9
 


Needless, Wicked, and Wrong

NO FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD should have to break news like this to her mother. Ellen Hardin had been enjoying the winter in Mississippi. With her father so far away, she particularly appreciated the attention lavished on her by her indulgent uncle Abe. “The Patriarch” might be an object of mockery to her parents, but he and Ellen got along well. In many ways he was like her father: a successful attorney and man of substance, wealthy, respected, and once elected to public office. Both kept extensive libraries, where Ellen indulged her growing interests in history and English literature.

But of course Abe had not gone to Mexico, despite wanting to. As a result, he now had plenty of time for his niece. Ellen’s brothers were still children, but she was nearly an adult. Ellen and Abe discussed Shakespeare. He took her with him on business trips around the state and to New Orleans, where she delighted in the cosmopolitan atmosphere. Her explorations of the Crescent City with her uncle “opened up a new world of observation and experience” for her.¹

Those experiences did not include bumping into Henry Clay, although he was in residence that winter at William Mercer’s home. She certainly would have recognized him. Not only was he the leader of her father’s party, but they were related through both business and marriage as well. When John Hardin’s father died, his mother married Henry Clay’s brother. This made the Whig leader John Hardin’s uncle and Ellen’s great-uncle. John Hardin also served as Henry Clay’s business agent in Illinois in the 1830s. The bluegrass elite of Kentucky kept tight company.

Ellen Hardin, age sixteen. The eldest of John J. Hardin’s children was devoted to her father. As a young child Ellen “always followed him about, as a little child more frequently follows the mother.” She dreamed about him when he left for Mexico and treasured the letters he sent home. On vacation in New Orleans, she was one of the first people in America to learn the news about Buena Vista. Courtesy Saratoga Springs History Museum. (photo credit 9.1)

Virtually all war news from northeastern Mexico arrived in the United States via the port of New Orleans. The lag time was generally two to three weeks. Reports had to be carried by courier from the interior of Mexico over poor roads, and often through hostile populations, to the port of Matamoros. News then traveled by boat to the mouth of the Mississippi River, and from there to New Orleans. The fastest route from New Orleans to Washington included a steamboat to Montgomery, Alabama, and from there a combination of local trains and horse-drawn post carriages to a Georgia train depot that connected to the Northeast. As for the telegraph, in 1848 it extended no farther south than Petersburg, Virginia. The American public’s access to battle reports during the first year of the war was inversely proportional to their distance from New Orleans.

News from central Mexico was even slower in arriving in the United States. It sometimes took six weeks or two months for Polk to receive official battle reports from General Scott. To his chagrin, President Polk often read about events in Mexico in newspapers days before reports arrived via official diplomatic routes. Embedded journalists and their special couriers proved more efficient at navigating the difficult and complex transportation routes than the army did.²

A report of the “great victory at Buena Vista” arrived in New Orleans on Sunday afternoon, March 21, nearly a month after the battle. This was a week later than it might have appeared, but it took Taylor’s battered army eight days to regroup, bury their dead, and locate a courier willing to brave the guerrilla-controlled roads to the rear of Buena Vista before an American-authored account of the battle left Coahuila. The embedded journalists who had covered Taylor’s earlier victory at Monterrey and had an interest in scooping other papers had all left with Scott’s army for Veracruz. Along with virtually everyone except General Taylor, they assumed the fighting in northern Mexico was done.

A special edition of the New Orleans Mercury appeared at five thirty that Sunday evening. The Picayune’s special edition appeared an hour later. Ellen Hardin, in New Orleans with her uncle, was thus one of the first people in America to learn of her father’s death. President Polk received his report two days later. Henry Clay received the news in Ashland a week after that. Had he extended his stay in New Orleans one week longer, he would have learned of his son’s death without Lucretia by his side.³

Ellen and Abe immediately left for Vicksburg, where Sarah was visiting friends. It was in Vicksburg that Sarah Hardin’s daughter and brother told her that her husband was dead. The widow put her affairs in Mississippi in the best order she could, packed up her children, and returned home. By coincidence, an Illinois volunteer returning from Buena Vista traveled up the Mississippi on the same steamship as the Hardins, bound for the same destination. He carried with him some of the dead colonel’s personal effects, including a Mexican battle flag Hardin had captured in Buena Vista and which he had specifically requested should be “sent home as a last memento for his wife.”⁴

They returned to a community that embraced them and their grief. The news from Buena Vista was difficult for the people of Illinois to wrap their heads around. For fifteen years the former congressman, militia general, and now Mexican War hero had built a reputation on a steely invincibility. He had vanquished Illinois of her Indians and Mormons, taken charge of the survivors after the explosion on the Princeton, and been the first to volunteer for Mexico. His constituents had grown to revere “Colonel John J.” Suddenly “no Hardin was there … his manly form, his proud, glorious smile greeted not the throng of his admiring friends.” A good portion of the first two Illinois regiments of Mexican war volunteers were also gone, but when news of Buena Vista made it to Illinois, it was “Col. Hardin’s death” that the papers predicted “will shed deep gloom over the state” and “be regarded as a national calamity.” The loss of “one of the noblest specimens of man” couldn’t help but “be felt in all the circles of society.”⁵

When Hardin’s death was announced in his courthouse, an Illinois judge reported that there wasn’t “a dry eye” in the court. “He was too brave,” wept the major in charge of Hardin’s remains. Sarah was deluged with letters, from friends, from acquaintances, from admirers. They came from Illinois and Mississippi, St. Louis and New Orleans. Democrat Thomas Hart Benton sent his condolences despite his political differences with John. None of this was much consolation, not even the letters from women who wrote simply to reassure her that while they had never met, they sympathized with her. Virtually every letter asserted that her husband was a great hero. True, he had “died a glorious death.” But he was still dead, and at age thirty-six she was left with three children to raise. “My heart dies within me,” she admitted to her sister. “How can I live, how dark and lonely will be the journey of my life.”⁶

