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A Tame, Spiritless Fellow

IT IRRITATED ABRAHAM LINCOLN that the voters who came to his campaign rallies weren’t more interested in tariffs. Congress had just passed an act that drastically reduced import levies, and Lincoln was incensed. The tariff was “in greater dispute than ever.” Clearly, this should have been the leading issue of the campaign. Congressional candidate Abraham Lincoln covered eleven foolscap half sheets with notes for a brilliant, technical, inspiring speech on the matter. But he never got to deliver it. All the good voters of Illinois wanted to hear about was war.¹

He supposed it made sense: Illinois was the center of western expansionist fervor, full of voters who had moved west in search of opportunity, and who might move again given the right circumstances. It hadn’t been long since Illinois was the frontier. Lincoln’s district, though majority Whig, was full of pro-war constituents who believed that the conquest of Mexico was part of God’s plan. Mexicans “are reptiles in the path of progressive democracy,” the Illinois State Register declared, who “must either crawl or be crushed.”²

Immediately after authorizing the war, Congress had called up twenty-five thousand volunteers from the states closest to Mexico to aid Taylor at the border for a term of three months; forty thousand more volunteers were to be allotted evenly among the remaining states. Their term of enlistment was one year, which seemed ample, since almost everyone north of the Rio Grande expected a swift conclusion to the whole business. Illinois’s quota of volunteers, three regiments of a thousand men each, filled almost instantly. Thousands more men clamored for an opportunity to fight. Some crossed into neighboring states for a chance to enlist.

First among Illinois’s volunteers was John J. Hardin. He had been itching to fight Mexico, pestering Congressman Douglas for news about hostilities throughout the spring, and repeatedly volunteering to lead troops to California. Hardin’s cousin, Kentucky representative John McHenry, broke the news to him the day after Polk’s war message to Congress. McHenry was a Whig, but decidedly not one of the “Immortal Fourteen” congressmen who openly opposed the president. Like almost all other members of his party, he voted in favor of the war, despite admitting that it contained “palpable falsehoods.” The entire business disgusted him. “No good reason has been applied and none can be applied to why our army was sent to entrench themselves & … their batteries opposite Matamoros—a child could have told it would lead to war,” he fumed to Hardin. Making no attempt to moderate his views in order to suit his hyperpatriotic cousin, McHenry pronounced it “useless to disguise the fact that we have been brought into this war by the weakness or wickedness of our pres[iden]t … while we must all stand by the country right or wrong it is grievous to know that when we pray God defend the right our prayers are not for our own country.” As for “those who have brought it on,” McHenry declared them to “have a fearful responsibility even in this world and in the next.”³

McHenry knew full well how desperately his cousin wanted to fight Mexico, even if he didn’t quite understand it. He thought Hardin’s patriotism and willingness to sacrifice all for the mendacious Polk were naive, and he let him know as much. The political climate in Washington was so poisonous, he warned, that “I can think no Whig would stand the least possible chance of getting any post where he can do honor to himself or service to his country” except where it would benefit the Democrats. But if “under all the circumstances” Hardin was still intent on supporting this war, McHenry offered lukewarm encouragement: by all means “raise your men & go at it.”⁴

Hardin did. The governor appointed him colonel of Illinois’s volunteers, and he set to work organizing his troops with typical efficiency and intensity. Colonel Hardin led the call for men at a rally in Springfield. “Let us not say that Taylor and his brave men can whip Mexico without our aid,” Hardin proclaimed. “This is not the language of brave men. Let us have a hand in whipping her.” He placed a call for troops in a local paper. “Illinoians should respond to the call which has been made upon them, promptly and with spirit,” he wrote. “The General [meaning himself] asks no one to go, where he is not willing to lead.” Always at his best when he felt the call to arms, Hardin was in his element. “You stand very high here with all our Military men and volunteers,” one admirer told him.⁵

Hardin was inundated with letters from young men anxious to fight. “I have somewhat of an inclination for Glory, and to engage in such an expedition as I understand you have,” wrote one when offering his services. Nor was adventure the only thing on their minds. Manifest Destiny was at stake. Like Hardin, many of them hoped to go to California. Several expressed the opinion that “the government aught not to lose the present opportunity of conquering New Mexico and California. Such an other may never occur.”⁶

Others worried that if the men of Illinois did not volunteer in great enough numbers, they, or their state, would be shamed. “Excuse me for expressing my humble tribute,” wrote one grateful admirer, “expressive of the thanks due from all good citizens, for your anticipated efforts to redeem them from the suspicion” that “our state has proven less gallant and patriotic than her neighbors.” Hardin also warned the men of the state that “the fame of this state” might “be tarnished” if there was “either difficulty or delay in raising the requisite number of troops.”⁷

National honor was at stake too. Even those inclined to dismiss Polk’s claim that Mexico started the war couldn’t help but feel that much depended on the outcome of America’s first foreign war, that it could offer “a lesson” to “nations which jeer at the power and energies of a Republican people.” The local Whig paper in Lincoln and Hardin’s district, the Sangamo Journal, steadfastly denied that Mexico had started the hostilities, but in June it heartily endorsed the war, warning that “the eyes of all European nations will be upon us.… If we dictate terms to Mexico within her own dominions;—we shall be respected;—if not every petty power in the world will spit upon us.” Fortunately, Mexico seemed unlikely to put up much of a fight. The people of Mexico were clearly racial inferiors, “but little removed above the negro,” according to the Democratic Illinois State Register. Or perhaps closer to the Indians that the nation had successfully banished west of the Mississippi less than a decade earlier. One friend of Hardin’s declined the call to arms because he imagined there would be “nothing to whip but a parcel of blankeded half-breeds armed with bows and arrows.”⁸

And men had practical reasons for volunteering. Illinois’s economy was in tatters, the state was struggling under an enormous debt obligation, and jobs were scarce in 1846. The pay for a private worked out to $15.50 a month, twice what a common laborer could earn (assuming he could find a job in the first place).⁹

Whigs were also worried about their reputation and were determined to avoid any charges of disloyalty. The Federalist Party had been totally discredited by their opposition to the War of 1812, and collapsed as a national party after holding a convention in Hartford to discuss means of bringing that conflict to a close, including the possible secession of New England. The disgrace of the Federalists was so intense that thirty years later Democrats, including Polk, referred to the Whigs as “the Federal Party” as a means of disparaging them.

