Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (15 page)

We often think of the Mexican War as one between the powerful Americans and the poor, defenseless Mexicans. In this progressive narrative, the Americans are intoxicated by the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, seizing land as they expand west, building the new country through the age-old mechanism of seizure and confiscation, and then dominating and exploiting the other nations of Central and South America. In his book
The Audacity of Hope
, Obama railed against the Monroe Doctrine, which he defined as “the notion that we could preemptively remove governments not to our liking.” And recently Secretary of State John Kerry announced in a speech to the Organization of the American States that, as far as the Obama administration was concerned, “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”
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Both Obama and Kerry seem ignorant of what the Monroe Doctrine really means, or the context in which it was articulated. In
reality, America, having freed itself from British colonial rule, had to contend with a continent that was the playground of empire, with the British, the French, and the Spanish all vying for land and supremacy. The Monroe Doctrine was a defense of the independence of the nations of the Americas from new attempts at European colonial rule, the doctrine stating that the United States would consider such impositions of foreign rule as belligerent actions to which the United States would have to respond. It was not an assertion of United States ownership of the Americas, but rather a warning to the European powers to leave the New World alone.

Progressives insist that, in practice, the United States became the behemoth of the Western hemisphere, regarding the Caribbean and Latin America as its “backyard.” Yet if this is so, why does America have so little control over its backyard? Why are there so many independent nations in Central and South America—not to mention Mexico itself—that enjoy full sovereignty and frequently defy their powerful neighbor to the north? By the end of the Mexican War, American troops had captured Mexico City. The whole country was in the possession of the United States. So from one perspective the United States took half of Mexico; from another, the United States returned half of Mexico which it could have kept for itself. We cannot assess the legitimacy of these actions—and the claims for reparations that inevitably accompany them—without examining what really happened. And recalling our effort to do “history from below,” we must throughout these inquiries concentrate on the fate of the little guy.

“Manifest Destiny” was a term first used by John O’Sullivan in 1845 in the
Democratic Review
. Sullivan argued that if America expanded from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, this would increase both its security and prosperity. Sullivan said it was America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for
the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Sullivan’s point was that tens of millions of people were being ejected from Europe as a consequence of famine and hardship, and they were landing in America in search of a better life. Why, he asked, did these teeming millions from Ireland, Scandinavia, and elsewhere have any less right to land than the Spanish whose only claim was that they conquered it first? Admittedly at the time Sullivan wrote this, Mexico had fought off the Spanish and won its war of independence. Still, Mexico was controlled by mestizo oligarchs, themselves of partial Spanish descent. Abraham Lincoln described the Mexican government as a mixture of tyranny and anarchy. The life of the ordinary Mexican was difficult and insecure, not only because of poverty but also because of government-sanctioned corruption and seizure of land and goods. Property rights were based on an anti-quated land grant system that was capriciously enforced. Political rights were few, and Civil Rights non-existent. So despite Mexican independence, the Mexicans themselves had virtually no rights that they could count on.

The Mexican War began with Texas. Since gaining its independence from Spain in 1821, the Mexican government had through land grants and other incentives encouraged Anglo settlers and traders to relocate to Texas. Many people from the American South and West did so. The Mexicans wanted the Anglos to help revitalize the economy and—as they were reputed to be rough, combative types—to help them fight the Comanches and other warlike Indian tribes. The Anglos did all that but they also brought with them their own sense of political and legal rights. Mexican attempts to encroach on those rights they regarded as tyranny.

