11

Duty and Justice

POLK’S FETISH for secrecy was open knowledge. But generally speaking, what he chose to hide remained hidden. The president, therefore, had every confidence that Nicholas Trist’s assignment would remain a “profound secret.” Commissioner Plenipotentiary Trist traveled as a special agent so that Polk could bypass the Senate, and he was paid out of the president’s private funds. He adopted an alias, “Dr. Tarreau,” a French merchant, so as to avert suspicion. And Trist was known for his discretion; Andrew Jackson had vouched for it.¹

This mission was strictly classified. In the president’s view, it was no one’s business that he was making overtures for peace to a despised and diminished Mexico. Publicity could only bring criticism, both from the extremists in his own party and from the Whigs, who were clearly in the ascendancy. “The success of Trist’s mission,” he wrote in his diary, “must depend mainly on keeping it a secret from that portion of the Federal [Whig] press & leading men in the country who, since the commencement of the war with Mexico, have been giving ‘aid and comfort’ to the enemy by their course.” With luck, Trist would be home, treaty in hand, before the hostile Thirtieth Congress was seated at the start of December. Until then, “the strictest injunctions of Secrecy” must be followed.²

But within three days of Trist’s departure from Washington, the New York Herald disclosed both the details of Trist’s mission and the terms of the proposed treaty, “with remarkable accuracy and particularity.” Polk fumed to his diary, “I have not been more vexed or excited since I have been president.” Worst of all, he had no idea whom to blame for the “treachery.”³ He suspected the secretary of state, whose ambitions for the presidency had positively crippled his objectivity and ability to do his job. Buchanan, in turn, pointed to Virginia Trist. Perhaps Trist himself was to blame.

It was impossible to determine who was at fault. The leaks continued. Just days after Trist “fetched up, to use a seaman’s phrase, at Vera Cruz,” his journey was so well publicized that Trist’s own family and friends looked “to the newspapers” to learn of his progress. “He writes but seldom,” Trist’s brother wrote to Virginia, but “I see enough about him in the news papers.”⁴

Soon the very pretense of secrecy appeared futile to virtually everyone except Polk. The embedded journalists spoke openly of Trist’s movements, as did the press and common soldiers in Mexico. Whig newspapers accused Polk of sending Trist to Mexico in order to “spy” on General Scott or otherwise undermine his operations. And before the end of the year, both Trist and his peace treaty appeared as the subplot of popular author Charles Averill’s The Mexican Ranchero; or, The Maid of the Chapparal: A Romance of the Mexican War. The pulp novelette was available for purchase for twenty-five cents at “periodical depots” throughout the United States and Canada, as well as from wholesale agents in cities throughout the Midwest and along the eastern seaboard. The “trade” was of course furnished with a “liberal discount.”⁵

From a pro-war perspective there were worse places for Nicholas Trist to land, although Polk probably didn’t see it that way. The Mexican Ranchero was one of the better works in the healthy genre of sensationalistic war fiction. Cheap potboilers printed on rough paper with eye-catching covers, war novelettes placed fictional characters in real battles and featured plenty of sex, violence, heroism, and racial stereotyping. A large audience of readers who appreciated convoluted plotting and nonstop action consumed them voraciously, particularly urban working men. The Mexican Ranchero, like many of its genre, featured romance between a white American soldier and a light-skinned Mexican woman. This romance helped readers imagine that the ultimate resolution of their violent war would not be theft, misery, and the forced displacement of Mexican citizens, but a sort of international marriage that would bring bliss to both husband and wife, United States and Mexico.⁶

Nor was this fantasy limited to politicians, editors, and novelists. Some in the occupying army had similar thoughts. One Indiana captain wrote his brother that in order to conquer the country “every man is required to give in his mite and I shall therefore commit matrimony with the first decent, clean and respectable, yellow Mexican gall I can meet with—I will annex myself to this country by some such desperate act.” What Houston and the Public Ledger both understood was that sex sells, and that the fantasy of sex with Mexican women, or “personal annexation,” could help sell white American workingmen on absorbing Mexico, just as surely as it could sell novels. Given the increasing clamor for taking all of Mexico in the fall of 1847, the sales pitch appears to have been working.⁸

Rejon the Ranchero. Rejon, the eponymous guerrilla partisan of the 1847 dime novel The Mexican Ranchero, determined to kidnap Nicholas Trist to prevent peace between the two countries. Dime novels such as The Mexican Ranchero promoted both the war and annexation of Mexican territory with thrilling tales of adventure and romance on the front. Charles Averill, The Mexican Ranchero (1847), 53. (photo credit 11.1)

It was at this moment that Trist’s mission was fictionalized, offered for sale for twenty-five cents, and avidly consumed by readers around the country. The fate of his treaty is a key plot of The Mexican Ranchero, secondary only to the romantic travails of three Mexican and three American characters hell-bent on personal annexation. At the start of the action a band of Mexican guerrillas, led by the skilled partisan Rejon the Ranchero, are doing their best to derail the peace process by killing U.S. soldiers. They take the Mississippi Volunteer Corps hostage and hatch a plot to kill General Taylor. They also decide to waylay Nicholas Trist, the only man who can bring peace to Mexico. Rejon sends a mysterious and beautiful cross-dressing female ranchero called the Maid of the Chapparal to capture the American minister.

Trist would have been flattered by his portrait in this novel. As imagined by the author, Trist is no ordinary diplomat. A sterling specimen of American Anglo-Saxon manhood, the fictional Trist stands tall, with a “muscular and well developed form,” and a “face on whose every lineament was marked the impress of thought. That bold, open countenance and towering brow told at once of a powerful intellect and commanding mind.” Diplomats were not usually elevated to heroic status in war novelettes. It is a testimony to the public’s knowledge of and concern about Trist’s peace mission in the fall of 1847 that Charles Averill was willing to endow diplomacy, and the making of a treaty, with the highest level of manliness and drama.⁹

The fictional Trist’s personal virtues are not sufficient to keep his mission secret, however. The Maid of the Chapparal had no more problem locating Trist than did the American newspapers, which repeatedly enraged the president by reporting the details of his peace mission. “You are Mr. Trist, the American diplomatist, commissioned to negociate a peace?… You are even now on your way to the capital with peace propositions in your possession?” the female ranchero asked him. “ ‘You are strangely correct …, mysterious lady,’ answered the wondering Trist.—‘This mission was supposed to be a secret between myself and my government. How you have discovered it, senora, I can not pretend to surmise.’ ”¹⁰

Trist is eventually rescued by the escaped Mississippi Volunteers, and Rejon is revealed to be Ambassador Don Almora, not an enemy at all, but rather a friend to America. Mexican characters marry Americans, and the reader is assured that the eminently capable Trist is about to bring the war to a close with his skillful diplomacy. “The war is well nigh self-exhausted; Peace with its smiling face is treading close upon the bloody footsteps of the grim old King of Carnage.”¹¹

If only Nicholas Trist’s reality had been so simple. In The Mexican Ranchero the only thing standing between diplomatist Trist and peace was a band of misguided rancheros. These Mexican partisans needed only to accept the love offered them by their American invaders to realize that they were all one family. Peace was on its way, but what kind of peace? The author never speculates on the ultimate fate of Mexico. How much of it would be absorbed by the United States? Would it continue to exist as an independent country? And the increasing discord in the United States between opponents of the war and aggressive expansionists demanding all of Mexico played no role in the drama. As Trist learned in the fall of 1847, guerrilla partisans were the least of his troubles. For in truth it was not the people of Mexico but his own president who was attempting to waylay him on his way to the capital “with peace propositions in his possession.” And it appeared doubtful that anyone was coming to save him or his treaty.

