Last week President Trump posted a “Presidential Message” on the “Anniversary of one of our Nation’s earliest displays of military might.” He wanted to “honor the memory of the brave men” he said, “who gave their lives in service to our Nation” during the Mexican War.
It is not uncommon for a president to take the anniversary of a historical event as an occasion for reflecting on the policies and goals of his administration, but invocations of the Mexican War are relatively rare. But Trump, as we well know, is not like other presidents.
“Guided by our victory on the fields of Mexico 178 years ago,” his message reads, “I have spared no effort in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction.” Trump claimed that he was stopping the flow of drugs into the United States, halting the “invasion of illegal aliens,” and “dismantling narco-terrorist networks all across the Western hemisphere.” Trump also, he said, had secured control of the Panama Canal from foreign takeover, a very odd claim, and that his administration was “aggressively pursuing an America First policy of peace through strength and will continue to reassert the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to ensure the Hemisphere remains safe, prosperous, and free.”
For white people.
Whatever one thinks of Trump’s policies, and however much one might agree or disagree with his party’s belief in the magnitude of the border crisis, it is easy to see how Trump both invoked and found justification for his policies in the virulent racism that preceded the war.
Late in the 1980s, when I knew I wanted to go to graduate school to study American history, one of the first books I read was Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny. It is a fantastic book that got me thinking. Horsman wrote about the origins of “American Racial Anglo-Saxonism,” tracing its roots back to the Tudor antiquarians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Trump speaks the language of these racial Anglo-Saxonists. After the War of 1812, for example, Trump asserted, the United States was “guided by the steadfast belief that our Nation was destined by divine providence to expand to the golden shore of the Pacific Ocean.” After “Mexican forces launched an ambush along the Rio Grande, killing 11 and wounding 6 American troops” (a highly dubious proposition), and “with the promise of Manifest Destiny beating in every American heart” (another highly dubious proposition), President James K. Polk commenced a violent invasion that seized more than half of Mexico’s territory and even more of its arable soil. (Trump, of course, did not call it that). It was a war of territorial aggression that led to the United States claiming much of Mexico, many of its citizens, and many thousands of Indigenous people as subjects of an aggressively expanding American empire.
Not all Americans supported the war, and the notion that Manifest Destiny beat in every American heart is simply not true. Mexicans and Indigenous people, after all, did not feel that this war was a good thing, and they are Americans, too. But many white Americans were deeply concerned about the American aggression in Texas and beyond.
The Mexican War is a big subject, and I suspect that many of us in our survey courses do not do it justice. One way I have found useful to get at this in the classroom is by looking at the career of John Quincy Adams, the greatest ex-president in American history. Leonard Richards’ old, brief biography of Adams’s congressional career is wonderful. I am sure there is more recent work out there, but because my department long ago dispensed with its survey courses, a decision I gradually came to support, I no longer have occasion to teach these classes.
It is important to remember that by the middle of the 1830s a national two-party political system had emerged. The Second American Party System, as it is called, was the product of the politics of the Market Revolution. These two parties, to a very great extent, disagreed over the economic and political future of the United States. They were struggling to define this thing called a “Republic,” a vague concept which all embraced but over which different people could disagree. By 1840, these two parties, Whigs and Democrats, were competing in all parts of the country, a product of the extraordinary political talent of Martin van Buren, who worked harder than anyone to try to keep the slavery issue out of politics.
The territorial expansion of the United States, the fulfillment of what newspaperman John L. O’Sullivan called its “Manifest Destiny,” would introduce questions about race, slavery, the economic and political future of the United States, and the definition of the Republic that could not easily be avoided, and Adams played an important role in this story. He did not retire after his presidency. He was elected to Congress from Massachusetts in 1831 and would serve for the next seventeen years until his death in 1848. Throughout these years, Adams was an enemy of the Slave Power conspiracy, premised on the belief that slaveowners and their allies would do anything to protect the institution of slavery, even if that meant depriving white people of their constitutional rights. Adams, for instance, led the fight against the Gag Rule, through which pro-slavery members of the House and Senate managed to shut off all debate on antislavery petitions which floated into Congress.
