AUTUMN 1847–JUNE 1848
While Winfield Scott was pacifying Mexico City, James K. Polk was running out of patience in Washington. For nearly three weeks the President had been fretting about the armistice that Scott had signed with Santa Anna at the gates of the city, and now, on October 4, 1847, he decided to take action. He would recall Trist and direct Scott to begin making sure that the Mexicans paid for the support of his army.*
The next day Polk explained his line of reasoning to his cabinet. He was not, as yet, particularly dissatisfied with Trist himself, but he feared that Trist’s continued presence would probably encourage the Mexican government in the belief “that the United States was so anxious for peace that they would ultimately conclude one upon the Mexican terms.”1 So Polk directed Buchanan to send a letter of recall to Trist; at the same time Marcy was to transmit Polk’s wishes to Scott in regard to levies on the Mexican people. Marcy accordingly directed Scott to throw the burden of sustaining American forces “to the utmost extent” upon the people of Mexico.2
Two weeks later, Polk’s attitude toward Trist suddenly changed from indifference to anger. On October 21, 1847, the Southern mail brought a recent message from Trist outlining the terms he had been proposing to the Mexicans. One of them sent Polk into a rage: this was Trist’s offer to grant the territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande to Mexico. Whereas Polk had reacted indifferently the day before, on learning of Scott’s occupation of Mexico City, he now wrote, “[Trist] had no right to depart from his instructions, and I disapprove his conduct in doing so.”
These were not good days for Polk. His critics were becoming more and more vindictive, and support for the war, damaged by the heavy casualty lists, was waning. And to add to his ill humor, Senator Benton called the next day and backed the President into a corner in defense of Benton’s son-in-law, John C. Frémont, whose court-martial for insubordination in California was about to begin in Washington. Polk had approved Kearny’s actions in preferring those charges against Frémont, but he held his tongue—and his ground—as the powerful senator blustered. But the ordeal apparently took its toll, for Polk vented pent-up fury when he berated Trist’s actions before the cabinet the next day: “Mr. Trist has managed the negotiation very bunglingly and with no ability.… I expressed in strong and decided terms my disapprobation of his conduct.…”†
In Mexico City, Nicholas Trist was, of course, unaware that he had been recalled, and he dealt with the Mexicans patiently. On October 20, the day before Polk’s explosion, he reopened peace negotiations with the Peña government. Thing went slowly. Trist had to wait for two weeks to learn that Peña would appoint commissioners “in a few days.”
Peña, of course, knew in general what terms Trist would propose, and he, personally, was favorably disposed to accept them, as his goal was peace. But Peña was a Moderato, and others felt differently. The radical Puros, his main political opposition, desired the war to continue until the Americans had completely destroyed the vestiges of the old Mexican army and had discredited the Church; with these two institutions out of the way, they could bring about the social reforms they advocated. Other Mexican politicians, less idealistic, were reluctant to advocate peace for fear of being accused of bribery. And some still clung to the hope that American Whigs would force Polk to sign easy peace terms in order to bring the troops home. But since Peña’s Moderatos represented the bulk of the influential Mexican people, it appeared that peace would come about, albeit slowly.3
The Mexican governmental structure also had delay built into it. Peña himself, even though he was the leading statesman at the time, was legally only a caretaker president pending the election of an official “interim president.” The election, held on November 11, 1847, turned out favorably for the Moderatos with the decisive election of Pedro María Anaya, and a week later a meeting of seven states supported a movement for peace.‡ Progress toward peace, though steady, was time-consuming.
On November 16, 1847, Polk’s order recalling Trist arrived at Mexico City. Trist accepted his recall philosophically at first, thinking that the government in Washington might benefit from a firsthand account of the situation in Mexico. And he had plenty of time to prepare for his departure, as Scott could not provide him escort to Veracruz before December 4. The interim gave Trist a couple of weeks to think his situation over.
To his surprise, Trist discovered that many influential men in Mexico were considering his recall to be a very grave mistake. Edward Thornton, of the British legation, was one, and he soon began to adopt the role of “honest broker” between Trist and the Mexicans. As Trist and Thornton were on cordial terms, Trist asked Thornton, who happened to be leaving for Querétaro, to deliver the news of his relief informally to Peña and to ask if he could provide some proposal for Trist to take back. Peña, now foreign minister, took the news hard. With Trist gone, he reasoned, Mexico could attain peace only by sending a request for negotiations to Washington—an action so humiliating to Mexico that no Mexican government could afford to take it. So Peña asked Thornton to notify Trist, on his return to Mexico City, that his commissioners were ready to talk at once, that the governors approved the “principle” of peace, and that the British government would not interfere.
