Unlearning the American Myth, Part 4

The War on Mexico

The previous post in the series, Make America Great Again, 1811-1828, can be found here.

The War on Mexico

Whenever I come back to the research and writing of these posts I get a distinct feeling of empowerment. I think there is something utterly unique about the study of history and it’s clear to me that my study provides a deep level of support as I, along with pretty much everyone else, navigate the unravelling of American democracy and its founding mythology.

In this post I once again draw primarily from Greg Grandin, but there’s also quite a bit from Howard Zinn, as well as Juan Gonzalez and his book, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. Unless otherwise cited, the source for everything that follows is based on Grandin’s book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.

One of the themes Grandin brings out in his overall history is the degenerative nature of war. The way violence emboldens more extreme violence, more racism, and more entitlement. The war on Mexico fits into that picture in a dramatic way.

I was especially keen to write this post as a part of my ongoing reflection on the link between U.S. history and today’s complex immigration situation. To what extent does even this “old” history suggest harm that continues to call out for understanding, responsibility, and repair? As William Faulkner famously wrote, The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

The Mexican Context

Grandin tells us “it’s a wonder Mexico survived the nineteenth century at all.” Some in the United States had their sights on the territory even before Anglo settlers started arriving in its Tejano northern reaches, when it was still a colony of Spain.” Expanding plantations and slavery were a big part of the motivation.

After breaking from Spain in the early 1820s, Mexico suffered one calamity after another, including a series of coups and civil wars. It lost Central America, then Texas. In 1847, it almost lost the Yucatan to a revolt of Mayan peasants. A year later, the U.S. took the rest of its northern territory, and soon after, in 1862, France’s Napoleon III used Mexico’s inability to pay its foreign debt as pretext to invade the country.

After occupying Mexico City, Napoleon installed Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian and his wife, Carlota, as emperor and empress, with the support of Mexican conservative Catholic elites. Mexican liberals fought back, with rebels waging a five-year-long guerrilla war that drove out the French, after which they executed Maximillian.

The United States assisted the Mexicans in their fight against the French by giving loans and extended credit to buy weapons and other equipment. After the victory, U.S. creditors called in their debts and Mexico, bankrupted from its many wars couldn’t pay. Over the next few years, businesses from nearly every sector of the fast-growing post-Civil War economy made demands on Mexico City. Among them were real estate and mining companies insisting that Mexico recognize land grants issues by Emperor Maximillian.

The liberals in Mexico who now commanded the government refused most of these cases. In response, the U.S. pressed Mexico harder and powerful voices began “calling on Washington to take Mexico ‘in hand’ and establish a ‘protectorate’ over the country, or seize the country entirely and lead it ‘to a higher plane of civilization.’”

Beginnings

In practical terms, the war on Mexico started with the taking of Texas. In our mythological context, it’s worth noting that the martyred heroes of the Battle of the Alamo (Feb. 23 - March 6, 1836), including Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett were defenders of slavery bent on violating Mexican sovereignty and usurping its land. Their leader, Sam Houston served under Andrew Jackson in his bloodthirsty war against the Creek and shared Jackson’s racist and expansionist views (Gonzalez).

Violations of Mexican sovereignty had already taken place, but the taking of Texas set the stage for further violations. And the unexpected strength of Mexican resistance served as confirmation of their barbarism and backwardness.

It was in the context of these tensions with Mexico in 1845, that the editor of the Democratic Review used the phrase that would become famous, saying it was “Our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allowed by Providence for the free development of our multiplying millions” (Zinn).

The Monroe Doctrine (America for the Americans) was barely two decades old but it was now overshadowed by the more overtly racist cry of Manifest Destiny, a clear expression of American exceptionalism that meshed with the concurrent surge of eugenic pseudo-science promoting white European superiority (Gonzalez).

And so it was that in April 1846, with strong support in the House and Senate for a war on Mexico that President James Knox Polk, a slaver and expansionist, obliged with a declaration of war. Polk spoke of the war as a necessary measure of self defense when indeed the reverse was true: “President Polk had incited war by sending American soldiers into what was disputed territory, historically controlled and inhabited by Mexicans” (as cited in Zinn).

Once the war had begun, even John Quincy Adams, who on May 25, 1836 made one of the most powerful anti-war speeches in U.S. history (a speech that included the powerful line, “The banners of freedom will be the banners of Mexico; and your banners…the banners of slavery”), eventually supported it, as did Abraham Lincoln. (Zinn)

In the early days of the war, Walt Whitman wrote that: “Yes: Mexico must be thoroughly chastised!…Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, America knows how to crush, as well as expand.” (Zinn)

American Manifest Destiny is, of course, divinely inspired and sanctioned. As Senator H.V. Johnson put it, “I believe we should be recreant (cowardly) to our noble mission, if we refused acquiescence in the high purposes of a wise Providence. War has its evils….but however inscrutable to us, it has been made, by the Allwise Dispenser of events, the instrumentality of accomplishing the great end of human elevation and human happiness….It is in this view, that I subscribe to the doctrine of manifest destiny” (Zinn).

