Mexican War Research Articles

The Mexican War on Drugs: Crime and the Limits of Government Persuasion

The Mexican War on Drugs: Crime and the Limits of Government Persuasion

Dark Day on the Prairie

Dark Day on the Prairie Robert Lacy (bio) Mankato, Minnesota, is an attractive riverfront town in the south central part of the state. It boasts a university campus and a sprinkling of light industry. The National Football League’s Minnesota Vikings used to gather there each summer to train for the coming season. Carol Kennicott, the heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, was from there; and it’s where Pa was usually headed when he hitched up the wagon on tv’s “Little House on the Prairie.” Today it is a prosperous and growing little metropolis. Despite the national economic downturn, optimism abounds. You can feel it as you walk the streets. But it wasn’t always that way. One hundred and forty years ago Mankato was a raw outpost on the American frontier. It was one of those tenuous, perhaps temporary places that a newly arrived immigrant from Germany or Sweden might find himself in after heeding the call to “go West.” It was also, on December 26, 1862, the scene of an event unique in the history of the United States. Unique in its magnitude. Unique in its awfulness. That was the day, just one day past Christmas, when the federalized militia of the State of Minnesota, acting on orders from President Abraham Lincoln, hanged thirty-eight Sioux Indians. Hanged them all together, all at once. It is by a factor of more than six the largest mass execution ever to take place on American soil. Nothing else comes close. The U.S. government electrocuted six captured Nazi saboteurs in Washington, D.C., in the early days of American involvement in World War ii, and in terms of numbers that ranks second to the Mankato killings. Also, during the Mexican War, the U.S. Army hanged “about thirty” (nobody seems to have kept count) Irish-immigrant deserters immediately following the Battle of Chapultepec. That does come close, but it happened in faraway Mexico City, not here in the United States. And, as for the Sacco-Vanzetti and Rosenberg executions, while they may loom larger in the nation’s historical consciousness, they were just small potatoes [End Page 236] compared to the great slaughter that occurred that long-ago day in Mankato. The hangings were initially scheduled for December 19, 1862, but they had to be postponed for a week after the man in charge, Colonel Stephen Miller of the Seventh Minnesota Volunteers, determined that he didn’t have the right kind of rope. Presumably something sturdier was called for. Lincoln was forced to issue a revised order moving the date back a week. Picture the perturbation all around—just the kind of irritating inconvenience one had to put up with out on the prairie in those days. The Indians to be hanged were renegade Sioux who had gone off their reservations along the Minnesota River in August and, during the course of a five-week rampage, killed many white settlers: estimates range from a low of three hundred and fifty to a high of more than a thousand. Lincoln himself, according to one of his biographers, thought the correct number might be about eight hundred. At any rate many settlers were killed. The reasons for the uprising were the usual ones: clash of cultures, simmering resentment on one side, indifference and favoritism on the other, lack of strong leadership among Indian elders who knew such an effort was doomed from the start, lack of understanding on the part of the whites that things had gotten as bad as they had, possibly even the heat—August that year was said to be sweltering. But the fact that these were “annuity” Indians (so-called “cut hairs”), who had accepted the federal government’s coin to give up their old warring ways and then reneged on that pledge, seems to have made the white desire for revenge, when the time came, much stronger than it otherwise might have been. The original list of culprits, as drawn up in the field by a drumhead court, numbered three hundred and three. And, left to their own devices, the white Minnesotans might have hanged every one of them. But Lincoln, mindful of...

War powers: the politics of constitutional authority

Chapter 1: Who Has Authority to Take the Country to War? 1 Chapter 2: Presidential Discretion and the Path to War: The Mexican War and World War II