In truth, Clay’s party shared a great deal with the earlier Federalists, including a faith in a strong central government, widespread support in New England, and what Democrats regarded as a haughty elitism. They could hardly afford to justify linking themselves with the Federalists by offering only lukewarm support of a foreign war. “The Whigs here are much more ready to turn out than the real annexation party—they say it is to show our country and they are ready to Protect it,” wrote a friend to Hardin. “There is no doubt in my mind but that a majority of those who turn out will be Whigs.”¹⁰

Whigs also feared association with abolitionists, antislavery radicals who believed it was God’s will that slavery end immediately. Even in their two areas of strength, New England and the upper Midwest, abolitionists were only a small minority in the 1840s. But they were vocal, motivated, and seemingly fearless. From the outset they loudly condemned the war with Mexico as unjust and part of a plot to strengthen slavery, just as they had condemned Texas annexation and the Texas Revolution before that. Immediately after the passage of Polk’s war bill, the abolitionist Boston Whig proclaimed it “one of the grossest National lies that has ever been told.” From his post as editor of the Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison impressed upon readers that the “chief anti-slavery work” was to end the war: “Endeavor to paralyze the power of the government, that Mexico may be saved, and the overthrow of the Slave Power hastened.” Antislavery ministers condemned the war from their pulpits, and antislavery citizens in New England and the upper Midwest protested the war by writing dozens of antiwar petitions to Congress.¹¹

Democrats perennially linked Whigs with abolitionists, but in truth a mainstream Whig like Henry Clay or John Hardin had little more in common with an abolitionist like Garrison than did James Polk. The defection of a segment of New York’s Whigs to the Liberty Party in 1844, a defection that may well have cost Clay the election, should have made this obvious. While Whigs (particularly southern Whigs) were more likely than Democrats to personally disapprove of slavery, they were just as willing as Democrats to allow the South its own institutions, particularly given the centrality of slave-grown cotton to northern manufacturing and trade. Cotton was the most valuable national export, and New York’s wealth was closely tied to its control of the transatlantic cotton trade. In the eyes of moderates such as Henry Clay, who linked manumission with the colonization of freed black people in Africa, the agitation of abolitionists was counterproductive, actually setting back the cause of ending slavery by alienating slave owners. And a national party in the 1840s simply couldn’t win a majority on an abolitionist platform. Whigs had to distance themselves not only from their disloyal Federalist forebears but also from antiwar abolitionists. Tempers ran high. When abolitionists in Bloomington said publicly what many in Congress were saying privately, that the war was unjust, volunteers, most likely belonging to both the Whig and Democratic parties, smashed their windows.¹²

The Whigs of Illinois more than rose to these challenges. Edward Baker, currently the sitting Whig congressman from Lincoln’s district, also decided to enlist. After receiving permission to raise a fourth regiment of volunteers, he rushed home without even resigning his congressional seat. He made the trip from Washington to Springfield in just six days, and within a month marched with his men out of Springfield through a gathering of thousands of well-wishers.¹³

This couldn’t help but have affected Abraham Lincoln deeply. Hardin and Baker were his two main rivals in the congressional district. Both had now chosen war over politics, dismissing as petty concerns, unworthy of a patriot, the issues and contests that still enchanted Lincoln. And while there was no love lost between Lincoln and Hardin since the contested nomination, Edward Baker was one of Lincoln’s closest friends. The Lincolns had revealed the depth of their esteem for Baker when they named their second son, born just months earlier, after him. Young Eddie hadn’t yet sat up when his namesake left for the Halls of the Montezumas.

Thousands of Whigs followed Hardin and Baker’s lead, but Abraham Lincoln was not among them. Although he had enjoyed his three months of military service as a young man during the Black Hawk War, and claimed in 1858 that his election as captain by his fellow volunteers “gave me more pleasure than any I have had since,” Abraham’s priorities in the summer of 1846 did not extend to Mexico. There was the new baby at home, he had finally won the nomination for Congress, and all his energy was focused on winning the election in August.¹⁴

Nor was Lincoln alone in withstanding the call to arms. There were many powerful public men who found the pro-war hysteria and the enlistment of Hardin and Baker baffling. David Davis, a member of the state legislature and occasional business partner of both Lincoln and Hardin, marveled that “the only Whig Congressman (Col Baker) from this state left his post in Congress and has the command of the 4th Regiment of Volunteers.” Davis refused to speak at an enlistment rally on the grounds that since he was not going to enlist he couldn’t very well ask others to do so. For her part, his wife, Sarah Davis, couldn’t bear “to think of the sacrifice of human life—mourning families and all the evils and miseries attendant on war.”¹⁵

John Hardin’s law partner and closest friend, David A. Smith, was also open in his disdain for the military life. When Hardin tried to entice him to Mexico, his response was definitive. “I would not give the glory and gain of spending one week quietly at home with my wife and children for all the laurels, honor, and enchantments of whatever name or nature that you or all Old Rough & ready will reap on the fields of Mexico,” he wrote Hardin that summer. He had no fear of Hardin’s disdain. “You will most likely say that I am a tame spiritless fellow and will never make any stir in this world. That is very likely and I am content that should be so.” Perhaps, Smith suggested, it was Hardin who had his priorities wrong, and Mexico was the last place a man should look for honor. “The greatest thing to us after all is to conquer ourselves and then we shall be more than the most successful Military chieftains. We shall be conquerors in the highest and best sense of the term.”¹⁶