Still, as Zinn points out, the level of opposition was remarkable, with antiwar meetings taking place despite attacks by patriotic mobs. And it was shortly after the war had begun that Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax and spent a night in jail for his activism. He likely would have stayed longer but friends paid his tax without his consent and he was released. Two years later he gave a lecture, Resistance to Civil Government, which was later printed as the essay Civil Disobedience, which contains the memorable line: “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”

Culmination

As the army moved closer to Mexico City, the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator openly declared its wish for the defeat of U.S. forces. But Fredrick Douglass, rather summed it up by writing in his newspaper: “No politician of any considerable distinction or eminence seems willing to hazard his popularity with his party…by an open and unqualified disapprobation of the war. None seems willing to take their stand for peace at all risks; and all seem willing that the war should be carried on, in some form or other” (Zinn).

Carry on it did, with the Americans taking Monterrey and Veracruz. Zinn describes the indiscriminate shelling of Veracruz: In two days, 1,300 shells were fired into the city. A reporter for a New Orleans paper wrote, “The Mexicans variously estimate their loss at from 500 to 1,000 killed and wounded, but all agree that the loss among the soldiery is comparatively small and the destruction among women and children is very great.”

On the outskirts of Mexico City in the fall of 1847, as prelude to the final battle, 4,000 Mexicans were killed or wounded, 3,000 were captured, and nearly 1,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing (Zinn).

The Americans took Mexico City in September 1847, and Mexico surrendered soon afterwards. While there were calls to take all of Mexico, the Treaty of Guadalupe, signed in February 1848, took 55 percent. The Texas boundary was set at the Rio Grande, and the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming were ceded. In return, the United States paid Mexico $15 million. As Zinn poignantly notes in the concluding line of his chapter on the war, the payment led one newspaper to conclude that “we take nothing by conquest…Thank God.” Despite the aggression and bloodshed, America remained the innocent beacon of democracy, always justified in its actions.

Aftermath

More than 100,000 U.S. troops participated and nearly 14,000 died, the highest mortality rate of any war in U.S. history (Gonzalez).

In the words of one historian, the nation’s elites “placed their most restless and desperate citizens upon the throat of Mexico” with looting, civilian massacres, rape, and terror. The extent of the brutality and racism of U.S. troops was so severe it drew public condemnation from generals Grant and Meade (Gonzalez). And after one particularly horrific rampage, the commander of U.S. forces, General Winfield Scott, declared martial law and established tribunals to try American war criminals.

Grandin concludes that the widespread atrocities were fueled in large measure by racism and anti-Catholic sentiments, and that the fighting “emboldened some of the most aggressive political and cultural tendencies in American life.” And with its decentralized nature, the U.S. soldiers experienced their violence as liberty and, as settlers, they “carried this blood-soaked entitlement forward.”

Ulysses S. Grant, who helped win the war, concluded that it was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker nation.”

Birth of a Corporate Empire

Burdened by heavy, unpayable debt, and lured by the promise of investment, Mexico’s leaders practically handed over the national economy to foreign investors. Within half a century, U.S. interests would come to control, nearly absolutely, oil production, railroads, utilities, livestock, agriculture, and ports. Almost all of Mexico’s exports went to the U.S. and a good percentage of U.S. manufactured goods went to Mexico.

In the border region, starting in about 1870, corporations and individuals dispossessed long-term inhabitants of a massive amount of property. North of the border, ranchers and railroad companies used ‘litigation, chicanery, robbery, fraud, and threat’ to take millions of acres from indigenous communities and former Mexican citizens.

Congress did all it could to facilitate and formalize the dispossession with “homestead” acts such as the 1873 Timber Culture Act and the 1877 Desert Land Act. The dispossessed appealed to U.S. courts, but in nearly all cases judges ruled against them…citing as precedent a decades old ruling issued in support of Jackson’s Indian removal policy, including judgments that upheld the doctrine of discovery: ‘Conquest gives title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny.’

Below the border, the rapid expansion of export agriculture took millions more acres. In an expulsion that rivaled the brutality of Jackson’s removal policy, tens of thousands of Yaqui were driven from their homes in Señora and deported south, to the Yucatan and Oaxaca. There they were put to work on sugar, tobacco, and henequen plantations (though Mexico had long abolished chattel slavery, the spread of export-led capitalism intensified various mechanisms of forced labor)….Decades earlier, Jacksonians justified Indian removal in the name of settler sovereignty. Now, it was mostly capital advancing forward.

Conclusion

The former citizens of Mexico were a diverse group that included old-line Spanish families whose land claims sometimes went back hundreds of years, many servants and laborers, California miners, and dozens of Indigenous peoples. They didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them and they found themselves in a nation where politics itself was organized around white supremacy, entitlement, and expansion, and the violence that went with it was taken for granted. It was all part of God’s Plan.

The corporate empire soon had its sights set overseas and Iowa representative John Kasson articulated the continuation of the frontier mindset in 1881: “We are rapidly utilizing the whole of our continental territory. We must turn our eyes abroad, or they will soon look inward upon our discontent.”

Sources

Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, 2022

Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, 2019.

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1990.