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“The Mischief Is Done”

NICHOLAS TRIST WAS not indifferent to expansion. As chief clerk of the State Department, second in command to Secretary of State Buchanan, he had been appointed by Polk to help him accomplish his goals. He was an excellent choice: his Spanish was impeccable, and his understanding of the “Spanish Character” and internal politics of Mexico set him apart from most other diplomats. Trist distinguished himself in other ways as well. Tall and handsome, with enviable posture and formal manners, the chief clerk radiated poise and confidence. He was fully aware that he was not only one of the best-pedigreed Democrats in the United States but also one of the most capable.

Trist also brought a little glamour to the administration. Thomas Jefferson had been responsible for his legal education, personally tutoring the young man for two years, sixteen hours a day. Jefferson and Trist’s grandmother, Elizabeth, were old friends, and he early recognized a nascent intelligence in young Nicholas that commanded his attention. Trist’s essential character and beliefs had been shaped by Jefferson: religious skepticism, love of logic, and commitment to abstract notions of justice. Just as important, Jefferson had blessed Trist’s marriage to his granddaughter, Virginia, and made him his private secretary. Trist’s intellect, abilities, and love more than repaid Jefferson’s investment. He served as the aging Jefferson’s companion on rides through the Virginia countryside, long walks around the grounds of Monticello, and countless conversations in the president’s library, the contents of which Trist catalogued. And at the end of his life, Nicholas and Virginia Trist provided Thomas Jefferson with a great-granddaughter, named Martha and called Patsy like Jefferson’s daughter. Jefferson acknowledged his dependence on Trist by naming him an executor of his will.

Nicholas Trist. Portrait by John Neagle, 1835. Nicholas Trist was thirty-five years old when this portrait was painted by the fashionable artist John Neagle. Trist was on a visit home from his duties as U.S. consul to Cuba. Although he had held the position for only a year, he had already decided that foreign service, particularly in the tropics, did not agree with him. He longed for a posting back in the United States. Courtesy Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., at Monticello. (photo credit 5.1)

After Jefferson, Andrew Jackson took him under his wing. Jackson thrilled to Trist’s stories of life with the first Democratic leader, and treasured him as a conduit to the president he venerated above all others. Nicholas and Virginia Trist were frequent guests at the executive mansion, and the president often summoned Trist to discuss issues of the day.

Trist, like so many other Democrats, found Jackson’s powerful personality intoxicating. He gleefully recorded an instance when Jackson announced, “I care nothing for clamors, sir, mark me! I do precisely what I think just and right!” Trist greatly approved of the statement. For his part, Jackson grew nearly as dependent on Trist’s intellect and fine penmanship as had Jefferson. He made Trist his personal secretary, provided him lodgings at the White House, and traveled with him. Jackson later named Trist American consul in Havana. Nicholas found the posting onerous—he worried about catching a tropical disease, and Virginia found the Havana climate intolerable. The Trists returned to Washington.¹

In the spring of 1845, Jackson convinced Polk to hire Trist as chief clerk of the State Department. For a man who had never really wanted to work hard, whose priorities were family life and reading, the forty-five-year-old Trist had built himself a nice career.

Polk saw in Trist a man who shared his values. They were both southerners and slaveholders, true believers in the party and the expansionist agenda first advocated by the two Democratic giants. Both speculated in southwestern land, and both owned plantations where slaves grew staple crops, although Trist’s sugar plantation in Louisiana was never remotely as profitable as Polk’s cotton plantation in neighboring Mississippi. Trist, moreover, had attended West Point, suggesting that he understood the power of the military to advance American interests. Along with experience and competence, Trist was also known for the attributes Polk valued most: loyalty and discretion.

But there was no personal relationship between the two. There is no evidence that Polk ever as much as asked Trist about either Jefferson or Jackson, a fact that can only be attributed to Polk’s singular reserve. He never invited the chief clerk for dinner. Secretary of State James Buchanan was a frequent and enthusiastic guest at Sunday dinners at the spacious Trist family abode in Washington, but Polk never visited. Buchanan became well known to Thomas Jefferson’s great-grandchildren; Polk never met them. Had Polk followed the lead of Jackson and Jefferson in befriending Trist, history might have turned out differently. But as it was, Polk never got to know Nicholas Trist well enough to recognize two traits that Jefferson left to his grandson-in-law: the conviction that he was smarter than almost everyone else, and an innate distrust of war.