If David A. Smith was a “tame spiritless fellow,” so too was his friend Abraham Lincoln. Like Smith, Lincoln much preferred life with his wife and children to the “enchantments” of Mexico, and like Smith, he had long held that a man needed to conquer himself, to become disciplined, in order to be a conqueror “in the highest and best sense of the term.” “Internal improvements,” a phrase beloved by Whigs, had two meanings. And Lincoln subscribed to them both. An individual needed to master his or her impulses, work diligently, and focus on the moral improvement of the family, just as surely as a community needed to create institutions such as schools, libraries, and churches, and a state needed to finance bridges and good roads, in order to improve the lives of everyone. It was Whig doctrine. It was also Abraham Lincoln’s creed. Manifest Destiny held an allure, but new land was no substitute for sustained effort and economic development, either for an individual or for a state.¹⁷

Lincoln never seriously considered following Hardin and Baker to Mexico. The invasion of Mexico distracted America from what he believed was truly important—a Whig vision of America’s future glory built on economics and not territorial expansion. This was not Abraham Lincoln’s war.

Fortunately, his Democratic opponent in the congressional race was a Methodist minister, another “tame spiritless fellow” as lukewarm about the war as he was. But at the moment, the public cared for neither economics nor religion, just Mexico. It was beginning to dawn on Lincoln that if he was going to get to Washington, he’d have to either avoid discussing the conflict or at least give the impression of speaking in its favor.

Lincoln was sorry about the war but not especially worried about the outcome. Though foreign observers questioned how a small force comprising mostly down-and-out immigrants and untrained volunteers would perform against a better-prepared and well-organized Mexican army fighting on the defensive, the news from the battlefield was all good. Mexico’s soldiers wore elegant uniforms, but the army was burdened with outdated armaments, political instability, and poorly paid and fed conscripts.¹⁸ Even before the Illinois volunteers left the state, news of thrilling victories filled local papers. In the first regular engagement of the war, on May 8, Taylor’s force of two thousand defeated General Arista’s army of six thousand near a watering hole north of the Rio Grande known as Palo Alto. The Mexican column, shattered by Taylor’s efficient artillery, was driven from the field with a loss of two hundred men, nearly four times that of the Americans.

The following day, Arista assumed a defensive position along a dried-up riverbed and waited for Taylor. Taylor’s frontal assault at the Resaca de la Palma was a complete success. The regular forces proved experts at the deployment of the bayonet, and the dragoons were magnificent on horseback. Twelve hundred Mexicans were killed, and only 150 Americans. The remains of Arista’s army fled across the Rio Grande to the safety of the well-laid-out brick town of Matamoros. The Mexican general was forced to abandon his personal papers when the Americans gleefully ransacked them. They found orders from the Mexican government to send General Taylor to Mexico City as a prisoner of war. Taylor prepared to cross the Rio Grande and finish off the Mexican army.¹⁹

Arista wanted to hold Matamoros, but his demoralized troops left little hope of withstanding the now imminent attack. On May 17, he began to move supplies and guns from the city. On May 18, U.S. soldiers waded across the river “up to their armpits,” and as “the band struck up yankee doodle the first time it was ever played south of that river,” the men “raised a cheer that made the woods ring.” The U.S. Army marched into Matamoros without opposition and raised the Stars and Stripes above the city, Taylor appointed one of his officers military governor, and the residents of Matamoros had the decidedly unwelcome honor of being the first in Mexico to experience U.S. Army occupation.²⁰

Everyone recognized the monumental nature of the occasion. Captain R. A. Stewart, an ordained minister, sugar planter, and commander of the Louisiana volunteers, set aside his military garb on Sunday, June 1, to address the victors of Matamoros on Jeremiah 7:7: “Then I will cause you to dwell together in this place, in the land I gave to your fathers forever and ever.” In his view, the occupation of the U.S. Army was “calculated to shed light over the dark borders of Tamaulipas—to make its inhabitants embrace the blessing of freedom.” And Taylor’s remarkable victories “showed most plainly and beautifully, that it was the order of providence that the Anglo-Saxon race was not only to take possession of the whole North American continent, but to influence and modify the character of the world.” The emotional men embraced his affirmation of Manifest Destiny. The “eyes of many sunburnt veterans … were filled with tears” by the end of the reverend’s discourse.²¹

Americans at home agreed that the “many daring deeds” and “brilliant impetuosity” of the American troops proved the superiority of the United States and “sustained nobly the character of the Anglo-Saxon race.” Even the anti-Polk congressman John McHenry expressed a bit of glee in a letter to his cousin Hardin after the capture of Matamoros about “how our army have whipped the Mexicans.” The press went wild in their celebration of the “heroic little army” that had achieved such “matchless victories.” “The prowess of our brave soldiers has made the perfidious Mexicans bite the dust,” cheered an Illinois paper. “The serpent of the Mexican arms now writhes in death agony in the beak of the American eagle.” Another paper gushed that “since the eventful days of our Revolutionary struggle no battle has been fought in which the heroes who march under the Star Spangled Banner, covered themselves with more glory, than did the little band who pressed forward at the command of the heroic Taylor, and charged an enemy of vastly superior numbers, in the very teeth of their roaring, death-dealing cannon!”²²

No one received more acclaim than Zachary Taylor. Letters from the battlefront universally praised the “cool and gallant manner” in which Taylor led his troops, and noted that he “won the hearts of his soldiers by his willingness to share with them the most imminent perils.” Journalists insisted that “there are few instances of a popularity so suddenly acquired, yet so universal and well founded, as that of Gen. Taylor.” It wasn’t simply his “brilliant” victories and military “genius” but “the display of gallantry, coolness, and conduct which won those victories” that “gained him the hearts of his countrymen.” Immediately after the battles on the Rio Grande, soldiers in the field began composing and singing “Taylor songs.” By early July, newspapers were already speaking of General Taylor, “Old Rough and Ready,” as a presidential candidate, while the public gathered at rallies designed to advance his candidacy.²³ Polk simmered, convinced the acclaim belonged to him and not to his Whig general.

