It was not surprising that the Whigs and other opponents of the war should take the first opportunity to give the President their opinion of such a misrepresentation. The standing of the opposition had been greatly strengthened by the very victories upon which Mr. Polk had confidently relied for his vindication. Both our armies in Mexico were under the command of Whig generals, and among the subordinate officers who had distinguished themselves in the field, a full share were Whigs, who, to an extent unusual in wars of political significance, retained their attitude of hostility to the Administration under whose orders they were serving. Some of them had returned to their places on the floor of Congress brandishing their laurels with great effect in the faces of their opponents who had talked while they fought. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (1) relocated to chapter end.] When we number the names which leaped into sudden fame in that short but sanguinary war, it is surprising to find how few of them sympathized with the party who brought it on, or with the purposes for which it was waged. The earnest opposition of Taylor to the scheme of the annexationists did not hamper his movements or paralyze his arm, when with his little band of regulars he beat the army of Arista on the plain of Palo Alto, and again in the precipitous Resaca de la Palma; took by storm the fortified city of Monterey, defended by a greatly superior force; and finally, with a few regiments of raw levies, posted among the rocky spurs and gorges about the farm of Buena Vista, met and defeated the best-led and the best-fought army the Mexicans ever brought into the field, outnumbering him more than four to one. It was only natural that the Whigs should profit by the glory gained by Whig valor, no matter in what cause. The attitude of the opposition—sure of their advantage and exulting in it—was never perhaps more clearly and strongly set forth than in a speech made by Mr. Lincoln near the close of this session. He said:
As General Taylor is par excellence the hero of the Mexican war, and as you Democrats say we Whigs have always opposed the war, you think it must be very awkward and embarrassing for us to go for General Taylor. The declaration that we have always opposed the war is true or false accordingly as one may understand the term "opposing the war." If to say "the war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President" be opposing the war, then the Whigs have very generally opposed it. Whenever they have spoken at all they have said this; and they have said it on what has appeared good reason to them; the marching of an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure; but it does not appear so to us. So to call such an act, to us appears no other than a naked, impudent absurdity, and we speak of it accordingly. But if when the war had begun, and had become the cause of the country, the giving of our money and our blood, in common with yours, was support of the war, then it is not true that we have always opposed the war. With few individual exceptions, you have constantly had our votes here for all the necessary supplies. And, more than this, you have had the services, the blood, and the lives of our political brethren in every trial, and on every field. The beardless boy and the mature man, the humble and the distinguished,—you have had them. Through suffering and death, by disease and in battle, they have endured and fought and fallen with you. Clay and Webster each gave a son, never to be returned. From the State of my own residence, besides other worthy but less-known Whig names, we sent Marshall, Morrison, Baker, and Hardin; they all fought, and one fell, and in the fall of that one we lost our best Whig man. Nor were the Whigs few in number or laggard in the day of danger. In that fearful, bloody, breathless struggle at Buena Vista, where each man's hard task was to beat back five foes or die himself, of the five high officers who perished, four were Whigs.
There was no refuge for the Democrats after the Whigs had adopted Taylor as their especial hero, since Scott was also a Whig and an original opponent of the war. His victories, on account of the apparent ease with which they were gained, have never received the credit justly due them. The student of military history will rarely meet with narratives of battles in any age where the actual operations coincide so exactly with the orders issued upon the eve of conflict, as in the official reports of the wonderfully energetic and successful campaign in which General Scott with a handful of men renewed the memory of the conquest of Cortes, in his triumphant march from Vera Cruz to the capital. The plan of the battle of Cerro Gordo was so fully carried out in action that the official report is hardly more than the general orders translated from the future tense to the past. The story of Chapultepec has the same element of the marvelous in it. On one day the general commanded apparent impossibilities in the closest detail, and the next day reported that they had been accomplished. These successes were not cheaply attained. The Mexicans, though deficient in science and in military intelligence, fought with bravery and sometimes with desperation. The enormous percentage of loss in his army proves that Scott was engaged in no light work. He marched from Pueblo with about 10,000 men, and his losses in the basin of Mexico were 2703, of whom 383 were officers. But neither he nor Taylor was a favorite of the Administration, and their brilliant success brought no gain of popularity to Mr. Polk and his Cabinet.
During the early part of the session little was talked about except the Mexican war, its causes, its prosecution, and its probable results. In these wordy engagements the Whigs, partly for the reasons we have mentioned, partly through their unquestionable superiority in debate, and partly by virtue of their stronger cause, usually had the advantage. There was no distinct line of demarcation, however, between the two parties. There was hardly a vote, after the election of Mr. Winthrop as Speaker, where the two sides divided according to their partisan nomenclature. The question of slavery, even where its presence was not avowed, had its secret influence upon every trial of strength in Congress, and Southern Whigs were continually found sustaining the President, and New England Democrats voting against his most cherished plans. Not even all the Democrats of the South could be relied on by the Administration. The most powerful leader of them all denounced with bitter earnestness the conduct of the war, for which he was greatly responsible. Mr. Calhoun, in an attack upon the President's policy, January 4, 1848, said: "I opposed the war, not only because it might have been easily avoided; not only because the President had no authority to order a part of the disputed territory in possession of the Mexicans to be occupied by our troops; not only because I believed the allegations upon which Congress sanctioned the war untrue, but from high considerations of policy; because I believed it would lead to many and serious evils to the country and greatly endanger its free institutions."
[Sidenote: January 13, 1848.]