Polk regretted sending Trist to Mexico as soon as he received his envoy’s first petulant letter about Scott. The president complained that “because of the personal controversy between these self important personages, the golden moment for concluding a peace with Mexico may have passed.” It was bad enough when Trist and Scott were quarreling like children. But when the two men reconciled, matters actually became more ominous. Scott was the last confidant he wanted for his agent; moreover, months went by without any official communication from the front, and early evidence suggested that the minister was easy to manipulate.¹²

Trist’s initial negotiations with Santa Anna were not promising. In fact, he wasn’t even supposed to be negotiating: his job was to see that the treaty Polk had stipulated was signed by Mexico. His “plain duty,” as Polk put it, was “to submit the ultimatum of his Government.” Yet Trist had the temerity over the summer to forward a Mexican proposal for a boundary at the Nueces River. Given that Polk’s excuse for invading Mexico was that American blood had been shed on American soil when the Mexican army crossed the Rio Grande, nothing was more likely to embarrass him in front of his political opponents than news that a U.S. representative openly acknowledged a possible Mexican claim to the Nueces Strip. “You have placed us in an awkward position,” Buchanan wrote Trist privately. “To propose” that the United States could possibly “abandon that portion of our country where Mexico attacked our forces and on our right to which the Whigs have raised such an unfounded clamor, will be a fruitful case of appeal against us in the next Congress.”¹³

Polk was exceedingly irritated that “Mr. Trist has managed the negotiation very bunglingly and with no ability.” No further progress toward peace appeared to have been made since then. Polk’s imagination ran wild with visions of a conspiracy, Trist as Scott’s “mere tool … employed in ministering to his malignant passions.”¹⁴ The two of them would undermine everything he had worked for.

After his hopes for a speedy treaty were dashed, the president, along with other expansionists, found that his appetite for Mexico was growing. He had originally directed Trist to settle for nothing less than a southern boundary at the Rio Grande, as well as the annexation of Mexico’s provinces of Upper California and New Mexico. But now he imagined an American Sonora, an American Baja, and full command of the Gulf of California between the two. In September Polk told his cabinet that he was “decidedly in favour of insisting on the acquisition of more territory.” The United States should take Tamaulipas and the line of thirty-one degrees. And twenty million dollars was too much to pay.¹⁵

Trist and his treaty had clearly become a liability. But there was no unanimity in the cabinet about how to proceed. Possibly Trist was making a treaty; perhaps he already had done so. Given the delay in communications, it was impossible to know what was happening. Matters were becoming strained in the cabinet. Buchanan was “nervous” and exhibiting “a degree of weakness” in his pursuit of the presidency that Polk found “almost incredible.” Secretary of the Treasury Walker worked so hard that Polk was convinced that “his general health may be destroyed and his life endangered, if he continues to apply himself as he has heretofore done.” Polk was particularly sensitive to this after “careworn and “overwhelmed” Secretary of War Marcy’s nervous breakdown.¹⁶

This left Polk doing Marcy’s job in addition to his own. He was already “devoting all my time & energies” to micromanaging the war and “examining all the details of everything that is done, as far as it [is] possible for me to do so.” It was a “vast amount of labor” made worse by the fact that Polk didn’t feel he could trust the subordinate officers in the War Department, almost all of whom were Whigs. “Many of them are indifferent and … take no sort of responsibility on themselves, and this renders it necessary that the Secretary of War & myself should look after them, even in the performance of the ordinary routine of details in their offices.”¹⁷

Polk’s health was visibly failing. The chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs called on Sarah Polk to warn her that James “was wearing himself out with constant and excessive application, that if he did not take some recreation, he would die soon after the close of his term.” He suggested that she “insist upon his driving out morning and evening; that she must order her carriage and make him go with her.” Sarah, who understood her husband’s destructive work habits better than anyone, attempted to follow the advice. Day after day she ordered their carriage, “and the carriage waited and waited, until it was too late. It would have been obliged to wait all day, for somebody was always in the office, and Mr. Polk would not, or could not, come,” she later recalled. It was hopeless. “I seldom succeeded in getting him to drive with me.”¹⁸

James Knox Polk. The exact date when Polk sat for this daguerreotype is unclear, but his haggard appearance and thin hair indicate that it was late in his presidential term or perhaps in the months after he left office. One letter writer who saw Polk in the summer of 1847 described his “fatigued and careworn countenance, which me-thought, might turn the hearts of some of his most violent opponents” (Sandweiss, Eyewitness to War, 241). Daguerreotype with applied color, ca. 1847–49, 213/16 × 2⅜ inches. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, P1981.65.12. (photo credit 11.2)

In early October, Polk was struck by a serious attack of chills and fever. Bedridden, he “transacted no business of any kind” for nearly a week. Polk wasn’t used to idleness, and long days in bed left him too much time to think about the war. How had things gone so wrong? And how could he salvage the coming presidential election for the Democratic Party?¹⁹

When he finally rose from bed, still too “feeble” to remain standing for more than a few minutes at a time, Polk’s first decision was to fire Trist. He called the cabinet to his bedroom. He explained that if Trist remained in Mexico, it might well convince the Mexican government that “the U.S. were so anxious for peace that they would ultimate[ly] conclude one upon the Mexican terms.” The cabinet was unanimous in agreement: Trist should be fired. Nor would Polk appoint any other negotiator. It would be up to Mexico to come to him, and the longer the Mexicans waited, the more it would cost them. Buchanan sent a recall letter to Trist. All negotiations were to be immediately suspended, and Trist was to return home at once.²⁰

Just two weeks later Polk learned of Scott’s capture of Mexico City. Rather than regret recalling Trist, however, the news only strengthened his conviction that Trist and the treaty he carried were woefully inadequate to the new reality. Matters now appeared in an entirely different light than they had back in April. The war was won, so why not escalate his demands? In October 1846, General Taylor had suggested that a boundary at either the Rio Grande or the “Sierra Madre Line,” giving the United States the cities of Matamoros and Monterrey and the states of Chihuahua and Sonora, “was the best course that can be adopted.” He told Polk that the Sierra Madre line would be easily defensible with small garrisons at Monterrey, Saltillo, Monclova, Linares, Victoria, and Tampico. This recommendation appeared sound, and it was conservative compared to the views of some in his own cabinet. Walker openly favored “taking the whole of Mexico.” Although Buchanan had initially argued against taking any territory from Mexico at all, as a presidential candidate he now declared that annexing all of Mexico was “that destiny which Providence may have in store for both countries.”²¹

But in Mexico City, matters looked very different. After an initial attempt at negotiations with Santa Anna collapsed, Trist found himself without recourse. Scott’s victory had led to chaos in Mexico’s government. Santa Anna had fled the capital and factions battled for control. Some argued for peace, while others demanded that the nation keep fighting, with guerrilla forces if necessary, until the invaders were ejected. Some of the wealthiest families supported the total annexation of Mexico by the United States as the option most likely to bring stability to the country. The occupying U.S. troops were set upon by guerrillas on a daily basis. Those irregular forces made it nearly impossible to get any news back to Washington.