If you teach this material, you will need to remind your students that the first amendment to the Constitution guarantees citizens the right to petition their legislators, a cornerstone of the Bill of Rights. The gag rule, Adams argued, was obviously unconstitutional. Adams we should point out, was not an abolitionist—he thought they were troublemakers, but he did believe strongly that the constitution mattered. Adams considered the gage rule to be “in direct violation of the constitution of the United States, of the rules of the House, and of the rights of my constituents.” Because the gag had to be renewed at every session of Congress, there were frequent opportunities to excoriate southern slave-owners and northern Jacksonians for denying the right to petition, and to savage them on constitutional grounds. John C. Calhoun, obviously a supporter of slavery, called Adams a “mischievous bad old Man.” The gag rule, it should be pointed out, served the interests of slaveowners, and the Jacksonians quite well. How could Van Buren and others focus attention on banking and currency reform if Congress had to continually deal with the slavery question. The Gag Rule was consistent with Van Buren’s goal of keeping slavery out of politics.
Adams was able to bring up slavery despite the gag rule. In February 1837, for instance, he tried to introduce a petition from nine women in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He tried to present it, arguing that they wanted the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and not abolition in toto. No matter, the resolution was tabled. Then Adams asked the speaker to rule on another piece of paper, one that looked like a petition, but was filled with scratches and marks “purporting to come from slaves.” Could this, he asked, be presented? The question produced an immediate reaction as southerners jumped at the implication that slaves had the right to petition congress. Adams sat back as confusion reigned. Some said he should be expelled for introducing a resolution from slaves. He pointed out that he had said “purported.” Later he said that the resolution did indeed come from slaves, but they were slaves that preferred slavery to abolition and wanted Congress not to tamper with slavery in any way. This made his opponents even madder. This went on for five days, to Adams’ great satisfaction. Adams was receiving nearly a dozen assassination threats a month.
During his years in Congress he had other opportunities to annoy proslavery zealots. In 1841, he defended 39 Africans before the Supreme Court after they had seized control over the slave ship Amistad. These Africans, sailing from one part of Cuba to another, had rebelled and captured the ship they were on. They hoped to sail to Africa, but they were deceived by their Spanish hostage crew, and ended up on Long Island Sound. Adams and his associates won the case and the Africans were returned to Africa on the grounds that Africans were never the legal property of the Spaniards. Rather, they were “kidnapped Africans, who by the laws of Spain itself were entitled to their freedom.”
In many ways, the Jacksonians played into Adams’ hands. In no way was this more so than over Texas. The Jacksonians were, in general, land hungry and beholden to frontier interests. They were an aggressively-expansionist party. Many Whigs, their opponents, did not share their enthusiasm for acquiring additional chunks of land. They wanted to develop what the United States already had, they said. They worried that adding “inferior races” could weaken the republic. And they could not help but notice that Jacksonian expansion seemed to benefit the plantation south more than the rest of the country. Adams became convinced that Jacksonian expansion was part of a larger “Slave Power Conspiracy.” Most of all, the Jacksonians wanted Texas.
The Texas issue, of course, grew out of the Mexican Revolution. Mexico had gained its independence from Spain in 1821. In 1823, in order to create a buffer zone between Mexico’s interior and the United States, the Mexican government encouraged migration into Texas. Land hungry Americans came in droves, in greater numbers than expected, outnumbering Mexicans by 2 to 1, and this produced alarm in Mexico City. The Mexican government, after all, abolished slavery in 1829, and in 1830 it enacted a law directing immigrants to abide by Mexican Law and custom, part of which was Roman Catholicism. But the Mexican government was too weak to enforce its authority. Then in 1834, General Santa Anna seized control of the Mexican government and established a dictatorship. Texans revolted and Santa Anna, with 6000 men, stormed into Texas in 1836, killing 188 at the Alamo and 300 more at the Goliad.
