|
|
 |
 |
From the War with Mexico to "Enduring Freedom"
|
|
|
|
From November 2001 . . .
I'm currently teaching History 582.01, an upper-division survey of American military history from Colonial times through 1914. Despite the nominal parameters of the course, it is impossible to ignore the recent World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks, the U.S. response in Afghanistan, and so on. For that reason I decided to invite several antiwar activists to address the class.
To prepare the way for their arrival--and more importantly, to ground the discussion in the context of the course--I created a special lecture. The U.S. War with Mexico seemed a good point of departure.
I. Introduction: "Blowback"
The CIA coined the term "blowback" to describe the unintended adverse consequences of covert operations. Political scientist Chalmers Johnson has used the term to analyze the unintended adverse consequences of US foreign policy in general.
II. The War with Mexico
The war began as an attempt by the United States to acquire territory between Louisiana Purchase and Pacific, especially upper California. California had San Francisco, the best harbor on the Pacific coast. The advantages for US trade with Asia were obvious.
The Polk administration offered to buy the region for $15 million. The Mexican government refused to sell, fearing that if it did so popular outcry would topple it from power. (The area constituted half of Mexico as of 1845.)
The Polk administration responded by sending an “Army of Occupation” into a disputed region of Texas. Then and since, this was widely seen as an attempt to goad Mexico into war. It worked. Fighting began in May 1846. The conflict lasted until 1848, when the US got the territory it wanted. The cost: $15 million plus $3.25 million in debts owed by US citizens to Mexico, which US agreed to accept. Plus US dead: about 7,700, mostly from disease.
The war was popular among most Democrats and in the South. It met significant opposition elsewhere, because it seemed a blatant power grab quite possibly intended to create “an empire for slavery.”
A. Voices against the war
1. Abraham Lincoln
As a first-term Illinois congressman, Lincoln rose on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to denounce the Polk administration's policy. He thought President himself "deeply conscious of being on the wrong side in this matter." He must feel "the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, crying from the ground against him." Polk's real policy, Lincoln averred, was to distract public with dream of military glory, "that rainbow that rises in showers of blood, that serpent's eye that charms but to destroy."
2. Henry David Thoreau
. . . opposed the war in a famous essay, Civil Disobedience
3. James Russell Lowell, Bigelow Papers
They may talk of Freedom's airy
Tell they're purple in the face,--
It's a grand gret cemetery
Fer the barthrights of our race;
They jest want this Californy
So's to lug new slave states in
To abuse ye, an' to scorn ye,
An' to plunder ye like sin.
4. Ulysses S. Grant: The Civil War as "blowback"
Grant was a young officer with
Zachary Taylor's Army of Occupation along the Rio Grande in 1845-1846. "We were
sent to provoke a fight," he wrote in his memoirs, "but it was essential that
Mexico commence it. It was very doubtful whether Congress would declare war; but
if Mexico should attack our troops, the Executive could announce, `Whereas, war
exists by the acts of, etc., and prosecute the war with vigor. Once initiated
there were but few public men who would have the courage to oppose it."
To Grant's mind, the triumph only sowed the wind. In his memoirs he would call
the Mexican War "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a
weaker nation," and, recognizing that the addition of new territory pressed the
slave controversy past the breaking point, he added: "The Southern rebellion was
largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are
punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary
and expensive war of modern times."