Trist and General Scott spent long hours discussing the futility of occupying central Mexico. There were just too many Mexicans, and many of them understandably hated their occupiers. Out of the eight million inhabitants in Mexico, Scott wrote, “there are not more than one million who are of pure European blood. The Indians and the mixed races constitute about seven millions. They are exceedingly inferior to our own. As a lover of my country,” he later explained, “I was opposed to mixing up that race with our own.” Scott was adamant that “too much blood has already been shed in this unnatural war.”²² The situation was chaotic, unstable, and very likely to end in disaster.

America’s soldiers found their first extended experience as an occupying army unsettling. Many, including Ulysses Grant, were shocked by Mexico’s poverty. “With a soil and climate scarsely equaled in the world she has more poor and starving subjects who are willing and able to work than any country in the world,” he wrote to his fiancée, Julia. “The rich keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is incredible. Walk through the streets of Mexico for one day and you will see hundreds of beggars, but you never see them ask alms of their own people, it is always of the Americans that they expect to receive.” And the occupying army was getting antsy. “The Mexicans swear they will not fite any more and they will not cum to any terms of piece and I can’t tell how long we will remain here,” complained one North Carolina volunteer. “We would much rather they would cum to some terms of piece or fite one or the other for we are getting tired of lying still and doing nothing.”²³

Mexico might not choose to fight, but plenty of its citizens were willing. Stone-throwing mobs set upon U.S. soldiers, who were in turn forced to break up riots, such as the one that resulted when a local man, accused of murdering an American, was publicly whipped. Embedded journalists no longer adjusted their coverage to protect the troops. The New Orleans Crescent noted that the army’s morale began to decline during the occupation. “Robbery seems to be the order of the day,” it reported. “I can trace this bad conduct on the part of some belonging to the army to nothing but the insatiable appetite for gaming that exists in this city. Men lose their money, then their credit, and self-respect. Some of them will stoop to most anything.” The New Orleans Picayune reported that the night after a Texas Ranger was killed by guerrillas, “a company of Rangers went to the vicinity of the murder and killed 17 Mexicans, and wounded some 40 more.” The article, titled “Massacre of Mexican Citizens!,” was reprinted as far away as Albany.²⁴

With a clear view of the reality of the American occupation, Trist’s perspective on Manifest Destiny and America’s mission began to change. Polk’s instructions were nothing, he wrote, next to “the iniquity of the war.” America’s invasion of Mexico and its occupation of the capital were “a thing for every right-minded American to be ashamed of.” And Trist was ashamed. He wanted to go home, and he hoped Polk might reward him for his service in a manner that would allow him some free time. But he also realized that he had to bring the war to an end, not just for his own sake, but for the sake of his country and the country that had been invaded. He determined to make peace with “as little exacting as possible from Mexico.”²⁵

Just weeks before Trist learned of his recall, prospects for negotiation began to improve. Santa Anna had, once again, been sent into exile, and the new president, Supreme Court justice Manuel de la Peña y Peña, who had opposed the war in 1846, was pushing for peace. Peña and his moderate supporters asserted that accepting America’s terms offered Mexico the best opportunity for rebuilding the shattered country and preventing further encroachment by its avaricious northern neighbor. But these views were considered treasonous by many in Mexico who maintained that a sustained guerrilla war was a better, more honorable outcome than surrendering any land to the Americans. The majority of people in Mexico steadfastly believed that the Nueces River was the rightful southern boundary of Texas.

Peña’s position was precarious. Another political coup seemed possible at any time, and the new administration would likely be far less amenable to compromise. A treaty of peace, signed by representatives of a legitimately recognized government, was clearly necessary to bring the war to an end. After all, the original dispute over Texas’s independence was in large part the result of the fact that Texans never signed a peace treaty with Mexico in 1836.

As the occupation dragged on, the soldiers became more and more desperate. Ulysses S. Grant wrote Julia, “Mexico is a very pleasant place to live because it is never hot nor ever cold, but I believe evry one is hartily tired of war … I pity poor Mexico.” Lieutenant John M. Brannan of Indiana, who like a number of his fellow officers in Mexico would go on to greater fame in the Civil War, had recently been brevetted to captain for “gallant and meritorious conduct” in the Battle of Contreras and Churubusco. But the honors hardly mattered. He and his men also wanted to go home. He bemoaned the seemingly endless occupation in a letter to his brother at the end of October. “There is no prospect of ever seeing a white face or the United States again,” he complained. “You will soon hear what Congress intends doing in regard to this war. I have made up my mind that we have to conquer and occupy the whole country and regenerate this ignorant, superstitious and vicious race.”²⁶

Brannan wasn’t the only person waiting anxiously for the Thirtieth Congress to convene at the end of December and to make clear their intentions regarding the war. If and when Nicholas Trist came to some agreement with Mexico, Congress would have to ratify the treaty. If things continued to drag on without a resolution, as seemed likely, it would be up to the Whig-controlled House of Representatives to take charge and force the president to do the people’s bidding.

Across the United States that fall, congressmen were setting off for Washington, wondering how the war would shape their terms. When Congressman Lincoln looked east in the fall of 1847, he could visualize a number of different routes to Washington. None of them was simple, and neither he nor Mary had ever traveled east of Kentucky. With rambunctious and (others thought) badly governed four-year-old Robert and their toddler Eddie to tend to, the journey must have seemed especially daunting. Eddie had begun showing signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him less than three years later, and Mary had begun to suffer from debilitating headaches. But after all the years they had spent working toward this election, and nearly a year and a half of waiting since it took place, the Lincolns were ready for the journey. In October they leased their Springfield home for the year for ninety dollars, and two days later started for Washington.

There was no easy way to get to Washington from Springfield in 1847. You couldn’t travel by train. Nor was there a route by water. Indeed, the general difficulty of getting anywhere easily from the remote towns and cities of western states such as Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee explains the appeal of the Whig vision of an activist central government among a population that otherwise venerated the frontier values and expansionist platform of Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party. What hope could there be for a fledgling community far from the seat of power, or for a young and penniless but ambitious man, without the helping hand of the government, with its protective tariffs and ability to extend credit? A number of mid-westerners were as angry about Polk’s veto of the Rivers and Harbors Bill, which would have done so much to improve transportation and commerce in their portion of the country, as they were about the war with Mexico.