Trist was now in a difficult situation. He could no longer continue negotiations legally; even the ugly word “traitorous” occasionally cropped up in his mind.4 On the other hand, Trist saw that abandoning his negotiations, so delicately launched, could be disastrous. He agreed with Peña that the Mexicans would never go to Washington with hat in hand; the alternative would be years of American occupation, at great expense, with unforeseen results.
Many respected voices were now urging Trist to remain in Mexico—those of Peña, Thornton, Scott, and even the correspondent James Freaner. But even this expression of confidence among his associates could never have been persuasive had Trist not been convinced himself. So on December 4, 1847, Trist decided that he would stay. At least the time it took for the mails to make a round trip would give him another few weeks.
But though Peña had given assurances of speed, the Mexicans continued to delay. At this time the point at issue in the negotiations was the boundary between the two nations. The commissioners were prepared to accept Trist’s official proposal (which did not conform to his own views) that it follow the Rio Grande until it reached 32 degrees north, and thence west. But they had no power—they had not been confirmed by the Senate. So Trist, having defied his notice of recall, was forced to wait.
The Mexicans were receiving mixed messages from the outside world, the most important of which was the rumor that the Whigs in the United States would force easier terms than those Trist was offering. Trist tried to combat that hope by citing another school of thought in the United States, one that favored occupying and annexing all of Mexico. And the much honored “right of conquest” could justify a lesser evil: retaining control of Chihuahua, Veracruz, and other points occupied by American forces. One potential complication, fortunately, was dispelled—that of British interference. Britain would provide “good offices” but nothing more. She would not take sides with Mexico.
The talks, though hampered by foot dragging among the various factions of Mexico, were cordial. Trist remained on friendly terms with the Mexican negotiators, especially the head, J. B. Couto.§ And the British representatives, while remaining neutral, continued to assist.
By this time Scott had openly assumed a supporting role to Trist. His pecuniary assessments on the Mexican states, for example, were useful in demonstrating to Mexico that the American occupation could sustain itself for a long time. And his confining his occupation to Mexico City (and a few critical points outside) had political as well as military motivations. Thus his sudden discovery of his inability to occupy either Zacatecas or San Luis Potosí, despite his previous announcement,5 made Trist’s peace negotiations with the Mexicans much easier.
On January 6, 1848, Scott told Hitchcock that he expected a treaty within three days.6 But still the suspense continued, always under the threat of stern reaction from Washington. On January 8, 1848, Anaya’s one-month term as interim president expired, and Peña once more took office. Talks continued amid domestic confusion,‖ until, at the end of January, the Mexicans were ready to sign a treaty. They accepted Trist’s terms but demanded $30 million in payment. That amount of money Trist could not grant, so he declared the negotiations ended.7
But the atmosphere still remained cordial. On January 30 Scott was invited by the ayuntamiento of Mexico City to visit the ruins of a Carmelite convent about fifteen miles outside the city. He accepted with pleasure, but he was cautious: while the city fathers and prominent Mexicans went by carriage, Scott and his staff, with Generals Butler and P. F. Smith, went on horseback. At 8 A.M. they left the city, accompanied by an infantry regiment for the first five miles. Thereafter they proceeded under the guard of two companies of dragoons.
At the festive dinner Scott sat with the alcalde, and was entertained by a fine band of musicians. Toasts generally ran to sentiments of peace, though some of the Mexicans were open in hoping the war might be continued until all the clergy and the army were destroyed. In early afternoon Scott and his staff started back for Mexico City, warmed by the hospitality of a onetime enemy, and more convinced than ever that peace was at hand.8
Two days later Freaner, who had now attained the status of a quasi staff officer, passed the word that Trist was joining the Mexican commissioners at the sacred shrine of Guadalupe Hidalgo for the purpose of signing a peace agreement. By that evening, copies of an agreed-upon text were shown to members of Scott’s staff.
On Wednesday morning, February 2, 1848, Trist and the Mexican commissioners met at Guadalupe Hidalgo, and there they signed the treaty of that name. The boundary between the two countries would run along the Rio Grande to the southern boundary of New Mexico—close to Trist’s earlier proposal—thence west along the Gila River to the Gulf of California. From there it would run westward along a line just south of San Diego to the Pacific Ocean. The United States would assume Mexico’s debts to its citizens and pay $15 million for the territory it gained. Scott, at Trist’s behest, “pledged his word” that he would suspend hostilities.9
But the internecine fighting among the victors themselves had not ended. On February 9, 1848, one week after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Winfield Scott penned an angry letter to the secretary of war that contained these lines:
Slips from newspapers and letters from Washington have come to interested parties here, representing, I learn, that the President has determined to place me before a court … and that I am to be superseded by Major-General Butler. My poor services with this most gallant army are at length to be requited as I have long been led to expect they would be.a
And so they were. On February 18, 1848, Scott received a legalistic letter from Marcy that began: “In view of the present state of things in the army under your immediate command, and in compliance with the assurance contained in my reply to your letter of the 4th of June, wherein you asked to be recalled, the President has determined to relieve you from further duty as commanding general in Mexico.” The letter went on to designate Butler as Scott’s successor and to instruct Scott to appear before a court of inquiry, appointed to investigate the charges Scott had leveled against Pillow and Duncan as well as the charges presented against him by Worth. The general-in-chief was therefore to be a defendant as well as an accuser in the forthcoming court of inquiry.