By midsummer, news from the front, or fronts, was even better. At the start of the war, Polk, with the military counsel of Major General Winfield Scott, had decided on a two-pronged attack on Mexico: Taylor’s forces were to drive south through Texas and Monterrey toward Mexico City, while a second force, under the direction of Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny, would capture Mexican lands to the west, into New Mexico and Chihuahua and on to California. A third, smaller central division, under the command of Brigadier General John Ellis Wool, was added to secure Chihuahua in north-central Mexico. Polk ordered the navy to blockade the port of Veracruz, and sent word to Commodore Sloat in California to put his earlier order for the capture of California into action.

Polk’s plans were spectacularly successful. Kearny marched the fifteen hundred frontiersmen who made up his Army of the West a thousand miles, averaging a hundred miles a week, from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas all the way to the provincial capital of New Mexico. Despite bluster on the part of Manuel Armijo, governor of New Mexico, in six weeks the Yankees marched unopposed into Santa Fe. On August 16, New Mexico and its eighty thousand inhabitants were in American hands. After Kearny promised to protect the inhabitants and their property and to respect their religion, the majority of the proud citizens of Santa Fe took an oath of allegiance to the United States. Unaware of the extent of simmering hostility to American occupation that existed in the province, Kearny took leave of New Mexico for California, after directing a Missouri lawyer under his command, Colonel Alexander W. Doniphan, to head south to Chihuahua to reinforce Taylor.

The Army of the West was accompanied by a thousand Missouri volunteers and a battalion of Mormon soldiers, serving in the only religiously based unit in American military history. After John J. Hardin directed the expulsion of Mormons from Illinois, Brigham Young determined to move beyond the reach of American persecution. Mere days after Congress’s assent to war, a church elder asked Polk for federal assistance for a migration to Mexican territory beyond the Rocky Mountains. Polk agreed, provided the Mormons also fight Mexico. Polk authorized Kearney to receive “as volunteers a few hundred of the Mormons who are now on their way to California, with a view to conciliate them, attach them to our country, & prevent them from taking part against us.” The five hundred men of the battalion contributed their uniform allowance to the purchase of wagons and provisions that enabled the Mormon exodus. Seventy women and children accompanied the soldiers all the way to California. By the end of the summer, the American public was convinced that New Mexico was safe in American hands, as headlines proclaimed, “Santa Fe Taken, Without the Firing of a Gun!”²⁴

The news from California was even more brilliant. Nearly a year before provoking war with Mexico, Polk had authorized a “scientific expedition” to California under the command of famed explorer Captain John C. Frémont, Thomas Hart Benton’s son-in-law. Frémont arrived in California in January 1846, where the suspicious actions of his men drove the Mexican authorities to order him out of the country. They decamped for Oregon, but when a special courier from Washington brought news of worsening hostilities with Mexico, Frémont returned to California, fought several modest skirmishes, and raised a flag in Sonoma featuring a crudely drawn picture of a bear. They declared California independent on July 4, 1846, only days before gaining confirmation that Mexico and the United States were in a state of war. Then Frémont’s men lowered the Bear Flag and replaced it with the Stars and Stripes.

Commodore Sloat, receiving the same news of war, captured Monterey on July 7, and three days later the navy occupied San Francisco Bay. California’s major ports were secured. On August 16, Commodore Robert Stockton, who succeeded Sloat, took Los Angeles without opposition, and declared himself governor of the territory. By the end of the summer, papers were confidently reporting that “the whole of Upper California is now in the possession of the Americans” and “forever lost to Mexico.” As in New Mexico, papers reported, “the capture of California seems to have been effected without bloodshed or resistance.”²⁵

This was not entirely true. While bloodshed was minimal, there were countless episodes of robbery and intimidation that left much of the populace disenchanted with the Yankees. In Santa Barbara, a picturesque town of approximately two hundred adobe houses with red tile roofs laid out between a placid bay and the mountains, U.S. troops made the mistake of imposing upon the powerful de la Guerra family. José de la Guerra, the richest man in the county, “offered to help” the Americans by lending them ten to twelve horses out of the approximately fifty-eight thousand on his quarter-million-acre ranch. After the ranch manager’s wife prepared and served them breakfast, eight U.S. soldiers seized forty-three horses and threatened the life of ranch employees, claiming that “they were enemies of the government and the troops could take anything and everything.” Three lieutenants ended up in court as a result. But most californios lacked the connections and resources of the de la Guerras and had no recourse when their property was taken.²⁶

Stockton gloated about his triumph in a letter to the president. “All is now peaceful and quiet. My word at present is the law of the land. My power is more than regal. The haughty Mexican Cavalier shakes hands with me with pleasure, and the beautiful women look to me with joy and gladness, as their friend and benefactor. In short all of power and luxury is spread before me, through the mysterious workings of a beneficent Providence.”²⁷

America’s mood verged on the lighthearted: embedded journalists traveling with the troops turned battles into entertainments and idealized both America’s hero-soldiers and their triumphs. The public was so anxious for news from Mexico that some unscrupulous newsboys and the papers themselves manufactured stories to get people to buy papers. One newspaper with its own correspondent in the field celebrated the enthusiasm for war news.