The distrust of war was perhaps more his grandmother’s doing than Jefferson’s. The president’s struggles to keep the United States out of war with England and France during the last years of his presidency were well known and had been widely condemned at the time, but Jefferson had also encouraged a somewhat aimless eighteen-year-old Trist to attend the fledgling military academy at West Point. His grandmother, however, did not want Nicholas to become a warrior. While she initially agreed with his course of study (she rarely disagreed with Jefferson about anything), during his second year she sent her grandson a letter that clearly condemned both war and those who waged it. “I would as soon hear of your turning Highway man as to join any army, from ambitious motives,” she told him. “War is at best a horrid calamity and those who wage war for the purpose of subjugating nations to their will are guilty of a heinous crime.” She reminded “Dear Nicholas” that “when the hour arrives that you must quit this World let not your conscience upbraid you with having done any thing to dishonor humanity.” Reminding him of the mental suffering that his father had experienced after killing a man in a duel, Elizabeth Trist asked, “What must be the reflection of those who are instrumental in heaping misery on thousands, how many Widows and Orphans are thrown into the world destitute and wretched”?²

Not that he required a great deal of convincing on this point. Trist excelled in academics at West Point and made a number of lifelong friends, including Andrew Jackson Donelson, Old Hickory’s nephew and namesake. But neither the spartan living conditions nor the intense physical demands of the military academy agreed with him. Painfully thin and prone to hypochondria, he worried constantly about his health. And he had trouble submitting to authority. As he explained to Donelson, “I claim the liberty of regulating my own conduct by what I deem right.”³ Not surprisingly, Trist gradually came to the conclusion that he was unsuited for a military career. He left West Point without graduating and returned to Monticello determined to marry Virginia Randolph and serve Jefferson any way he could.

A quarter of a century later, Trist found himself in a far less pleasant position in James K. Polk’s administration. The chief clerk had had no idea that working for this president would prove so arduous. Trist enjoyed books, music, long dinners, and quiet time with his family. Polk, on the other hand, fully believed that “no president who performs his duty faithfully and conscientiously can have any leisure.” Trist’s workload was staggering. “There has never been one day in which I had not on hand some subject (or several subjects) to dispose of which require … deliberate thought and research. And these subjects have all had to be disposed of by snatches,” he wrote miserably. The “enormous mail” was overwhelming, and he was responsible for overseeing the work of the entire staff of the State Department. “Everything that comes passes through my hands in the first instance, anything that goes passes though my hands in the last instance.”⁴

He struggled to meet Polk’s high standards. The perfectionist president was convinced that if he handed over “the details and smaller matters to subordinates constant errors will occur.” With no little sense of pride, Polk admitted that “I prefer to supervise the whole operations of the Government myself rather than entrust the public business to subordinates, and this makes my duties very great.”⁵

It also made Trist’s duties great. The chief clerk frequently found his letters returned to him for correction. The hours were endless, the intensity stressful, and Trist felt his health declining. “Without a single day’s intermission,” he wrote, “by the time I get away from the office I am broken down for the day.” He began fantasizing about a less onerous posting somewhere far from the center of power. Instead, since James Buchanan, the secretary of state, was frequently out of the office, he found himself running the department.⁶

Thus he had quite a clear view of Polk’s provocation of Mexico, and the president’s latest move ordering Zachary Taylor a hundred miles into the Nueces Strip. Polk had already decided that if this tactic failed, he would risk the consequences and simply declare war. On April 25, 1846, he told his assembled cabinet that the time had come to “take a bold and firm course toward Mexico,” and that “forbearance was no longer either a virtue or patriotic.” Employing a language more common to dueling and other affairs of honor among southerners than to high diplomacy, Polk was adamant that the United States “take redress for the injuries done us into our own hands.” According to him, by rejecting minister John Slidell, by refusing to pay claims put forward by U.S. citizens, and above all by refusing to recognize Texas’s ownership of the Nueces Strip, Mexico had insulted the United States to such a degree that honor required the southern neighbor be punished.

As for the many injuries done to Mexico by the United States—the annexation of Texas, the occupation of the Nueces Strip, the repeated insults offered by America’s incompetent and offensive minister—none of them factored into Polk’s analysis. Mexico, inferior in both race and power, must necessarily bend to the will of its neighbor. To those who suggested that it might be unseemly, even un-Christian, to attack a weaker nation, Polk argued that “we must treat all nations, whether great or small, strong or weak, alike.”⁷

Polk’s concept of justice was unquestionably shaped by his experience as a slave master. Some slaveholders, such as Henry Clay, or Thomas Jefferson a generation before, struggled with the knowledge that slavery was wrong. But like most intensely conservative slave masters in the 1840s, Sarah and James Polk believed the domination of white over black was part of God’s plan. James may have been influenced by his wife’s views on this point. He liked to repeat evidence of Sarah’s “acumen” on the topic by relating a conversation the two had had on a hot July afternoon in the White House. Gazing out the window at slaves working the grounds, Sarah interrupted her husband from his writing with the assertion that “the writers of the Declaration of Independence were mistaken when they affirmed that all men are created equal.” When James suggested this was just “one of your foolish fancies,” Sarah elaborated. “There are those men toiling in the heat of the sun, while you are writing, and I am sitting here fanning myself … surrounded with every comfort. Those men did not choose such a lot in life, neither did we ask for ours; we were created for these places.” Domination of the strong over the weak, and white over black or brown, was not just the reality of slavery, it was also, in their perspective, right.⁸