The Texans, with aid from the southern states, fought back and when they won their independence, they appealed to the United States to recognize Texan independence. Adams had little use for the Texas rebels. Like many northerners, he suspected that the Texas Revolution was part of a plot hatched by slaveowners to further southern interests. Adams accused the supporters of the Texans of being racists. He asked speaker of the house James K. Polk, “Do not you, an Anglo-Saxon, slave-holding exterminator of Indians, from the bottom of your soul, hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian emancipator of slaves and abolisher of slavery?” Adams’s stand was popular, especially his belief that southerners hoped to carve up several slave states out of the Texas region. His claim that the Texas Revolution was a criminal act set off by enslavers and land speculators had instant appeal throughout much of the Northeast.
Andrew Jackson was unable to do anything about annexing Texas. Van Buren, his successor, had little interest in doing so, as he was firmly committed to keeping slavery out of politics. William Henry Harrison, a Whig, was elected President in 1840, and he too had little interest in annexation, but he died soon after taking office. He was replaced by John Tyler, who was scarcely a Whig at all. In fact, Tyler’s stand on banking was similar in many ways to Jackson, and that alienated Whig power broker Senator Henry Clay and others who largely read him out of the party. Tyler became a president without a party. He saw the Texas issue as his only hope for political salvation.
Adams watched Tyler with suspicion. In a speech to his constituents, Adams insisted that “Your country is no longer a democracy, it is no longer even a republic—it is a government of 2 or 300,000 holders of slaves, to the utter exclusion of the remaining part, and all the population of the other states in the Union.” Now Tyler’s trump card was that British politicians had made antislavery speeches for home consumption, and they had stated that they favored a free and independent Texas as an alternative to southern cotton and as a barrier to further American expansion. Thus Tyler’s supporters could throw back at Adams that the was abetting a foreign conspiracy, one orchestrated by the British, designed to reduce the growing economic power of the United States.
After February of 1844, Tyler’s secretary of state was John C. Calhoun. Tyler charged him with completing negotiations for the annexation of Texas. In April 1844, Calhoun sent the treaty to the Senate, along with a copy of a letter he had written to Richard Pakenham, the British minister to Washington. The “Pakenham letter” was a bombshell. Besides denouncing Pakenham’s government for interfering in Texas and supporting abolition throughout the world, Calhoun sang the praises of slavery and cited statistics to prove that blacks were better off as slaves than freedmen. He justified annexation as a means of defending the institution of slavery. So what? The letter strengthened Adams and the northern whigs, because it proved that Texas annexation was about acquiring additional land for the institution of slavery. The annexation treaty was defeated overwhelmingly in the Senate.
Adams knew that the election of 1844, which pitted Clay against the democrat James K. Polk, would revolve around Texas. Speaking to a Boston audience, Adams said that “your trial is approaching. The spirit of freedom and the spirit of slavery are drawing together for the deadly conflict of arms. The annexation of Texas to this Union is the blast of the trumpet for a foreign, civil, servile, and Indian war, of which the government of your country, fallen into faithless hands, have already given the signal—first by a shameless treaty, rejected by a virtuous senate; and again by the glove of defiance, hurled by the apostle of nullification, at the avowed policy of the British empire peacefully to promote the extinction of slavery throughout the world. Young men of Boston: Burnish your honor, prepare for the conflict, and I say to you, in the language of Galgacus to the ancient Britons, think of your forefathers! Think of your Posterity!” (I had to look up who Galgacus was, too, but even if you don’t, I think you can catch the urgency of his tone).
Despite Adams’ efforts, Polk won the election, and Adams expected gloomy days ahead for the republic under Tyler’s successor. Now Tyler had submitted a joint resolution annexing Texas to the United States. A joint resolution requires only a majority vote of both houses, rather than the 2/3 required for the ratification of a treaty. The Texans were wary, and to sweeten the pot, Polk accepted the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas. The Texas he saw added to the union, in other words, was larger in a sense than the Texas that had broke away from Mexico. THAT Mexico had its southern border at the Nueces River. Polk was an incredibly hard-driving and aggressive president. He was willing to compromise his territorial ambitions when it came to a dispute with Britain over the Oregon boundary, but never on the question of gaining additional territory from Mexico. Polk sent John Slidell as his emissary to Mexico City with authority to buy California and New Mexico from the Mexican government, and to get Mexico to recognize the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas.