Scott had been through this type of thing before, and although he blustered in a long letter to Marcy,11 he turned over the army to Butler with goodwill and attended the first session of the court of inquiry, which convened in late February. In late April 1848, with the court suspended, he left for home, refusing all ceremonies and honors.
Scott had seemed reconciled to his situation, but Scott’s army was not. Robert E. Lee, for one, mourned that Scott, having performed his task, had been turned out as an “old horse to die.”12 Less restrained were others. One lieutenant described Scott’s departure:
Grey haired officers and rugged soldiers wept when they parted from their General, and a host of officers followed him to the Penon, to obtain word from, or exchange one look with their hero and their idol.13
However, many officers and men had been critical of Scott’s decisions during the fighting. Polk’s action in peace now cemented the army—and much of the public—behind him.
One last incident, small but significant, closes the Winfield Scott story. Shortly after his relief from command, Scott received a remarkable offer from certain prominent figures in Mexico who favored annexation of Mexico to the United States. They proposed that Scott resign from the United States Army—which he was legally free to do—and issue a pronunciamento declaring himself dictator of Mexico for a term of six years.
The proposition was not so chimerical as it might appear. Scott observed that 70 percent of his men would be discharged in place when the peace was ratified. With a generous offer, such as a pay raise of 10 to 20 percent, he believed he could maintain a force in Mexico of some 15,000 men. He was already in control of the principal ports, arsenals, forts, and even the mines of Mexico. But Scott did not, despite his disappointments, contemplate this offer seriously, though he seemed to enjoy toying with it. He rejected it, he later claimed, because he feared the consequences to the United States of assimilating Mexico as being “perilous to the free institutions of his country.” And he made a nod to “the wishes of the Polk administration.”14 Public reasons aside, Scott was too much of an American soldier to participate in such a questionable scheme.
President Polk saw that he had no choice but to accept the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and submit it to the Senate. Such a prospect infuriated him. The fact that Nicholas Trist had negotiated the treaty without portfolio rankled him. But Polk himself had provided a precedent for honoring such an informal treaty, as he had been prepared to accept a treaty nearly a year earlier if it could have been negotiated secretly by Moses Y. Beach.b What infuriated Polk the most was the attitude of the man who had signed the treaty. For Trist, once he had crossed the Rubicon of staying without authority, had become progressively more secure in his own rightness and more contemptuous of Polk and Buchanan—becoming, in fact, far more anti-Polk than his friend Scott. Trist’s whole attitude was now one of defiance: he would no longer serve in the government; he referred to Gideon Pillow as a “reptile”; and he wrote of Polk, “His mind is too corrupt or too imbecile.… I say the same of every man capable of retaining a seat in his cabinet during the last 3,4, or 5 months.”15 Fortunately, Trist’s most defiant letter did not, at this time, come to light. In it he asserted that the land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande was as much a part of Tamaulipas as the counties of Accomac and Northampton were part of Virginia.16
Nevertheless, Polk rose above his anger. Exercising his customary “excellent judgment as to what was and what was not attainable,”17 he decided to accept the treaty. It had given him all he had sought, and to repudiate it would play into the hands of those who described him as “Polk the Mendacious.” So on receipt of the treaty (delivered at the hands of Freaner) he once again, as he had at the beginning of the war, called his cabinet into session on a Sunday. On Monday they met again, and though Buchanan and Walker opposed it initially,c Marcy, Mason, Johnson, and Attorney General Nathan Clifford favored it. As this treaty demanded no territory not already occupied by the United States, it had the best possible chance of ratification by Mexico.
On Tuesday, February 22, the anniversary of the first day of Buena Vista, President Polk submitted the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the United States Senate. Its ratification was by no means a foregone conclusion. Whig opponents, led by Daniel Webster, opposed it on the grounds that they disapproved of any territorial acquisition. More numerous were those who demanded more, not fewer, concessions from Mexico. Some, such as Houston and Jefferson Davis, claimed to object on the basis that the treaty had been negotiated by a private citizen. And by now Benton was opposed to anything Polk requested because of his anger over the Frémont affair.
