There were certainly people in the US who wanted to annex the whole of Mexico. Why weren’t they able to prevail? The short answer is that they didn’t have the votes to pass such a treaty in Congress. But there is, as always a long It always amazes me that so many foreigners seem to know way more about US laws and Constitution than most Americans do. I would dare to say that most Americans only know the 1st and 2nd Amendments. We really need to bring Civics back into our schools. I’m sure there are lots of politicians who only want to keep constituents apprised of the 1st and 2nd Amendments, but keep them ignorant of the rest.. And if you have the time to spare, read on.When the story of James K. Polk is told, he is presented as this outsider that no one had ever heard about, who surprised the whole country by defeating Henry Clay and becoming the 11th president of the United States.
But in truth, by the time he became president, he was already a man of some prominence. He had been a strong Jacksonian Democrat and had risen to become Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, before becoming Speaker of the House.
He was then recruited by Democrats to return to Tennessee and run for governor, pulling off a narrow victory over his Whig rival. The year was 1839. From this post, he unsuccessfully tried to be nominated Vice President for the election of 1840, but failed. It was a fortuitous failure, since the Democrats ended up losing the election, in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837, a prolonged economic downturn that lasted into the mid 1840s.
Polk returned to his governorship, but he was destined to know a few more failures before ascending to the pinnacle of American politics. In 1841, he lost his race for reelection for Tennessee governor. He ran again in 1843, only to lose yet again. This is the origin of the perception that he was a political nobody. By the time 1844 rolled around, he had been out of office for 3 years and out of national politics for nearly a decade.
In the 1820s, Mexico had a problem: the state of Coahuila y Tejas was very susceptible to raids from Native Americans and American freebooters known as filibusters, due to its sparse population.
To combat this, the Mexican government stumbled on a solution of apparent brilliant simplicity: why not invite more whites from North of the border? This they did, passing a law permitting the immigration of foreigners with the General Colonization Law of 1824.
The only problem was this: how to get this mass of Protestant foreigners to assimilate? Even before the passage of this law, there were already some American illegal immigrants who had settled into Texas. Now, there would be an even larger influx of them, and their culture would become dominant.
Mexicans wanted to abolish slavery in their new state. In 1827, Coahuila y Tejas passed a law forbidding the introduction of additional slaves into the state. In 1829, slavery was abolished over the whole of Mexico. The American settlers ignored the law. In 1830, Mexico forbade further immigration into Texas. American settlers ignored that, too.
Eventually, tensions rose between the Mexican government and the American Texans. When Santa Anna seized power in Mexico City, they initially cheered. But soon, he started wanting to centralize power. Texas revolted and decided to fight for independence. Santa Anna had the misfortune of being captured in battle, and he had to agree to withdraw his army South of the Rio Grande.
Texas claimed independence, but the Mexican government continued to view it as a renegade province run by rebels. The Texans, who wanted more security, asked for American annexation. In 1836 and 1837, few Americans wanted war with Mexico, which is what annexation would have meant. The US extended diplomatic recognition to the Republic of Texas, but there would be no annexation… for now.
There was another reason neither Andrew Jackson nor his successor Martin Van Buren wanted to annex Texas: it would have become a slave state and upset the balance between free and slave states in the nation.
But Jackson and Van Buren wouldn’t be president forever, and Jackson would later change his mind in any case. The election of 1840 brought William Henry Harrison to power. His main accomplishment was to die within a month, leaving John Tyler president.
John Tyler was a Virginian. He was Whig, in that he opposed Andrew Jackson. But he did not oppose Jackson because he supported the Whig programs of tariffs and infrastructure-spending; he opposed Jackson because he did not think that Jackson was enough of a states’ rights supporter, as evidenced by his stance during the Nullification Crisis. In fact, he has started out as a Democrat. This slaveholding Southern Democrat in Whig’s clothing, is who was now president of the United States. He vetoed several bills sent to him by Congress, angering his putative Congressional allies so much that they attempted to impeach him. To him, annexing Texas and having it join the Union as a slave state was a great idea. Furthermore, he might be able to ingratiate himself to the South enough to win reelection in 1844 as an independent candidate.
Unfortunately for Tyler, his plan was derailed by a catastrophic accident.
A week ago, I purchased a new car. It’s a 2016 Lincoln MKZ Hybrid with a red exterior and a beige interior. Every time I see a new friend, I’m tempted to show off my car. Look how nice this car looks! Look at my gas mileage! Would you like me to turn on the heated seats? Look, it has remote start!
Fortunately for me, when I show off these features, none of them are dangerous.
Unfortunately for Robert F. Stockton, his toy was much more dangerous. He was the captain of the USS Princeton, a steam warship of the US Navy. Tyler had organized a reception in his honor, after which various luminaries went on a cruise down the Potomac river. His guests urged him to demonstrate how strong and powerful his big guns were, and he complied. As he did so, one of the guns burst. Shrapnel was sprayed into the crowd, and many people died. Among the dead was the Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur, the man who had been tasked with negotiating the annexation of Texas. It was February 1844. This meant that there wouldn’t be enough time for the annexation to go forward and for Tyler to claim credit early enough to win reelection.
But Tyler continued to push for annexation, and this fractured the Democratic Party. Martin Van Buren was the front-runner for the nomination, having been the architect of the Jacksonian Democracy and the successor of Jackson himself. But he was not a fan of slavery, and consequently not a fan of annexing Texas. This earned him enough enmity from enough Southerners to scuttle his nomination.
