FOUR MONTHS LATER James Polk made prophets of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster by commencing a war with Mexico.
Polk’s war was a land grab wrapped in self-defense. Texas entered the Union with its southern boundary in dispute. The United States claimed the Rio Grande as the border; Mexico claimed the Rio Nueces, more than a hundred miles to the north. Mexico nominally claimed the rest of Texas as well, never having acknowledged the loss of its rebellious province. But though it responded to the American annexation of Texas by severing relations with the United States, it took no military action to challenge the new regime on its northern frontier.
This frustrated Polk. The president’s expansionist appetite grew with the eating; not content with depriving Mexico of Texas, Polk coveted California as well. He attempted to purchase California, but the Mexican government rebuffed him. Polk then sought a pretext for declaring war on Mexico. He sent troops to the disputed strip between the rivers, hoping to goad the Mexicans to attack. Weeks went by and the Mexicans refused to take the bait. Polk, more vexed than ever, prepared a war message for Congress, in which he blamed the Mexicans for insults and injuries against American honor and interests. It was a flimsy document, as Polk himself recognized, but he was determined to have California and its Pacific harbors, by whatever means necessary. Then, just as he was about to transmit his message to Congress, he received news that Mexican troops had finally engaged the Americans. “After reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil,” Polk told Congress. “War exists, and notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico itself.” For emphasis the president added, “The two nations are now at war.”
JOHN CALHOUN BEGGED to differ. Polk wanted Congress simply to endorse his assertion that war existed and give him authority to prosecute it. Calhoun wasn’t going to be stampeded into anything. “The question now submitted to us is one of the gravest character, and the importance of the consequences which may result from it we cannot now determine,” he told the Senate. “The president has announced that there is war; but according to my interpretation, there is no war according to the sense of our Constitution.” Calhoun didn’t challenge Polk’s account of the attack on American forces. Nor did he question Polk’s authority to resist and repel such attacks. But he distinguished hostilities from war. “It is our sacred duty to make war,” he told his fellow senators, “and it is for us to determine whether war shall be declared. If we have declared war, a state of war exists, and not till then.”
Calhoun succeeded in slowing the rush to war, but not by much. Congress debated the president’s request, with most of the negative comments coming from the Whigs. Some asked whether Polk had done all he could to avoid armed conflict; their strong implication was that he had not. A few went so far as to charge Polk with provoking the war. “This war was begun by the president,” Garrett Davis, a Kentucky Whig, told the House. Some inquired whether the Mexican attack, if it indeed had occurred as the president said, had been authorized by the Mexican government. Still others rejected Polk’s assertion that the soil on which the blood had been shed was American. Some said flatly that it was Mexican; others remarked that ownership was still in dispute.
But Polk knew the American political mind better than the dissenters did. He understood that the shedding of American blood—under whatever circumstances—created an irresistible impulse toward war. A negative vote could be characterized as an unpatriotic vote, and no lawmaker lightly risked that. The few surviving former Federalists remembered how their party had wrecked on its opposition to the War of 1812. In the end scarcely a dozen Whigs refused the president’s request. John Calhoun haughtily abstained.
DANIEL WEBSTER DODGED. His conscience and his constituents opposed the war, but as one of those Federalist refugees, he recalled how the winds of war could blow popular sentiment in unexpected directions. When the vote was taken, he was not in the Senate chamber.
Yet he reserved the right to complain. So did other Whigs and even some Democrats, including David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, who amid House discussions of a war-funding bill proposed an attachment stipulating that slavery be barred from any territory taken from Mexico in the war. The Wilmot proviso passed the House but fell short in the Senate; it was reintroduced and again passed the House, and again failed in the Senate. The proviso became a lightning rod between the antislavery and the pro-slavery elements in Congress and between North and South. The opponents of slavery decried the ability of Southern obstructionists in the Senate to negate the will of a growing majority in the country; the defenders of slavery pointed to the proviso as the latest recrudescence of the tyrannical moralism of the abolitionist North.
Daniel Webster hadn’t abandoned hopes for the White House. He had watched John Calhoun disqualify himself by his extreme sectionalism, and he had seen Henry Clay get caught in the sectional cross fire. Of the threesome who entered Congress almost together nearly four decades earlier, only Webster still had a chance at the presidency. James Polk had pledged, before his election, that he would serve but one term if elected; unless he reneged, the 1848 race would be wide open. After Clay’s failure in 1844 and subsequent retreat to Ashland, Webster became the leading figure in the Whig party and the favorite to win the party’s nomination.
But he had to walk a narrow path. He couldn’t oppose an important antislavery measure like the Wilmot proviso without antagonizing his Massachusetts supporters and most Northern Whigs and contradicting his own antislavery statements. But he couldn’t support the Wilmot measure without alienating Southern Whigs.
He tried to change the subject. “Sir, we are in the midst of a war, not waged at home in defense of our soil, but waged a thousand miles off, and in the heart of the territories of another government,” he declared after American troops had invaded Mexico proper. “Of that war no one yet sees the end, and no one counts the cost. It is not denied that this war is now prosecuted for the acquisition of territory; at least, if any deny it, others admit it, and all know it to be true.” Webster decried the aggression and supported an amendment forbidding all taking of territory from Mexico. “We want no extension of territory,” he said. “We want no accession of new states. The country is already large enough.” This position suited most of Massachusetts and many Northern Whigs. It also allowed Webster to rise above the debate over whether territories taken from Mexico should be slave or free.
But the no-acquisition amendment failed. The expansionist mood was too powerful, and even many Northerners were willing to chance the spread of slavery if necessary to enlarge the national domain. More than a few recalled Henry Clay’s reasoning regarding Texas: that slavery was temporary, while the national domain was permanent.
Webster blamed Northern Democrats for the failure of the amendment. “It has been voted down by the Northern Democracy,” he said. “If this Northern Democracy had supported this amendment, it would have prevailed, and we should then have had no new territory at all, and of course no new slave territory; no new states at all, and of course no new slave states.”
Yet wherever the blame lay, Webster was left to vote for or against the Wilmot proviso. He couldn’t vote against it; his constituents would have been outraged. But a vote in favor might rile the South and cost him the Whig nomination for president.
He voted in favor and hoped no one would notice.