The newsboy hits the streets and shouts out “here’s the extra ’Erald—got the great battle in Mexico.” The merchant rushes from his store and buys an extra … cartmen draw up to the sidewalk and stop with their loaded carts while they read … the clerk, on his way to the bank, reads a full account.… The dandy on the hotel steps, the cabman on the stand, the butcher at his stall, the loafer on the dock, the lady in the parlor, the cook in the kitchen, the waiter in the barroom, the clerk in the store, the actor at rehearsal, the judge upon the bench, the lawyer in the court, the officer in attendance, even the prisoner at the bar, [read] of the victory and rejoice!²⁸

The war was going so brilliantly that even Lincoln was forced to take part in a pro-war rally. At the statehouse in June, he found himself, along with four other distinguished speakers, supporting “prompt and united action” to “sustain” America’s honor and “secure her national rights.” The local paper lauded the “warm, thrilling, effective” speeches in favor of war.²⁹

The speech was strictly political. Lincoln had had no change of heart, and he made no further public statements about the war. He was intent on winning the election. Abandoning his law practice entirely, Lincoln ran a disciplined campaign that summer. It helped that his opponent was an indifferent public speaker. But Lincoln “kept his forces well in hand,” and one supporter remembered that “long before the contest closed we snuffed approaching victory in the air.”³⁰

Henry Clay made no speeches about the war in the summer of 1846. He was still so adored in his home state that he could have returned to office in 1846, had he wished, or he could have traveled the country, delivering addresses to enthusiastic Whig audiences. But Clay showed no interest. Seemingly retired forever from the world of politics, he roused himself only enough to bemoan the nation’s fate in a letter to a friend in June. “A war between two neighboring Republics! Between them because the stronger one has possessed itself of Territory claimed by the weaker!” It was almost too much to believe, made worse for Clay because he had “foretold” what would happen. “This unhappy War never would have occurred if there had been a different issue of the Presidential contest of 1844.”³¹

The “trumpet of war” sounded as loudly in Kentucky as in Illinois. Three regiments of Kentucky volunteers were mustered into service in May and June, and as in Illinois, Clay noted, “a vast proportion” of the volunteers “are Whigs, who disapproved of the measures which have led to this unfortunate war.” Among them was Clay’s favorite son and namesake, Henry Clay Jr., who was appointed lieutenant colonel in the Second Kentucky Volunteers. The father tried to keep up a strong front in a letter to his best female friend, Octavia LeVert: “We cannot but admire and approve the patriotic and gallant spirit which animates our Country men, altho’ we might wish that the cause in which they have stept forth was more reconcilable with the dictates of conscience.” But it was a painful parting. The young volunteer was the most gifted of his sons, the one for whom he had the greatest expectations. How bitter it was that Henry Junior was risking death for a president his father detested and a conflict he despised. Clay presented his son with the family dueling pistols and wept as he bid him goodbye.³²

War News from Mexico, 1848. Richard Caton Woodville of Baltimore was just twenty-three when he produced his ambivalent painting of Americans reading the news from Mexico. This widely circulated image reflects the intense public interest in the war as well as the role that newspapers played in spreading news from the front. The 1846 conflict was the first American war covered by embedded journalists, whose reports offered Americans around the country what would have seemed like intimate access to the experiences of the troops on a nearly daily basis. Woodville’s concern about the impact of the war on the future of slavery can be inferred by the presence of African Americans in the forefront. That the figure to the left is thoughtlessly dropping a match into a barrel suggests that the war may have devastating and unintended consequences. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (photo credit 6.1)

Nor was that the full extent of difficulties faced by Clay that summer. While the rest of the nation rejoiced at the news of American victories in Mexico, Clay’s family was “laboring under a severe domestic affliction.” His son John suffered another breakdown in August, requiring a second hospitalization. Clay sought relief at a nearby spa for a few days, but returned home to the devastating news that his first and favorite grandson, Martin Duralde, was dead. Duralde, just twenty-three, had been suffering for eighteen months from a “hoemorrage of the lungs” due to tuberculosis, and had finally succumbed to “frightful convulsions from a congestion of the brain.” Duralde had grown up in the Clay household after his mother’s death at age twenty-two. Clay poured out his grief in a letter to Duralde’s doctor. “Death, ruthless death, has deprived me of Six affectionate daughters, all that I ever had, and has now commenced his work of destruction, with my descendents, in the second generation.”³³

Lieutenant Colonel Henry Clay Jr. Henry and Lucretia’s third and most promising son volunteered to lead Kentucky troops to Mexico, despite his father’s hostility to the war and his own Whig principles. Courtesy of Ashland, the Henry Clay Estate, Lexington, Kentucky. (photo credit 6.2)

September brought more alarming news. Henry Clay Jr., who had joined Taylor’s forces after his victories along the Rio Grande, had “met with a serious accident.” Perhaps the elder Henry never heard the rumor that Lieutenant Colonel Henry Clay’s injuries were sustained in a riding accident while drunk. He was charged with drunkenness in the accident, but his subordinates maintained the charges were false. He admitted to his father that “I have not and probably shall never recover the perfect use of my arm.” Clay’s nerves may have been at a fevered pitch over the safety of his son that month, but September also brought the most brilliant victory yet for U.S. forces.³⁴

Monterrey, a provincial capital of fifteen thousand, sat on a key transit route in northern Mexico and was considered of strategic importance both to Mexicans and to Americans, who envisioned the city as an anchor in a defensive line across northern Mexico. After his embarrassing losses along the Rio Grande, General Arista was stripped of command. His replacement was ordered to concentrate his forces in Monterrey and defend the city from invaders. Given the setting of the town, nestled in the foothills of a mountain range and extending along a river, and the layout of the city, with straight and easily barricaded streets, this seemed straightforward. In July and August, the seven thousand Mexican troops now gathered in the area, under the command of General Ampudia, constructed impressive fortifications around the city.

