Mexico, part two: expansion controersy

In the 19th Century the U.S. seized land: It was our manifest destiny.

For a century the U.S. was content with our national borders.

President Trump is not content.

Trump is a builder and he sold Americans on the idea of national greatness. America is great and more is greater. All four presidents on Mt. Rushmore enlarged our national borders, two by war, two by acquisition. 

After World War II, the Roosevelt postwar plan was for strong countries to use their power to enforce rules of non-aggression. That era is over. Trump sees opportunities for acquisition: the oil of Iran and Venezuela; the strategic position of Greenland; Canada's oil, timber, minerals, and giant space on a map; Ukraine's rare earth; Gaza for resorts; and Cuba for something, maybe its good weather, Trump said. 

Jack Mullen joins yesterday's guest post author Erich Almasy in refreshing our memories about how the U.S. expanded it territory.Jack and I thinned and picked pears in local orchards in the late 1960s, and we both worked in the office of U.S. Rep. Jim Weaver in the 1970s. He studied history at the University of Oregon.

My experience is that schools in Oregon in the postwar 1950s and 1960s skipped quickly over the Mexican War. Our teachers, veterans of WWII, had fought a war against an expansionist aggressor nation.

Jack Mullen and his wife Jennifer Angelo

Guest Post by Jack Mullen

The 1861-65 American Civil War overshadows the Mexico American War (1846-48) in the mind of most Americans. The Mexican War was the Wicked War, Ulysses S. Grant said. It brought a full-blown national campaign debate over an incursion into a foreign country in the 1844 Presidential race between James K. Polk and Henry Clay.

 

Stephen F. Austin brought three hundred slave-owning families into the Mexican area of what is now Texas. Mexico had outlawed slavery in 1829. Texan Americans formed a provisional government and raised an army to rebel against Mexico: the Texas Rebellion of 1835-36. The 1836 battle of San Jacinto resulted in Texas becoming an independent nation, the Lone Star Republic, a polity that permitted slavery. Eight years later, Texas became the focal point of the 1844 Presidential Election between the Democrat, James K. Polk, and the Whig, Henry Clay.

Polk’s campaign focused largely on the annexation of Texas into the Union. Texas would tip the U.S. Senate balance in favor of slave states. Polk campaigned on a vision of an American empire that extended to the Pacific, a potential bonanza for slave territory expansion. Henry Clay campaigned on economic development and opposition to the Texas annexation. Clay’s main support came from northern states.

Polk won a close election. Before Polk took his seat in the White House, out-going President John Tyler, with congressional consent, annexed Texas into the Union. The senatorial balance problem was solved by cleaving off the northern part of Massachusetts and making it the state of Maine. Seven months later, a boundary dispute over which country could claim land between Nueces and Rio Grand River, led to war between the U.S. and Mexico.

A young Abe Lincoln accompanied his wife to Lexington, Kentucky, her hometown, in 1847, where he attended a Henry Clay rally. Clay’s fiery speech opposing the war stirred Lincoln to the point that he kept a copy of Clay’s speech in his pocket. Lincoln brought his anti-war feelings to the halls of Congress in his one term in Washington.

American anti-war movements at the time involved strange bedfellows. John C. Calhoun, the racist senator from South Carolina, opposed Polk’s war for fear that non-White and Catholics would be become part of the country. Northern opponents of slavery opposed the war because it expanded slavery. Northern thought-leaders, including Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglas, considered it unconstitutional, an expansion of executive power, and an unjust land grab. Protestant churches, including Quakers and Congregationalists, argued the war violated Christian principles.

Newspaper accounts described disturbing actions by volunteer brigades of American soldiers involving rape of Mexican women.

President Polk pursued the war that was our "manifest destiny," in the 1946 words of newspaper editor John O'Sullivan, fulfilling its God-given mission to control all of North America. The war’s end came once American troops under General Winfield Scott occupied Mexico City. That began the dispute over how much of Mexico's territory was enough. More territory meant more war. General Scott and special envoy Nicholas Trist were chose not to try to claim all of Mexico.Trist negotiated what would become the Guadalupe Hidalgo treaty, in which 55 percent of Mexican territory was given to the United States for $15 million. It secured peace, but the settlement infuriated President Polk when he learned that the Mexican territories of Sonora and Baja California were not included in the settlement. Polk called for Trist’s return to the Capitol. Trist refused. Polk fired him and refused to pay Trist's salary. Polk hated the treaty, but realizing the increasing unpopularity of the war with Mexico, he reluctantly accepted the treaty.

America expanded to the Pacific under Polk, but did not expand to the Guatemala border or include Baja California and Sonora.

As protesters march in Saturday's No Kings event, and as sentiment against bombing and troop deployments in Iran continue, opponents of the Iran War can take heart in the notion that anti-war and anti-expansionist movements do influence U.S. decision makers. News accounts of disturbing actions -- My Lai in Vietnam, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, or a bomb destroying a school in Iran -- affect the public mood. Americans are notoriously sensitive to war casualties. At some point peace is a better option than war.

Under President Grant,Trist got vindication for drawing the boundaries where he did. Grant restored his back pay with interest and he was given a postmastership job.



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