Lincoln in the World (8 page)

Some modern historians have dismissed the All Mexico movement as little more than “sensationalism selling newspapers.” Yet the debate over the fate of America’s neighbor to the south dominated Lincoln’s first months in Congress. Influential Democratic figures, like historian George Bancroft, supported the annexation proposals, as did some other politicians, like Michigan’s Lewis Cass, who declared that “to attempt to prevent the American people from taking possession of Mexico, if they demand it, would be as futile in effect as to undertake to stop the rushing of the cataract of Niagara.”
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The All Mexico movement actually represents a critical shift in the American rationale for expansion—from “an almost Nietzschean self-realizationism,” according to one historian, to a new “quasi-altruism.” Expansionists now saw their role as “a religious duty to regenerate the unfortunate people of the enemy country by bringing them into the life-giving shrine of American democracy.” As with the agitation over Texas annexation, the enthusiasm sometimes resembled the wild euphoria of an evangelical revival. At other times, as with the Texas debate, it carried romantic overtones. At a mass meeting in January 1848, the Texas statesman Sam Houston advised doubters to make a trip to Mexico. “Look out for the beautiful
señoritas
, or pretty girls,” he told his audience, “and if you choose to annex them, no doubt the result of this annexation will be a most powerful and delightful evidence of civilization.”
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Aside from the opposition to Polk’s proposals, most Whigs, like Lincoln, shared little in common with the All Mexico crowd. The Whig delegation in Congress had long since grown wary of the war. Polk noticed that as early as December 1846 many Whigs had stopped showing up at White House receptions. “This is probably to
be attributed to the excitement growing out of the party debate … on the subject of the Mexican War and my course in conducting it,” the president wrote in his diary. The following year, Whig senator Thomas Corwin of Ohio—Lincoln’s future minister to Mexico—delivered a blistering indictment of the war. “If I were a Mexican I would tell you, ‘Have you not room in your own country to bury your dead men? If you come into mine, we will greet you with bloody hands, and welcome you to hospitable graves.’ ” Whig representative Joshua Giddings, one of Lincoln’s fellow boarders at Mrs. Sprigg’s, complained about the bad behavior of U.S. troops and threatened to cut their supplies.
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Lincoln had never been as strident an opponent of the war as either Corwin or Giddings. And yet, perhaps convinced by his idol Henry Clay’s address in Lexington, Lincoln plunged himself into opposition politics almost as soon as he entered the House. Lincoln’s rationale for taking on Polk was twofold. First, he considered the war “
unnecessary
, inasmuch as Mexico was in no way molesting, or menacing the U.S. or the people thereof.” Second, he thought the conflict was “
unconstitutional
, because the power of levying war is vested in Congress, and not in the President.” Lincoln did not contend, as some Whigs did, that the war revealed a deliberate plot of slaveholders to extend their territory. Instead, he thought Polk was simply a demagogue. The American invasion, Lincoln explained, amounted to little more than “a war of conquest brought into existence to catch votes.”
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A few days before Christmas 1847, Lincoln submitted his “spot resolutions” to the House. The document closely followed Clay’s prescription for challenging Polk. The goal, Lincoln stated, was to “establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our
citizens
was so shed, was, or was not,
our own soil
, at that time.” The Illinois congressman asked a series of rhetorical questions of the president, suggesting that the outbreak of hostilities had been the result of American provocation, not Mexican belligerence.
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On January 8, 1848, Lincoln sat down and wrote a letter to his
law partner back in Springfield. The congressman reported that he had begun “getting the hang of the House,” and had made a short speech on a minor issue. “I find speaking here and elsewhere about the same thing,” Lincoln said. “I was about as badly scared, and no worse, as I am when I speak in court.” He added that he was about to make another, more important, speech soon. “I hope,” Lincoln told Herndon, “to succeed well enough to wish you to see it.”