What I Know About Scott County, Tennessee

What I Know About Scott County, Tennessee Meredith Sue Willis Spring 1994 After growing up in the Appalachian region, I lived for twenty years in New York City. During my time there, many of the things people dread most about big cities happened to me: I had my apartment burglarized and my pocketbook picked; I was mugged by knife-wielding thugs. But [End Page 22] the only time I ever had a gun pointed at me was in Scott County, Tennessee. My Aunt Okey Jo and Uncle Thurman Mullins lived in Scott County. She was a school teacher, and he was a store manager for one of the timber companies working the mountainous Tennessee forests. Uncle Thurman grew up a few mountains away, near Wise, Virginia. After serving in World War II, he didn't want to go to college, and he didn't want to dig in the earth or under it, so he signed on with the company. As store manager, he got to wear a white collar and live in a management-level house on Bosses Row in New River. The house had four rooms, an attached kitchen, and a bath. Whereas, as Uncle Thurman liked to say, the mill workers up on Mud Street got two rooms—and a path. But even though Uncle Thurman and Aunt Jo had a bathroom, their house was covered with raw planks. Only the general manager of the mill got painted clapboards. Later, when the company had taken what it could use and moved on, Uncle Thurman—unlike the folks on Mud Street—did not end up unemployed. Uncle Thurman had saved enough capital to start several small businesses: a hot dog stand, a private grocery store, a shed full of factory chickens, a herd of black Angus cattle. What with Aunt Jo's salary teaching for the county, and only one child, my cousin Thurma Jo, they did okay, and bought a house of their own on Route 27. They stayed in Scott County because they were comfortable there, although I wouldn't say anyone ever mistook them for natives. Aunt Jo taught grammar in one-room schools and then in the high school; she and cousin Thurma Jo rose through the ranks of the Eastern Star and Rainbow Girls; Uncle Thurman got elected to the school board. When you visited, they liked to give you tours of Scott County in their vast, air-conditioned Lincoln. We saw their church and the county offices in [End Page 23] Huntsville. We toured Rugby, a brief-lived utopian community founded by nineteenth-century British educators. They showed us places you could find Indian arrowheads if you wanted to get out and look. They told us that Scott County was discovered by Daniel Boone, but I have learned in my later years that most Appalachian communities west of the Cumberland Gap make that claim. The county was named for General Winfield Scott, under whom a lot of Tennessee men fought in Andrew Jackson's war and the Mexican War. Scott County loved its warriors. Uncle Thurman, thought not a native, was a warrior. He fought in the Second World War, participating in, but never talking about, the Battle of the Bulge. He and his people, like Scott County people, always fought in whichever war. Scott County seceded from Tennessee to fight with the North during the Civil War. Another of the marvels of the county, Aunt Jo told me, was that they declared war on the Kaiser in 1914 in advance of the rest of the United States, and had never yet made peace. That was the kind of thing they like to tell about, my aunt and uncle. Also about how when Aunt Jo first went to register to vote in the late 1940s, eighty years after the Civil War ended, and she asked for the Democratic party form, she was told at the courthouse that you couldn't register as a Democrat in Scott County. We've always been Republicans here, they said. I'm sure they told her this politely and knowing Aunt Jo, who liked to get along with people, she probably registered as she was told. She...

REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN WAR: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.–Mexican War by Michael Scott Van Wagenen (review)

REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN WAR: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.–Mexican War by Michael Scott Van Wagenen (review)

Fault Lines: The United States–Mexican War Reconsidered and Remembered

Fault Lines: The United States–Mexican War Reconsidered and Remembered

Peacekeepers and conquerors: the Army Officer Corps on the American frontier, 1821-1846

In Jackson's Sword , Samuel Watson showed how the U.S. Army officer corps played a crucial role in stabilising the frontiers of a rapidly expanding nation. In this sequel volume, he chronicles how the corps' responsibilities and leadership along the young nation's borders continued to grow. In the process, he shows, officers reflected an increasing commitment to professionalism, insulation from partisanship, and deference to civilian authority--all tempered in the forge of frustrating, politically complex operations and diplomacy along the nation's frontiers. Watson now focuses on the quarter-century between the Army's reduction in force in 1821 and the Mexican War. He examines a broad swath of military activity beginning with campaigns against southeastern Indians, notably the dispossession of the Creeks remaining in Georgia and Alabama from 1825 to 1834; the expropriation of the Cherokee between 1836 and 1838; and the Second Seminole War. He also explores peacekeeping on the Canadian border, which exploded in rebellion against British rule at the end of 1837, prompting British officials to applaud the U.S. Army for calming tensions and demonstrating its government's support for the international state system. He then follows the gradual extension of U.S. sovereignty in the Southwest through military operations west of the Missouri River and along the Louisiana-Texas border from 1821 to 1838 and through dragoon expeditions onto the central and southern Plains between 1834 and 1845. Throughout his account, Watson shows how military professionalism did not develop independent of civilian society, nor was it simply a matter of growing expertise in the art of conventional warfare. Indeed, the government trusted career army officers to serve as federal, international, and interethnic mediators, national law enforcers, and de facto intercultural and international peacekeepers. He also explores officers' attitudes toward Britain, Oregon, Texas, and Mexico to assess their values and priorities on the eve of the first conventional war the United States had fought in more than three decades. Watson's detailed study delves deeply into sources that reveal what officers actually thought, wrote, and did in the frontier and border regions. By examining the range of operations over the course of this quarter-century, he shows that the processes of peacekeeping, coercive diplomacy, and conquest were intricately and inextricably woven together.