The shortest route to Washington from Springfield was 840 miles, mostly by stagecoach, which was a fantastically uncomfortable way to travel, particularly with small children. Overcrowded coaches bounced and jostled over rutted roads that were dusty in the summer and muddy in the winter. In difficult patches passengers were expected to get out and walk. Travel was totally unregulated and accidents frequent. Undergreased axles broke or caught fire; coaches collided with pedestrians and smaller vehicles, sank into streams or holes, or, dramatically, toppled over, often resulting in serious injuries. On the “splendid turnpikes in Kentucky” (financed with help from Henry Clay) travel was relatively safe, but on the “natural roads” virtually everywhere else, “the pitching from side to side was like that of a small steamer on a coasting trip.” In the best of circumstances passengers could expect to arrive at their destination hungry, thirsty, sleepy, and covered with dust. Grisly accounts of less favorable outcomes were easy to find in local newspapers.²⁷

But the Lincolns didn’t choose the shortest route, and the reason had little to do with comfort. Mary wanted to visit her family in Lexington. And members of Congress were reimbursed for their travel at what was then the astronomical sum of forty cents a mile. It was the rare congressman who didn’t choose a route that was, in the words of New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, another Whig elected to the Thirtieth Congress, “exceedingly crooked, even for a politician.”²⁸ Lincoln’s chosen route was twice as long as necessary. It included lengthy trips by river steamer down the Mississippi and then up the Ohio and Kentucky rivers to Frankfort, Kentucky, followed by a train trip to Lexington to visit the Todds. They then returned to Frankfort, went by steamer to Pennsylvania, caught a stagecoach to Cumberland, Maryland, and from there traveled by train first to Relay Station, Maryland, and then by the Baltimore and Ohio to Washington. Lincoln’s trip of 1,626 miles cost the taxpayers $1,300.80, approximately $30,000 today. Although his journey cost $878.80 more than the shortest possible route, Lincoln, like most congressmen, assumed he was entitled to inflated mileage to offset his low congressional salary. The wealthy didn’t have to worry about such things, of course, but for a common man, mileage was one of the great benefits of serving in Congress.

The highlight of this meandering journey for Mary Todd Lincoln was visiting her family in Lexington. If she sometimes considered herself superior to the society she found in Springfield, it was because she measured everything about her current situation against the benchmark of Lexington. And Springfield just didn’t measure up. It had some graceful trees and a few homes of architectural note, as well as a few markers of its emerging gentility, including a Thespian Society and a Young Men’s Lyceum, although it wasn’t nearly as genteel as Jacksonville.

But Springfield’s most outstanding characteristic was its mud. During rainy periods the streets were virtually impassable by foot, particularly for ladies. To make matters worse, the numerous hogs who roamed the streets in search of scraps enjoyed uprooting the wooden sidewalks. Thanks in part to lobbying by Abraham Lincoln, the twenty-five-hundred-person town of Springfield had become the capital of Illinois on July 4, 1839. The unfinished statehouse sported classical columns, but the business district, full of shanties, was an eyesore. Illinois’s new capital had ambition to spare, but in the 1840s it was still very much a work in progress.

Lexington was altogether different. It had grand homes in town and grander hemp plantations outside it (Mary’s grandfather’s estate was one of the nicest). Lexington also had Transylvania University, the oldest institution of higher learning west of the Alleghenies, and the alma mater of John J. Hardin, Jefferson Davis, and Mary’s own father. Robert Todd was fortunate enough to have studied law there under Henry Clay in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Lexington had high society and families of long standing like her own, many of whom had originally migrated from the Piedmont region of Virginia, where they knew a thing or two about living well. They had brought their love of horse racing, gambling, and hard liquor to the Bluegrass Region, and prospered thanks to their many slaves.²⁹

Lexington had a beautiful setting amid undulating hills, fertile limestone soil, and the highest concentration of slaves in the state. Kentucky was part of the border South, caught uneasily between the large cotton plantations that dominated the states to the south and the relative freedom of the states to the north. There were 210,000 slaves in Kentucky at the end of the 1840s, fully one-fifth of its population. But most of the state, including Hardin County, where Abraham Lincoln was born, was composed of small farms worked by families without the aid of slave labor.

Lexington, by contrast, was home to large plantations and a slave population with a density closer to that found in the Deep South. Slaves in Lexington, like those in Mississippi or Alabama, were likely to labor outdoors under the oversight and lash of white overseers, to sleep in separate slave quarters, and to interact primarily with other slaves. Most of the wealthy families in Lexington owned slaves. The Clays and Todds were no exception.

The landlocked city was in some ways on the decline in the 1840s, bypassed by Louisville since steamers opened up the river depot to the New Orleans trade via the Mississippi. Lexington no longer bid fair to take the seat of government away from Frankfort despite years of lobbying by Henry Clay, but it was still the cultural capital of the region. Lexington had a somewhat better claim than Jacksonville to the title “Athens of the West.” Lexington was Mary’s ideal of a city. She remained a Kentucky girl at heart, and throughout her years in Springfield she always subscribed to a Lexington newspaper.

The Lincolns arrived in Lexington on November 4, their fifth wedding anniversary, and passed three lovely weeks, ending on Thanksgiving Day, in the stately two-story brick home where she had lived as a teenager, complete with double parlors, coach house, and elaborate flower gardens leading to a gentle stream. It was Abraham’s first visit to his wife’s hometown, and his first introduction to her stepmother and small half brothers and half sisters. It was the first time the Todds had met Mary’s children as well. Mary was proud to show off her two handsome sons and congressman husband. By all accounts Lincoln charmed his in-laws during that visit.

This was the first real vacation of Abraham Lincoln’s life. It was also his first extended exposure to real slavery, as opposed to the indenture system of Illinois. During his sojourn in Lexington he had ample opportunity to study the “peculiar institution” firsthand. There were slaves in the Todd household, and separate slave quarters out back. Notices of runaway slaves appeared in the daily paper. Lexington was also the slave-trading center of the state. Slave auctions and shackled slaves were common sights, and Lincoln likely saw both during his visit. The jail of a slave trader was easily visible from the home of Mary’s grandmother down the street. From the terrace of her lawn, Lincoln could look down over spiked palings into the yard of the slave pen and hear the cries of slaves tied to the whipping post. Five slaves were sold during his visit to Lexington to satisfy a legal judgment in favor of his father-in-law. Slavery became a reality for Abraham Lincoln in a new way during those three weeks.