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No One Man

Herndon’s violent reaction to Lincoln’s Mexican War speech caught the congressman off guard. Once “you get over your scare,” Lincoln told his partner, “read [the speech] over again, sentence by sentence, and tell me honestly what you think of it.” A second reading apparently did nothing to placate the younger man. Herndon wrote back, arguing that Polk’s invasion was perfectly justified.
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Lincoln fired off another tart response. “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever
he
shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure,” the congressman complained. “Study to see if you can fix
any limit
to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him?” The Constitution was designed explicitly to guarantee that “
no one man
” could launch a war, Lincoln declared. Herndon’s argument, the congressman scolded his friend, “destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.”
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Herndon made his case on narrow grounds, offering “exclusively a constitutional argument” in support of Polk. Because the letters of Lincoln’s law partner have been lost, it is left to historians
to speculate about his precise thinking. In later years, as Herndon recalled the exchange, he said he was trying to save Lincoln from a political blunder. Yet there is no evidence beyond Herndon’s word to support this claim. It seems more plausible that Herndon was simply caught up in the excitement of a victorious war. He devoured newspapers and could easily have been swept away by the crusades of the penny press. Lincoln’s law partner was still only in his late twenties and highly susceptible to the lure of romantic adventures. Herndon’s correspondence with Lincoln alternated between policy critiques and personal gossip. In one letter later that year, Herndon bragged to his law partner about “kissing a pretty girl.” Lincoln good-naturedly replied: “Go it while you’re young!”
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Herndon once described himself as “a young, undisciplined, uneducated, wild man.” He acknowledged that he could be “somewhat of a radical.” Lincoln’s law partner would eventually develop something of a track record for advocating foreign policies that were both expansionist and reformist. Herndon once wrote an editorial recommending the annexation of Cuba—on the “rather advanced ground” that the abolition of slavery on the island would follow. Lincoln’s law partner believed events in nineteenth-century North America held consequences that were “world wide and world effecting.” They represented, he later insisted, “a motion and a rush of the race Godward.”
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Lincoln also held a progressive vision of America’s world role. Yet Herndon’s breathless enthusiasm often grated on his sober law partner. The older man complained about the “glittering generalities” that emerged from Herndon’s mouth. Lincoln liked to make his arguments carefully and logically, assembling a preponderance of irrefutable facts. Herndon preferred emotional appeals. When a lawyer gets “tears on the jury,” the younger man noted, then he knows he has won the case. Herndon would sometimes make an argument to his partner by maintaining that he simply “felt it
in my bones
.” Lincoln would needle Herndon, asking him how his “bones philosophy” was working out.
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Herndon concluded that Lincoln had committed “political suicide” by his opposition to the war. “When I listened to the comments of his friends everywhere after the delivery of his speech,” he later recalled, “I felt that he had made a mistake.” Lincoln’s law partner believed that the spot resolutions and subsequent speech “sealed Lincoln’s doom as a Congressman.” Yet there is little evidence to support this assertion. Lincoln ultimately developed a remarkably refined position on the Mexican War—one that satisfied both the expansionists among his hawkish western constituents and his dovish Whig patrons back east.
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Lincoln and other members of Congress scrambled to try to bridge the divide as the All Mexico agitation gathered momentum. In early February 1847, Democrat John C. Calhoun laid out a program he called the defensive-line strategy. Calhoun’s plan called for the United States to absorb a vast swath of land in northern Mexico while at the same time withdrawing American forces from the heart of the country. The goal was to satisfy Americans who demanded an indemnity from the Mexicans, without taking so much land that it would aggravate the divide over slavery. Lincoln, notes the historian Mark E. Neely Jr., ultimately “compromised easily with expansionism” and adopted Calhoun’s strategy “in all its guises.”