Abraham Lincoln was in Illinois when he heard. The two men had parted as enemies over an election that Hardin was only half interested in and which Lincoln now looked back on with ambivalence. A year later, Lincoln was congressman-elect, still in Illinois. He understood what was required from a man in his position: he would take the lead in honoring Colonel Hardin. On Monday, April 5, he convened a memorial meeting in the state capital in honor of the state’s first volunteer. His introductory address praised Hardin’s many virtues, and then, speaking for the assembled multitudes, Lincoln proclaimed that “while we sincerely rejoice at the signal triumph of the American arms at Buena Vista … it is with the deepest grief that we have learned of the fall of the many brave and generous spirits there, and especially, that of Col. J. J. Hardin.” Lincoln made sure the meeting, and his words, were reported in the local paper.⁷

Lincoln spoke for the people, as befitted their elected congressional representative. But did he speak for himself? Hardin had once been, in Lincoln’s own words, “more than a father” to him, yet Lincoln couldn’t help but notice that Hardin’s death vastly improved his own political prospects. “The death of Hardin was not detrimental to Lincoln,” noted one Illinois jurist, as Hardin had been the “strongest” politician in the state. Nor was this jurist the only observer to recognize that had Hardin survived the war, Lincoln would have been hard-pressed to match the colonel’s “high aspirations, strong convictions, resolute purposes,” and “great military renown.” Hardin was “the most popular” Whig politician in the state even before the war, and some said his “personal popularity was greater” than that of almost anyone else in Illinois. David Davis, later Lincoln’s campaign manager, also concluded that had he lived, Hardin would have “controlled the politics and offices of the state.”⁸

What none of these men knew was that Hardin had repudiated “the noise & hustle of politics & law” just weeks before Buena Vista, when he assured his wife he felt “no distinction to participate in them again.” That letter arrived posthumously. But John Hardin had just celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday. In political terms he was still a young man, and more than entitled to change his mind. His interest in “party struggles” might very well have revived once he was back in Illinois. He certainly could have returned to Congress had he chosen, and Stephen Douglas might have found the war hero a far more difficult challenger than Abraham Lincoln in the 1858 Senate race. Had Hardin lived, Lincoln would have been overshadowed.⁹

As spring turned to summer, Lincoln had multiple opportunities to measure himself against his deceased rival. He didn’t have a great deal else to do; he was a year into an interminable sixteen-month wait between his election and the start of the Thirtieth Congress. There was year-old Eddie to deal with, and his legal practice could be demanding, but Lincoln was basically waiting for his future in Washington to begin.

The brightest spot on his immediate horizon was the upcoming River and Harbor Convention in Chicago in early July. President Polk had predictably vetoed an act passed by the closely divided Democratic Congress to provide federal funding for river and harbor improvement. Such federal action was anathema to his small-government views. Whigs responded with a call for a great national gathering in Illinois’s burgeoning metropolis, the midwestern transportation hub of Chicago.

It would be Lincoln’s first visit to the city; he was going as a convention delegate from Illinois, and he would deliver a speech. He would finally have the opportunity to promote his ideas about the importance of federal action in the interest of internal improvements, an opportunity denied him during the election when Illinois was focused on war. He would brilliantly unmask the shortsightedness of Democratic policies in the presence of thousands of like-minded and politically connected Whigs from around the country. He had high hopes his speech would bring him positive publicity, perhaps even the beginnings of a national reputation.¹⁰

But Hardin’s name remained in the papers. A meeting called to support Taylor for president adopted a resolution that with the death of John Hardin, “the whole country has lost a statesman of exalted patriotism.” Far from Illinois, Hardin was proclaimed “one of Nature’s noble spirits, a soldier tried and true, a rare union of the best qualities of the head and heart.”¹¹

Hardin was lauded by Zachary Taylor and by General Wool, who issued an order naming Hardin’s sacrifice essential to the victory at Buena Vista. This assertion was patently false, for Hardin died in vain, blundering into a trap set by Santa Anna. The deaths of ninety-one Illinois men in a Mexican ravine served no strategic or tactical purpose. But this was too painful to contemplate, let alone verbalize. It was far better that Hardin’s mourners focus on his bravery, leadership, and patriotism, rather than on his willingness to die a pointless death in a war he no longer understood or endorsed.

There were the many poems about Buena Vista that reminded readers of his particular heroism. In May a returning veteran stated that it was Hardin and not Taylor who so brilliantly chose the army’s position at Buena Vista. Taylor chose not to contradict him. In June news of Sarah Hardin’s plans for the funeral was reported as far away as Baltimore, and when the town of Frankfort, Kentucky, asked Sarah Hardin for the right to return her husband’s remains to the “same soil” that held the remains of the Kentucky Hardins, the correspondence was reprinted in distant Albany and New Orleans. Writing for the widow, Hardin’s law partner David Smith insisted that Hardin’s grave rest in Illinois, “where he is admired and beloved.” The use of the present tense appeared to be deliberate. The Kentucky state legislature chose to inscribe Hardin’s name on their memorial to the war dead anyhow. Calhoun County, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, renamed its county seat Hardin in honor of the colonel, despite the fact that there was already a county in Illinois named after John Hardin’s grandfather, the Revolutionary War hero and Indian fighter.¹²

The public outpouring of grief reached a crescendo in July, just as the River and Harbor Convention came to a close. The twelve-month volunteers recruited at the start of the war had completed their year of service, and most of them returned home. The First and Second Illinois volunteers, retracing the same route that had taken them to Mexico, arrived by the steamer Missouri in St. Louis on July 7. They bore with them the remains of their beloved colonel. Hardin’s funeral became a multiday, two-state affair, its account reprinted in papers large and small around the nation. His coffin, along with that of a Missouri officer, was loaded on a hearse, followed by Hardin’s beloved “war mount”—the “beautiful grey charger” that accompanied him through Mexico.¹³

Leading Hardin’s charger was Benjamin, the African American servant who had accompanied Hardin to Mexico. Slavery was illegal in Mexico, and from the start of the war the coerced black servants traveling with the army understood that Mexico offered economic and social opportunities denied them in the United States. Many black men taken to war discovered that, for them, Mexico was the real land of freedom. They escaped into Mexico and never returned.¹⁴ But Benjamin did not desert. He showed a striking loyalty to Hardin, given the fact that the colonel never mentioned his name in a letter home. Although he was a young man, he not only marched alongside the colonel in life but accompanied his horse home after Hardin’s death, carrying “his clothes, sword, saddle, and other articles” with him through Mexico and Texas.¹⁵ And yet, like virtually all the other unheralded servants in Mexico, Benjamin received no public acknowledgment. He received none of the acclaim accorded the white American men of his age who left for Mexico. Nor, in fact, did he receive as much acknowledgment as Hardin’s horse. In reports of the funeral, he was simply Hardin’s unnamed servant.