Taylor, meanwhile, marched his six thousand men from Matamoros to Monterrey. On September 19, he reconnoitered the mile-long city, seemingly unconcerned that he was about to attempt to storm a virtual fortress. On Sunday, September 20, U.S. troops deployed into a line of battle. During the three-day battle that followed, they accomplished the seemingly impossible. Taylor divided his forces, and half, under the command of Brigadier General William Jenkins Worth, took advantage of a driving rain to seize the main road into town by surprise. They then stormed the town, first seizing earthworks from the Mexicans, then capturing a stone fort with the use of an artillery barrage, and finally driving the Mexicans from their interior fortifications. The other half of the American forces, under Taylor, attacked from the opposite direction. On the morning of September 23, Taylor’s forces were fighting in the streets of Monterrey, smashing through the walls of houses and bayoneting Mexican soldiers. The destruction was terrible, and horrified residents watched as “Monterey was converted into a vast cemetery. The unburied bodies, the dead and putrid mules, the silence of the streets, all gave a fearful aspect to this city.”³⁵

Heroic Defense of the City of Monterey. Mexicans produced few images of the invasion of their country during or directly after the war. This rare lithograph depicts the chaos and destruction of the street fighting during the third day of the siege of Monterrey from a distinctly Mexican perspective. Mexican soldiers heroically defend their city with the help of civilians and a priest. From Album Pintoresco de la República Méxicana (Mexico: Hallase en la estamperia de Julio Michaud y Thomas), ca. 1848–50. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. (photo credit 6.3)

The following morning, Ampudia surrendered. The Americans were getting dangerously close to his munitions storehouse, and the general feared an explosion. All public property in the town was handed over to Taylor’s forces, and Mexican troops agreed to retire from the field. The U.S. Army settled into an extended occupation of the town. Ampudia requested, and was granted, an eight-week armistice, which each government had the right to veto.

The terms were generous on Taylor’s part—far too generous, in Polk’s eyes. “It was a great mistake of Gen’l Taylor to agree to an armistice,” the president wrote in his diary when he heard. “He had the enemy in his power & should have taken them prisoners.” He immediately, and angrily, vetoed the armistice. The cabinet agreed that had Taylor “captured the Mexican army, deprived them of their arms, and discharged them … it would have probably ended the war with Mexico.” But Taylor’s actions made sense given the situation, which Polk wholly failed to comprehend. The American troops were exhausted, hungry, and low on ammunition. They were in no state to continue the grueling hand-to-hand combat that would be required to secure the city.³⁶

Taylor was also fairly sure the war was now over. The United States had secured Texas and had taken the fight into Mexico itself. His job was now done. Five hundred U.S. soldiers had perished in the capture of Monterrey, and Taylor had no interest in seeing that number increase. Had the war been about the Mexico-Texas boundary, it would have been over.

But Polk’s ambitions involved more than Texas alone, and they were growing larger with each U.S. victory. At a cabinet meeting on June 30, Secretary of State Buchanan tried, once again, to convince the president of the folly of dismembering Mexico. When Secretary of the Treasury Robert Walker argued in favor of taking everything north of the twenty-sixth parallel (including most of Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, and Baja California, as well as a good portion of Nuevo Léon and Tamaulipas; in total, a third of modern-day Mexico), Buchanan protested. “If it was the object of the President to acquire all the country North of 26° … it should be known,” he insisted. And “the opinion of the world would be against” us, “especially as it would become a slave-holding country.” Walker responded “that he would be willing to fight the whole world sooner than suffer other Powers to interfere in the matter.” Polk agreed with his belligerent secretary: “I remarked that I preferred the 26° to any boundary North of it.”³⁷ And no one in the cabinet questioned Buchanan’s assumption that these new lands would become slave territory.

The war, then, was far from over.

As the summer turned to fall, American newspaper readers might have noticed a subtle shift in war news. After the initial euphoria of America’s stunning victories dissipated, the nearly universal response in favor of the war began to fray. In late May, the Philadelphia North American, a staunch Whig paper, had cheered that “all party distinctions” had been “lost—all hearts heated and fused into one fiery mass against the foes of the country.”³⁸

But news of mounting casualties led many in the United States to ask why the war had not yet been brought to a conclusion. Because the army did not censor the letters of soldiers, both volunteers and regulars wrote home with vivid reports of overcrowded, unsanitary camps and outbreaks of communicable diseases in the regiments. Many of these were published by their families in local papers. One October 1846 letter from Monterrey, published in the New Orleans Picayune, admitted that “the health of the army is bad, a very heavy proportion of the officers and men being on the sick list.… Our sufferings are intolerable.” A correspondent to the New Orleans Times noted in November that “disease was very common with the officers and the men” stationed along the Rio Grande. Volunteers, particularly from the countryside, lacked the previous exposure to communicable diseases that might have provided some immunity, and as a result they suffered from this disease at a higher rate than did the regulars. Unused to standards of camp sanitation, and more liable to undercook their rations or overindulge on the novel tropical fruits they encountered, they were also more prone to illness caused by tainted water and poor diet.³⁹

The women of Baltimore formed a benevolent organization “to assist the poor sick and wounded soldiers” with donations of preserved food, and journalists made similar appeals to the “patriotism” of women in other towns, but the bad news kept coming. When a shipload of sick and injured soldiers arrived in Louisiana, a journalist marveled that half of the passengers “were wounded or sick, some having lost their legs, others their arms, and others being wounded in their arms and legs.… Will you believe me when I tell you that with all these sick and wounded and dying men, not a surgeon or nurse was sent along to attend upon them, not a particle of medicine furnished, not a patch of linen for dressing wounds.” David Davis wrote to a Massachusetts friend that the Illinois volunteers “have been treated worse than dogs & one half either die, or return home, emaciated & with constitutions wholly broken down.”⁴⁰