In 1830, the Mexican government halted Anglo immigration into Texas, imposed customs duties, reorganized the governmental structure of Texas, and set up new military garrisons there. By this time,
a majority of the people in Texas were Anglos, not Mexicans. Historian Daniel Walker Howe estimates that in 1830 “Anglos in Texas outnumbered Hispanic
tejanos
by more than two to one.”
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Sam Houston, who had emigrated to Texas from Tennessee, wrote President Andrew Jackson about the difficulty of dealing with the Mexican government. “Mexico is involved in civil war. The federal constitution has never been in operation. The government is essentially despotic.” Led by Houston, the Texans decided to break away from Mexico. They weren’t being ornery or recalcitrant. Historian H. W. Brands reminds us that the Americans who moved to Texas had been induced to do so as settlers. Mexico’s ban on new immigration meant that “Texas could remain a frontier society indefinitely.” But according to Brand, “Very few Americans—even among westerners—loved the frontier for its own sake. They migrated to the unsettled regions because they could afford land there, but no sooner did they purchase their plots than they wanted the frontier to look like the settled regions back east… . Nearly all the Americans in Texas had assumed that more of their compatriots would follow them there, and that the Texas frontier would fill with towns and eventually cities and the rising standard of living towns and cities entailed.”
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In sum, these were poor settlers who were looking for a better life, and that prospect seemed thwarted by the actions of the Mexican government, which was centralizing authority at the expense of Mexico’s states.

In 1836, the Texans revolted, proclaiming Texas the “Lone Star Republic.” This wasn’t purely a white or Anglo rebellion. Historian David Montejano points out the rebellion was “brought about through an alliance of the newcomer Anglo colonists and the established Texas Mexican elite.”
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Originally the Texan revolt was not an attempt at secession. Rather, the rebels demanded that Mexico live up to the Mexican constitution of 1824, which granted the states a
large degree of autonomy. But General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, Mexico’s dictator since 1829, was not about to do this. It was only when Mexico ignored the Texan demands, responding with force, that the Texans decided on a complete separation from Mexico. There is an interesting echo here of the American Revolution which began as a protest against British misrule—the deprivation of “the rights of Englishmen”—but eventually became a movement for full independence and to affirm the universal “rights of man.” In the same vein, the Texans started out by trying to be good Mexicans and when that didn’t work they broke away and drafted a new constitution modeled on that of the United States.

The Texans petitioned the United States for help in their war against the Mexican government. Oddly enough, none came. President Andrew Jackson—despite his reputation as an expansionist—rejected intervention on behalf of the Texans. Even when the Texans won and became a republic, the U.S. refused to admit Texas as a state, largely because of Northern concerns that the admission of Texas would strengthen the slave power of the American South. So Texas remained an independent republic for about a decade. Finally in 1845 Texas received admission into the United States. Now it was a matter of settling the border between Texas and Mexico.

It was the disputed claims between the Texans and the Mexicans—over where Mexico ended and Texas began—that set off the Mexican War. Mexico claimed the border was the Nueces River, while Texas insisted it was the Rio Grande. On balance, the Mexicans appear to have had the stronger case, yet for almost a decade they made no effort to enforce it, allowing Texas free access to the larger territory it claimed. Upon admitting Texas as a state, President Polk sent a delegation of U.S. troops to the Rio Grande to “inspect” the border. The Mexicans ambushed an American patrol, thus precipitating the Mexican War.

The Mexican War, though popular among the American people, was controversial and divided the country’s leaders. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass was opposed, attributing it to America’s “cupidity and love of dominion.” Ralph Waldo Emerson thought it unwise and imperialist. Thoreau refused to pay his Massachusetts poll tax on the grounds that it would help fund the Mexican War. (He was jailed for a night while a relative paid the tax and obtained his release.) By contrast, Walt Whitman argued that Mexico was the aggressor and therefore “Mexico must be thoroughly chastised.”
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Congressman Abraham Lincoln opposed the war, as did his mentor Henry Clay. The Whig position was against expansion—Whigs generally believed that America should set an example of a free republic rather than expand its boundaries. In the 1844 presidential election, the Whig candidate Henry Clay lost to the Democrat James Polk in part because Clay opposed admitting Texas to the Union. Clay later condemned the Mexican War as motivated by a lust for conquest and “a spirit of universal dominion.”
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By contrast, the Democrats favored extending freedom by enlarging the boundaries of the United States, through purchase and treaty when possible, through force when warranted. This debate was complicated by the slavery issue: Southerners wanted the country to get bigger so they could add more slave states; Northerners wanted to ensure that any additions to America would be free states rather than slave states.