Benjamin escorted Hardin’s horse and body through the streets of St. Louis in a grand parade accompanied by a military band. Their destination was the courthouse rotunda, where the entire second floor had been decorated in what reporters deemed “excellent taste,” both “solemn and imposing.” The darkened room was lit only by lamps, while military banners and black crepe hung from the columns. Hardin’s coffin, along with that of the officer from Missouri, were placed on a bier, draped in black and edged with white lace.

Thomas Hart Benton addressed the crowd. His comments were brief but highly emotional. He praised the volunteers for fulfilling the “pious and sacred” duty of returning Hardin’s “earthly remains” over three thousand miles, and, ignoring the fact that the rest of the Illinois dead remained in Mexico, he stated that the graves of Americans “should not be trod by foreign feet.” He confirmed that all of Washington, including the president himself, had been absorbed by “anxiety” over the fate of Taylor’s army before learning the “glorious news of a great and almost unparalleled victory.” And he reflected that both Illinois and Missouri had contributed more than their share of the dead at Buena Vista. Pointing to the coffin, he intoned, “The brave, lamented and beloved Hardin lies there!” On behalf of the state of Missouri, he offered thanks for the opportunity to pay tribute to the great hero of Illinois. On the “bloody and glorious field of Buena Vista,” Benton assured them, the “American character … immortalized itself by valor.”¹⁶ It was largely a political performance. Hardin’s remains didn’t need to visit St. Louis. But their return provided an opportunity for a leading Democratic politician to glorify the cause of war. With the twelve-month volunteers returning from service, the army was desperately in need of new bodies. Recruiting posters papered the walls of St. Louis that July. The courthouse remained in its mourning garb for two days to allow the “very many who have not yet seen it” an opportunity to experience the “very solemn effect” and “highly impressive character” of the funeral rites. As for Hardin, his coffin was returned to the steamboat Defiance, which delivered the colonel, his horse, and Benjamin to Illinois.¹⁷

A week later, John Hardin was laid to rest in his hometown of Jacksonville. It was Bastille Day, a fitting date to bury a man who many believed sacrificed his life for the cause of liberty. It was a hot, dry day, and by midmorning Jacksonville was overflowing with a crowd of fifteen thousand admirers from around the state. There was a festive air in the town, with rural families decked out in their best clothes and parasols “as plenty as blackberries.”¹⁸

Jacksonville was a small town, but it was the seat of one of the most fertile counties in the state, and among its eight thousand residents were many men of means originally drawn from New England and Kentucky. It had certain pretensions to both sophistication and what the Whig ruling class considered right-minded reform. It boasted the State Asylum for the Deaf and Mute (procured through John Hardin’s efforts while in the state legislature), along with a small college founded by one of the sons of renowned theologian Lyman Beecher, a Plato Club, an art association, and the “flourishing” Jacksonville Female Academy, where Ellen Hardin was educated. It boasted a number of fine brick homes, the oldest of which had been built for John Hardin. The residents of the town were committed to providing “all the refinements of social life” and the “cultivation of … higher aspirations.”¹⁹

Town residents liked to call it the “Athens of the West,” but on the day of the funeral the public square felt more like Rome. Mounted marshals dressed in white sashes cavorted in front of the stores, hotels, and offices that lined the square, while a military band entertained the throngs. Jacksonville was a “dry” town, but many in the crowd were visibly drunk, either unaware or unconcerned that the man they arrived to honor had been a lifelong advocate of temperance.²⁰

Among the crowd, but most likely sober, was the entire delegation to the Illinois state constitutional convention, which was then meeting thirty miles away in Springfield in order to revise the state constitution. Among the most serious issues they faced was whether to enshrine into the constitution the ban against the “immigration and introduction, under any circumstances, of free negroes into the state.” That the new constitution would explicitly restrict voting to “white citizens” was a foregone conclusion. During Abraham Lincoln’s first term in the state legislature, he voted in favor of a resolution that “the elective franchise should be kept pure from contamination by the admission of colored voters.” That resolution passed, 35–16.²¹

Laws restricting the immigration of free blacks into midwestern states were long-standing and widespread, but they were enforced only sporadically before the 1830s. In 1819 and 1829 the Illinois legislation had attempted, and failed, to limit immigration to whites. But starting in the 1830s, rising racism led northern and western states under Democratic control to increase their enforcement and pass increasingly restrictive laws limiting the political and social rights of free African Americans. Black people in Illinois could neither marry white people nor testify against them in court. Public schools in Illinois excluded black children. Abraham Lincoln was on record as opposing the “injustice” of slavery in the legislature in 1837, but he was even more open in his opposition to abolition societies “and the doctrines promulgated by them.”²² Like virtually every other politician in Illinois in the 1840s, Abraham Lincoln appealed to racial prejudice in order to advance his political beliefs. In 1836 and 1840, he accused Martin Van Buren of favoring black suffrage. Had he still been in the statehouse, Lincoln might well have voted to ban black immigration into the state. But this was by no means a foregone conclusion. Amending the state constitution was a serious matter and required sustained debate.