The visit to Lexington was as much a highlight of the long journey to Washington for Abraham Lincoln as it was for his wife, although for very different reasons. It wasn’t that Lincoln didn’t enjoy the Todd family circle. He got along particularly well with her father, whom he had previously met in Springfield. They shared not only family interests, including young Robert Lincoln, named after his grandfather, but also political beliefs. Robert S. Todd was one of the most prominent citizens in the town, president of the branch bank of Kentucky, engaged in the cotton manufacturing business, and a twenty-four-year member of the Kentucky state assembly. Although Todd and Lincoln came from dramatically different backgrounds and only one was a slave owner, both were dyed-in-the-wool Whigs. There were a lot of Whigs in Lexington. American hemp, a plant related to marijuana that was grown for its fiber, was vastly inferior to that grown in Russia. Hemp became a profitable crop in Kentucky only because of a high protective tariff levied on Russian hemp passed by the Whigs. With its fledgling manufacturing concerns and remote location, Lexington was the center of Whig strength in Kentucky. Todd was on a first-name basis with all the leading Whig politicians in the state, including Lexington’s favorite son, Henry Clay. Mary had known the Clays since childhood, when she once brought a pony to Ashland to show it off to Clay. She admired the statesman almost as much as her husband did.³⁰

It was Clay who made this such a special trip for Lincoln. A lawyer who parlayed success at the bar into a political career on the national stage, a firm nationalist whose abilities to compromise were unparalleled, and an advocate of the interests of westerners, Henry Clay was an easy man for Lincoln to admire and identify with. And like the rest of America, he also thrilled to Clay’s speeches. His cousin later attributed the fact that Lincoln initially became a Whig to the fact that he “always Loved Hen Clay’s Speaches.”³¹

Lincoln did indeed love Clay’s speeches, but he had never heard the orator in person. All agreed that Clay’s true genius as a speaker lay primarily in his animated, passionate delivery and deep bass voice. Listeners compared Clay’s voice to “the finest musical instrument,” which could be as “soft as a lute or full as a trumpet.” It was a voice of “wonderful modulation, sweetness, and power.”³² Lincoln knew that reading Clay’s speeches was like deciphering a musical score without ever having heard it performed. A few weeks before his marriage in 1842, Lincoln, as a member of the executive committee of the Springfield Clay Club, invited the Kentucky senator to deliver an address in Springfield. “The pleasure it would give us, and thousands such as we, is beyond all question,” he wrote.³³

Clay never made it to Springfield in 1842. But in 1847 Lincoln went to Lexington, and there, at last, he heard the music live. The very day he and his family arrived in Lexington, newspapers announced that Henry Clay would deliver an address on the war in Mexico, at a meeting presided over by Robert S. Todd. Lincoln had obviously picked a fortuitous time to visit Clay’s hometown. What he didn’t yet know was that this speech, one of Clay’s greatest, would change the course of both men’s careers.

By the time the Lincolns reached Kentucky, the military occupation of Mexico’s capital had already dragged on for two months. While agitation to “conquer and occupy” the whole country was becoming more avid the longer Mexico stalled, many Whigs had begun to argue that the best solution was to withdraw U.S. troops from Mexico without taking any territory, bringing a swift and not entirely shameful end to a bloody war that had started with a lie. This was what the Massachusetts House of Representatives called for in April 1847: “the restoration of an honorable peace, without further attempt to dismember the territory of the enemy, and upon terms of mercy and magnanimity becoming a great and brave people toward a sister republic.”³⁴

The war needed resolution, and the opposition Whig Party needed leadership and guidance. “Old Rough and Ready” Zachary Taylor was a growing favorite for the party’s nomination in 1848, but not even his most fervent supporters imagined that the plainspoken general could provide the rank and file with direction in this crucial period. The general likely could rally the troops at election time, but his command of soldiers was far greater than his command of policy.

So the Whigs did what came naturally; they turned to Henry Clay.

Leading Whigs had been prodding Clay for some sort of statement on the war almost from its beginning. Now, at last, the Sage of Ashland agreed to speak. Clay was not doing well. His health was on the decline, and his son’s death continued to haunt him. The loss of Henry Junior, he wrote a friend, was particularly “deep and so agonizing.” He had been baptized in the hopes that it would provide some solace, but five months later Clay admitted that he had “been nervous ever since” hearing of his son’s death, and still couldn’t bring himself to look at “the partner of my sorrows,” Lucretia, “without feeling deeper anguish.” He found it painful to walk the grounds of Ashland, for the very trees reminded him of his son.³⁵

Clay determined to oppose the war that took young Colonel Clay’s life. Countless Americans had seen images of his son handing over his dueling pistols just moments before death, asking that the senior statesman learn that his son had “done all [he] could with them, and now return them.” His son had sent a final message: it was up to Henry Clay to soldier on. He would condemn the extension of slavery and offer a solution to the ongoing immoral conflict in Mexico. And perhaps he would find peace. Whether primarily out of bitterness at the loss of the best hope for the next generation of his family or anger at the war he would have prevented had he become president in 1844, Clay decided, at age seventy, to speak out with conviction. He would let the American people know exactly what he thought, even if it cost him the Whig nomination in 1848. And he would do it at home, in Lexington, where pro-war fervor still ran high, but he knew he would always find an audience that loved him. Some things were more important than becoming president.

Yet perhaps, at the same time, this new path would finally lead him to the presidency. It wasn’t impossible. He would have been the frontrunner for the party’s nomination, but in the last letter he ever received from his son, written just weeks before Buena Vista, Henry Clay Jr. confided that General Taylor would run for president in 1848. “He feels his power,” he told his father, and admitted that “except for yourself there are very few whom I would prefer to him.” Clay had lost the 1840 nomination to William Henry Harrison. That war hero’s death had delivered the nation into the hands of John Tyler and his disastrous presidency. Could Henry Clay allow another general to become president? Could he prevent it?³⁶

From the day Clay’s address was announced in the papers, excitement ran high, and not just in Lexington. News that Clay would speak out “created a sensation in the political circles seldom experienced,” reported one New York newspaper. “ ‘What will he say?’—‘What course will he pursue?’ were the questions universally asked.” A Milwaukee paper gushed that voters there were anxious to learn what “one of the first men of the nation, with no station or commitments to bias the soundness of his judgment” would say about “the topic which of all others now lies nearest the heart of the whole people.”³⁷

Papers across the nation picked up the news, and a series of notable figures announced their intention to be there for the event, including the governor and senators from Kentucky. Some audience members traveled hundreds of miles just to hear Clay’s speech. Abraham Lincoln may possibly have visited Ashland earlier that week with his wife or father-in-law and met with Clay personally. If so, he might have had some sense of what Clay would say on November 13. But Clay held his cards tight. He knew the importance of surprise to a dramatic address. No one expected Clay to praise the war, but just what he would say was a mystery.

The address was originally scheduled for Lexington’s courthouse, but as visitors and reporters from throughout the region poured into the city, it became apparent that the crowd would number in the thousands. The venue was changed to the new Market House, a cavernous brick building on Water Street.

On a dark and rainy Saturday morning, the crowd began to assemble outside. An immense assembly of men and women thronged the hall, “all ages participated, the father as well as the son—all classes and conditions of society.” Many in that Lexington audience still supported the war. Some, no doubt, imagined that the dismemberment of Mexico by the United States was just and right. The vast majority unquestionably supported slavery. They were all ready to hear something remarkable.