“No Transient Spectacle”: Bayard Taylor, Wilderness Tourism, and the Re-creation of the United States

“No Transient Spectacle”:Bayard Taylor, Wilderness Tourism, and the Re-creation of the United States James Weaver (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Rocky Mountain National Bank, Central City, Colorado Territory. Signed January 14, 1875, for $500. All images accompanying this essay courtesy of Shawn Larson at the Denver Stock Exchange, Englewood, Colorado, denverstockexchange.com. The checks and certificates used during the Colorado Gold Rush often present scenes of wilderness couched in documents of economic transaction. For instance, highlighting the “wildness” and nostalgia of the western frontier, this check depicts a Native man who struggles to fend off two grizzly bears with one leg pinned beneath his horse. Such an image also provides a subtle advertisement for (as well as a clear caution against) “wilderness tourism,” reminding the check holder of the dangers and adventures still to be had in the West. However, when coupled with the images of the Independence Mine and the emerging settlement community of Denver (Colorado National Bank) which appear later in the essay, this scene also sparks a sense of urgency, as the “Old West” of rugged individuals and foreboding landscapes is being replaced by the “New West” of transcontinental railroads, corporate mining operations, and cities, prompting many to seek solace in nature—albeit as tourists rather than settlers of the wilderness. [End Page 254] “Could the pencil faithfully represent this magnificent transfiguration of Nature, it would appear utterly unreal and impossible to eyes which never beheld the reality,” Bayard Taylor writes of a sunset in Eldorado, his 1850 travel narrative about the Gold Rush boom of California. “It was no transient spectacle, fading away ere one could feel its surpassing glory,” he continues (235). “I have seen the dazzling sunsets of the Mediterranean flush the beauty of its shores, and the mellow skies which Claude used to contemplate from the Pincian Hill; but, lovely as they are in my memory, they seem cold and pale when I think of the splendor of such a scene on the Bay of San Francisco” (236). As he attempts to capture the unreal beauty he witnessed in California, Taylor suggests that this natural scene implies the “surpassing glory” of a national dream now being realized. Having recently acquired California from Mexico, the United States had confirmed that it would be “no transient spectacle.” Rather, as Taylor’s chapter title asserts, California could become “the Italy of the West,” a claim that seeks to enshrine American grandeur alongside long-established scenes of European natural wonder. His favorable contrast between the splendor of San Francisco and the “cold and pale” memories of Europe invokes a national pride, one anchored first in the land itself and second in what enterprising Americans can make of that land. Taylor’s confident pronouncements of a promising national future, however, are set against a backdrop of increasing sectional tensions within the United States—tensions that would escalate over the coming decade and result in the union’s dissolution. The fate of the nation clearly was a central concern for Bayard Taylor, and his two narratives of western travel, Eldorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire (1850) and Colorado: A Summer Trip (1867), illuminate connections among commercial development of natural spaces, sociocultural refinement of the American populace, and a concurrent extension of US imperial political power. In these works, Taylor employs his skills as a travel writer to assure his audience that they are witnessing a lasting spectacle themselves. Documenting the Gold Rush boom of California following the Mexican War and then detailing the transformations of [End Page 255] Colorado territory in the wake of the Civil War, Taylor links the surpassing glory of the nation to its magnificent transfiguration of its natural resources, insisting on the land’s capacity to restore and redirect the nation’s imperial project after the sociopolitical fractures of war. Ultimately, attending to the nuanced ways in which Taylor’s imperialist attitudes intertwine with his environmentalist sensibilities offers us a clearer understanding not just of the thematic connections between Eldorado and Colorado but also of the significant contributions Taylor made to nineteenth-century discourse about the West. During his fifty-three-year life, Taylor came to be known—to...