Those attending the constitutional convention had a lot to deal with, but John Hardin’s death took precedence. They took the week off to attend the funeral, and resolved to wear black crepe armbands for thirty days in Hardin’s honor. Also in attendance at the funeral were “many members” of the Chicago River and Harbor Convention. The gathering, which editor Horace Greeley of New York declared to be the largest meeting held in America up to that time, would have fully met Lincoln’s expectations, had his short speech in favor of internal improvements gained any attention at all. But it wasn’t even reprinted in his local Whig paper. The convention concluded on June 7, and delegates to the convention from New England and the South went “many miles out of their course to be present” in Jacksonville for the funeral.²³

Lincoln didn’t have to go far out of his way to pay his last respects to John Hardin. He shared a stagecoach through the Illinois prairie with a writer for the Boston Courier, traveling from the convention to the funeral. When they reached the outskirts of Springfield the latter noted that Lincoln “knew, or appeared to know, every body we met, the name of the tenant of every farm-house, and the owner of every plat of ground … he had a kind word, a smile and a bow for everybody on the road, even to the horses, and the cattle, and the swine.” However he felt about the colonel, the congressman-elect’s attendance in Jacksonville would have been expected. Most likely Lincoln, along with his traveling companion from Boston, was part of the crowd jockeying for position in the Bastille Day heat. He would not have been drinking. Like John Hardin, Lincoln never touched the stuff.²⁴

At ten o’clock, a formidable procession got under way. Taking the lead was a militia group named in Hardin’s honor, followed by the governor and his retinue, the delegates to the Illinois state convention, and judges, academics, and doctors. A smartly dressed local volunteer fire company carrying a banner, members of the clergy, and the local Masonic fraternity marched ahead of the funeral car with pallbearers. Behind them was “the noble animal upon which the bold Hardin had ridden for many a weary mile, over many a desert and dangerous waste,” again led by Benjamin. Sarah Hardin and Ellen and her two brothers followed, along with other relatives, and after them came the surviving members of Hardin’s regiment. The assembled citizens trailed behind. A marching band provided a funeral dirge, “impressive and solemn beyond description,” composed especially for the occasion. They stopped at the Hardin family’s “large and hospitable mansion” at the eastern end of town and gathered beneath the “noble trees, reared by the hand now still in death.” Before he was laid to rest by his “Masonic brethren,” the assembled multitude heard a very peculiar eulogy, provided by Hardin’s first law clerk.²⁵

Richard Yates extolled John Hardin’s many virtues. He spoke of his political prowess and the fact that “he was never unsuccessful before any people for any office for which he was a candidate.” He made sure his audience heard all about Hardin’s distinguished forebears in Kentucky, including the original John Hardin. George Washington had selected that John Hardin to negotiate with the Shawnee in 1792, he claimed, “on account of his great knowledge of Indian character, his firmness of purpose, and his fearlessness of danger.” And the forebear died as he lived, “never avoiding the post of danger, and ever ready to serve his country.” Yates also praised John J. Hardin’s “classical education,” “brilliant intellectual facilities,” and “legal ingenuity.” Yates had studied law under Hardin and had a somewhat inflated opinion of his abilities. “To his competitors, he was a powerful opponent,” Yates stated. But Hardin was also beloved. “His uniform, courteous, manly and gentlemanly bearing” won “a warm respect and devoted friendship” among the legal community.²⁶

What Yates focused on, above all, was Hardin’s “firm, noble, manly” character. “Need I say he was brave? He could not be otherwise,” Yates admitted. But unlike Thomas Hart Benton, Yates was not interested in extolling Hardin’s martial virtues or vindicating the losses at Buena Vista. On the contrary, he was intent on remembering a man of “exalted purity of moral character” without a “single vicious habit” or “base appetite.” What Hardin was notable for, Yates claimed, was not his martial virtue but his innate moral restraint. Hardin was “incorruptible” and “exemplary as a devoted and sincere Christian.” In a claim that may have raised the eyebrows of more than one tame, spiritless fellow in the audience, Yates claimed that “never was a nature more fitted for the enjoyment of the pleasures of home” than John Hardin. Never was one “more adapted to the discharge of all duties of a kind father and devoted husband.”²⁷ The Hardin eulogized at his funeral was not the man who raised Illinois’s first regiment to fight America’s war of empire. It was a man who had conquered himself rather than conquering others.

To be sure, John Hardin was a temperance advocate who took pride in his upright “habits.” Just before leaving for Mexico he was elected an elder in the Presbyterian Church, and he had, in fact, donated the Jacksonville lot on which the church stood. His obituaries often contained the claim that “few men, amid the trials and temptations of public life, have been more successful at maintaining an upright and consistent character in all the walks of life” than had John Hardin.²⁸

But to describe him as a restrained family man took some creativity, particularly at a military funeral. David Smith, whom Hardin had unsuccessfully tried to lure to Mexico, and Hardin’s widow and children, were not the only ones in the audience who recognized that for Colonel Hardin, the possibility of military service always trumped the “enjoyment of the pleasures of home.” He was martial to the bone. But this was not how Yates chose to remember him.

This was because Yates had his doubts about the war with Mexico, doubts so strong that he was willing to air them at a military funeral for a war hero, surrounded by the surviving soldiers of Hardin’s regiment. “Differ as men may and do, as to whether the war could have been avoided,” Yates admitted, “there has been but one common, patriotic, national American sentiment” in response. The volunteers turned out, despite the fact that not all supported the cause. “Be the opinions of men on the war what they may, surely none could fail to admire the exalted patriotism which induced our volunteers … to endure privation, to encounter the disease of a strange climate, and to face death.”²⁹

To what end? Buena Vista may have been a great victory to the nation, but “to us, my friends, this victory, however brilliant, is a sad defeat. To us the question comes at what cost?” The men of Illinois fell “in a strange land, far from kindred and home. There were no kind mothers, or sisters there—no wife to pillow their gallant heads.” Yates noted what Benton had not: that the remains of the vast majority of the dead, unlike John Hardin, Henry Clay Jr., and other officers famous or wealthy enough to merit special treatment, had not been returned for burial to the United States. They had been buried where they fell, on Mexican soil, trampled by foreign feet.