Clay was not an original thinker, but he could energize and inspire an audience like few other men in politics. He knew the speech he was about to deliver was among the most important of his career, a speech that could save lives, perhaps change history. The American people still looked to him for guidance. After all, no other politician had proven as skillful as Henry Clay at delivering his nation from a crisis. And almost half of all voters had chosen him over Polk in 1844. Clay knew that many of them felt the loss nearly as acutely as he did. Much was at stake, both for him and for the nation.

At exactly eleven o’clock Clay mounted the podium with the supreme confidence that always accompanied the orator when he was in his element and an erect bearing that belied his seventy years. “The shouts of the assembled thousands” filled the room as General Leslie Combs called the meeting to order and a series of officers was elected, including Robert Todd as vice president. General Combs requested that the audience observe a “perfect silence” during the following address, “as it was probably the last time that” Clay “would ever address a populous assembly.” Henry Clay had come before them, Combs said, out of his duty to the country. The “momentous question” of the resolution of the war now presented itself to the American people, and no man who loved his country could remain silent. Clay would not “allow any selfish consideration to palsy his tongue.” Clay was there, Combs reminded his audience, because he would “rather be right than be President.” The audience roared its approval.³⁸

As Clay rose and faced the assembly, a silence descended over the room. Clay began his address on a subdued note. Speaking in measured tones, he noted how the dark and gloomy weather outside the lecture hall perfectly reflected the condition of the country. Anxiety, agitation, and apprehension were the rule, given the unsettled state of the “unnatural” war with Mexico. Clay’s voice rose as he bluntly described the manner in which Polk had provoked an “unnecessary” war of “offensive aggression,” laying blame on the president and detailing his many lies and deceptions.

Clay excoriated the president, but he reserved some of his wrath for the congressional Whigs who had capitulated in 1846 and voted in favor of the war. The United States never should have annexed Texas in the first place, since everyone had understood at the time that annexation would result in war. Yet the majority of congressional Whigs had voted in favor of a war declaration with “a palpable falsehood stamped on its face” that Mexico was to blame. “Almost idolizing truth,” Clay intoned, “I would never have voted for that bill.” And the audience could see that the great man meant what he said. Voting for a bill with a lie at its heart was exactly the kind of thing that the old, opportunistic Clay might have done, had he been in Congress. But not the man who faced them today. His sincere disgust at that vote, if not completely fair, was for the witnesses assembled in the Lexington Market House too evident for doubt.

With increasing intensity, Clay detailed the terrible results of that vote and the “frightful struggle” that ensued. Clay lingered over the mad “sacrifice of human life … waste of human treasure … mangled bodies … death, and … desolation.” Thousands of Americans had already died, and many more soldiers had been disqualified by a “wild spirit of adventure” from returning to civil society. And whose fault was this? It was Mexico, not the United States, that was “defending her firesides, her castles, and her altars.”

Nor was Clay done. Congressional Whigs had agreed to the war because they were afraid of appearing unpatriotic. But “whose hearts,” Clay emotionally asked, “have bled more freely than those of the Whigs?” His voice nearly cracking, Clay asked an audience intimately familiar with his own grief, “Who have more occasion to mourn the loss of sons, husbands, brothers, fathers than Whig parents, Whig wives, and Whig brothers, in this deadly and unprofitable strife?” Clay held back his tears, but many in the audience did not. All knew he had lost his son. And it had been widely reported that Colonel John Hardin was Clay’s nephew: two dead young men of promise in one family. Clay’s losses, and the nation’s losses, were nearly unthinkable.

But this address was not primarily about Henry Clay. It was about the country to whose service Clay had devoted his entire long career. And more than the youth of that nation had been lost in the past two years. With a deep and burning indignation, Clay told his audience that the United States had lost its “unsullied character” internationally. Other nations “look upon us, in the prosecution of the present War, as being actuated by a spirit of rapacity, and an inordinate desire for territorial aggrandizement.” Even God himself must wonder at America’s actions. His deep bass voice thundering, Clay leaned into the podium, warning his audience about the dangers of annexing Mexico and citing historical examples to prove that imperialism inevitably led to ruin for the conquering nation. He dwelt at great length on the “direful and fatal” consequences of emulating the Roman Empire, the ill effects on the character of the nation of becoming a “warlike and conquering” power, and the incredible expense of annexing Mexico.

Clay also expressed his reservations about the racial implications of inviting Mexicans to join the Union. “Does any considerate man believe it possible that two such immense countries, with territories of nearly equal extent, with populations so incongruous, so different in race, in language, in religion and in laws could be blended together in one harmonious mass, and happily governed by one common authority?… [T]he warning voice of all history … teaches the difficulty of combining and consolidating together, conquering and conquered nations.” The Moors had failed to hold Spain, and England was struggling to hold Ireland. “Every Irishman hates, with a mortal hatred, his Saxon oppressor,” and “both the Irish and the Mexicans are probably of the same Celtic race. Both the English and the Americans are of the same Saxon origin.”³⁹ Appealing to the racist views of his audience, Clay proclaimed that annexing Mexico would doom the United States.

But he had a solution. Because war powers resided with Congress, Congress could end the war. It was up to them to quickly and honorably settle the Mexican boundary issue and then to demand the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Mexico, ending a disgraceful and immoral war without annexing a single acre of Mexico’s land beyond the Nueces Strip. And Clay demanded that Polk comply. His audience, swept up in the moment, exploded in applause and implied agreement that Polk would be forced to comply, that they would see to it.

Not everything in this address was as universally pleasing as Clay’s demand that Polk be held to account. Clay also addressed the issue of slavery. Although he was speaking in a slave state, to an audience full of slave owners, Clay clearly and sharply disavowed “any desire, on our part, to acquire any foreign territory whatever, for the purpose of introducing slavery into it.” Heads turned when he said that, although no voices were raised in dissent. If anyone doubted his position on this subject, Clay added, in a voice of utter seriousness, that he had “ever regarded slavery as a great evil.” The fifty enslaved men, women, and children back at Ashland might reasonably have argued otherwise, but no one in the audience that day would have dared. Slavery was a great evil. In the past, Clay had often stated his belief that slavery was wicked. But now he offered no concessions to slave-holding Whigs, and no hope that Henry Clay, if he had anything to do with it, would allow new slave states to be created out of Mexican land. It was a radical stand, a brave stand. Abraham Lincoln wasn’t the only man in attendance that day who must have marveled at Clay’s courage.

