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For the first half of this decade, America commemorated the 50th anniversary of World War II -- Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, V-E Day, V-J Day. During my youth there were similar observances of the Civil War centennial, from Bull Run to Appomattox.
But we are in 1996 at the sesquicentennial of the most important war in American history, and one looks in vain for a Mexican War Commemoration Commission, for battle re-enactments, for commemorative postage stamps, for any evidence that anyone has even noticed.
Most historians would call the Civil War the most important, but there wouldn't have been a Civil War without the Mexican War. It gave North and South a West to fight over (the issue in 1860 wasn't slavery per se, but expansion of slavery into the new territories).
The proximate cause of the Mexican War was the U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845. Texas had declared its independence from Mexico in 1836 -- an act Mexico refused to recognize -- and from then on, the Republic of Texas tried to attach itself to the Union even as it printed money, exchanged diplomats and otherwise exercised its sovereignty.
But much of America didn't want Texas. New Englanders and Midwesterners argued that Texas was a domain of slaveholders, and adding it would just expand slavery.
So matters stood until James Knox Polk was elected in 1844 on an expansion platform. Seeing that annexation was inevitable, President John Tyler pushed it through Congress in early 1845 before Polk took office.
Then followed the usual method of getting America into war: station troops in a provocative place, and arrange for the other side to fire first.
In this case, the western border of Texas was rather vague. The boundary might have been the Nueces River, or the Rio Grande, a hundred miles west.
American soldiers crossed the Nueces and approached the Rio Grande. Finally the Mexican Army responded. American troops had been fired upon, and President Polk had his war.
Lest this explanation sound unduly cynical, it comes from the memoirs of a young American lieutenant who distinguished himself in the campaign.
The war with Mexico, he wrote, was provoked by the
action of the army,
resulted from a conspiracy to
acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed
for the American Union,
and was in general one of
the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker
nation.
In Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau was so appalled
that he refused to pay his poll tax and spent a night in
jail. It inspired his essay Civil Disobedience,
one
of the most influential writings ever, an inspiration to
Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King.
In Washington, a Whig congressman from Illinois derailed his political career. He tried the same straddle that Gulf War opponents would use 145 later -- he supported the troops and voted the funds, but opposed the war. It didn't work, and that was the only term that Abraham Lincoln served.
On the military front, American soldiers were outnumbered and had a long supply line to protect. The generals were Whigs, the President was a Democrat, and he thwarted them often to keep the war from producing a heroic general who could then take the White House from the Democrats.
The U.S. Army managed anyway, and managed brilliantly. Many men who would be heard from later -- Robert E. Lee, George B. McClellan, George G. Meade, Thomas J. Jackson -- learned their soldiering during the Mexican War.
The one who learned the most was that young lieutenant mentioned earlier, Ulysses S. Grant, at an obscure battle called Palo Alto along the Rio Grande where American artillery prevailed against a much larger Mexican force.
Historian Bernard de Voto observed that Grant there
learned about fire power. In four years of the Civil War
he only twice forgot the superiority of metal to human
flesh.... a great part of the defeat of the Confederate
States of America was inflicted in the muggy Mexican sun on
May 8, 1846. For the far more brilliant Lee, who had as
much chance as Grant to learn the lesson, never learned
it.
The Mexican War added Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California to the Union, along with pieces of Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Kansas.
It inspired some enduring literature -- Thoreau's essay and Grant's Memoirs (unlike modern generals, Grant was literate and did not need to employ a ghost-writer).
It offers our politics and our imperialism at their worst, and our military at its best, succeeding despite being outnumbered and in hostile territory.
And yet we seem bent on pretending that it never
happened. Is it because the revisionists will attack a
tasteless celebration of American imperialism
? Or
perhaps the right-thinkers will denounce revisionists
who cast doubt on the eternal purity of American
motives
?
Who knows? But by ignoring the Mexican War, we become a nation of cowards, unwilling to deal with our own history.
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