1812: The Old History and the New

The War of 1812 has long been one of our forgotten conflicts. Most people know only a few of the war’s details, such as Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, the writing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” or the burning of the nation’s capital. Why is the public memory so hazy? One reason is that the causes—the vindication of neutral rights—are difficult to understand. Another is that the outcome is unclear. Who really won the war is still disputed today. Yet another reason is the impact of the Civil War, a contest of such epic proportions that it swept both the War of 1812 and the Mexican War deep into the recesses of the public memory.

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico. By Amy S.Greenberg. New York: Knopf, 2012. 368 pp.

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico. By Amy S. Greenberg. New York: Knopf, 2012. 368 pp. It has long been conventional wisdom among historians of nineteenth century that James K. is most important president about whom Americans know nothing. Nonetheless, Young Hickory has enjoyed something of resurgence of late, due in large part to efforts of nonacademic authors, who have praised for his role in creation of an American empire (see, for example, Robert W. Merry's A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, The Mexican War and American Continent [New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009] and Walter R. Borneman's Polk: The Man Who Transformed Presidency and America [New York: Random House, 2008]). In narrative that emerges from these and other recent works, should be regarded as man of vision, while his critics appear, at least by implication, as querulous naysayers, whose scrupulous regard for moral niceties failed to consider larger national interest. Amy S. Greenberg does not share this view. On contrary, Greenberg argues in A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and 1846 Invasion of Mexico that eleventh president thoroughly deserved sobriquet Polk Mendacious, bestowed upon him by his political enemies. In Greenberg's telling of events leading up to clash of arms in spring of 1846, never really sought peaceful settlement with Mexico. Rather, she argues, decision to send diplomat John Slidell to negotiate with Mexican leaders was little more than charade by administration to provoke them into hostilities (p. 96). then proceeded to use attack on Rio Grande as pretext to demand satisfaction in form of territorial concessions. Unlike many biographers of eleventh president, Greenberg gives considerable attention to Sarah Polk, his most trusted advisor, going so far as to name one chapter Mr. and Mrs. Polk's War. But this is more book about those who opposed than it is about those responsible for it. Greenberg's title comes from quote from Ulysses S. Grant, who in 1879 wrote that there had never been a more wicked war waged by United States. A junior officer in his twenties at time of conflict, Grant regretted that he had lacked the moral courage to resign. Greenberg focuses on small group of men who did have courage to speak out during years. …

Devotion to the Adopted Country: U.S. Immigrant Volunteers in the Mexican War by Tyler V. Johnson (review)

Reviewed by: Devotion to the Adopted Country: U.S. Immigrant Volunteers in the Mexican War by Tyler V. Johnson Jeffrey Mauck Devotion to the Adopted Country: U.S. Immigrant Volunteers in the Mexican War. By Tyler V. Johnson. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2012. Pp. 180. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780826219732, $40.00 cloth.) Tyler Johnson has written a very well-researched book that is a welcome addition to the historiography of the U.S.-Mexico War and the social history of Jacksonian America. Johnson shows that immigrant and Catholic volunteers (often [End Page 98] one and the same) saw the war as a “unique opportunity” to demonstrate loyalty to their adopted country and “refuting the claims of nativists . . . who doubted the ability of any immigrants, especially Catholics, to remain loyal to the United States” (122). The war proved to be a “testing ground for this complex debate” (2), often played out in the Catholic and Democratic press, which supported the volunteers, and the nativist press, which sought to minimize their contribution. Unfortunately, most military histories and studies of antebellum immigration or religion have paid little attention to the issue, offering the oversimplification that the war brought a “lull” in nativism (2). Johnson does a good job in showing that the picture was far more complicated. The author devotes chapters to exploring the role of immigrant soldiers in the war: the enlistment of volunteers; the activities of the immigrant soldier in Mexico; and, the riot involving the Catholic Jasper Greens of Georgia. He also explores the role of the American Catholic church in the war, specifically the activities of two priests who accompanied Taylor’s army. He does not, however, devote much attention to the question of the San Patricios, who were regulars who deserted to Mexico. The entire book is excellent, but this reader found the author’s discussion of the experiences of Fathers John McElroy and Anthony Rey of particular interest. Both Polk and Taylor worried that Mexicans would interpret the invasion as a war on the Catholic Church. New York’s Bishop John Hughes met with Polk and agreed to assign the priests to serve with Taylor. They probably had little impact on Mexican opinion, however, as neither knew Spanish. McElroy confined his activities to the area around Matamoros (including regulars at Fort Brown). Rey accompanied the army to Monterrey, only to later be killed by guerillas near Cerralvo. Both demonstrated great compassion for the many soldiers of any faith dying of disease, winning the praise of many but not all Protestant officers. So just what did the immigrant soldier find in Mexico? Johnson avoids the pitfall of revisionists who overstate the case. Immigrants and Catholics found soldiering in Mexico to be “an uncertain experience.” Some earned the respect and admiration of their peers. Others “met scorn and condescension” (29). The same was true of how their actions were interpreted at home. On one hand, Irish Catholic general James Shields emerged a hero in the war and later served as senator from three different states. On the other hand, a riot involving the predominantly Irish Jasper Greens of Savannah and another Georgia company provided the nativist press with fodder to smear the Irish American community. Supporters of the Greens challenged their adversaries’ version of events and said the whole thing had been blown out of proportion. How did the wartime experience of these immigrant and volunteers affect the course of nativism in the coming years? If these men thought they would return to a more tolerant America, they soon found they were mistaken. A new influx of Irish immigrants after the war as well as the long-standing anti-Catholicism of many Americans “awakened nativism to an unprecedented degree” (124). At the same time, the author concludes, the immigrant soldier came home determined to stand up for his rights and refused to be cowed by nativist slurs. I have only one quibble with the book. Since most of the focus is on Catholic immigrants, much of it about Catholicism and the war with Mexico, I found the [End Page 99] title somewhat misleading. Nevertheless, this is excellent scholarship and a significant contribution to our understanding...