That James K. Polk viewed international relations through the lens of slaveholding and dominance is notable but not particularly surprising for a southerner who modeled himself on General Andrew Jackson. Newspapers throughout the South echoed the belief that national honor, like personal honor, was a matter of highest significance, one that sometimes required the physical reprimand of inferiors. Just days before Polk addressed his cabinet, the New Orleans Bulletin explained that “the United States have borne more insult, abuse, insolence and injury, from Mexico, than one nation has ever before endured from another.… They are left no alternative but to extort by arms, the respect and justice which Mexico refuses to any treatment less harsh.” If not, other nations would lose all respect for the United States. The New Orleans Delta warned that if the United States did not take “active measures” against Mexico, “every dog, from the English mastiff to the Mexican cur, may snap at and bite us with impunity.”⁹

Sarah Polk, as fervent a believer in Manifest Destiny as her husband, agreed that the nation’s honor must be upheld at all costs. “Whatever sustained the honor and advanced the interests of the country, whether regarded as democratic or not,” she stated at a dinner party in defense of war, she “admired and applauded.”¹⁰

These southerners were not alone. There were certainly northerners who believed in April 1846 that Mexico deserved punishment for the insults it had offered the United States. Walt Whitman, editor of a Democratic newspaper in Brooklyn, declared that “Mexico must be thoroughly chastised.… Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, America knows how to crush, as well as how to expand!”¹¹

But the threats and bluster were loudest from the South. It was the men of the South, that group that referred to themselves as “the chivalry,” who specialized in what Massachusetts Whig Robert Winthrop called “gasconading bravadoes.” The Milwaukee Daily Sentinel and Gazette saw Slidell’s mission for what it was: a plot to insult Mexico and then demand satisfaction for an insult supposedly done by Mexico against the United States. It was, in the newspaper’s judgment, a typically southern response. On April 29, the paper predicted that although Mexico “acted with becoming spirit and self respect” in dismissing Slidell, the United States “will insist upon ‘satisfaction,’ and as it is a question between us and a weaker nation on the South, the ‘chivalry’ will, doubtless, back up his demand and call upon the President and Congress to declare war against Mexico.” Northerners, far more than southerners, were likely to agree with the paper that “it will be an evil day for Human Progress, Civilization and Christianity when America disturbs the peace of the world.”¹²

Nor was everyone in the cabinet ready for war in late April. Only Secretary of State Buchanan seconded the proposition that Polk “recommend a declaration of war” against Mexico to Congress. There was still the tricky matter of the Oregon boundary: surely it should be resolved before attacking Mexico. The cabinet agreed to discuss the matter further the following week. Two days later, Congress passed a joint resolution to end the joint occupation of Oregon with England, and invited the two countries to settle the matter amicably. Polk signed the bill and, with a clear message that he was willing to compromise and hand over the northern portion of the territory to England, had it sent across the Atlantic. Fully expecting the British to comply with a settlement that was very much in their interest, Polk turned his attention to Mexico. He began drafting a war message to present to Congress.¹³

In Illinois, one politician was almost as anxious as Polk for hostilities to begin. The Illinois press was full of rumors of hostilities at the border, and on May 2, John Hardin inquired if his good friend, Congressman Stephen A. Douglas, had any inside information about affairs with Mexico. Douglas was one of Illinois’s most powerful politicians and a leader of the state’s Democratic Party, but the secretive president wasn’t about to share with anyone, not even leaders of his own party, the fact that he had determined to go to war. “We are in a state of quasi war with that country, and are left to conjecture as to what is to be the sequel,” Douglas wrote his friend. Hardin was fixated on California. He suggested to Douglas that in the event of war, troops immediately march to California from the Midwest and seize California by land. And Hardin himself should be the man to organize those troops. Douglas was supportive but noncommittal, for in truth he knew no more than Hardin. “The intentions of the administration in this respect are a profound secret. No one pretends to know what course will be pursued,” he wrote Hardin.¹⁴

Much depended on one unprepossessing man; a potbellied, undereducated, slave-owning career military officer from Virginia. Zachary Taylor favored civilian clothes and a large straw hat, and his résumé was exceedingly modest, consisting primarily of a victory over the Seminole tribe in 1837 and several decades of garrison duty. He was no intellectual, and had heretofore shown little genius for the science of war. Many of his junior officers questioned his abilities. But the enlisted men adored him for his lack of pretension and common touch. Astride his beloved mount, Old Whitey, Taylor inspired veneration among the troops, despite the fact that the steed’s appearance was a bit nobler than the rider’s.