The Democrats found an acceptable compromise nominee in Polk, who had garnered Andrew Jackson’s support, and who pledged to pursue the annexation of Texas. The Whigs nominated Henry Clay, whose narrow defeat was seen as a mandate for annexation, which was approved by both chambers of Congress, albeit very narrowly in the Senate, even before Polk had taken office.
This meant that there would be war with Mexico.
There were two reasons why war was almost inevitable. The first was that Mexico had never relinquished its claim on Texas. The second was that there was a border dispute between the Republic of Texas and the Mexican government, a dispute that was inherited by the US with the annexation of Texas.
Texas was claiming territory up to the Rio Grande as its own. The Mexican government thought that this was utterly ridiculous, since the state of Coahuila y Tejas had never extended that far. For Mexico, it was well known that Texas proper ended at the Nueces river.
Polk could have settled the border dispute if he had been so inclined. But he wanted war, having pledged to acquire California from Mexico in his electoral campaign. Since Mexico hadn’t done anything, asking Congress for a declaration of war would have come across as an act of naked aggression on a weaker neighbor. So, instead, he merely sent American troops into the disputed territory, hoping to spark a confrontation with Mexican troops.
Not surprisingly, this is exactly what happened. Polk declared that the Mexicans had spilled American blood on American soil and asked for his declaration of war. It would have been difficult for most legislators to refuse to appropriate funds for the war in this circumstance, and Polk got what he wanted.
The Mexican army was no match for American forces. Both Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor were very effective commanders. And soon enough, Mexico was decisively defeated. Mexico City itself was captured, and this caused a massive headache for everyone.
Nicholas Trist was a Virginian. His only accomplishment of note seems to have been that he had married a grand-daughter of Thomas Jefferson’s. He was supposed to be a good boy who would do as he was told. Polk sent him to Mexico to negotiate a peace treaty, but events on the ground changed rapidly afterwards. The US conquered more territory than anticipated, and Polk wanted to change his instructions.
Trist, however, had gone from clashing with Winfield Scott, a Whig and no friend of Polk, to being on friendly terms with him. Polk decided to recall him and to send a more compliant negotiator. But Trist refused to be recalled, stating that he had gone too far into the negotiations and that it was his moral duty to end the war and prevent further bloodshed. He sent a strongly worded letter back to Polk in which he lectured him and called him a warmonger. He stated that he would remain in Mexico City and continue to negotiate a peace treaty in his capacity as a private citizen. After this was done, Polk was free to accept or reject the treaty.
Polk was in a bind. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave him everything he had asked for at the beginning of the war. The House was controlled by Whigs. If he rejected the treaty, he could be painted as a warmonger and they would have enough party unity to refuse to vote further appropriations for the army in Mexico. And if his successor was a Whig, everything he had gained in the war so far would be relinquished.
Reluctantly, he sent it to the Senate for ratification. There, the treaty had two groups of opponents. Southerners wanted more territory. They wanted to prolong the war until the entirety of Mexico had been conquered. Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi introduced an amendment to demand that a larger portion of what is now Northern Mexico be ceded. This, he knew, could not pass. It was designed to sink the treaty so that the war would continue.
At the opposite side of the ideological spectrum, Senator George Badger of North Carolina introduced an amendment to relinquish all conquered territory. This also, it was well known, couldn’t pass.
Both these amendments were defeated. Between the people who hated the treaty because they didn’t want any Mexican land and the people who hated the treaty because they wanted more land, there were enough votes to defeat ratification. But everyone was in a bind. Those who opposed annexation realized that there was no way to reject annexation without prolonging the war, which would bring even more territory under American control. Those who wanted to annex more land realized that there were not enough votes to do what they wanted, and that given that the next president would probably be one of the Whig generals who had won the war, there was a high likelihood that no land whatsoever would be annexed.
And so, thanks to pragmatism, this treaty, with a negotiator dismissed by the president, this treaty that no one loved, this treaty that accomplished something no one exactly wanted, became law. And Mexico was spared total conquest.
Soon enough, the country started fracturing over the fate of Mexican cession. Shouldn’t slavery be banned in the new territories as it had been banned in the Northwest Ordinance? Who exactly was empowered to decide whether slavery could be allowed: Congress, state legislatures, territorial legislatures? Rather than fight over these abstract details, shouldn’t the line of the Missouri compromise simply be extended? But if slaves were property, and property was inalienable, did Congress even have the right to ban it anywhere? And if Congress didn’t have the right to ban slavery anywhere, was the Missouri Compromise of 1820 constitutional?
Soon enough, these debates grew more and more acrimonious, each section feeling more and more alienated from the other. Soon enough, both bisectional parties fractured, replaced by an explicitly anti-slavery Republican Party in the North and a Democratic Party dominated by Southern interests. Soon enough, there was bloodshed in Kansas between pro and anti-slavery partisans. Soon enough, the Supreme Court decided decisively in favor of the extreme Southern position, and the North was infuriated, convinced that there was some nefarious conspiracy at work to make slavery legal everywhere, including in free states. Soon enough, John Brown mounted a quixotic expedition in Virginia in which he aimed to start a slave insurrection. Poorly planned, this expedition was doomed from the start. But John Brown gave a masterful performance at his trial and came to be seen as a martyr in the North, which infuriated the South, and gave them further cause for alienation from their northern brethren. Soon enough, a Republican president was elected and, swept by a wave of mass hysteria, Southern states started seceding one after another, and formed a Confederacy. And soon enough, there was war among the disunited states.
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