him the necessary casus belli that Navy Secretary Bancroft, the noted Harvard-educated historian, had told him he needed not only to fend off the inevitable European protests and remonstrations but also to be on the right side of history for posterity’s sake.
With this in mind, on Sunday, May 10, 1846, Polk sat down at his desk in the White House to prepare his war message to Congress the following day. He had been in office scarcely fourteen months and until now his official duties had included primarily such mundane chores as receiving a platoon of aging veterans from the War of 1812 or a delegation of Potawatomi Indians in full paint and war bonnets.
But now, having just turned fifty years of age, President Polk found himself drawing up a document that would send tens of thousands of Americans into harm’s way—some, many perhaps, never to return—a sobering consideration to be sure. Furthermore, as it happened to be a Sunday, in midmorning Polk put down his war message half finished and headed off to the Presbyterian church with Mrs. Polk and an entourage. It was apparently not something that went so far as to seem un-Christian to him, but Polk later regretted to his diary that the stern duty “made it necessary for me to spend the Sabbath in the manner I have.”
News of the Mexican attack quickly spread and set the American public to seething, but not everyone was happy with Polk’s decision to go to war. Among them was none other than John C. Calhoun, who had nearly started the Civil War several decades too early when he threatened to secede his state over an abominable tariff.
Because of Calhoun’s august position within the Senate, Polk had summoned him to inform him of his intentions, but when the South Carolinian read the preamble to Polk’s war message (he claimed to be scandalized that it placed the blame solely on the Mexicans, which he said offended his sense of honor) he failed to vote for it. In fact, what made Calhoun anxious was the distinct possibility of two intertwining results he envisioned growing out of a war of conquest with Mexico. The first was the “centralizing and consolidating tendencies in the [federal] government” that would further undermine states’ rights and, even more perilous, the possibility that “a sectional struggle [would develop] over the conquered territory.” A quick glance over Calhoun’s illustrious career tells us that he could change his views as quickly and as often as a chameleon changes its colors, but it turned out in this case he was right on both counts.
Polk, meanwhile, was further vexed by the so-called Conscience Whigs, men who truly believed that the war was unnecessary and unjust because the issues might still have been negotiated peacefully. For their moralizations, Polk reserved his special scorn.
Next day in Congress Calhoun argued passionately against a war but wound up abstaining when it came time to vote. To his diary, Polk remarked, “There is more selfishness and less principle among members of Congress than I had any conception of, before I became president of the U.S.”
Thomas Hart Benton, still clinging to his position that the Texas issue was merely a subterfuge to spread slavery, voted for the declaration anyway, as did Henry Clay, and it passed with only two nay votes. On Monday, May 11, 1846, Mr. Polk officially had his war.
* An allusion to the degree of latitude, 54°40’, in the Oregon Territory beyond which they would rather go to war with England than concede.
† In the 1820s Stockton was instrumental in acquiring territorial rights to what became the country of Liberia on the west coast of Africa, to which the abolitionist American Colonization Society hoped to deport former slaves after they were emancipated.
‡ The steamboat had been invented a quarter century earlier, and the coal-burning oceangoing Princeton was a vast improvement, driven not by cumbersome side or rear paddlewheels but by a giant bronze propeller (screw) 14 feet in diameter, which was far more efficient.
§ At the height of the Nullification Crisis of 1832, when at Calhoun’s behest South Carolina was threatening to secede from the Union over what it believed were unfair tariffs, President Jackson threatened severe repercussions, at which point
Senator Benton chimed in, “When Andrew Jackson starts talking about hanging, men begin looking for ropes!”
‖ Pakenham’s relations with the Americans were consistently less than cordial. Possibly this had to do with the fate of his favorite cousin, Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, who was slain by Andrew Jackson’s troops in 1815 during the Battle of New Orleans.
a For instance, Frémont’s wife, Jessie, wrote that Rose Greenhow, whose husband was head of the Spanish department of the U.S. foreign service and who would later become an infamous Confederate spy, was in the employ of the British ambassador.
b Both Herrera and Paredes were generals in the Mexican army. In fact, most of the Mexican presidents of the era were or had been generals, and the transfer of power in Mexico, unlike that in the United States, more often than not was the result of a military coup.