Zachary Taylor. Photograph by Mathew Brady, ca. 1847. Taylor, known as “Old Rough and Ready,” was ordinarily dressed less formally than in this daguerreotype portrait taken during or soon after the war. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. (photo credit 5.2)

Taylor may have felt ambivalence when Polk ordered him to leave Louisiana for Texas in the summer of 1845. Like most officers, Taylor supported the Whig Party over the Democrats. While neither side advocated a large peacetime army, Whigs repeatedly pushed for increased funding for the army and were steadfast supporters of the military academy at West Point. The Democratic Party feared the consolidation of power associated with a standing army, and wistfully believed state militias capable of protecting the nation. They didn’t trust professional military men, and suggested that West Point might as well be disbanded. Army officers were suspicious, as well, of Democratic schemes for expansion. Less than four years had passed since the United States withdrew from a brutal guerrilla war of attrition against the Seminole Indians of Florida. The seven-year-long war, which failed to remove the tribe from their ancestral home, was fought in the blistering heat of the Everglades’ swamplands. It was remarkably unpopular with officers and enlisted men alike, many of whom sympathized with the Seminoles and grew to hate the white settlers of the region. Many West Point officers resigned as a result of service in the Seminole War. Taylor, like most other Whigs, had serious misgivings about the annexation of Texas. According to one of his officers, Taylor privately denounced annexation as “injudicious in policy and wicked in fact.”¹⁵

But Taylor followed orders and marched his troops to the edge of the contested territory. Not long after his arrival along the banks of the Sabine River, he received a novel map of Texas from the quartermaster general’s office. It superimposed a new boundary mark at the Rio Grande over the earlier boundary mark at the Sabine. Lieutenant Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock of Vermont marveled in his diary at the “impudent arrogance and domineering presumption” of both the map and the administration that made it. Hitchcock, a close friend of Taylor’s for twenty-five years, was the grandson of Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, and had served as both commandant of cadets and assistant professor of tactics at West Point. He would soon celebrate his forty-eighth birthday, and as a man born at the close of the eighteenth century, he had seen many things in his life. But he was sickened by the implications of this map for the future mission of the troops. “It is enough to make atheists of us all to see such wickedness in the world, whether punished or unpunished,” he wrote in his diary.¹⁶

Fall in Corpus Christi was better than expected. The town itself was a disgrace, a ramshackle settlement of twenty or thirty structures that existed primarily for the purposes of illegal trade across the Nueces. Most of the population was involved in smuggling to some degree or another. But there were excellent opportunities for fishing and swimming in the bay. The men broke up the monotony of drilling with horse races and light amusements, including a performance of Othello in which another West Point officer, a young lieutenant named Ulysses S. Grant, was cast as the daughter of Brabantio. On October 16, the secretary of war directed Taylor to move “as close as circumstances will permit” to the Rio Grande, subject to his own judgment. Taylor’s judgment told him to stay where he was, and so the troops remained in Corpus Christi.¹⁷

Winter was less pleasant. A severe cold snap at the end of November took everyone by surprise. The sun didn’t shine for two straight weeks in December, and the men shivered in raised tents designed for use in balmy Florida. It was the coldest weather anyone in the region could remember. In an ominous preview of things to come, dysentery and diarrhea caused by poor sanitation began to ravage the camp. Some of the men took out their frustrations on local residents. After a spate of “outrages of aggravated character” against Mexicans living nearby, Taylor restricted his men to camp at nighttime.¹⁸

On February 3, 1846, Taylor received direct orders to march his men 150 miles south, all the way to the Rio Grande, also known as the Rio del Norte. He was understandably unenthusiastic. Secretary of War Marcy had earlier suggested to Taylor that the army’s mission was defensive. The new orders reiterated that Taylor should not consider Mexico “an enemy” unless, of course, it should act that way. But if Mexico fired the first shot, Taylor should take advantage, and “not act merely on the defensive.” Clearly the administration was hoping Taylor would shoulder some of the blame if hostilities ensued. And how could he not? Why was he deliberately marching four thousand men deep into territory that was widely understood, by everyone other than fervent U.S. expansionists, to belong to Mexico? “The ‘claim,’ so called, of the Texans to the Rio Grande, is without foundation,” Colonel Hitchcock wrote in his diary. “She has never conquered, possessed, or exercised dominion west of the Nueces.”¹⁹

Taylor had done almost nothing to prepare for future operations while in Corpus Christi. Now he sat on news of the impending move for three days. But conditions in the camp had degenerated, and Lieutenant Ulysses Grant summed up the reaction to Taylor’s orders: “Fight or no fight evry one rejoises at the idea of leaving Corpus Christi.” On the eve of their departure, General Taylor issued orders to the troops governing relations with civilians. He enjoined “all under his command to observe, with the most scrupulous regard, the rights of all person who may be found in the peaceful pursuit of their respective avocations, residing on both banks of the Rio Grande. No person, under any pretence whatsoever, will interfere in any manner with the civil rights or religious privileges of the people, but will pay the utmost respect to both.” Taylor had these instructions translated into Spanish and posted along the route to Matamoros, on the Rio Grande. Taylor wrote a new will before starting the long trek to an unknown fate.²⁰