The public evinced quite a bit more concern about the volunteers than the regulars. Although serving in the same army, they were dramatically different groups, and were perceived that way at the time. More than twice as many volunteers as regulars served in Mexico, 59,000 versus 27,000. The vast majority of enlisted men in the peacetime regular army were poor, uneducated, and unskilled. Forty percent were recently arrived immigrants (many not yet naturalized), and 35 percent could not sign their name. Their average age was twenty-five. Service in the army was neither particularly remunerative nor honorable; in a democratic culture that upheld freedom and independence as precious American rights, soldiers were considered overly servile. They were subjected to harsh corporal punishment, including whipping, and forced to labor under conditions they considered degrading, often alongside slaves. Most men who enlisted in the regular army did so because they had no better options in the sluggish and unpredictable economy in the decade following the Panic of 1837. Even those poorly paid jobs open to unskilled laborers, such as digging ditches and canals or hauling coal, were hard to come by. Not surprisingly, many of these men deserted when the opportunity presented itself.⁴¹

Volunteers, by contrast, tended to come from the middle and upper echelons of society. Their ideas about discipline were decidedly more lax than those of the regular army, and they insisted upon being treated with respect, like citizens. They demanded (but were not legally entitled to) the right to withdraw from service when they chose.

There was no love lost between the two groups. Volunteers looked down upon the regulars and often failed to conceal their contempt. Their disdain was not simply grounded in a conviction of their social superiority. Like most Americans, the volunteers questioned whether a democratic republic like the United States had any need for a standing army, and doubted that men serving for wages could be relied upon in a fight. Both beliefs had long histories. Soon after the Revolution, Congress declared that peacetime standing armies were “inconsistent with the principles of republican government” and “dangerous to the liberties of a free people,” since they could easily be “converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism.” As for paying men to fight, this too seemed suspicious to Americans. In the 1840s Americans still venerated the volunteer ethos as particularly admirable and trustworthy, while professionalization would not take on the positive attributes of skill and expertise until after the Civil War. One could practice as a doctor or lawyer in the 1840s without a great deal of training or any formal certification, and all firefighting was conducted by volunteers, even in large cities. Americans were hesitant to employ paid firemen because they questioned whether men motivated by financial interests would be willing to risk their lives at a fire. Paying soldiers seemed equally problematic.⁴²

The regulars, by contrast, found preposterous the idea that volunteers could defend the United States, let alone conduct an offensive war like that in Mexico. They resented their extra rights and privileges, as well as the fact that volunteers won a disproportionate amount of praise for victories that by rights belonged to the regulars. Zachary Taylor, who found the volunteers impossible to control, believed them more trouble than they were worth. Perhaps he was right. Volunteers, lacking both training and discipline, were not only less reliable under fire than the regulars, and disproportionately susceptible to communicable disease, in part because of their poor sanitation practices, but also committed atrocities against Mexican civilians that would come to shock Americans back home.

The occupation of Matamoros and Monterrey did not go smoothly. Captain R. A. Stewart, the minister, had hoped the American occupation of Matamoros would “make its inhabitants embrace the blessing of freedom.” But Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant recognized how unlikely that was. He wrote to his fiancée, Julia, of the “great many murders” and “weak means made use of to prevent frequent repetitions. Some of the volunteers and about all the Texans seem to think it perfectly right to impose upon the people of a conquered City to any extent, and even to murder them where the act can be covered by the dark. And how much they seem to enjoy acts of violence too! I would not pretend to guess the number of murders that have been committed upon the persons of poor Mexicans and the soldiers, since we have been here, but the number would startle you.”⁴³

None of this should have been surprising. As youths, most of the volunteers had thrilled to tales of Texas heroism and Alamo martyrs. Even enlightened U.S. soldiers were, by modern standards, racist. They saw Mexico as an immoral nation and Mexicans themselves as an inferior race practicing a suspect religion. Many who volunteered felt deep enmity for the people of Mexico, and conflated them with Indians and African American slaves. Lacking training and discipline, with little knowledge of military codes, many ran wild. Texas Ranger Buck Berry, whose three-month term of enlistment actually expired before the battle of Monterrey, continued on with Taylor because “some of us had traveled six hundred miles to kill a Mexican and refused to accept a discharge until we got to Monterrey where a fight was waiting for our arrival.”⁴⁴

Soon this was national news. On October 6, the New Orleans Picayune reported that “eight Mexicans, including two women, had been killed” a few miles outside nearby Camargo, “an old dilapidated-looking town” on the San Juan River. “The murder was attributed to some of the volunteers.” The story was picked up by other papers. The following week the Charleston Mercury broke news of atrocities in Monterrey. “As at Matamoros, murder, robbery, and rape were committed in the broad light of day, and as if desirous to signalize themselves at Monterey by some new act of atrocity, they burned many of the thatched huts of the poor peasants. It is thought that one hundred of the inhabitants were murdered in cold blood, and one … was shot dead at noon-day in the main street of the city.” This story was picked up and circulated in other papers as well. By late May, news of volunteer depradations had made it to London.⁴⁵

Many Mexican citizens had fled Monterrey as soon as U.S. forces arrived, having heard news of affairs in Matamoros, while the Mexican press complained that “the volunteers, the most unprincipled and ungovernable class at home, have been let loose like blood-hounds on Mexico.” Lieutenant George Gordon Meade agreed. On October 20, he wrote his wife that the volunteers “have made themselves so terrible by their previous outrages as to have inspired the Mexicans with a perfect horror of them.”⁴⁶

Even sympathetic voices admitted the truth of these stories, but they blamed the carnage on the people of Mexico. Violent volunteers were simply seeking “revenge” for the “outrages committed on the persons and property of American soldiers.” Ohio volunteer Frank Hardy, stationed in Matamoros, explained to his brother that although “for a while it was thought that many of the Mexicans were favorable to the institutions of the United States.… it is now pretty generally believed that they are almost without exception snakes in the grass, and are at heart strongly attached to their Government.… they profess friendship to the Americans merely for the purpose of being protected and making money—They are in short a treacherous race and have hearts the most of them as black as their skins.” He admitted that many of his fellow soldiers “are in favor of prosecuting the war—when hostilities shall again commence—upon different principles, and plunder, and ravage, and give them a taste of war in all its horrors, and see if that will bring them to a sense of their folly in contending with the United States.”⁴⁷ It was a lesson learned over decades of Indian wars back home; when faced with a “treacherous race,” the rules of war did not apply. Vengeance, in their eyes, was justice.

