With the support of that power, said Murphy, Aberdeen would have been willing to fight.[27] Her military assistance did not particularly matter, but he was afraid that popular unfriendliness toward the government—already shown by a violent opposition in the press and the parliament—and the scarcely slumbering hatred of England might drive the country into active support of the United States, and bring on a general conflagration.[28] Such was the situation when Peel, whom Louis Philippe leaned heavily upon, stood at the head of the British government; and after he resigned at the end of June, 1846, it became far more difficult. For the new administration Louis entertained no such regard. The marriage of the Duc de Montpensier, his son, to a Spanish princess destroyed the entente cordiale. Harsh language was exchanged. Guizot and Palmerston endeavored to overthrow each other, and the British ambassador at Paris had a personal difficulty with Guizot.[29]
As for France herself, the premier’s loud advocacy of an American balance of power compelled him logically to prevent the United States, if he could, from acquiring new territory. Influential writers—Gabriel Ferry, for example—insisted that French interests, principles and prestige in Mexico demanded protection. L’Epoque, which many regarded as Guizot’s personal organ, took that ground firmly in a long and studied article, and called for joint intervention. Le Journal des Débats, our persistent enemy, suggested the same view. But the diplomatic journal, La Portefeuille, was resolute for neutrality, and the other leading papers reiterated the familiar objections against playing the British game; and hence, while it appeared reasonable to expect that Guizot would aid England more or less in a diplomatic way to limit the extension of our boundaries, no other sort of French intervention seemed at all probable.[30]
EFFECTS OF AMERICAN SUCCESS
The success of our armies clinched the argument. From the first, McLane urged that a vigorous campaign should be waged. That, he said, would be the best way to prevent interference, and he predicted that victories would overcome sympathy with Mexico. Had Taylor been defeated on the Rio Grande, as Londoners expected, those ill-disposed toward us in Europe, wrote our minister at Paris, “might have been emboldened to unfriendly or offensive demonstrations”; but as it was, reported McLane, the conduct of the American army and the magnanimity of the American general served to “inspire a respect for our country and our cause which was not felt before, and which nothing less could have produced.” The failure of Ulúa to detain Scott until the yellow fever should force him to decamp had no slight effect; and the victories at Vera Cruz and Cerro Gordo, reported Bancroft, who succeeded McLane at the court of St. James, totally changed the complexion of sentiment in Europe regarding the United States. After the battles of Contreras and Churubusco the same minister said to a friend, “You should be here to see how our successes have opened the eyes of the Old World to our great destinies.” In England racial sympathy, too, could not wholly be suppressed. Scott received very handsome compliments from the commander of the British fleet at Vera Cruz and from a son of Sir Robert Peel, who was aboard one of the vessels; and Robert Anderson remarked in his diary: When our arms do something glorious, “jealousy, for the moment, is conquered by pride.” Indeed Lord Palmerston himself spoke most warmly to Bancroft of our victories as illustrating the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon.[31]
King believed they “secured a perhaps doubtful neutrality.” “Let Mexico show the determination and the power to resist,” remarked Le Journal des Débats significantly, and a way to aid her will doubtless be found, but “Europe cannot intervene effectively in behalf of a people who throw themselves away.” It is impossible to help those who will not help themselves, admitted the London Times; and Palmerston—disgusted, no doubt, like every one else, with Mexico’s failure to achieve anything except fresh revolutions—admitted to Bankhead that it would be very imprudent to break with the United States for the sake of a country which did nothing effectual to defend itself.[31]
Some things, however, it was possible to do against us. At the beginning of the conflict our minister observed in London a systematic endeavor to break down American credit, and so embarrass our military operations. Viscount Ranelagh proposed to bring over enough British officers for some four or five thousand men, and it was not their fault nor his that Murphy said the Mexicans would not serve under foreigners. A captain employed by the highly favored company of English mail packets landed Paredes, an avowed enemy of the United States, at Vera Cruz. Mexico is “the very country for the guerilla,” hinted Britannia; it “has ready-made guerillas by the ten thousand or the hundred thousand; it has hills and hollows where ten men might stop the march of 50,000.” And the same journal went still farther. In the case of an invasion, it proclaimed, “the soldier is a soldier no more; he is a burglar, a robber, a murderer”; and should foreign troops invade England, “No quarter!” ought rightfully to be the cry.[32]
But the special delight of unfriendly journals was to misrepresent our military operations.[33] Apparently Taylor’s battles on the Rio Grande surprised the editorial mind so much that few comments were ready, but after a while the Times remarked, “No hostile army has been really beaten”; and it described our success at Monterey as merely occupying “a town of log-huts.” That paper long professed to regard the war as “a border squabble,” “ridiculous and contemptible,“ “justified by hypocrisy,” “carried on with impotence,” and sure to end “in some compromise more humiliating to the United States than to Mexico.” “The Americans who have to conduct this most wearisome of wars,” it assured its gratified readers, “are least of all nations competent to the task. They have no army, and have constitutional objections to raising one. They have no money, and are resolutely determined to find none. They have no General, and have just agreed [by rejecting the plan of a lieutenant general] never to have one.”[34]
VIEWS OF OUR MILITARY OPERATIONS
“The military tactics of the Americans,” remarked the Examiner at the same stage, “have displayed an equal want of talent and of purpose”; while its fair colleague, Britannia, exclaimed: The hostilities against Mexico are “at once wretched and ridiculous.... So much for the boasting of Jonathan!” With unwinking and unsuspecting humor the Times commented thus on the fight at Buena Vista: “Beyond the fact that the Americans undoubtedly beat off, though from a strong position, a force nearly quadrupling their own, they seem to have no great grounds for triumph.” In fact they were now “worse off than ever”; they had actually lost prestige; and all the Mexicans needed to do was “to sit still and be sulky.”[34]
Scott fared no better than Taylor. His bombarding Vera Cruz was characterized as “revolting,” as an “infamy,” as “one of the most atrocious and barbarous acts committed in modern times by the forces of a civilized nation,” as “degrading to mankind.” Somehow the Times was repentant enough to publish a reply, which said: “The first broadside of Lord Exmouth’s guns at Algiers destroyed a greater number of unoffending, unarmed people, than the bombardment of Vera Cruz,” and pointed out that Scott was under some obligation to treat with humanity his own troops, whom delay would have exposed to the yellow fever. Compassionate John Bull! exclaimed the American Review; “Is it true that the English bombarded Copenhagen? Is Hindostan more than a fiction? Had Clive and Hastings any substantial bodily existence? Is not Ireland a mythe” and of course it might have added that an assault would have caused immensely more loss of life at Vera Cruz than did the bombardment.[35]