And there they remained. Yates asked his listeners to identify with “the deep felt sorrow of the wife, who shall never look on that loved one again,” as well as “the tears of the bright-eyed boys and girls whose father’s form now fills a soldier’s grave in a foreign land.”³⁰ Yates could not bring himself to speak in favor of the war, even as he extolled a man he “loved” who sacrificed his life in Mexico.

The eulogy and funeral were followed by a light meal served under a nearby grove of trees. A series of military speakers attempted to outdo one another in their tributes to Colonel Hardin. Many praised the valor of the soldiers in battle. All agreed that a monument to the memory of the Buena Vista dead should be built as soon as possible.³¹ As the crowd returned to the public square, Sarah Hardin invited the surviving members of the First Illinois to join her for dinner in their family home.

The writer for the Boston Courier who traveled with Lincoln through Illinois reported that the funeral was designed “to gratify a spirit of military ardor.” Like most citizens of Massachusetts, the journalist opposed the war, and he imagined that Illinois, which had sent more volunteers south than any state except Missouri, was still gripped by a “military mania” for Mexico. He noticed that Jacksonville, like St. Louis, was full of recruiting posters. “The fruit of to-day’s pageant,” he wrote of the funeral, “will be the enlistment of at least a thousand new victims to the insatiate ambition of our wicked and unprincipled government.”³²

But this reporter never actually made it to Hardin’s funeral. He remained in the Jacksonville public square after the procession departed, and completely missed Yates’s conflicted eulogy. He never learned how similar Yates’s view of Hardin was to the antiwar views of New Englanders. That summer, a letter writer to the antislavery National Era also claimed that Hardin was a paragon of restrained manhood. He asserted that John Hardin opposed the war, and “confessed, from the outset, that the Mexican War was all needless, wicked, and wrong.”

While Hardin’s views of Mexico and Manifest Destiny evolved during his year of service, and by the time of his death he had come to question the wisdom of annexing Mexican land, by no means did Illinois’s first volunteer ever say that the war was “needless, wicked, and wrong.” He most certainly did not say this in 1846. But antiwar voices played fast and loose with the facts of Hardin’s biography in their attempt to turn Hardin’s death into a cautionary tale. Despite condemning the war, according to this account, Hardin foolishly let a misguided sense of patriotism, rather than his conscience, guide his actions. His decision to follow “that treacherous and illusive motto, ‘Our country, right or wrong,’ ” became the cause of his undoing. “From that hour, the wrath of heaven seems to have overshadowed him.”³³

While Yates never went so far as to claim that Hardin thought the war needless, wicked, and wrong, his own views about the war were clear to everyone in the audience, and not far from those holding sway in New England. But because the Boston reporter missed Yates’s eulogy and focused only on the pre- and post-funeral celebration, he believed that the people of Illinois continued to embrace the war. Had he been privy to the conversations between Sarah Hardin and her husband’s men in the Hardin home after the funeral, he might not have claimed that the returning volunteers “express, at present, very little or no opinion at all as to their feelings.”³⁴ But his assumption that the people of Illinois felt the same in the summer of 1847 as they had a year earlier was mistaken. The antiwar spirit that had moved Richard Yates was on the rise, even in the pro-war West. Yates hardly would have dared question the war otherwise. Abraham Lincoln would not have made the same mistake as his traveling companion. He knew there was a change in the air.

It started long before the funeral. David Davis commented on the decline in war spirit in Illinois in December 1846: “Everyone around here was anxious to enlist in June last. Nothing was before the eyes of the young men then but the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of war. Now the drums might beat for a week & not a single man fall into line.” Martial ardor cooled as the war dragged on, scores of volunteers died of disease, and reports of bad behavior on the front diminished the glory of volunteering. Recruiting meetings began to be met with indifference, or worse. When opponents of the war turned out for a “war meeting” in Chicago in February 1847, they vigorously debated the virtues of the war with the military speakers who hoped to drum up enlistment. A correspondent for the antislavery Liberty Party reported that one audience member introduced a resolution “declaring that all war is sinful and anti-Christian,” while another “made some very sensible remarks on the iniquity of the war, notwithstanding a wild buffalo of a fellow attempted to bellow him down.” The few recruits convinced to volunteer “made the tour of the grog shops before retiring to rest,” the journalist reported. “One of them showed his bravery by kicking a small boy who happened to stand in his way. By the time he gets to Mexico he may be prepared to kill women and children. So much for volunteering in Chicago.”³⁵

It was obvious in the spring of 1847 that the new recruits were less impressive in terms of their character and accomplishments than the first men to turn out had been. One letter writer declared them to be “young and ignorant, some of them are utterly abandoned and worthless.” Fifty “raw” recruits waiting to descend the Mississippi from Peru, Illinois, were so “excessively noisy and drunk” that a steamship captain refused to let them on board. As the twelve-month volunteers returned to Illinois in the summer of 1847, apathy toward the war turned into something closer to distaste.³⁶

The returning volunteers, for the most part, looked terrible, even their officers. William Weatherford, who succeeded Hardin as colonel of the First Illinois, appeared on the streets of Jacksonville the week of Hardin’s funeral, “very much emaciated by sickness, and darker colored than most Indians.” His shirt was dirty, his pants “worn through in holes,” and his shoes “nearly worn out.” Worse yet, he seemed uninterested in conforming his appearance to the norms of civilized society. He wore his shirt “open in front, like a common frock coat,” with no collar or necktie. The Boston reporter noted that descriptions “of the uncouth appearance of the Mexican officers” hardly compared to “such a poverty-stricken and miserable specimen of a commander” as Lieutenant Colonel Weatherford.