CHAPTER THREE
The Pathfinder
Zachary Taylor wasted little time avenging the April massacre of his reconnaissance patrol. Nor did the newly arrived Mexican army commander, Mariano Arista, wait for the ceremony of a formal declaration of war; immediately he crossed his 4,000-man army over the Rio Grande and arrayed it for battle near the town of Palo Alto, on the road to Matamoros, near the present-day city of Brownsville, Texas.
On May 8, 1846, Taylor’s 2,000 U.S. soldiers encountered this Mexican force astride the highway.
The Americans were a rough bunch, for the most part army regulars, with a large percentage of unruly Irish and German immigrants and a detachment of Texas Rangers, but they were officered by some of the best in the business, including West Pointers Braxton Bragg, Ulysses Grant, George Meade, Kirby Smith, John Sedgwick, and George Sykes—each of whom would rise to the rank of corps commander or higher during the Civil War.*
Taylor, Old Rough and Ready, was a no-nonsense commander, wealthy,† grizzled, aggrieved,‡ experienced, and incidentally against Texas annexation in the first place.
Nevertheless, here he was, squared off against Arista, the handsome, blond, aristocratic, American-educated Mexican commander, who had formed his superior-sized army into a line of battle a mile wide and a quarter mile away across a plain of dense chaparral. And there both sides remained as the sun crossed straight-up noon and began to sink into the hills, turning the situation into some sort of Mexican standoff, while each side sought to resolve its own dilemma.
Taylor had wanted to orchestrate a bayonet charge, confident that even though he was outnumbered two to one his tough, disciplined men would prevail. His problem was that Arista had spread out his larger force in a line so long Taylor’s men simply couldn’t contend with it; even if they crushed the center, the sides would close in on them.
Arista had also wanted to attack in strength, Alamo style, but when he looked at the thick chaparral, he realized he could never control his infantry over such terrain.§ Ultimately he decided to wait for developments, which were not long in coming.
Taylor had honed his twelve-pounder gunners into something called “flying artillery,” a European invention in which the horse-drawn cannoneers would rush to a spot, quickly set up and get off a few rounds, then haul off again before the enemy guns could get a fix on them. Under the expert command of Brevet Major Samuel Ringgold (who was mortally wounded later that day) the flying artillery soon had hundreds of Mexicans falling all around General Arista. Frustrated, the Mexican general sent out a detachment of cavalry to silence them, but his horsemen soon encountered a “hollow square” of the Eighth U.S. Infantry Regiment (another European invention, of the Napoleonic era),‖ which unhorsed the majority of them.
Meanwhile, U.S. riflemen were dropping Arista’s men in their tracks, while the Mexicans were unable to avenge their tormentors because of faulty gunpowder.a Mercifully all the shooting set the chaparral on fire, which blanketed the battlefield with so much gun smoke that the fight was called off by both sides as though night had fallen. Before dawn the Mexicans withdrew a few miles back to a place called Resaca de la Palma. Unmercifully, a large number of Mexican wounded had been incinerated in the flames, and the once proud and exuberant Mexican Army of the North sat by its cooking fires that early morning contemplating the impending sunrise and not liking what it saw.
It is never an easy task to get soldiers to fight properly, and doubly hard when they have just been defeated. True, the Americans had not given Arista’s men a thorough whipping at Palo Alto, but even the least experienced of them understood deep down that they had not won the day.
Thus it was with considerable apprehension, the following morning, that Arista’s army, with the Rio Grande to its back and no bridge across, again looked north into the thick chaparral, and again beheld the blue-uniformed host of Taylor’s American army marching toward them.
