Tried by the standard of conquest, the course of the American people toward Mexico is the most natural in the world. Mexico possesses immense wealth, and incalculable capabilities in the way of increasing that wealth; and she is no more competent to defend herself against a powerful neighbor than Sicily was to maintain her independence against the Romans. We are her neighbor,—with a population abounding in adventurers domestic and imported, and with politicians who carve out states that shall make them senators and representatives and governors, and perhaps even presidents. As we get nearer to Mexico, the population is more lawless, less inclined to observe those rules upon faith in which the weak must depend for existence. The eagles are gathered about the carcase, and think that to forbid its division among them would be to perpetrate a great moral wrong. The climate of Mexico seems to invite the Northern adventurer to that country. "In general," says Mr. Butterfield, (who has just published a volume that might be called "The American Conqueror's Guide-Book in Mexico," and to which we take this occasion to express our obligations,)—"in general, the Republic, with the exception of the coast and a few other places, which from situation are extremely hot, enjoys an even and temperate climate, free from the extremes of heat and cold, in consequence of which the most of the hills in the cold regions are covered with trees, which never lose their foliage, and often remind the traveller of the beautiful scenery of the valleys of Switzerland. In Tierra Caliente we are struck by the groves of mimosas, liquid amber, palms, and other gigantic plants characteristic of tropical vegetation; and finally, in Tierra Templada, by the enormous haciendas, many of which are of such extent as to be lost to the sight in the horizon with which they blend." This picture is calculated to incite the armed apostles of American liberty, and to render them impatient until they shall have carried the blessings of civilization to Mexico, rewarding themselves for their active benevolence by the appropriation of lands so admirably adapted to the labors of the descendants of Ham, whom it would be impious in them to leave unprovided with the best fields to work out their mission,—which is, to produce the greatest possible crops with the least possible expenditure of capital and care, for the good of that superior race which kindly supplies the deficiencies of Heaven with respect to Africa,—a second Providence, as it were, and slightly tinged with selfishness.
We need not dwell upon the importance of second causes in the government of mankind. We find them at work in fixing the future of Mexico. The final cause of the absorption of Mexico by the United States will be the restless appropriating spirit of our people; but this might leave her a generation more of national life, were it not that her territory presents a splendid field for slave-labor, and that, both from pecuniary and from political motives, our slaveholders are seeking the increase of the number of Servile States. Mexico is capable of producing an unlimited amount of sugar and an enormous amount of cotton. There is a demand for both these articles,—a demand that is constantly increasing, and which is so great, and grows so rapidly, that the melancholy prospect of rum without sugar has presented itself to some minds, not to speak of only half-allowance to all the tea-tables of Christendom. Africa is beginning to wear shirts, and the stamp of more than one Yankee manufacturer has been indorsed on the backs of many African chiefs. Slave-labor, we are assured, can alone afford an adequate supply of cotton and sugar; for none but negroes can labor on the plantations where cane and cotton are raised, and they will labor only under compulsion, and compulsion can be had only under the system of slavery. The point seems to be as clearly established as reason can establish it, though the negroes might object to the process adopted and to the conclusion drawn; but they are interested parties, and not to be regarded therefore. We must add, that the quality of Mexican sugar is as good as the yield is enormous, and, were the cane-fields in our hands, it would be impious to doubt of there being a fall of a mill on the pound all the world over. Compared with such a gain to the consuming classes, what would it matter that the producers were "expended" every four or five years, thereby furnishing an argument in favor of the revival (we should say extension, for it appears to be lively enough) of the slave-trade between Africa and America? So is it with Mexican cotton, which propagates itself, and is not raised annually from the seed, as in our cotton-growing States. In the Hot Land of Mexico, the laborers in the cotton-fields merely keep these fields clear from weeds, as we should say,—no easy task, it may be assumed, with a soil so luxuriant, and where frost is unknown. Yet the amount of cotton produced annually in the Hot Land is shamefully small, not exceeding ten million pounds,—a mere bagatelle, which Manchester would devour in a week. Consider what an increase in cottons and calicoes, what a gain in shirts and sheets, would follow from the seizure of those fields by Americans from Mississippi and Alabama; and let no idle notions concerning national morality prevent the increase of those comforts which the poor now know, but which never came to the knowledge of Caesar Augustus, and which were unknown to Solomon in all his glory. Where would have been the great English nation, if the adventurous cut-throats who followed Norman William from Saint Valery to Hastings had been troubled with squeamish notions about the rights of the Saxons?