“Going to and Returning from Mexico.” This antiwar cartoon, published in the popular New York humorous periodical Yankee Doodle in late 1846, contrasts a new volunteer (who seems to be reconsidering his enlistment) with ragged and maimed soldiers returning from Mexico. Critiques of the appearance and behavior of the veterans were common by the summer of 1847, and many states struggled to fill their quotas of new volunteers. Yankee Doodle 1, no. 6 (Nov. 14, 1846): 71. (photo credit 9.2)

What use did America have for such a “broken-down man, unfit for further service, and without much hope for the future”? The reporter predicted that “with scores of others in similar situations,” Weatherford would probably become “a violent politician, an office-seeker and a demagogue.” Critics of the war suggested that the returning veterans, corrupted by their military service, would, in turn, corrupt the political process.³⁷

Lincoln had the opportunity of witnessing the growing antiwar sentiment in his state firsthand when one of Springfield’s most eminent ministers, Albert Hale, of the Second Presbyterian Church, preached two sermons critiquing the war as “unjust” on the Sunday before John Hardin’s funeral. Not content to simply elaborate on the waste of the war in human life, the “barbarous and inhuman cruelties” committed by both sides, and the “wicked” character of this war in particular, Hale also condemned the returning veterans. Those once upright and moral young men had returned to Illinois defiled. “When the war is over,” Hale intoned, “the multitudes that remain—that have been schooled amidst its immoralities, its cruelties and its crimes—will operate, like a moral pestilence, over the length and breadth of the land.”³⁸

Albert Hale was a prominent figure in Springfield. Forty-seven years old, he had been educated at Yale, and moved to Illinois at the same time as Hardin and Lincoln in order to perform missionary work among the Sac, Fox, and Pottawatomie tribes. In 1839 he became pastor of Springfield’s Second Presbyterian.³⁹

But his sermons against the war did not sit well with many in the capital, and particularly not with the delegates to the constitutional convention who knew Hale from his official duties ministering to the assembly. All the delegates left for a week for Hardin’s funeral immediately after Hale’s sermons, but the controversy continued after their return. Lincoln and the delegates were back in Springfield on Monday morning, July 19, when Reverend Hale was scheduled to deliver a prayer to reopen the convention.

Hale’s entrance into the convention hall was uneventful, but as he rose to the dais and began to address the assembly, he was interrupted with “hissing and clapping of hands” by a Democratic delegate outraged by Hale’s critique of the war. Ignoring the outburst, Hale finished his prayer. The incensed delegate accosted Hale and, making sure he was clearly heard throughout the hall, warned the minister that “if he did not wish to be hurt, he must not come there again.”⁴⁰

The Sangamo Journal reported this exchange directly below a long article about John Hardin’s funeral. The newspaper found the proceedings at the convention hall outrageous, “totally at variance with our free institutions,” and a clear infringement on Hale’s right to free speech, ultimately deciding to publish Hale’s antiwar sermons in pamphlet form so that “the community may be able to form a correct opinion in the case.” Starting in the summer of 1847, anyone in Illinois who wished to consider the “inequity” of the war needed only to pick up a copy of this pamphlet.⁴¹

Or they could simply read a newspaper. The embedded journalists traveling through Mexico with the army were, on the whole, as pro-war as any group in America. Most, if not all, felt antipathy for the people of Mexico, grounded in Americans’ perceived racial superiority. William Tobey, the correspondent for the Philadelphia North American, traveled as a soldier with the Pennsylvania volunteers. He repeatedly informed his readers that they had no concept of how “different” the people of Mexico were from Americans. “The mass are ignorant, indolent, barbarous, treacherous and superstitious, given to thieving, cheating, [and] lying,” he wrote. Sharing in the day-to-day sufferings of U.S. troops, embedded journalists closely identified with them. Witnessing the results of Mexican resistance firsthand, the dead bodies of U.S. soldiers killed by local guerrilla fighters, they were not wholly unsympathetic to reprisals against the civilian population.⁴²

And so at first they largely overlooked robberies, rapes, and even murders committed by soldiers. Reports of murders by American volunteers that appeared in print in 1846 were generally drawn from letters written home by enlisted men, and quite often only antislavery papers were willing to print them. The Ashtabula Sentinel of Ohio claimed that not “a hundredth part of the crimes committed by our troops are published, or ever come to the knowledge of our people.” A few journalists, including Christopher Mason Haile, writing for the New Orleans Picayune, condemned the “disreputable conduct” of some of the volunteers, including numerous “outrages against Mexican citizens” such as “robbing, assaulting the women,” and breaking into houses. These offenses had been “too long neglected” by the press, and Haile admitted it gave him “great pain” to condemn the soldiers he traveled with.⁴³

But by and large, antiwar reporting in the first year of the war was limited to abolitionist papers and mainstream Whig papers in New England. This followed the model of war coverage set in the War of 1812. That war was wildly unpopular in the Federalist stronghold of New England, the region most likely to suffer economically from a disruption of trade with England. Federalist papers in New England loudly opposed the War of 1812, critiquing it in searing terms as an offensive war, thus immoral, and likely to corrupt America’s men by exposing them to the horrors of war.⁴⁴

But Federalist papers outside New England were more circumspect. Editors had to sell papers, and charges of disloyalty could have devastating effects not only on sales but also on the health and welfare of the editors themselves. When Baltimore’s Federal Republican opposed the War of 1812 in the nation’s most pro-war city, retribution was quick. A mob destroyed the offices of the paper not once but twice over the course of the war, beating and torturing both the editor and his supporters. Federalist editors in Savannah, Alexandria, Richmond, and New York City were also silenced by the threat of mob action. Outside New England, opposition to the war was viewed as treasonous.⁴⁵

The Federalist Party was ultimately destroyed by its opposition to the War of 1812, of course. While abolitionist papers such as William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator of Boston condemned the war with Mexico from its inception, Whig papers tended to be just as patriotic as Whig congressmen in 1846. Because of its economy, relatively strong antislavery sentiment, and Whig majority, New England continued to be the one region in which it was safe to express opposition to American war, whether against England in 1814, Native American tribes in the 1820s and 1830s, or Mexico in 1846, and mainstream Whig papers in New England proved more willing to oppose America’s invasion of Mexico, and the behavior of U.S. troops, than papers elsewhere.