The debate was reaching a white heat, and ratification appeared dubious.
Congressman John Quincy Adams, former president of the United States, had served his country well. He performed his last civic contribution in a strange way—by dying. On the evening of February 22, the same day that the treaty was submitted, Adams died. As a representative, Adams would not have been able to vote on the treaty, but his influence, as one of the Immortal Fourteen, was great. However, it was his stature as a former president, and the recess that the proper ceremonies necessitated, that made the difference. For while Congress was in recess, tempers had time to cool. When the Senate resumed debate on Monday, February 28, members returned to their task with a noticeably improved sense of responsibility.
But ratification was still questionable. The very evening it was submitted, Polk learned that four members (out of five) of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee had voted against it on the basis that Trist had negotiated without authority. They intended to recommend that Polk send a new commission, with proper powers, to Mexico.
Polk retaliated strongly. After properly berating Trist as “insolent and insubordinate,” he pointed out that the issue at stake was not Trist himself but the treaty. If the Senate insisted upon a new commission, he continued, he hoped they would advise him what terms they would accept. And, finally, he summed up his whole position:
If the treaty in its present form is ratified, there will be added to the United States an immense empire, the value of which twenty years hence it would be difficult to calculate.18
For several more days the fate of the treaty hung in the balance. About a dozen Democrats, it was estimated, would vote against it because it demanded too little territory. The Senate went into executive session, in which Webster demanded a new commission; Houston still refused to recognize Trist’s authority; Houston and Davis now wanted more territory; and Baldwin, of New England, wanted a provision prohibiting slavery in the acquired territory.19 But finally the Senate settled for certain modifications. And on March 10, a year and a day after the Veracruz landing, it ratified a modified version of Guadalupe Hidalgo by a vote of 38 to 14, four senators abstaining.d Polk sent a commission consisting of Attorney General Nathan Clifford and Senator Ambrose Sevier to carry the treaty to Mexico City.
The war was now almost over. Much time elapsed between the arrival of the senatorial party and ratification by the Mexican Senate on May 25, 1848. But the final approval was inevitable, as the Mexicans had no other choice: all the territory ceded was in American hands. In the words of Bernardo Cuoto, one of the negotiators,
The present treaty does not merely prevent an increase of our losses by a continuance of the war; but it serves to recover the better part of that which was already under the control of the conquering army of the United States; it is more exactly an agreement of recovery than an agreement of cession.20
On June 12, 1848, Clifford sent home a thrilling message: “The flag of the United States was taken down from the national palace in this city and that of the Mexican republic was hoisted.”
Peace had arrived almost exactly nine months from the day that Scott had occupied Mexico City.
* Polk, Diary, October 4, 1847, p. 267. As noted above, Scott had already begun making levies to that end.
† Polk Diary, October 21, 23, 1847, pp. 271–72. The conjecture regarding the link between the Benton episode and Polk’s disposition the next day is the author’s.
‡ Justin Smith, The War with Mexico, vol. II, p. 236. Only San Luis Potosí, with its belligerent governor, objected.
§ Couto said of Trist, after the signing of the treaty, “Of him there remain in Mexico none but grateful and honoring recollections.” Justin Smith, vol. II, p. 323.
‖ An insurrection in San Luis Potosí, though put down, threatened disintegration of the entire country.
a Scott to Marcy, February 9, 1848, Winfield Scott Memoirs, vol. II, 572–73. One of the sources of information was an article in the American Star, published in Mexico City, on February 7, 1848.
b When Beach was in Mexico, Polk had recorded in his diary: “Wednesday, 14th April, 1847.—After night Mr. Buchanan called and read me a letter which he had received this evening from Moses Beach of the New York Sun.… Mr. Beach describes the revolutionary condition of Mexico, but expresses the opinion that a treaty may be made which would be satisfactory to the United States, and leaves the inference that he make such a treaty.… Mr. Buchanan [the previous November) informed him confidentially of the terms on which we would treat, and it was deemed advisable to constitute him a secret agent to Mexico. He was so constituted … but was not clothed with any diplomatic powers. He may miscontrue his authority and it may be possible that he may induce the Mexican authorities … to make a treaty with him. Should he do so, and it is a good one, I will waive his authority to make it, and submit it to the Senate for ratification. It will be a good joke if he will assume the authority and take the whole country by surprise and make a treaty.” Polk, Diary, pp. 217–18.
c Buchanan, formerly the man of peace, now complained that the treaty did not cede enough territory to the United States.
d Polk gave credit to Magnum, who, “though a Whig, is a gentleman.” Exec. Doc. No. 52, quoted in Eugene McCormac, James K. Polk, p. 548.