POLICY OF THE WHIGS

Under these circumstances the gyrations and contortions of Whig politics, viewed as a whole, were curious to observe. At first the party joined in shouting and voting for stern hostilities. “Doubt, division, reproach will be unknown,” announced the North American. But the Whigs presently saw, as the New York Tribune pointed out, that a full share of the burden would be theirs, while most of the glory and profit would fall to the other side. Moreover, these criticisms of Polk and the war, even when not suggested by the Whigs, seemed like yellow fields of ripening party advantage. Very soon, therefore, they withdrew to a respectable, intrenched position: they would support the war, but on its conclusion Polk and the Democrats would be called to a strict account. “I have no doubt we shall make much Capital out of it,” wrote a Whig Congressman. Presently, however, it looked as if the conclusion of the war might lie beyond the next Presidential election, and most of the party sallied forth impatiently, sickle in hand.[12]

Castigating Polk was the most obvious opportunity for the harvesters, and they used it with due zeal. Some of the jibes were good-natured. Playing on the powers legally his, the National Intelligencer happily exclaimed, “Here, there, everywhere at once, civil, military, judicial and executive, dove of peace, thunderbolt of war, and a perfect serpent of diplomacy, who was ever so various or so amazing?” Bracketing the President of the United States with a famous dwarf of the day as “Tom Thumb’s cousin, Jim Thumb,” was another merry as well as able fling. To remark, however, when he sent in a Message, that he came “puffing and blowing into Congress,” went a trifle too far, perhaps; and other pleasantries exposed themselves distinctly to that criticism. The Boston Atlas described the war Message as “perfectly characteristic of its author;—weak, wheedling and sneaking,” while some thought it better to sail on the other tack, and picture “His High Mightiness,” the arrogant, domineering tyrant of the White House, as planting “his foot upon the charter of our liberties.”[13]

Despatching Taylor to the Rio Grande was called “a well-nigh fatal blunder,” even though suggested by the “demon,” who was commonly thought rather shrewd. Letting Santa Anna go back to Mexico seemed to different Whigs like treason, treachery, folly and idiocy. Polk “takes his ease on some sixty-eight dollars per day,” while the soldiers he has driven to the field subsist on fare that “his very slaves would loathe,” the Whig Almanac luckily discovered. Bribery, duplicity, falsehood, imbecility, cowardice and infamy were a few of the other good things found in the President’s conduct; and the chief Whig organ undertook to lay him finally at rest on the greensward in this elegant fashion: “Why, the very savage of the courtyard in other times—that most brutal of mankind, the bully of the bailiwick, who chewed up an ear or nose, or scooped out with thumb a prostrate adversary’s eye—was generous in comparison.”[13]

In attempting more serious criticism the Whigs met with embarrassments. The majority of them, whose argument had been that immediate annexation of Texas would necessarily mean war, could not with inward peace declare that Polk had brought on the war by sending Taylor to the Rio Grande; and the great number whose contention had been that Mexico still owned Texas could not well deny that annexing her province by an Act of Congress, which amounted on their theory to a constitutional declaration of war, had created a state of things which made it entirely proper for Polk to send Taylor there. “Swindlers of 1844, with your ‘peaceable annexation,’ do not skulk! Here is the fruit of your doings! Look it in the face!” exclaimed the New York Tribune when the war bill passed, but it soon appeared more tactful to ignore this aspect of the matter.[14]

EMBARRASSMENTS OF THE WHIGS

Other embarrassments remained, however. It was very well for northern Whigs to indulge in what Carlyle might have called a “running shriek” against “a pro-slavery war,” but they were cautioned to let no echoes of it cross the Potomac. When a Senator greeted the war Message by saying he would later read the documents that accompanied it, and for the present would merely observe that Polk’s course was “utterly unjustifiable,” Ritchie paraphrased Master Dogberry at him: “By virtue of mine office I do suspect thee to be a thief.” While some papers denounced the government for not settling with Mexico by negotiation, others admitted that Mexico had refused to treat. When Delano announced for the sake of buncombe that he was “ready to go shoulder to shoulder with all those who supported the honor of the country,” Thurman replied that it seemed a strange method of supporting one’s country, to declare like Delano, after war had begun, when it existed both in law and in fact, that it was “illegal, unrighteous, and damnable.” Abraham Lincoln, wishing to distinguish himself before the home folks, did this feat in the House by revealing, in a manner suited to his years, that since Mexico had exercised jurisdiction on the northern bank of the Rio Grande, the first American blood must have been shed on Mexican, not American, soil; but unhappily the fact remained that Connecticut had for some time exercised effective jurisdiction over northeastern Pennsylvania, yet did not own the territory.[15]

Those who raved against Polk and his “tribe” for driving the war bill through Congress had to face Winthrop and a galaxy of other Whigs, who admitted that war did already exist. Congressmen denouncing the Executive for sending Taylor to the Rio Grande were unable to deny that notice of his march from Corpus Christi had been given on the floor of the House (March 23) long before the outbreak of hostilities, and nothing had been done about it; that on May 12 Whigs of the Senate, led by Crittenden, had recognized that American territory extended to the Rio Grande; and that after the army could safely have withdrawn from that vicinity no serious attempt had been made to bring about its recall. Partisans of the unoffending Mexicans were startled to hear the impeccable Boston Atlas confess in a moment of candor: “The conduct of that government towards us has been such as might have justified the extreme resort to war”; and those eager to berate Polk for unconstitutional aggressiveness had to digest a similar lapse on the part of the National Intelligencer, which conceded that Congress had thrown round him a mantle of indemnity by a vote “implying confidence in the rectitude of the President in beginning this war.”[16]

While Polk was roundly taken to task for appointing so many Democratic generals, Whig journals boasted that most of the leading officers belonged to their party. The military operations afforded numerous opportunities for invectives against the administration, but ere long a number of the invectives came home to stay. Taylor, it appeared, had recommended the advance to the Rio Grande; he protested against embarrassing the prosecution of the war by discussing its genesis; and the smallness of his army at the critical time, his waiting so long after the occupation of Matamoros, the terms given at Monterey, his peril at Buena Vista, Kearny’s off-hand annexation of New Mexico, Scott’s discharging volunteers after the battle of Cerro Gordo, and his famous Jalapa proclamation, all brought up against the administration, proved in every case chargeable to the Whig commanders.[16]

WHIG ORATORS