In March 1846, Taylor marched his four thousand men through the Nueces Strip. It was “dreary, desolate, dry, and barren” countryside, a land better suited for snakes than people. The nearer they got to the Rio Grande, “the more dwarfed and thorny the vegetation—only the cactus more hideously large.” And it was hot. “The sun streamed upon us like a living fire,” one soldier recorded. Despite Taylor’s proclamation asserting the “friendly intentions” of the U.S. Army, many of the inhabitants fled when they caught sight of the American troops. By no means did this feel like American territory. One American soldier who marched out of Corpus Christi expressed his disorientation in a letter back home to Illinois. Sitting in “the shade of a sort of white thorn,” he reflected that “all about me are cactus, God knows how many kinds. It is impossible to describe them. All plants here have thorns, all animals stings or horns and all men carry weapons and all deceive each other and themselves.”²¹

Mexican forces, meanwhile, had begun to mass at Matamoros on the southern bank of the Rio Grande, near the mouth of the river. From time to time the U.S. soldiers caught sight of them, marching in the distance. The Americans on the ground grasped better than most what was happening. Colonel Hitchcock wrote in his diary: “We have not one particle of right to be here.… It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses.”²²

Taylor took up a position directly across the Rio Grande from the fortified port town of Matamoros and placed his cannon in clear sight of the stone and adobe buildings of the town square. He directed naval units to blockade the city and prevent food or supplies from reaching either the city of sixteen thousand or the occupying Mexican army. Cuban-born General Pedro Ampudia, a veteran of the Alamo and San Jacinto, sent Taylor a message giving him twenty-four hours to break camp and return to Corpus Christi. He also had handbills smuggled into the U.S. camp promising good treatment and high pay to any immigrants who chose to desert to Mexico. Taylor explained that he was under orders, and suggested that responsibility for the war would rest with the nation that fired the first shot. Taylor would regret war, but he would not avoid it.²³

His men weren’t so sure. In one night fifty swam across the river and disappeared into Mexico. Taylor posted guards to prevent further desertions. Two weeks after Taylor’s arrival, forty-two-year-old General Mariano Arista, a former Mexican governor who had once lived in Cincinnati, assumed command of the Mexican forces, which now numbered eight thousand. The following day, April 24, Arista sent a detachment of cavalry across the river. Taylor dispatched a small squadron of dragoons to meet them. The Americans were overwhelmed, and after a short firefight they surrendered to the Mexicans. Eleven U.S. soldiers were killed. Polk had his reason for war, although he didn’t know it. Given the lack of communication between the Mexican frontier and the rest of the world, it would be two full weeks before the tidings would reach Washington.²⁴

Polk spent those two weeks preparing for a war he was intent on beginning, regardless of conditions on the Rio Grande. On May 3, he called Senator Thomas Hart Benton to his offices in order to press the Democratic leader on the issue. Benton was one of the nation’s most outspoken expansionists, a former Tennessean who, like Polk, modeled himself on Andrew Jackson and preached the gospel of Manifest Destiny. A physically imposing man with a temper that matched his bulk, Benton had served under Jackson in the War of 1812 and loved a good fight. He had killed a man in a duel, and shot his onetime mentor Jackson in the arm. He left Tennessee to get out of Jackson’s shadow, and was now the West’s most powerful politician.

Polk needed Benton’s support, but also had reason to believe he would be sympathetic with Polk’s approach. “I told him we had ample cause for War,” Polk wrote in his diary. Benton “expressed a decided aversion to a war with Mexico” and particularly “advised delay” until negotiations with England over Oregon were “either settled” or “brought to a crisis, one of which must happen very soon.” Polk agreed that if war could be avoided “honourably,” that would be ideal, and he promised Benton that he would wait until John Slidell’s return from Mexico to take action.²⁵

Two days later, Polk and his cabinet agreed that they should wait for an update from General Taylor (from whom nothing had been heard in a month) before declaring war. On May 6, they received the erroneous news that Mexico had not yet attacked the United States. Two days later John Slidell returned from Mexico. He had no more idea than did Polk that Taylor had been fighting Mexico for over a week.

The failed diplomat and the president spoke privately for an hour, Slidell impressing upon Polk his conviction that “but one course toward Mexico was left to the U.S. and that was to take the redress of the wrongs and injuries which we had so long borne from Mexico into our own hands, and to act with promptness and energy.” Polk agreed, and told Slidell that he had “made up” his mind to send a declaration of war to Congress “very soon.”²⁶

The following day, Saturday, May 9, Polk called his cabinet together and asked, again, whether they agreed to “recommend a declaration of war against Mexico” despite the fact that, as far as they knew, Mexico had not attacked the United States. Polk told them “that in my opinion we had ample cause of war, and that it was impossible that we could stand in statu quo, or that I could remain silent much longer.” After all, “the country was excited and impatient on the subject.”²⁷

Polk was right on the last point. For weeks Democratic newspapers had been predicting that “war will be immediately declared against Mexico.” The Mississippian declared that “our government has exhausted all measures for peace and conciliation” and thus “no alternative is left but a resort to arms.” In Brooklyn, Walt Whitman was sure that “the people here, ten to one, are for prompt and effectual hostilities.” Polk explained to his cabinet that since the country wanted war, if he failed to rise to the call, “I would not be doing my duty.” All but Bancroft agreed that a recommendation of war against Mexico should be made to Congress the following Tuesday.²⁸