There are other articles, besides cotton and sugar, in the production of which slave-labor pays, and pays well, too; and all these articles Mexico is capable of yielding immensely. The world needs more rice; rice can be cultivated only by negroes, or people much like them; and rice can be raised in Mexico in incredible quantities, under a judicious system of industry, such as, we are constantly assured, slavery ever has been and ever will be. Tobacco is another Mexican article, and also one in producing which negroes can be profitably employed; and as tobacco is becoming scarce, while consumers of it are on the increase, it would seem to be our duty to prepare the fields of Tabasco for more extended cultivation,—since there, as well as in many other parts of Mexico, tobacco almost as good as the best that is grown in Cuba can be produced. Coffee, indigo, and hemp are Mexican articles, and can all be cultivated by slave-labor. Maize is grown in every part of the country, yielding three hundred fold in the Hot Land, and twice that rate in one district; and maize is a slave-grown article. Smaller articles there are, but valuable, in raising which slaves would be found useful,—among them cocoa, vanilla, and frijoles, the last being to the Mexicans what the potato is to the Irish, the common food of the common people. On the supposition that slaves could be made to labor well in wheat-fields,—and under a stringent system of slavery this would be far from impossible,—Mexico might afford profitable employment to myriads of Africans in the course of civilization and Christianization. Wheat returns sixty for one in the best valleys of the Temperate Region; and when we call to mind that flour is becoming a luxury to poor white people even in America, the propriety of having those valleys filled up with a black population of great industrial capability stands admitted; and as black people have an unaccountable aversion to working for others, the necessity of slavery is established by the high price of flour, and the capacity of the white races for consuming twice as much as is now produced in the whole world.
It would be no difficult matter to show that Mexico is the most productive of countries, whether we consider the variety of the articles there grown, or the capabilities of the land for increasing their quantity. To the manufacturer and the merchant she is as attractive as she is to the agriculturist; and her mineral wealth is apparently inexhaustible, and has passed into a proverb. During the thirteen generations since the Spanish Conquest, the value of the gold and silver exported is estimated at $4,640,204,889; and this is considered a very low estimate by those best qualified to judge of its correctness. Mr. Butterfield expresses the opinion that the annual export is now near $40,000,000, much of which is smuggled out of the country. The land is also rich in the common metals, the production of which, as well as of gold and silver, would be incalculably increased, should Mexico pass under the dominion of an energetic race, greedy of other men's wealth, if not profuse of its own.
We have said enough to show the capabilities of Mexico as a slaveholding country; and of the desire of American slaveholders to push their industrial system into countries adapted to it, there are, unfortunately, but too many proofs. They are prompted by the love of power and the love of wealth to obtain possession of Mexico, and the energy that is ever displayed by them when pursuing a favorite object will not allow us to doubt what the end of the contest upon which the United States are about to enter must be. We have then, to consider the character of the people upon whom slavery is to be forced, and the probable effect of their subjugation to American dominion. The subject is far from being agreeable, and the consideration of it gives rise to the most painful thoughts that can move the mind.
The exact number of people in Mexico it is not possible to state. Mr. Mayer estimated that in 1850 the proximate actual population was 7,626,831, classed as follows:—Whites, 1,100,000; Indians, 4,354,886; Mestizos, Zambos, Mulattoes, etc., 2,165,345; Negroes, 6,600. Only one-seventh of the population belongs to that class, or caste, to which, according to the common sentiment in the United States, dominion over the earth has been given. The other six-sevenths are, in American estimation, and would so become in fact, should Mexico own our rule, mere political Pariahs; and if they should escape personal slavery, it would be through their rapid extinction under the blasting effects of civilization. There are, at this time, it may be assumed, 7,000,000 human beings in Mexico to whom few Americans are capable of conceding the full rights of humanity. Of these, about one-third, the negroes and the mixed races, from the fact that they have African blood in their veins, would be outlawed by the mere conquest of Mexico by American arms, so far as relates to the higher conditions of life. As several of our States have already compelled free negroes to choose between slavery and banishment, and as the American settlers of Mexico would proceed principally from States in which the sentiment prevails that has led to the adoption of so illiberal a policy, a third of the native population would, it is likely, be reduced to a condition of chattel slavery within a very short time after the change of government had been effected. There is not an argument used in behalf of the rigid slave codes of several of our States which would not be applicable to the enslavement of the black and mixed Mexicans, all of whom would be of darker skins and less enlightened minds than the slaves that would be taken to the conquered land by the conquerors. How could the slaves thus taken there be allowed to see even their inferiors in the enjoyment of personal freedom? If the State of Arkansas can condescend to be afraid of a few hundred free negroes and mulattoes, and can illustrate its fear by turning them out of their homes in mid-winter, what might not be expected from a ruling caste in a new country, with two and a half millions of colored people to strike terror into the souls of those comprising it? Just or humane legislation could not be looked for at the hands of such men, who would be guilty of that cruelty which is born of injustice and terror. The white race of Mexico would join with the intrusive race to oppress the mixed races; and as the latter would be compelled to submit to the iron pressure that would be brought to bear upon them, more than two millions of slaves would be added to the servile population of America, and would become the basis of a score of Representatives in the national legislature, and of as many Presidential Electors; so that the practice of the grossest tyranny would give to the Slaveholding States, per saltum, as great an increase of political power as the Free States could expect to achieve through a long term of years illustrated by care and toil and the most liberal expenditure of capital.