But by the summer of 1847, even hardened journalists from outside New England found themselves forced to report on and condemn American atrocities that left them questioning their assumptions about American morality. It appeared that “the harsh treatment and privations the men are subjected to soon make one callous to all but his own feelings and interests,” one journalist explained.⁴⁶

The February massacre at Agua Nueva, when the Arkansas Rackensackers killed at least twenty-five Mexican civilians in a cave, was a key turning point in the reporting of the war. Few soldiers who had witnessed the event and scalped corpses could refrain from discussing it, and some of those who died at Buena Vista, including John Hardin, described the murders in the final letters they ever wrote home. Nonetheless, the New Orleans Picayune originally dismissed General Santa Anna’s report of the slaughter as “exaggeration.” But when a correspondent to the St. Louis Republican reported the story in “horrible detail,” the Picayune recanted and printed the Republican letter in full. “It is impossible to excuse the conduct of our volunteers on any plea of retaliation and it is wrong to conceal the facts of the case,” the paper admitted. News of the “American atrocities” at Agua Nueva was reprinted from Milwaukee to Texas.⁴⁷

The witness to the slaughter who wrote to the St. Louis Republican on Valentine’s Day of 1847 concluded, “Let us no longer complain of Mexican barbarity—poor, degraded, ‘priest ridden’ as she is. No act of inhuman cruelty, perpetrated by her most desperate robbers, can excel the work of yesterday, committed by our soldiery.” As it became increasingly difficult to differentiate the barbarity of U.S. soldiers from that of the Mexican people, journalists wondered if perhaps the war really was degrading the American character. William Tobey wrote from Veracruz in April, “I daily witness painful spectacles of human degradation and selfishness that before seemed impossible to our nature.” Reverend Hale’s critique of the corrosive effect of the war on America’s men was not so different from the reports that had been coming from Mexico for months.⁴⁸

John E. Durivage, the correspondent for the New Orleans Picayune stationed with Taylor near Monterrey, was another embedded journalist whose reporting changed over the course of the war. A Polk supporter with little love for the Mexican people, he was initially highly defensive of American actions. When two U.S. soldiers were “charged with having committed a rape upon a Mexican female,” Durivage was dismissive. “I hardly think it is a possible case in this country, but the accused will be tried for the offense nevertheless.” Durivage never reported the outcome of the trial.⁴⁹

But despite his unwillingness to believe that an American soldier would rape a Mexican woman, he became increasingly concerned with the behavior of the troops. By April 1847, he too openly wondered at the “outrageous barbarity” perpetrated “by persons calling themselves Americans.” He reported the “melancholy, incontrovertible fact” that another slaughter, similar to that at Agua Nueva, had taken place in the town of Guadalupe. “An American was shot two or three weeks ago, and his companions and friends determined to revenge his death. Accordingly a party of a dozen or twenty men visited the place and deliberately murdered twenty-four Mexicans.… Under pretext of revenging the death of a comrade, the inoffensive (for all we know) inhabitants of a rancho, who have been assured that they should be respected and protected, have been willfully murdered in cold blood.” Durivage realized that “such foul deeds as these cannot but be revolting to every good citizen,” but he reported them anyway. And he continued to report similar occurrences, such as the hanging of “upward of forty Mexicans” by the Texas Rangers, which appeared in a Matamoros paper in May. His final letters from Mexico openly discussed depredations against Mexicans and the futile attempts of Taylor and other officers to keep the volunteers in line.⁵⁰ These accounts, the prime source of war news, were summarized and reprinted in papers across the country.

As the war dragged on, rumblings of protest began to spread. The fourteen congressmen who had voted against Polk’s declaration of War in May 1846, including John Quincy Adams and Ohio’s antislavery firebrand Joshua Giddings, never ceased to speak out with vehemence against the war. Some of the most explosive rhetoric emerged from the Senate. The spellbinding fifty-two-year-old orator Thomas Corwin of Ohio shocked the nation when he rose in the Senate in February and offered that “if I were a Mexican, I would tell you, ‘Have you not room in your country to bury your dead men? If you come into mine we will greet you with bloody hands, and welcome you to hospitable graves.’ ”⁵¹

Polk considered his opponents guilty of treason, and said so in his annual message to Congress six months into the war. “A more effectual means could not have been devised,” he warned, “to encourage the enemy and protract the war than to advocate and adhere to their cause, and thus give them ‘aid and comfort.’ ” Polk’s reduction of dissent to treason outraged many Americans, including some war supporters. The mobilized antislavery forces of New England were joined by increasing numbers of dissenters to “Mr. Polk’s War.” In February antiwar protesters held a mass meeting in Boston where Charles Sumner bitterly attacked Congressman Robert Winthrop for voting for the war. The Massachusetts legislature, which had already refused to outfit its volunteer regiment, declared in April that the war in Mexico was “so hateful in its objects, so wanton, unjust and unconstitutional in its origin,” that it “must be regarded as a war against humanity.”⁵²

Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail after refusing to pay his poll tax in protest against the war. He delivered a lecture titled “Civil Disobedience” calling for resistance against the government, which he declared had been “abused and perverted” in the service of war and slavery. “Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.”⁵³ New England intellectuals such as James Russell Lowell and Ralph Waldo Emerson published trenchant critiques of the war.

The issue of slavery was not far from the surface of most of these critiques. Polk never wavered from citing Mexican aggression as the war’s cause, and he insisted that the issue of slavery was irrelevant to the prosecution of the war. But when he submitted a request to Congress in August 1846 for two million dollars to negotiate a settlement with Mexico, it became clear to Congress that there would be no peace without territory. Most of that territory was coveted by slave owners. Northern Democrats were blindsided by the request. They had no interest in additional lands to the south, particularly after Polk’s betrayal on Oregon.