Memories of War: Visiting Battlefields and Bonefields in the Early American Republic by Thomas A. Chambers (review)

Memories of War: Visiting Battlefields and Bonefields in the Early American Republic. By Thomas A. Chambers. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Pp. 232. Cloth, $29.95.)Reviewed by Matthew DennisThomas A. Chambers writes, love their (ix). In 2010, over 8.5 million walked the grounds of twenty-two battlefields administered by the National Park Service; countless more visited numerous other battlegrounds preserved privately and by state and local governments. Such interest or even veneration, he argues, was not always present. Memories of War: Visiting Battlefields and Bonefields in the Early American Republic explores, essentially, the prehistory of the modern public memory of these sites in the United States - a memory that dates to the era of the Civil War.Six engaging chapters conduct readers on a tour through the time and the space of America's historic battlefields in the first half of the nineteenth century - those bloodied during the French and Indian War, the Revolution, and the War of 1812. Chambers's excursion is not exhaustive. Important memory sites associated with King Philip's War predate his study, for example, and we mostly do not encounter the dark and bloody grounds of Indian-white conflicts, those War of 1812 arenas of conflict far from the Canadian borderlands, or the battlegrounds of the Mexican War. Moreover, Chambers sets aside well-studied locations - notably Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill - in favor of more obscure or less storied historic battle sites eventually rediscovered by Americans by the mid nineteenth century. These omissions do not necessarily compromise the author's larger thesis, because, as he argues, Americans poorly remembered all of these martial spaces - even a place as significant as Yorktown - and felt little compulsion to preserve them.Chambers is at his best when he reconstructs the experiences of the few Americans (accidental tourists) who actually did visit the exfoliating bonefields of Braddock's 1758 defeat in the wilds of western Pennsylvania, gazed at the moldering ruins of Ticonderoga, toured the long forsaken grounds of Guilford Courthouse, or as an afterthought combined an excursion to Niagara Falls with a trip to Chippawa or Lundy Lane, nearby Canadian battlegrounds. The author places these uncommon outings in the context of the growth of tourism in the United States, initially an elite affair and one that emphasized class performance, health, and aesthetics, particularly the quest for picturesque scenery. Chambers draws important distinctions between such tourism, North and South, and between rural and urban locales; his emphasis (geographically) on the Niagara Frontier and the southern backcountry yields important information and insights into these remote places and how they contributed to the protracted and conflicted construction of American identity and nationalism. But the great irony of book is that its subject is, essentially, an absence rather than a presence.Chambers writes, Before battlefield tourism could become a significant part of American tourism or culture, an impetus to visit such places needed to develop. That pull factor came from the landscapes around (6). Did Americans feel such a need? …