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The Illinois congressman recognized that it would be politically impossible to end a victorious war with a total retreat. “In a final treaty of peace, we shall probably be under a sort of necessity of taking some territory,” Lincoln explained. Still, he added, “it is my desire that we shall not acquire any extending so far South, as to enlarge and agrivate the distracting question of slavery.” When Whig newspapers like Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
seemed to advocate withdrawing U.S. troops all the way to the Nueces River, Lincoln tried to set them straight. “By putting us in the position of insisting on the line of the Nueces,” Lincoln wrote, “you put us in a position which, in my opinion, we cannot maintain.” The “true position,” the Illinois congressman argued, should be “that the boundary of Texas extended just so far as American settlements taking part in
her revolution extended.” Such an argument would require defending territory south of the Nueces River.
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The wrangling over All Mexico came to an abrupt end on February 19, 1848, when news arrived in Washington that the president’s man in Mexico City, Nicholas Trist, had secretly signed a treaty ending the war. Polk’s envoy had disobeyed his instructions to return to the capital. Yet the president concluded that the treaty—which ceded territory including both the mineral-rich deserts and the Pacific ports—ultimately served the national interest. At first, expansionists balked. Both Illinois senators actually voted against the treaty, hoping to win even more territory. But the penny press finally swung behind the peace initiative, and Americans in general supported Polk. By the summer, the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division was on its way home. As the troops marched out of Mexico City, the band played “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”
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A Stargazing Thinking Look

At some point after the Lincolns arrived in Washington, the congressman apparently sent his wife away. The circumstances remain somewhat mysterious, and what we know of the incident comes from a letter Lincoln wrote to Mary in April. “When you were here,” he explained, “I thought you hindered me.” And yet, “in this troublesome world, we are never quite satisfied.” Now Lincoln felt lonely. “I hate to stay in this old room by myself,” he wrote. Lincoln playfully teased his wife. At the boardinghouse, “all with whom you were on decided good terms … send their love,” he reported. “The others,” Lincoln added mischievously, “say nothing.” In another letter, he acknowledged Mary’s desire to return to Washington. “Will you be a good girl in all things?” he asked.
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As spring turned to summer, Lincoln increasingly devoted his attention to the upcoming presidential election. The congressman continued to defend the Whig record of challenging the war’s origins.
“It is a fact, that the United States Army, in marching to the Rio Grande, marched into a peaceful Mexican settlement, and frightened the inhabitants away from their homes and their growing crops,” Lincoln wrote to one Baptist preacher in May. “Possibly you consider those acts too small for notice. Would you venture to so consider them, had they been committed by any nation on earth, against the humblest of our people? I know you would not. Then I ask, is the precept ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them’ obsolete?—of no force?—of no application?”
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And yet, even as Lincoln appealed to the Golden Rule to support his Mexican War policy, he threw his support behind one of the war’s heroes for the Whig presidential nomination. Henry Clay would have been the obvious choice, but the Sage of Ashland was now in his early seventies. “Mr. Clay’s chance for an election is just no chance at all,” Lincoln explained to one ally. A smarter choice, Lincoln insisted, would be Zachary Taylor, the victorious Mexican War general. Taylor was a sloppily attired army officer—“a thick-set man with stubby legs and heavy brows contracted into a perpetual frown.” Ordinarily he would not make an ideal political poster boy. Yet, in this case, Taylor’s candidacy combined the glow of a victorious warrior with the complete lack of any political record to attack. “In my judgment, we can elect nobody but Gen. Taylor,” Lincoln concluded.
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The Illinois congressman and his pro-Taylor clique referred to themselves as the Young Indians. Lincoln wrote to Herndon in Springfield urging his partner to “gather up all the shrewd wild boys about town” and organize them into Taylor clubs. He explained that by choosing a military hero, the Whigs would turn “the war thunder” against the Democrats. Herndon did as he was told, but he was not particularly enthusiastic about the choice. The whole thing reeked of hypocrisy. “I was disposed to take a dispirited view of the situation,” Herndon later recalled, “and therefore was not easily warmed up.” According to one report in a Democratic newspaper, Herndon was prohibited from speaking at a Taylor rally in Springfield because of his tepid support for the candidate.
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