Word of Slidell’s mission arrived in Mexico before Slidell did, and soon after his arrival the Mexican government was overthrown by general Mariano Paredes and some 7000 soldiers. The new military regime refused to have anything to do with Slidell, and asserted Mexico’s claim to all of Texas. Polk regarded this rejection of Slidell as cause for war. Then he got word of General Zachary Taylor losing the eleven men Trump mentioned as the result of a supposed Mexican invasion of American soil. To Adams, Polk had provoked this war to extend slavery. Not everybody agreed with this interpretation. Some simply did not believe that the President would do this, or that it made sense for him to do so. But the point is clear. The Mexican War was an immense watershed. The two-party system was beginning to fall apart along sectional lines. This combustible situation was made clear in August of 1846, when a congressman from Pennsylvania, a democrat named David Wilmot, introduced an amendment to an appropriation bill that the President’s supporters tried to push through Congress at the last second.
Wilmot and his co-sponsors hoped to ban slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico. He was not an abolitionist. Wilmot said “I have no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery, nor morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”
The Wilmot Proviso did nothing that would have destroyed the institution of slavery, but it did say that slavery should not expand. That implied that there was something unclean, something dishonorable, about slavery. The Wilmot Proviso thus made clear a number of significant cracks in the Second American party System. Both northern Democrats and northern Whigs supported the Proviso. Many of these northerners were coming to believe in the Slave Power Conspiracy. Slaveowners, the story went, were members of an anti-democratic aristocracy that was willing to subvert the nation’s democratic institutions to protect the institution of slavery. The south already had unequal representation in the House because of the 3/5 clause. Slavery was now spreading, subverting institutions wherever it went. Looking on these events, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson could see that “Mexico will poison us.”
I MARRIED INTO A MEXICAN-AMERICAN FAMILY. I don’t speak Spanish well at all, but I can understand it. Watching Bad Bunny with my Mexican-American partner, her sister, our children, made it even more clear than it otherwise would have been how well he struck so many notes that resonated with his audience. It really was a fantastic performance, and I am sure I will watch it again to catch things that I missed—some of which were pointed out by observers far more astute than I.
Manifest Destiny. Ask an American about their nation’s history, and I find that even if they do not know the subject well, they will be able to tell you something about manifest destiny. It is one of those odd concepts, or bits of information, that really seems to stick. When I ask, students recite pretty easily that it meant that it was God’s plan that the United States expand across the continent. But expansion is such a bland word, isn’t it? Invade. Seize. Colonize. Take, steal, rob, exploit, and conquer. All these words seem to get at the underlying reality with more precision.
For those of us who teach Indigenous history, the expressions of this manifest design are so easy to see in the Annual Reports of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, all helpfully digitized by the University of Wisconsin. Indian Commissioner William Medill in 1848 argued, for example, that “Apathy, barbarism, and heathenism must give way to energy, civilization, and Christianity, and so the Indian of this continent has been displaced by the European.”
You see it, don’t you? “Manifest Destiny” meant the dispossession of Indigenous people. And as Horsman showed so well, Mexicans, too, were viewed as a race vastly inferior to the white Anglo-Saxons Americans idealized and idolized. So Bad Bunny ended his performance at the Super Bowl by reciting the names of the nations of the Americas. He showed the audience a football inscribed with the words, “Together We Are America.” Trump, meanwhile, who clearly was watching, posted on his silly Twitter knock-off a racist screed. He was angry, it seems to me, because Bad Bunny showed that Manifest Destiny was a racist fantasy. Americans’ attempts to fulfill that manifest destiny, to be sure, ruined the lives of millions of people, but Bad Bunny proved that it was a racist lie, an invocation of God to seize the life, liberty, and property of an enormous number of perfectly innocent people. Manifest Destiny was genocidal, in that if God’s plan was fulfilled in the way the white supremacists wished there would be no Spanish speakers left on this continent. It seems like maybe, just maybe, God did not want that after all. If there is a god, I would like to think that they are far more happy with the splendid color and beauty on display at halftime than the swinish grunts of the racist pig who leads the Republican Party.