The Indians would fare no better than the mixed races, though the mode of their degradation might differ from that which would be pursued toward the latter. The Indians of Mexico are a race quite different from the Indians whom we have exterminated or driven to the remote West. They are a sad, a superstitious, and an inert people, upon whom Spanish tyranny has done its perfect work. Nominally Christians, they are nearly as much devoted to paganism as were their ancestors of the age of the Conquistadores. They are the most finished conservatives on the face of the earth, and see ruin in change quite as readily as if they lived in New England and their opinions were worth quoting on State Street. The traveller can see in Mexican fields, to-day, the manner in which those fields were cultivated in the early days of the last Montezuma, before the Spaniard had entered the land,—as in Canada he can occasionally find men following the customs that were brought, more than two centuries ago, from Brittany or Normandy. The Indians are practically enslaved by two things: they are so attached to the soil on which they are born as to regard expulsion from it as the greatest of all punishments,—thus being much like those serfs who, in some other countries, are legally bound to the land, and are sold with it; and they are forever in debt, the consequence of reckless indulgence, and of that inability to think of the morrow which is the most prominent characteristic of the inferior races of men. This has caused the existence of the system of peonage, of which so much has been said in this country, in the attempts that have been made to show that slavery already prevails in Mexico. But American planters never would be content with peonage, which does not give to the employer any power over the Indians' offspring, or convey to him any of those rights of property in his fellow-men which form the most attractive feature of slavery as it exists in the United States. They would demand something more than that; and the system of repartimientos, under which the Indians of the time of Cortés were divided among the conquerors, with the land, would not improbably follow the annexation of Mexico to the United States. The natives would be compelled to labor far more vigorously than they now labor, and their burdens would be increased in the same ratio in which the American is more energetic and exacting than the Mexican. Under such a system, the Indians would vanish as rapidly as they did from Hayti, when a similar system was adopted there, soon after the discovery of America. Then would arise a demand for the revival of the slave-trade with Africa, and on the same ground on which African slavery was introduced into America,—because the negro is better able than the Indian to meet the demands which the white man makes upon the weaker races who happen to be placed in his power. With such unlimited fields for the production of sugar and cotton, those leading agencies of Christianity and civilization, it would never do for the world to deny to the new school of planters a million of negroes, so necessary to the full development of the purpose of the American crusaders. Observe what a gain it would be to the shipping interest, could the seas become halcyonized through the conquest of prejudices by men who believe that God is just, and that He has made of one flesh and one blood all the nations of the earth!
Even if it should not be sought to enslave the Indians of Mexico, that race would not be the less doomed. There seems to be no chance for Indians in any country into which the Anglo-Saxon enters in force. A system of free labor would be as fatal to the Mexican Indians as a system of slave labor. The whites who would throng to Mexico, on its conquest by Americans, and on the supposition that slavery should not be established there, would regard the Indians with sentiments of strong aversion. They would hate them, not only because they were Indians,—which would be deemed reason enough,—but as competitors in industry, who could afford to work for low wages, their wants being few, and the cost of their maintenance small. It is charged against the Indians that they are not flesh-eaters; and white men prefer meat to any other description of food. Place a flesh-eating race in antagonism with a race that lives on vegetables, and the former will eat up the latter. The sentiment of the whites toward the Indians is not unlike that which has been expressed by an eminent American statesman, who says that the cause of the failure of Mexico to establish for herself a national position is to be sought and found in her acknowledgment of the political equality of her Indian population. He would have them degraded, if not absolutely enslaved; and degradation, situated as they are, implies their extinction. This is the opinion of one of the ablest men in the Democratic party, who, though a son of Massachusetts, is ready to go as far in behalf of slavery as any son of South Carolina.
Another eminent Democrat, no less a man, indeed, than President Buchanan, is committed to very different views. He is the patron of Juarez, whom he would support with all the power of the United States, and whose government he would carry to "the halls of the Montezumas" in the train of an American army. Now Juarez is a pure-blooded and full-blooded Indian. Not a drop of Castilian blood, blue or black, flows in his veins. He is a genuine Toltec, a member of that mysterious race which flourished in the Valley of Mexico ages before the arrival of the Aztecs, and the marvellous remains of whose works astonish the traveller in Yucatan and Guatemala. He is a native of Oajaca, one of the Pacific States, and the same that contained the vast estates bestowed upon Cortés, to whom the Valley of Oajaca furnished his title of Marquis. A poor Indian boy, and a fruit-seller, Juarez found a patron, who saw his cleverness, and gave him an education, and so enabled him to play no common part in his country,—the independence of which he seems prepared to destroy, in the hope, perhaps, of securing for it a stable and well-ordered government.