Lincoln contended that President Polk had found an excuse to go to war with Mexico by falsely claiming that Mexicans had shed American blood on American soil. Lincoln introduced sarcastic “spot resolutions” demanding that Polk identify the precise spot on which that blood had been spilled. Even so, Lincoln’s position had its own nuance. Lincoln never disputed that the Mexican government was tyrannical, or that the Texans had a right to assert their independence. If Americans had a right to revolt against British rule, surely the
Texans had the right to throw off the tyranny of the Mexican oligarchs. Later, in his Mexican War speech on January 12, 1848, Lincoln would proclaim the Declaration of Independence to be “a most valuable, a most sacred right—a right which, we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.”
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Lincoln’s argument in opposition to the war was merely that it had been started under false pretexts, and that Polk had gone beyond defending Texas to coveting Mexican territory.

The war was short and decisive. The Mexicans were commanded by General Santa Ana, who had led the successful Mexican revolt against Spain. But Santa Ana was no match for the United States forces, led by Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. Taylor would later become president of the United States, and Scott the highest ranking general in the army. Junior officers in the American army included such familiar names as Ulysses Grant, George McClellan, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis—future Civil War adversaries, now fighting on the same side.

The war ended in 1847, when the Mexican capital fell to the United States. The United States flag flew over Mexico City, which was occupied by the U.S. army for nine months. Ultimately the Americans withdrew and the peace was secured by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which settled the Texas border and granted the United States a vast area extending from the present states of New Mexico to California to Wyoming. America, however, could have kept all of Mexico. The United States decided to keep half and give half back.

How to assess the Mexican War? I don’t feel sorry for the Mexican government, which started the war and lost the war. Nor will I deny that this was in part an American war of conquest that added a million and a half square miles to the territory of the United States. Who suffered as a consequence of the war? Howard Zinn, performing “history from below,” focuses on the small number of American
soldiers who refused to fight because they opposed America’s involvement in the war. Motivated by opposition to the war, and also by land grants offered to defectors by the Mexican government, around three hundred American soldiers joined the Mexican army. So a small contingent of soldiers quit or switched sides—who cares? The real issue is the impact on Mexicans who were directly affected by the war. We have to consider what became of them and their descendants.

Consider the claims we hear today about how Mexicans merely want to return and work on their own land that was unjustly taken. But no land was taken from them at all. After the war, the United States immediately recognized as valid the property rights of Mexicans who were now part of U.S. territory. The change was not in any individual’s land ownership but in the fact that people who were once Mexicans now became Americans.

Normally it is a lengthy process to become an American citizen—I know, because as an immigrant I went through it myself. Yet according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Mexicans who ended up on the American side were immediately made American citizens. Article IX of the Treaty guaranteed them “all the rights of the citizens of the United States.” This itself is historically unique: of the three main “involuntary” minority groups—American Indians, blacks, and Mexicans—only Mexicans were offered immediate American citizenship. They were granted more rights, including more secure property rights, than they had ever enjoyed before.

There is probably some truth to Robert Rosenbaum’s claim that, as a consequence of the war, “most mexicanos in the United States lost their freedom to live as they wanted to live.” Rosenbaum is the author of
Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest
. He documents several cases—not numerous but significant—in which Mexicans fought against American occupation. Rosenbaum also notes that
“full citizenship and property rights did not result in economic opportunity or social integration for mexicanos.” Besides the differences in language and culture, there was nativism and discrimination to contend with. Even so, Mexican Americans enjoyed more opportunity to improve their lives than they would have had in Mexico. They now enjoyed the whole set of rights under the U.S. Constitution, including the right to self-government. Political scientist Harry Jaffa writes, “The accessions of parts of Mexico to the United States did not mean a denial of self-government to the inhabitants of these regions but the first effective assurance of self-government they would have had.”
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