“This boa-constrictor appetite of swallowing states and provinces”: Anti-Imperialist Opposition to the U.S./Mexican War

Viewed in retrospect, opposition to the U.S./Mexican War stands out as the first moment of full-throated anti-imperialist critique leveled against the United States government by an ideological cross-section of its own citizens. This essay explores the nature and operation of that critique as it appears in several political speeches, newspaper editorials, and literary works from the period. Popular backlash against the war in many ways laid the foundation for anti-imperialisms that persist into the twenty-first century; indeed, opposition to the U.S./Mexican War indexes a tradition within the United States of condemning U.S. imperialism, and worrying over its long-term consequences for the political and moral character of the nation. In her recent essay “ Moby-Dick and the War on Terror” (2007), Carolyn Karcher indirectly touches on the political ramifications for our own historical moment, of deepening our engagement with this tradition. Ahab’s methods of overcoming resistance to his mission, Karcher writes, tells us something about “how the politics of fear has served to cow dissenters into silence and frighten humane, thinking people into supporting the war on terror.” But the U.S./Mexican War evoked a cacophony of dissenters who were neither “cowed” nor “frightened” into supporting what they considered to be an anti-republican, imperialist enterprise. In deepening our engagement with such outbursts of anti-imperialist dissent in the United States, we better position ourselves to productively apprehend twenty-first century anti-imperialist rhetoric—whether appearing in academic publications, the popular media, or in the mainstream political discourse—as a vital aspect of U.S. history and cultural identity.

Remembering the Forgotten War: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.–Mexican War by Michael Scott Van Wagenen (review)

Remembering the Forgotten War: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.–Mexican War by Michael Scott Van Wagenen (review)

America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union (review)

Reviewed by: America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union Erik J. Chaput (bio) Keywords Compromise of 1850, Stephen Douglas, Henry Clay, Texas, New Mexico, Origins of U.S. Civil War America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union. By Fergus M. Bordewich. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012. Pp. 496. Cloth, $30.00) Journalist Fergus Bordewich, the author of five previous books, including Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2006), an engaging [End Page 179] narrative history of the Underground Railroad, has produced a richly detailed and beautifully written account of a pivotal moment in American history that all too often simply receives a paragraph or two in broader accounts of the antebellum period. It is important to note at the outset that America’s Great Debate, though engaging, does not alter the traditional narrative of how the compromise measure worked its way through Congress, in terms of the Omnibus Bill that eventually emerged out of Clay’s proposals (against his wishes) to settle the sectional turmoil and Senator Stephen A. Douglas’s repackaging of the Omnibus into separate, more passable bills. America’s Great Debate is the second book to appear in recent years on the Compromise of 1850.1 Bordewich, however, casts his net wider than Robert Remini’s 2010 volume to incorporate a host of characters often glossed over. Indeed, the personalities of the major figures involved matter, and Bordewich sets up to capture this important episode in American history in all its complexity. Using a variety of sources, including the Santa Fe Papers at the Texas State Library; the Zachary Taylor Papers at the University of Kentucky; the published papers of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun; and, of course, the Congressional Globe, Bordewich traces the crisis, detailing the legislative battles in which politicians resembled punch-drunk brawlers. The author paints brilliant vignettes of the proslavery stalwart David Yulee, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Narciso López—a Venezuela-born solider who struck a deal with Mississippi Governor John Quitman to invade Cuba—Pierre Soulé of Louisiana, Mississippi’s Henry Foote, Texan frontiersman Robert Simpson Neighbors, Maryland Congressman James A. Pearce, Alexander Stevens and Robert Toombs of Georgia, and Millard Fillmore, who was thrust into the office of the presidency after President Taylor succumbed to a severe intestinal illness in July 1850. In addition, Bordewich provides first-rate discussions of California politics, the contentious speakership battle in the House as the Thirty-First Congress opened, and the Texas–New Mexico boundary dispute, which was “little more than naked empire building steeped in a mumbo jumbo of legalism” (61). Texas had previously claimed that its territory extended to the Rio Grande River, and President Polk’s defense of the [End Page 180] Mexican War rested in large part upon this very notion. However, this line of reasoning meant that the former Mexican province of New Mexico would be sliced in half, giving Texas a vast area that included Santa Fe, which it had never occupied. As Bordewich details, the debates show how “much slavery really had to do with the South’s aggressive posture.” Never “had slavery been defended so explicitly and with such sheer gusto in a national forum” (189). In line with Elizabeth Varon’s most recent book, America’s Great Debate shows how “disunion” was invoked both “as a process and a threat.”2 In terms of the final balance sheet, Bordewich sees many more gains for the slaveholding South, which “obtained the harsh new Fugitive Slave Law . . . as well as the North’s tacit abandonment of the hated Wilmot Proviso.” The bills “to organize New Mexico and Utah were also clear southern victories” because slavery was, at least on the surface, opened in an area that should have been geographically off limits based on the Missouri Compromise (392). Ironically, the compromise measure that was meant to calm sectional tensions “lit the fires of liberty far and wide across the states of the North, awakening Americans to the thing that Stephen Douglas never...