In the late fall, the New Orleans Delta reported on a “war between the Kentuckians and Mexicans” in which “not less than forty Mexicans have been killed within the last five days, fifteen of whom, it is said, were killed in one day, and within the scope of one mile.” Attempting to justify the actions of the volunteers, a correspondent to the Delta explained that “ever since the occupation of Matamoros by our troops the Mexicans have been cutting off our men … and the compliment has been invariable returned, generally two for one … in many cases the innocent is made to suffer for crimes committed by their guilty countrymen.”⁴⁸

The Kentuckians may have been bad, but they were not nearly as bad as the Texans. Taylor expressed regret in a letter on June 30 for “outrages committed by the Texas volunteers on the Mexicans and others” and claimed he was unable to contain the “lawless set.” While he admitted that many in the unit were skilled, he also believed that they were “too licentious to do much good.” Reliable information reached Washington “almost daily” about “atrocities” committed by “the wild volunteers.” General Scott appealed to the secretary of war: “Our militia & volunteers, if a tenth of what is said to be true, have committed atrocities—horrors—in Mexico, sufficient to make Heaven weep, & every American, of Christian morals, blush for his country. Murder, robbery & rape of mothers & daughters, in the presence of the tied up males of the families, have been common all along the Rio Grande.” General Wool wrote to Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan that deserters had not only robbed the citizens of the region with impunity but also “ravished women, two of whom had died in consequence of their brutality.”⁴⁹

General Wool and staff in the Calle Real, Saltillo. This early daguerreotype shows Brigadier General John Ellis Wool and his staff in the streets of Saltillo, Mexico, his headquarters from December 1846 to November 1847. Wool attempted to curb volunteer abuses against Mexican civilians in northeastern Mexico, but with limited success. Fully aware of fierce local opposition to the U.S. occupation, Wool was careful to travel with a large escort, as seen here, for purposes of security. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. (photo credit 6.4)

Congressman-elect Abraham Lincoln. Portrait by Nicholas H. Shepherd, 1846–47. The first picture ever taken of Abraham Lincoln reveals a well-groomed gentleman seemingly aware of his importance as a newly elected congressman. Mary Todd Lincoln also posed for a photo the same day at Shepherd’s Springfield studio. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (photo credit 6.5)

The Philadelphia North American was just one of many newspapers at the start of the war that celebrated “the spirit of the country” where the government “can rely for its wars upon the volunteers … men abandoning a better and brighter lot for the honor of striking a blow for the land of their love.” But it also had warned that “should the lust of conquest, or the passions of revenge” rear their heads, “public opinion will fall away from” the war “as good men shrink from crime.”⁵⁰ By the autumn of 1846, there were plenty of reports of crime for good men to shrink from.

On August 3, 1846, Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress. In the end, the race wasn’t even close. Lincoln surpassed his opponent by 1,511 votes, the largest margin of victory ever for a Whig congressional candidate in the district, and substantially larger than Henry Clay’s in the presidential contest two years before. He would be the only Illinois Whig in the Thirtieth Congress, which would not convene until December 6, 1847, sixteen long months after the election. Mary was thrilled, but Abraham was subdued. He admitted to his friend Joshua Speed that “being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends, for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.”⁵¹

One Whig who did not congratulate Lincoln on his election was John J. Hardin. He and the rest of the Illinois volunteers were mustered into service on July 10. On a bright summer day thousands of people, including Hardin’s wife and three children, gathered at the Mississippi River port of Alton to say goodbye to the 877 members of the First Illinois Regiment. The troops looked splendid in dark blue roundabout coats trimmed with yellow, light blue pants, and blue cloth caps with glazed covers. In the panoply of state-specific volunteer uniforms, this would help the men of Illinois identify one another, and men of other states to identify the origins of heroes and cowards. Each man carried modern weaponry: a government-furnished carbine and percussion-lock pistol. The dragoons also carried sabers. Hardin’s thirteen-year-old daughter Ellen later recalled that the “glitter of the scene” and “hopefulness of the soldiers” reassured the crowd. “Tears of parting were suppressed” and “forebodings of danger were silenced.” The First Illinois Volunteers crowded onto the “great white steamer” Missouri and then were gone, borne away, it seemed to Ellen, to “some unreal world.” She never forgot the sight of the steamer, and her father, disappearing from view.⁵²

Hardin spent August 3 in Port La Vaca on the Gulf coast of Texas, overseeing the disembarkation of his men from their ship and helping them set up camp. It was a chaotic business, and one he found taxing. Perhaps it reminded him of taking charge of the wounded on the Princeton in 1844, after the big gun “Peacemaker” exploded. He had won praise on that occasion for his leadership and calm in the face of disorder. Now those skills would be tested daily.

He wrote his wife, Sarah, that evening, exhausted and somewhat homesick. A great adventure lay before him, but his mind was still back in Jacksonville with his family, horses, and fields. “It is late Monday night, and election day in Illinois,” Hardin mused. “I should like to know how you are all getting along at home. You seem to be a long way off.”⁵³ Perhaps Hardin regretted missing an election that might have been his. If he did, those feelings didn’t last for long. The First Illinois wasn’t yet in Mexico, but each of the volunteers believed personal glory was on the horizon. And they were right. It would take longer than any of them expected, but they would ultimately take part in a battle that tame, spiritless fellows couldn’t possibly imagine.