Four hours later, Polk finally received news of the attacks on Taylor’s forces. The president threw himself into composing a declaration of war over the course of that evening and throughout a long Sunday. He stopped work only long enough to attend a two-hour church service with Sarah, consult with important members of his party, and sit down to Sunday supper. At ten thirty he finally went to bed. “It was a day of great anxiety to me,” he wrote in his diary, “and I regretted the necessity which had existed to make it necessary for me to spend the Sabbath in the manner I have.”²⁹

Polk had been composing this declaration in his mind for weeks, but it remained unfinished. He refused to see company on Monday morning and continued revising the message to Congress. Polk didn’t like doing things at the last minute. It bothered him that he “had no time to read the copies of the correspondence furnished by the War & State Departments” that would accompany his message. For a man who assiduously checked the work of even minor clerks, the fact that a document of this importance was leaving his office without a final proofreading must have been anxiety-provoking.

With just hours to spare before he addressed Congress, he called Democratic senators Lewis Cass and Thomas Hart Benton to his office. Cass read the message and “highly approved it.” Benton was not impressed by Polk’s war bill. He told the president that “he was willing to vote men and money for defence of our territory, but was not prepared to make aggressive war on Mexico.” Furthermore, he “disapproved the marching of the army from Corpus Christi to the left Bank of the Del Norte.” When Benton left Polk’s office, the president was not at all sure the senator would support his war. Polk “inferred, too, from his conversation that he did not think the territory of the U.S. extended West of the Nueces.”³⁰

At noon Polk sent his message to Congress. In the strongest possible language he excoriated Mexico, elided the truth, and demanded not that Congress declare war but that it recognize a war already in existence. He informed them that “now, after reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil.” None of it was true—but Polk didn’t consider it lies. There was a greater truth at stake, and he spoke in its service: “As war exists, and notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself, we are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interest of our country.”³¹

Democratic congressional leaders attached this declaration of war as a preamble to a bill authorizing funds for the troops, placed it in front of Congress, and demanded assent. It was a shrewd but contemptible move, and new in American history. By bundling the authorization of war funds with a declaration of war attributed to Mexico, Democrats ensured that any opponent of the measure could be accused of betraying the troops. Polk’s supporters skillfully managed to stifle dissent in the House by limiting debate to two hours, an hour and a half of which was devoted to reading the documents that accompanied the message. The flabbergasted opposition was caught completely off guard and struggled to amend the bill. Powerless and voiceless, they watched helplessly as Polk’s supporters ruthlessly stifled debate and foisted war on Congress and the country.

Just before the final vote, Garrett Davis, the Whig representative from Clay’s district in Kentucky, gained the floor by a subterfuge, and then launched into an attack on Polk’s statement and the rushed proceedings. “The river Nueces is the true western boundary of Texas,” thundered Davis. It wasn’t Mexico but “our own President who began this war. He has been carrying it on for months.” Although repeatedly interrupted by Democrats and called to order by the Speaker of the House, Davis alone was able to voice what many of his colleagues believed: “that if the bill contained any … truth and justice,” it would acknowledge “that this war was begun by the president.”³²

There were few men in Congress who took Polk’s claims at face value. For weeks, newspapers had asked their readers “for what purpose … our Army of Occupation has been ordered down from Corpus Christi to the Rio del Norte,” and concluded that Polk both “contemplated and desired” war. If not, “why was the United States army thrust upon the very lines of the Mexican?” The fact that he had provoked war by moving U.S. troops into an area long claimed by Mexico was self-evident. But the war bill offered the opposition a cruel choice: either assent to Polk’s lies or vote against reinforcements for Zachary Taylor’s troops, who, as far as anyone knew, were at that very moment engaged in battle with a much stronger Mexican army. Nor was Polk the only politician to recognize that “the country was excited and impatient” for war.³³

Seventy-eight-year-old John Quincy Adams was having none of it. As secretary of state under James Monroe, Adams had been one of the nation’s foremost expansionists, a firm believer since the 1810s that the entirety of North America was “our natural dominion.” He wrote the Monroe Doctrine, which made a claim for U.S. influence throughout the hemisphere. He secured U.S. access to the Pacific with his Transcontinental Treaty. And he continued to maintain that the United States should control the entirety of the Oregon Country.³⁴

John Quincy Adams. Antislavery activist John Quincy Adams headed the congressional opposition to war as leader of the “Immortal Fourteen,” the select group of antislavery congressmen who voted against Polk’s war bill. National Archives. (photo credit 5.3)