In a series of resolutions at the close of a speech that “carried conviction to every mind,” Henry Clay challenged the incoming Thirtieth Congress to investigate and determine the purpose of the war, to loudly oppose the president if he attempted to annex or dismember Mexico, to prevent the extension of slavery into any foreign territory, and to redeem the honor of the nation in the process. His final resolution invited the people of the United States who were “anxious to produce contentment and satisfaction at home, and to elevate the character of the nation abroad,” to hold meetings of their own in order to make their opposition to the war dramatically clear. The citizens of America must take upon themselves responsibility for ending the war. They must make their voices heard. Clay’s resolutions, including those opposing the extension of slavery, were submitted and unanimously adopted.⁴⁰

The thousands of people in the Market House exploded in applause, rising to their feet and filling the hall with their shouts and roars. Henry Clay had spoken for two and a half hours, but the crowd was energized rather than exhausted, called to action by “the great mass of truths” that Clay so powerfully presented. The speech they had heard was “rich, earnest, and true,” and not one they were likely to forget. Certainly, Abraham Lincoln did not. As he and the thousands of others left the hall that afternoon, they filled the streets and homes of Lexington with their praise of the Sage of Ashland, their approval of his resolutions, and their amazement that the seventy-year-old Clay was still at the height of his powers.⁴¹

Thanks to the wonders of the telegraph, plus a reporter who immediately after the speech rode eighty miles (in a record five hours) to the nearest telegraph office in Cincinnati, Clay’s speech and resolutions were in print across the country within days. The speech won immediate acclaim among northern Whigs, many of whom were both delighted and surprised by Clay’s clearly stated principles. “He is not afraid to speak out,” approved the Boston Daily Atlas, while another paper noted, “It is a high exercise of moral courage for Mr. Clay, living in a slave-holding State and addressing an audience composed mostly of the owners of slaves—to bear his testimony against any extension of this institution.” Several papers reported that Clay had demanded Polk’s impeachment if he didn’t comply with Congress’s wishes.⁴²

Nothing about Clay’s Lexington speech was radical, even if it was radical for Henry Clay. Almost all of it had been formulated by other Whig politicians in other contexts. But as so often was the case with Henry Clay, it was the way he said something that proved so inspiring. The “free simplicity, sound logic, and manly directness” of Clay’s words “attest their truth and crown their excellence,” noted one reporter. “The right thinking men of the country of all classes and parties will thank Mr. Clay for thus embodying in words that will not lie, the feeling of their hearts and the convictions of their judgments.”⁴³

Reactions to the speech in other quarters were less positive. A few abolitionist papers—but only a few—–contrasted Clay’s Lexington address with his boast in New Orleans a year earlier that he might “capture or slay a Mexican.” This was nothing more than a typical Clay flip-flop. “Mould the clay which way you will, ’tis a very clay-god still,” punned the Liberator.⁴⁴

But Democrats and many western Whigs labeled the speech treasonous. The administration’s paper, the Washington Union, condemned “the spirit of treason promulgated” by Clay, particularly his assertion that “the war has been brought upon us by our own act; and that we and not our enemies, are responsible for its evils and its guilt.” It also quoted an army officer who claimed to see “no difference between the men who in ’76 succored the British, and those who in ’47 give arguments and sympathy to the Mexicans.” Democrats in Nashville met to condemn Clay’s resolutions as “incompatible with national honor” and “having the direct tendency to encourage the opponents of peace in Mexico to protract the war.” The New York Courier and Enquirer, a conservative Whig paper, warned that adopting Clay’s unpatriotic resolutions would be “suicidal” for the Whigs. Soldiers in Mexico wondered if Clay’s stand signified advancing senility, whether “he has arrived at an age for the follies and errors of which he is no longer responsible.”⁴⁵

If the Lexington speech improved Clay’s standing in New England, it badly damaged it in the South. Southern Whigs concluded that Clay had “done himself great injury in his late speech” and that they would “not rally on Mr. Clay, or any Whig who swears by his Lexington resolutions.” Whigs in Georgia refused to hold a meeting to so much as discuss Clay’s resolutions. Of course, Clay knew before his Lexington speech that his chances of winning the presidential nomination without the support of southern proslavery Whigs were slim to none. He had taken a gamble with his speech. But he had always been a gambling man. If his words helped end a “frightful struggle,” then of course he hadn’t lost a thing. He was still the man who would rather be right than be president.⁴⁶

Clay’s words shook Washington, the nation, and beyond. In London, Britain’s foreign minister wrote approvingly about Clay’s speech “against an aggressive policy in the conduct of the Mexican War.” Clay asked his fellow citizens to join together against war in Mexico, and the people responded. Antiwar rallies inspired by Clay’s call to action bloomed from Indiana to New Jersey, Kentucky to Maine. Newspapers as far away as Mexico City reported that Clay’s call for meetings “is arousing the masses in all parts of the Union.”⁴⁷

Not surprisingly, the “views of Henry Clay were fully sustained” at a “great meeting” in Boston. A “peace” meeting held in the Broadway Tabernacle in New York was widely reported to be “one of the largest and most enthusiastic meetings ever held in that city.” In Philadelphia, “hundreds of the most respectable of the citizens” called for a “town meeting” in support of Clay’s resolutions, and “thousands went away who were unable to gain admission” when it occurred. The gathering was reported to be “one of the largest and most respectable public meetings ever called together.”⁴⁸

While it was primarily the Whigs of Trenton, New Jersey, who endorsed Clay’s resolutions by acclamation, citizens of all political parties turned out in Cincinnati to oppose “the causes and character of the Mexican War, as well as its further offensive persecution.” The first meeting in Cleveland opposing the war was such a success that antiwar protesters decided to hold another a week later. In New Orleans, agitation caused by the ex-senator’s oration was so great that one of the first things a returning soldier wrote about after his arrival in the Crescent City from Mexico was “Clay’s antiwar speech.” At meetings in cities around the country, thousands of people denounced the war, condemned Polk for starting it, and adopted Clay’s resolutions wholesale, “with a fervor of manner and earnestness of purpose that are rarely exhibited.”⁴⁹

The antiwar movement was no longer a New England phenomenon. The public meetings in the wake of Clay’s Lexington speech proved beyond a doubt that a peace movement was now national. Henry Clay didn’t create the movement, but his political stature, authority as a grieving father, and singular speaking abilities gave voice to masses of dissenters and offered a clear path to protest. It was a “great wave,” according to a Philadelphia reporter, which “rolled from Lexington, upheaved by the mighty voice of Henry Clay,” and now “goes onward from us with renewed and more overwhelming force.” And while Americans met in support of Clay’s “principles, more than to the man,” they appreciated Clay more than ever. “Henry Clay sat enshrined in their hearts—but they gloried in him most, because he had spoken forth the truth unshrinkingly.… They reverenced him because he had forgotten self in his love of country, and because he valued his country’s welfare more than his chances of gain.”⁵⁰

Abraham Lincoln bore witness to Clay’s courageous and principled speech, and to his dramatic gamble. When as a child he had pored over Clay’s biography, and as a young man committed Clay’s speeches nearly to heart, did he imagine the real thing would be like this? The oratorical brilliance he might have envisioned, but not the subject matter. Henry Clay had built his career on economic issues, and those issues had become Lincoln’s: internal improvements, a strong national bank, tariffs, and credit. These were the issues that Lincoln campaigned on, that inspired him, that drove him to Congress. They weren’t the issues that interested voters on the campaign trail in 1846, but still they were his issues. His issue was not the war, and it certainly wasn’t slavery. Before his trip to Lexington, Lincoln seemed generally unconcerned about the institution of slavery, viewing agitation to end the “peculiar institution” primarily as a nuisance that unproductively split the Whig Party.