Likewise, Taylor noted that Arista’s line was again intimidatingly long and the chaparral too thick for maneuvering an army across with any hope of organization. But this did not stop Old Rough and Ready. Against the best advice of nearly all his officers, he ordered a bayonet charge straight down the Matamoros highway.b
But first he ordered the artillery battery of the brave and unfortunate Major Ringgold, now commanded by Major Randolph Ridgely, to blow a hole through the Mexican center that rested on the roadway. No sooner had the cannons begun to fire than Ridgely and his men suddenly saw a troop of Mexican lancers bearing down upon them.c Ridgely managed to fire one gun point-blank into the head of the enemy column, then braced for the worst, but the leading Mexican horsemen went down like tenpins and the rest staggered off through the chaparral.
Taylor next ordered the Eighth Infantry Regiment to “Take those guns, and by God keep them!,” which was done in short order with a bayonet charge down the road that also netted a Mexican general named La Vega, the news of which prompted Arista himself to come to the fighting front. He remained there but a short time, trying to rally his men before hightailing it south with the rest of his army and the Americans in hot pursuit. They did not stop at the Rio Grande but kept on going, drowning some three hundred in the process, until they reached Matamoros, minus approximately a hundred prisoners, a thousand killed and wounded, and twice that number of deserters.
For their part, the Americans had lost 34 killed and 113 wounded in the two days of fighting, and the Mexicans had been chased back across the Rio Grande. It was an auspicious beginning to a war that would only be formally declared three days later by Washington, but Taylor knew what all men know who rise to his military rank: it wouldn’t always be this easy.
Nor was the “Oregon question” seeming to be easy for the Polk administration. As we recall, in July 1845, British ambassador Richard Pakenham had not only refused to accept Polk’s offer to set the Oregon boundary at 49 degrees (roughly where it is today) instead of hundreds of miles farther north, as the American Fifty-four Forty or Fighters were demanding, but he declined even to submit the president’s note to his superiors back in England.
Polk had then consulted his aging mentor, Andrew Jackson, who even on his deathbed continued to despise the British with a hatred that was almost indecent, receiving strong advice: “England with all her boast dare not go to war,” roared Old Hickory. “No temporizing with Britain now!” However, during that long hot Washington summer of 1845 Buchanan, Polk’s ever timorous secretary of state, began raising the issue of England’s reaction to the declaration of war with Mexico and wanted to know what he must say to the British and French ambassadors if they should ask if it was the United States’ intention to annex California.
Polk replied that it was none of England’s or France’s business.
Buchanan countered that unless the United States made a pledge not to annex California, “You will have war with England as well as Mexico, and probably France also.” To which the president replied that, before making any such pledge, “I would meet the war withEngland, France, or all of Christendom might wage, and stand and fight until the last man among us fell.” Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, Polk further allo
wed that “neither as a citizen nor as President would I permit or tolerate any intermeddling of any European Powers on this continent.”
It was a chancy situation, but throughout the year, and into early 1846, Polk hung tough, even after the British foreign minister ruminated that the president’s intransigence could “finally lead to war itself” and well-founded reports began arriving of British warships headed for the North Pacific coast. Neither was Polk moved by a rumor that a Catholic priest had sailed from Ireland with 10,000 wretched British subjects escaping the potato famine, bound for settlement in California; nor by reports from the U.S. consul in San Francisco, Thomas O. Larkin, that British agents were urging Mexican authorities in California to subjugate American immigrants. In fact, these things seemed to solidify Polk’s defiance. “If war comes with England,” declared the president, “it will be their fault.”
Since it is normally a national leader’s worst nightmare to be fighting war on multiple fronts, Polk must have been pleasantly relieved when England finally blinked. The new Paredes government in Mexico in April 1846 had in fact offered the British the province of California in exchange for their financial assistance, but Lord Palmerston turned it down on grounds it would lead to war with the United States.
Apparently at some point it had become clear that Polk was no pushover, and British politicians, who were just beginning to enjoy the peace and prosperity of the Victorian age, concluded that owning part of something was better than the possibility of owning all of nothing, or than starting another expensive war halfway around the world, and so agreed to draw the partitioning lines for the Oregon Territory almost straight westward from what is now Lake of the Woods, Minnesota, to the San Juan Islands on the Pacific, so that Vancouver Island and everything north of there would be absorbed into British Canada.