The First Brigade of Illinois Militia: Three Months Volunteers

Research Article| October 01 2012 The First Brigade of Illinois Militia: Three Months Volunteers Thomas M. Arliskas Thomas M. Arliskas Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) (2012) 105 (2-3): 173–182. https://doi.org/10.5406/jillistathistsoc.105.2-3.0173 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Thomas M. Arliskas; The First Brigade of Illinois Militia: Three Months Volunteers. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) 1 January 2012; 105 (2-3): 173–182. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jillistathistsoc.105.2-3.0173 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: A.C. Pickett's Private Journal of the U.S.–Mexican War, by Jo Blatti

Book Review| August 01 2012 Review: A.C. Pickett's Private Journal of the U.S.–Mexican War, by Jo Blatti A.C. Pickett's Private Journal of the U.S.–Mexican War edited by Jo Blatti. Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2011. 143 pp.; images, maps, notes, bibliography, index; paperbound, $19.95. James M. McCaffrey James M. McCaffrey University of Houston-Downtown Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2012) 34 (3): 91–93. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2012.34.3.91 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James M. McCaffrey; Review: A.C. Pickett's Private Journal of the U.S.–Mexican War, by Jo Blatti. The Public Historian 1 August 2012; 34 (3): 91–93. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2012.34.3.91 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Garrett Davis and the Problem of Democracy and Emancipation

Garrett Davis and the Problem of Democracy and Emancipation Christopher Waldrep (bio) It should come as no surprise that two Civil War-era political leaders born in Kentucky would hold similar constitutional understandings. President Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) and Senator Garrett Davis (1801-72) shared a common biography; both were natives of Kentucky and both followed Henry Clay to oppose slavery and favor democratic values. Both revered the founding principles of the U.S. Constitution as binding. Both served as Whigs in Congress, Lincoln [End Page 363] for one term, 1847-48, and Davis for four terms, 1839-46, where both opposed the Mexican War for similar reasons: they opposed the expansion of slavery. In the secession crisis, the two worked together as a team to keep Kentucky in the Union and crush the Confederacy.1 They fell out after 1863, ultimately because they disagreed not just over slavery but over the nature and meaning of self-government. Elected to the Senate in 1861, Davis came to Washington echoing key points Lincoln had made in his first inaugural address, especially the idea that "mystic chords" bound the American people together, committing ordinary citizens to their nation and its founding principles. To Davis the "mystic chords" were a "golden cord" or a "magic chain," but the idea was obviously the same.2 Lincoln and Davis both recognized that the power to interpret constitutional law ultimately resided in the people, but at the same time they saw that power was limited by organic law. Before the Civil War, many or most white Americans shared the idea that a static, unchanging Constitution constrained politics.3 The rub came when Lincoln attacked the idea that slavery could be a local matter, left to local elections; slavery, he said, was a moral wrong, an affront to the "leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism" as articulated in the Declaration of Independence. He said that the entire nation had an interest in whether [End Page 364] the states had slavery or not.4 To Davis, such thinking violated democratic principles. He thought that the Founders had limited popular authority by channeling it through the state governments. The people could end slavery but only through their state political systems, not through the apparatus of the national government, so long as they stayed in the Union. Such state-centered constitutionalism could encourage sectional agitation, as Davis fully understood. Davis saw two features in the "social system" of American constitutionalism that strengthened its force and tended the Union toward permanency.5 The Framers, rather than challenging nature, which would have made the document seem unnatural and contrived and therefore vulnerable to criticism, had instead adapted fundamental rights universally found in natural law. The most important of these, in Davis's mind, protected private property with due process of law. Natural law did not dictate property rights: "The natural law gives no right of property to a man in anything," Davis said. Through a political process the American people chose to put naturally occurring property rights in their constitution. He called it "public national law, growing out of the practice, usages, and uniform customs of the civilized world."6 So long as they remained in the Union, property owners need not fear government confiscation of their property outside legal processes. Basing the Union on natural law, and not just political bargaining, made any agitation against it seem less legitimate, Davis thought. For Davis, though, the naturalness of the Constitution went beyond such bedrock principles, no matter how important they might be. He also thought the Constitution incorporated a way [End Page 365] of thinking about race consistent with the best scientific knowledge available. Primarily by their silences, many historians have argued for Davis's irrelevance.7 Davis's frequent absences from the secondary sources, when he is so prominent in the primary sources, silently argues that most Civil War-era white Americans did not share his ideology or his continued commitment to antebellum constitutionalism in the postbellum era. "Racism had been rampant" before the Civil War, one scholar recently wrote about Northerners before continuing, "[b]ut the war years changed those attitudes." Racial prejudice endured at the end of...