Van Buren supporters in Congress, sick of Polk’s dissimulations, lashed back. On the sweltering evening of August 8, a little-known Pennsylvania Democrat named David Wilmot gained the floor and introduced a rider to the bill banning slavery from any lands taken from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso passed the House along strictly sectional lines but stalled in the Senate, where southerners had an advantage in numbers. Reintroduced in February 1847, it again passed in the House and stalled in the Senate.⁵⁴

By the middle of 1847, it was clear to virtually everyone in America that the spread of slavery was intimately connected with the resolution of the war. In September, a “Captain of the Volunteers” stationed in California published a scathing indictment of Polk’s war based on his personal knowledge of the administration’s diplomatic and military efforts to gain California. His account argued not only that “the present administration … have acted with a design to” annex “the territories of the Californias, Sonora, Chihuahua, and New Mexico … a measure as fraught with evil to ourselves as unjust to the inhabitants of Mexico,” but also that “the whole course of the administration” had been ordered to “insure” the possession of “the country of Mexico to the slaveholders of the South.” New England antislavery activists had been repeating this accusation for over a year. The Wilmot controversy allowed more moderate Americans, including men in uniform, to see that they had been right.⁵⁵

Walt Whitman, the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the war, proclaiming that Mexico should be “thoroughly chastised.” His support for the Wilmot Proviso led him to revise his views by the summer of 1847. In September he published an editorial, “American Workingmen, Versus Slavery,” that framed his support for the proviso in both sectional and class terms, starkly contrasting the interests of the “workingmen,” with whom Whitman identified, and slave owners. “If either the slaves themselves, or their owners, had fought or paid for or gained this new territory,” he wrote, “there would be some reason in the pro-slavery claims” to Mexican territory. “But every body knows that the cost and work come, forty-nine fiftieths of it, upon the free men.” Whitman’s antislavery views, not shared by the paper’s conservative Democratic owner, got him fired from the Daily Eagle. By arguing that the interests of workingmen and slave owners were opposed, Whitman learned that the interests of the Democratic Party and justice might well be opposed too.⁵⁶

With the exception of Free-Soil advocates such as Whitman, Democratic editors and their papers continued to wholeheartedly support the president and his war. America’s popular culture, which enthusiastically embraced the war at the outset, continued to celebrate both American Manifest Destiny and the valor of the American soldier in the months after Wilmot’s proviso was introduced. Urban taverns rang with pro-war drinking songs, marching bands played “General Taylor’s Quick Step” and other military airs, and readers devoured paperback accounts of “the success of American arms” and “Mexican treacheries and cruelties.” Even the citizens of antiwar Boston willingly paid twenty-five cents a person (children under twelve were half price) to visit “Donnavan’s Grand Serial Panorama of Mexico, delineating the Scenery, Towns, Cities, and Battle Fields” in spacious Boylston Hall.⁵⁷

A casual observer could be excused for assuming that America was united in support of war, but many Americans were perplexed and angry. Antiwar petitions to Congress appeared from around the country, including Illinois, and no longer just from areas of antislavery strength. Whig newspapers from Maine to South Carolina asked when the war would end, what would happen to Mexico, and why the war had been begun in the first place. “We believe the public sober sense of the nation never desired war,” a North Carolina newspaper stated in May. That same month a rising politician in Ohio wrote to his brother, Lieutenant William T. Sherman, stationed in Mexico, “There is no doubt that a large majority of the people consider it an unjust aggression upon a weak republic, excused by false reason, and continued solely for the acquisition of slave territory.”⁵⁸

Evidence of this view was clear around the country. Jane Swisshelm of Pittsburgh was just twenty-one years old when the United States declared war on Mexico. She was a deeply religious young woman, and already convinced that slavery was wrong. Although it was common for antislavery women to publish anonymous letters, Swisshelm’s opposition to the U.S.-Mexican War, which she viewed as a natural outgrowth of slavery, convinced her to go further. In 1846 she openly published a series of scathing editorials against the war in a local Pittsburgh paper, a radical move for a woman at the time.

Swisshelm also refused to shake the hand of an old friend just returned to Pittsburgh after volunteering to fight Mexico. When the volunteer asked if it was “possible” that she would not take his hand, Swisshelm looked into “his manly, handsome face” and told him, “There is blood on it: the blood of women and children slain at their own altars, on their own hearthstones, that you might spread the glorious American institutions of woman-whipping and baby-stealing.”⁵⁹

Rebecca Gratz, a sixty-seven-year-old philanthropist in Philadelphia, wrote her sister-in-law, “I feel so much more sorrow & disgust, than heroism in this war.… When we were obliged to fight for our liberty—and rights—there was motive & glory in the strife—but to invade a country and slaughter its inhabitants—to fight for boundary—or political supremacy—is altogether against my principles and feelings.” A doctor’s wife in Pennsylvania declared that through “wicked deception” by Polk, “this war has carried Sorrow and dismay into every portion of our Country.” After witnessing a military funeral for a local soldier in April 1847, a woman in Boston wrote in her diary that “our nation must be cursed for so unrighteous and needless a war. ‘There really is a God who judgeth and will avenge.’ ” A man in rural Massachusetts was so enraged by the war that he suggested to his cousin in Vermont that “the best thing the free states can do is to withdraw from the slave states and establish a free government.” He would just as soon “let the slave states support the accursed slave system alone.”⁶⁰

Not even Sarah Polk was immune from attack. A Massachusetts newspaper condemned her as a hypocrite who, despite “her piety … lov[ed] most cordially all plunder, robbery, murder, and every other sport for the sake of slavery.” But James K. Polk came in for special abuse. Emily Huse, a wife and mother in the Wisconsin Territory, bemoaned the war in a letter in September 1847 to a female friend. “Was there ever the like of that Mexican War? Horrid butcherys—Mexico is harder metal than Polk thought.” Huse’s husband had recently learned that three local men were killed in the war, and as a result was unable to sleep. He told his wife that he “wishes President Polk dead. Pity he hadn’t died 3 or 4 years ago.”⁶¹

From his camp near Monterrey, Zachary Taylor was thinking similar thoughts. “A report has reached here that President Polk was dead, which, I do not credit,” he wrote his son-in-law. But “while I regret to hear of the death of any one,” he admitted, “I would as soon have heard of his death … as that of any other individual in the whole Union.”⁶²