It was probably not so much the free institutions of the country that the South Carolina Senator was disturbed about as some others. He perhaps felt that the friends of slavery had set in motion a train of events whose result was beyond their ken. Mr. Palfrey, of Massachusetts, a few days later said with as much sagacity as wit that "Mr. Calhoun thought that he could set fire to a barrel of gunpowder and extinguish it when half consumed." In his anxiety that the war should be brought to an end, Calhoun proposed that the United States army should evacuate the Mexican capital, establish a defensive line, and hold it as the only indemnity possible to us. He had no confidence in treaties, and believed that no Mexican government was capable of carrying one into effect. A few days later, in a running debate, Mr. Calhoun made an important statement, which still further strengthened the contention of the Whigs. He said that in making the treaty of annexation he did not assume that the Rio del Norte was the western boundary of Texas; on the contrary, he assumed that the boundary was an unsettled one between Mexico and Texas; and that he had intimated to our charge d'affaires that we were prepared to settle the boundary on the most liberal terms! This was perfectly in accordance with the position held by most Democrats before the Rio Grande boundary was made an article of faith by the President. C. J. Ingersoll, one of the leading men upon that side in Congress, in a speech three years before had said: "The stupendous deserts between the Nueces and the Bravo rivers are the natural boundaries between the Anglo-Saxon and the Mauritanian races"; a statement which, however faulty from the point of view of ethnology and physical geography, shows clearly enough the view then held of the boundary question.
The discipline of both parties was more or less relaxed under the influence of the slavery question. It was singular to see Mr. McLane, of Baltimore, rebuking Mr. Clingman, of North Carolina, for mentioning that forbidden subject on the floor of the House; Reverdy Johnson, a Whig from Maryland, administering correction to John P. Hale, an insubordinate Democrat from New Hampshire, for the same offense, and at the time screaming that the "blood of our glorious battle-fields in Mexico rested on the hands of the President"; Mr. Clingman challenging the House with the broad statement that "it is a misnomer to speak of our institution at the South as peculiar; ours is the general system of the world, and the free system is the peculiar one," and Mr. Palfrey dryly responding that slavery was natural just as barbarism was, just as fig-leaves and bare skins were a natural dress. When the time arrived, however, for leaving off grimacing and posturing, and the House went to voting, the advocates of slavery usually carried the day, as the South, Whigs and Democrats together, voted solidly, and the North was divided. Especially was this the case after the arrival of the treaty of peace between the United States and Mexico, which was signed at Guadalupe Hidalgo on the 2d of February and was in the hands of the Senate only twenty days later. It was ratified by that body on the 10th of March, with a series of amendments which were at once accepted by Mexico, and the treaty of peace was officially promulgated on the national festival of the Fourth of July.
From the hour when the treaty was received in Washington, however, the discussion as to the conduct of the war naturally languished; the ablest speeches of the day before became obsolete in the presence of accomplished facts; and the interest of Congress promptly turned to the more important subject of the disposition to be made of the vast domain which our arms had conquered and the treaty confirmed to us. No one in America then realized the magnitude of this acquisition; its stupendous physical features were as little appreciated as the vast moral and political results which were to flow from its absorption into our commonwealth. It was only known, in general terms, that our new possessions covered ten degrees of latitude and fifteen of longitude; that we had acquired, in short, six hundred and thirty thousand square miles of desert, mountain, and wilderness. There was no dream, then, of that portentous discovery which, even while the Senate was wrangling over the treaty, had converted Captain Sutter's mill at Coloma into a mining camp, for his ruin and the sudden up- building of many colossal fortunes. The name of California, which conveys to-day such opulent suggestions, then meant nothing but barrenness, and Nevada was a name as yet unknown; some future Congressman, innocent of taste and of Spanish, was to hit upon the absurdity of calling that land of silver and cactus, of the orange and the sage-hen, the land of snow. But imperfect as was the appreciation, at that day, of the possibilities which lay hidden in those sunset regions, there was still enough of instinctive greed in the minds of politicians to make the new realm a subject of lively interest and intrigue. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (2) relocated to chapter end.] At the first showing of hands, the South was successful. In the Twenty-ninth Congress this contest had begun over the spoils of a victory not yet achieved. President Polk, foreseeing the probability of an acquisition of territory by treaty, had asked Congress to make an appropriation for that purpose. A bill was at once reported in that sense, appropriating $30,000 for the expenses of the negotiation and $2,000,000 to be used in the President's discretion. But before it passed, a number of Northern Democrats [Footnote: Some of the more conspicuous York; Wilmot, of Pennsylvania; among them were Hamlin, of Brinckerhoff, of Ohio, and McClel-Maine; Preston King, of New land, of Michigan.] had become alarmed as to the disposition that might be made of the territory thus acquired, which was now free soil by Mexican law. After a hasty consultation they agreed upon a proviso to the bill, which was presented by David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania. He was a man of respectable abilities, who then, and long afterwards, held a somewhat prominent position among the public men of his State; but his chief claim to a place in history rests upon these few lines which he moved to add to the first section of the bill under discussion:
Provided, That as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty that may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted.
This condition seemed so fair, when first presented to the Northern conscience, that only three members from the free States voted "no" in committee. The amendment was adopted—eighty to sixty-four—and the bill reported to the House. A desperate effort was then made by the pro-slavery members to kill the bill for the purpose of destroying the amendment with it. This failed, [Footnote: In this important and significant vote all the Whigs but one and almost all the Democrats, from the free States, together with Wm. P. Thomasson and Henry Grider, Whigs from Kentucky, voted against killing the amended bill, in all ninety-three. On the other side were all the members from slave- holding States, except Thomasson and Grider, and the following from free States, Douglas and John A. McClernand from Illinois, Petit from Indiana, and Schenek, a Whig, from Ohio, in all seventy-nine.— Greeley's "American Conflict," I. p. 189.] and the bill, as amended, passed the House; but going to the Senate a few hours before the close of the session, it lapsed without a vote.