But in the years since his presidency, his energies had increasingly focused on America’s domestic perils, and the fate of American slavery was now his biggest concern. Adams was not opposed to war in general. There were “times and occasions of dire necessity for war,” he wrote. But this was not one of them. He was adamant that “war for the right can never be justly blamed; war for the wrong can never be justified.” His opposition to “this most outrageous war” was total. Just before the vote he told his fellow Massachusetts representative, Robert Winthrop, that he “hoped the officers would all resign, & the men all desert, & he would not help them, if they did not.” When it was time to cast his vote, Adams loudly shouted no. But there were only thirteen men who followed his lead, all of whom, along with their constituencies, believed slavery to be the greatest peril facing America.³⁵

The rest took the path of least resistance. Robert Winthrop was one of them. A Brahmin descendant of Puritan John Winthrop representing an antiwar district, Winthrop was not an abolitionist. But neither did he have to fear a public backlash, as did many southern and western Whigs who acceded to Polk’s lies. He voted yes to war, but he was severely shaken by the proceedings and not at all sure he had made the right decision. “I found it hard to swallow so unjust a representation of the fact as the preamble of the Bill contained, & I did what I could to prevent it being prefixed to the Bill,” he explained in a plaintive letter to a close friend. “But when the condition of things was so critical, I could not allow the insertion of a false fact to prevent my being found on the side of the National Defenses. I do not blame any of my colleagues for differing from me. It was one of those cases, where one could not vote either way with any satisfaction.”³⁶

In 1844 the Whig Party warned that Polk’s election would lead to war with Mexico. Many reacted to the fulfillment of that prophecy with a sense of fatalism. “Heaven knows my heart is sickened at the idea of a War with any Country, & at a War with Mexico especially,” Winthrop wrote. “I fear it will lead to mischief of every kind. But the thing was inevitable. Annexation was War.… If we had not recognized its existence this week, we must have done so next week.” Many newspapers agreed. “The Congress of the United States have adopted the War with the Republic of Mexico in which the President has, without their consent or authority, involved the country.… THE MISCHIEF IS DONE,” the Cleveland Herald announced.³⁷

Whig leaders felt strongly that it was time to look to the future. Winthrop claimed he supported the war bill not only because he believed opposition to be “fruitless” but also because “if I can do anything to moderate the War spirit, either in relation to Oregon or to Texas, it must be by exhibiting myself wil[l]ing, when War comes, to vote men & money for defense.” Many in the Whig press agreed: “It will now and henceforward be the business of all good men … to mitigate the evils before us.”³⁸

Winthrop’s friends reassured him that he had made the right choice. “You need give yourself no uneasiness about the wisdom of our course in that matter or its impression upon the public mind at home,” one wrote. Even in Plymouth, “the very source & centre of all peace influences,” the leading Whigs “all took the ground that anything that looked like opposition to a most liberal and vigorous preparation” for war “on the part of the Whigs would be fatal to their future ascendancy … Your ground is not only right in itself” but “will be found to be the only safe one for a statesman to occupy … What a fearful account this administration will have to settle.”³⁹ Winthrop would also have an account to settle: although he couldn’t know it at the time, he would spend the rest of his career attempting to justify that vote for war.

Matters were nearly as chaotic in the Senate, but under Thomas Hart Benton’s leadership opponents of the bill managed to adjourn debate until the following day. At eight that evening Benton returned to the White House, full of questions and not at all happy. Polk called Buchanan and Marcy in as reinforcements for what he knew would be a contentious meeting. With a clear sense of outrage, Benton let all of them know that “in his opinion in the 19th Century war should not be declared without full discussion and much more consideration” than it had received in Congress that day. Marcy and Buchanan tried to reason with the Senate leader. Perhaps not realizing that Benton had dismissed U.S. title to the Nueces Strip in a private conversation with the president the previous day, the two men repeated the specious claim that “war already existed by the act of Mexico herself.” This could only have infuriated Benton. Polk remained silent. He “saw it was useless to debate the subject further.”⁴⁰

After Benton left, Polk, Marcy, and Buchanan agreed that the Missouri senator would oppose the passage of the bill, as would South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, and “two or three other Senators professing to belong to the Democratic Party.” In combination with the united Whigs, this coalition could defeat the bill in the Senate. Were that to happen, “the professed Democrats … will owe a heavy responsibility not only to their party but to the country.” Polk went to sleep convinced that “all that can save the bill in the Senate is the fear of the people.” The public wanted war. Polk hoped their elected representatives recognized the cost of opposing the will of the people.⁴¹

Debate in the Senate the following afternoon was heated. John C. Calhoun charged the president with provoking a war on Mexican soil, and Senator John M. Clayton of Delaware argued that Taylor’s maneuvers within clear view of Matamoros were “as much an act of aggression on our part as is a man’s pointing a pistol at another’s breast.” But Polk’s fears proved misplaced. Virtually all of them capitulated, and at 6:30 p.m. the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 42–2. Had it “been deliberately put to a vote, whether it was right to order Genl Taylor” to the Rio Grande, or for him to plant “his cannon” at Matamoros, or for Slidell to be “sent to Mexico, when he was & under the circumstances he was,” Calhoun was sure that “not a tenth part of Congress” would have voted “in the affirmative, & yet we have been forced into a war.” Apparently “fear of the people” was an animating force. Even Senator Benton, who mocked the idea of a Texas boundary at the Rio Grande in a scathing speech to the Senate in 1844, agreed that in the end, “he was bound to stick to the War party or he was a ruined man.” Robert Winthrop had cast his vote with thoughts of his own manhood in mind. He argued that to have “shirked the vote” would “have been hardly manly.” Southerner John C. Calhoun clearly didn’t see it that way. He abstained from voting.⁴²