Texas and the History of American Foreign Policy

Joseph A. Fry argues that regional influence helps explain the internal dynamics of American foreign policy, and understanding the connection between regions and foreign policy requires a holistic and inclusive approach. The history of Texas supports both contentions but also suggests that regional influence has been more nuanced and varied than Fry implies. Texas lies culturally and geographically between Kansas City and Mexico City, between Mississippi and California, and between the Gulf of Mexico and the Rocky Mountains. As such, it has never been exclusively Southern, Western, or exceptional. Instead, connecting cords of influence stretched across multiple regional, national, and international borders; and cooperation and conflict between the diverse people who came to Texas from beyond those borders constructed and reconstructed the culture and identity of Texas over time. That shifting identity and those cords of influence shaped the impact of Texas and Texans on American foreign relations, and as comes clear in examining the Mexican War, World War I, and Vietnam, understanding the influence of those factors qualifies and expands Fry's discussion of internal dynamics and inclusiveness.

A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent - By Robert W. Merry

A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent. By Robert W. Merry. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009. 376 pp. This is a book for aficionados of dramatically focused popular history. Merry, a former newspaperman and a nonfiction author of note, retells the story of the extraordinary accomplishments of the hardly dramatic President Polk, who did dramatic things during his busy single term in office in the 1840s, concentrating on the war with Mexico that followed the annexation of Texas. Rooted in the exuberant populism of the trans-Alleghany west, mentored by his fellow Tennessean, Andrew Jackson, Polk, an ambitious, seasoned and shrewd Democratic leader, was the youngest man to hold the presidency when he entered office. He was determined to carry out his party's agenda, in particular, extending America's boundaries across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. Merry tells a straightforward, sprawling, occasionally overdetailed, story. In covering familiar ground he takes his material largely one or another scholarly account (p. 154), relying on the standard historiography from Eugene McCormac's biography (James K. Polk: A Political Biography [University of California Press, 1922]) and Claude Bowers' populist interpretation of the era, published in the 1920s and 1930s (e.g., The Party Battles of the Jackson Period [Houghton Mifflin, 1922]), to many of the more sophisticated monographs and biographies appearing over the last generation. He also makes use of a limited number of the available printed primary source collections relying primarily on Polk's diaries and several newspapers, especially the administration's flagship organ, the Washington Union, as well as a short list of the correspondence of other leaders and some relevant web sites. In addition to his description of events, Merry offers succinct and tart judgments about Polk's demeanor, attitudes, and behavior toward others, as well as how he sought to accomplish his aims. He pays a great deal of attention to the jealousies, fears, petty intrigues, and personal loathing endemic among those at the top in Washington, fueled by the demanding president's impatience ... penchant for intrigue ... willingness to stir political animosity, as well as his self-righteousness and bold--or reckless--political calculus, in carrying through his initiatives (p. 159). Determined to be the leader of his administration, he worked closely with his cabinet in formulating policy and with members of Congress to get his way, overworking himself with every aspect of affairs, often revealing unnecessary involvement and meddlesome ways (p. 269). What did this add up to? Merry's position, other than his comments about Polk's personality and approach to people and events, goes back and forth. …