What Lincoln saw and heard that afternoon made him reconsider these positions. The Sage of Ashland, his Prince Hal, had described the horrors of the war with blinding clarity, struck down the president as a liar, and ordered the people to protest a war that they, and Lincoln, knew to be unjust. Speaking in a slave state, Henry Clay had condemned the expansion of slavery, and in no uncertain terms. He had linked the war in Mexico with the slavery issue in a way that few southerners dared. Lincoln could only guess at the reasons Clay had finally spoken out: those of a father still anguished at his son’s sacrifice, those of a patriot acting in what he felt were the best interests of his country, those of a righteous man choosing justice before ambition. But he understood the political consequences. By criticizing the war, Clay had jeopardized his political base in the South, which still largely supported it. By condemning slavery in a proslavery state, he had risked devastating voter backlash. It was a great act of political bravery. And Clay had right on his side.

Clay had made it clear that Mexican land must not, and would not, become slave territory. Henry Clay had demonstrated to the assembled thousands, and the many thousands more who would read his words in their morning papers the following week, that he valued truth and justice more than political office. And in so doing, he had proven that he was no mere politician. He was a leader.

Was this a revelation for Abraham Lincoln? He knew that the war and the extension of slavery were wrong. But had he understood that they were so very wrong that nothing else mattered? William Herndon later said that his law partner “stood bolt upright and downright on his conscience.” Was his conscience now alive to the moral wrong of the war? Lincoln saw clearly that his issues in Congress would not be economic ones. In this period of national crisis it was not the time to focus on tariffs. If Henry Clay could attack the war, the president, and the spread of slavery, so could he. Congressman Abraham Lincoln had a new mission.⁵¹

Nicholas Trist received Polk’s recall order just two days after Clay’s speech, and the following day read about it in the Mexico City press. He knew nothing about Clay’s speech, of course, but he too understood that personal sacrifice would be necessary to bring this war to an end. Lincoln’s mission had changed, but Trist’s had stayed the same. There was much in Henry Clay’s speech that the diplomat would have agreed with. He too believed that the people of Mexico and those of the United States were incompatible socially and racially, and that the United States could never effectively govern large portions of Mexico’s territory. He saw the corrupting effects of service in Mexico on the morals of many U.S. soldiers. Young men who would never engage in such behavior at home drank, gambled, and visited fandangos. Some did much worse. Most of all, Trist had seen firsthand the violence done against Mexico. He knew the Mexicans were fighting to protect their homes and families. He had come to believe that the United States was at fault. And it made him “ashamed” to be an American.⁵²

Trist believed that Peña’s presidency offered the best opportunity to bring the war to an end without a total dismemberment of Mexico. Local papers were reporting that Polk was ready to annex the whole country, and Trist warned Mexico’s diplomats that “a strong public opinion” in the United States was demanding that “the U.S. should select a line of boundary as may suit themselves.” He had earned the trust and respect of the Mexican negotiators over the previous months. This was an opportunity that couldn’t be squandered.⁵³

“What is my line of duty to my government and my country, in this extraordinary position in which I find myself?” Trist wondered. He consulted with General Scott and with another confidant, the British chargé d’affaires Edward Thornton. Scott encouraged him “to finish the good work he had begun.” Thornton begged for Trist’s “charity for this unhappy nation, to lend a hand toward the preservation of her nationality. I look upon this as the last chance for either party of making peace.” So too did James Freaner, an embedded journalist for the New Orleans Delta. “Mr. Trist, make the treaty!” he told him. “It is now in your power to do your country a greater service than any living man can render her. I know our country.… They want peace, sir. They pant for it. They will be grateful for it.”⁵⁴ Scott, Thornton, and Freaner, three men with very different agendas, all argued for peace. The soldiers wanted peace. And Mexico deserved peace.

Trist did something unheard of in American diplomacy: he refused to come home. He was, he knew, the only man who could make a treaty. He owed it as a “solemn duty to my country” to at least try. As a nervous Buchanan asked British diplomats to help deliver a second copy of the recall notice, which he suspected may never have arrived, Trist composed a sixty-five-page letter explaining why he refused to be fired. He was convinced the president was unaware of the true state of affairs in Mexico. Continued occupation was unwise, annexation of the whole impossible, he asserted. It offered “incalculable danger to every good principle, moral as well as political, which is cherished among us.” A conquered Mexico would ultimately corrupt and destroy America. Furthermore, Polk’s treaty terms would strip Mexico of half of her land. “However helpless a nation may feel, there is necessarily a point beyond which she cannot be expected to go under any circumstances.”⁵⁵ The United States could not ask Mexico to go further. He would not ask Mexico to go further.

Then he continued negotiations. The fictional Trist in The Mexican Ranchero faced down guerrilla partisans. But the real Trist faced down a president. The most creative novelist would have had difficulty coming up with a more heroic plot line.

Polk received Trist’s letter mere weeks after the Thirtieth Congress convened. The president had been “much fatigued” with his “long and close confinement & constant labour.” Now the news left him dumbstruck. Thousands of miles from his president, Nicholas Trist pressed his negotiations. The man was not naive: he knew he was risking his career. But as he later wrote, his course was now “governed by my conscience.” His “sense of justice” directed him to end America’s “abuse of power.” The people of Mexico deserved justice. He would deliver it to them. And, just as important, he would protect the people of America from the impossible burden of annexing Mexico.⁵⁶

Polk saw the matter differently. “I have never in my life felt so indignant,” he wrote in his diary. “He has acted worse than any man in the public employ whom I have ever known. His dispatch proves that he is destitute of honour or principle, and that he has proved himself a very base man. I was deceived of him.”⁵⁷ He wanted Trist physically thrown out of army headquarters.

Late one evening, two weeks after Clay’s speech, the exhausted Lincoln family finally arrived in Washington and checked into Mrs. Spriggs’s boardinghouse, on Carroll Row, just across from the Capitol Building. Mrs. Spriggs’s came well recommended. Both Baker and Hardin had lodged there during their congressional terms. It had been more than a month since the Lincolns left Springfield, and in three short weeks Lincoln and six Democrats were to represent Illinois in the lower house of Congress. “During my whole political life,” Lincoln later wrote, “I have loved and revered [Clay] as a teacher and leader.” As Lincoln pondered his path in the Thirtieth Congress, Clay’s speech and lesson were firmly in mind. “As you are all so anxious for me to distinguish myself,” he wrote to William Herndon, “I have concluded to do so before long.”⁵⁸ Congressman Lincoln would live up to his promise.

11 Duty and Justice

11

Duty and Justice