And with that, the U.S. Congress assented to war with Mexico. They did not declare war; Polk stole that privilege from them. John C. Calhoun recognized the implications of this constitutional usurpation. “The prescedent [sic] is pregnant with evil,” he wrote. “It sets the example, which will enable all future Presidents to bring about a state of things, in which Congress shall be forced, without deliberation, or reflection,… to declare war, however opposed to its conviction of justice or expediency.” But with near unanimity that in no way reflected the true feelings of their body, or of the nation, they condoned what would soon be called “Mr. Polk’s War.”⁴³

Polk was not one to gloat. He remained as dour and subdued as usual at the large White House reception that evening. But the Democratic press was united in their celebration. “We have the pleasure of announcing orders for the prosecution of the war with Mexico that will be hailed by our countrymen with a burst of universal enthusiasm,” wrote the New Orleans Tropic. “The American people are taking hold of it as becomes their energetic character. A great and powerful movement is about to be made, in which we see a glorious triumph of arms.”⁴⁴

The cabinet got straight to work implementing plans for the long-awaited war. There was a flood of volunteers to organize, officers had to be named, and everything from supplies to strategy demanded immediate attention. Polk’s first action was to request “all the orders and letters of instruction to our squadrons in the Pacific & Gulf of Mexico” and ask that these be read to the Cabinet. Polk “desired to refresh” his memory about the exact orders that he had given Commander J. D. Sloat when, back in the president’s third month in office, he had ordered Sloat to immediately seize San Francisco and other ports in California if war should break out. Perhaps he was also worried about how these orders would look in retrospect if subpoenaed by Congress.⁴⁵

Polk hardly could have been clearer about his territorial ambitions, but Secretary of State Buchanan somehow missed the hint. In a remarkable display of obliviousness, Buchanan drafted a message to the great powers of Europe disavowing interest in Mexico’s territory and presented it to the cabinet. Polk was flabbergasted when Buchanan read “that in going to war we did not do so with a view to acquire either California or New Mexico or any other portion of the Mexican territory.” Polk “told him that though we had not gone to war for conquest, yet it was clear that in making peace we would if practicable obtain California and such other portion of the Mexican territory as would be sufficient … to defray the expenses of the war … it was well known that the Mexican government had no other means of indemnifying us.”

This was not what Buchanan had hoped to hear. The secretary of state insisted that war “with England as well as Mexico, and probably with France also,” would be the result, “for neither of these powers will ever stand by and [see] California annexed to the U.S.” Growing ever more animated, Polk responded that “I would meet the war which either England or France or all the Powers of Christendom might wage, and that I would stand and fight until the last man among us fell in the conflict,” before he would ever agree to Buchanan’s pledge.⁴⁶

The men argued for two full hours, with the rest of the cabinet lining up behind the president. Finally, at close to 11:00 p.m., Polk rose, demanded that Buchanan strike out the offending paragraphs of his message, and sent the speechless secretary of state out of the room. Polk rarely had to exert his will so bluntly within the cabinet, and there was no longer any doubt among the men in the room that Polk intended to take California. The discussion “was one of the most earnest & interesting which has ever occurred in my Cabinet,” Polk wrote in his diary. But it wore him out. The president retired to bed “exhausted after a day of incessant application, anxiety and labor.”⁴⁷

Polk’s bluster aside, he hardly believed it necessary to fight “all the Powers of Christendom” for California. He didn’t even believe that he would have to fight Mexico. Polk’s brinksmanship with England was vindicated on June 6 when word arrived in Washington of a British-proposed compromise over Oregon, agreeing to a boundary at the forty-ninth parallel, along with possession of Vancouver Island. England had sent it off just ten days before learning about hostilities on the Mexican border. Polk forwarded the proposal to an enthusiastic Senate, shifting responsibility for the compromise away from himself, and the Senate ratified the treaty nine days later. If speaking cannon fire worked with England, surely it wouldn’t fail with feeble Mexico. When Polk’s younger brother wrote from Europe during the summer, inquiring about the possibility of serving as an officer in Mexico, Polk told him to “abandon” any thoughts of joining the fight. “In regard to the Mexican war, my impression and hope is, that it will be of short duration. I doubt whether there will be much more fighting unless it be in a guerrilla warfare.… It is probable that the war will be over very soon.”⁴⁸ A quick battle or two, and Mexico would surely capitulate.