The War with Mexico and the Poison of Slavery, 1846-1850

THE WAR WITH MEXICO AND THE POISON OF SLAVERY, 1846-1850

UNIT #11

I. THE POLITICAL BACKDROP BETWEEN NORTH AND SOUTH ON THE EVE OF THE WAR WITH MEXICO

A. THE NORTH-SOUTH COMPACT STRUCK IN 1787 CALLED FOR

______BETWEEN THE TWO SECTIONS

1. By 1840, the split was ______(see Map 8.1)

B. THIS BALANCE WAS MAINTAINED BY A STRING OF ______

PRESIDENTS

1. The South of the 1790’s had hoped that the new Southeast--from Kentucky,

Tennessee, and Alabama west to the Mississippi--would fill up faster than the Old

Northwest, thereby tipping the national balance toward the slave interest.

3. In addition, Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase of 1803 had, by 1848, yielded four new

states. Three of them--Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri--allowed slavery. Just

one, Iowa, prohibited it.

4. Florida, pacified by Andrew Jackson and purchased from Spain in 1819 by James

Monroe of Virginia, entered the Union in 1845 as a slave state.

5. That same year, President James K. Polk, a Tennesseean, annexed slave-owning

Texas, the biggest prize of all. Its entry into the Union had even produced a rare

concession: Texas could divide into as many as 5 states with 10 U.S. Senators!

6. However, although these admissions kept the sectional balance in the Senate, rapid

population growth in states like New York and Pennsylvania gave the North a

growing edge in the House of Representatives.

C. BY 1847, THE SOUTH SAW ITS POSITION IN THE SENATE

THREATENED BY ITS INABILITY TO ACQUIRE MORE SLAVE STATES

SO AS TO PRESERVE THIS BALANCE

1. The South’s only remaining geographic route to acquiring the necessary new slave

states lay in the U.S. expanding into ______, the ______

and ______.

II. THE WAR WITH MEXICO

A. THE WAR WITH MEXICO BROUGHT INTO SHARP CONTRAST TWO

DIFFERENT CONCEPTS OF “______”

1. The Democratic Party’s idea of progress: spread of existing institutions over ______.

This idea was summed up the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. “When God crowned

American arms with success sin the Revolution, [declared] a Democratic

congressman in 1845, He had not ‘designed that the original States should be the

only abode of liberty on earth. On the contrary, He only designed them as the great

center from which civilization, religion, and liberty should radiate and radiate until

the whole continent shall bask in their blessing.’”

2. The Whig idea of progress: envisaged the improvement of institutions over ______.

a. Whigs were not opposed to extending the blessings of American liberty, even to

Mexicans and Indians, but they objected to doing this by force.

b. Reflecting the Evangelical Protestant origin of much of their ideology, they placed

their faith in mission rather than in annexation. “As a city set upon a hill,”

Whigs insisted that the United States should spread the ideas of “true republicanism”

by example rather than conquest.

c. Horace Greeley identified the other tenet of Whig ideology: “Opposed to the instinct

of boundless acquisition stands that of Internal Improvement. A nation cannot

simultaneously devote its energies to the absorption of other’s territories and the

improvement of its own.”

B. POLKS’S PRIMARY WAR AIM: ______

C. THE TRIUMPH OF MANIFEST DESTINY

1. He won a military victory so lopsided that the US could buy for just $15m two of

Mexico’s largest jurisdictions that could become states: ______and ______.

2. Indeed, Polk wanted all of Mexico. However, opponents in Congress, including

most ______and a minority of ______, successfully blocked any such

move and its obvious objective: ______. In fact,

______would turn out to be the last.

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson darkly prophesied that “the United States will conquer Mexico,

but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico

will poison us.”

III. THE POISON OF SLAVERY

A. JEFFERSON’S EMPIRE FOR LIBERTY HAD BECOME MOSTLY AN

EMPIRE FOR SLAVERY

1. Territorial acquisitions since the Revolution had added the slave states of Louisiana,

Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas to the republic, while only Iowa, just admitted

in 1846, had increased the ranks of free states.

2. Many northerners feared a similar future for this new southwestern empire.

a. They condemned the war as part of a “slave power conspiracy” to extend slavery.

b. Was not President Polk himself a slave owner? Had he not been elected on a

platform of enlarging slave territory by annexing Texas? Were not proslavery

southerners among the most aggressive proponents of manifest destiny? And did not

most of the territory (including Texas) wrested from Mexico lie south of the old

Missouri Compromise line of 36 30’—a traditional demarcation line between

freedom and slavery?

c. A Georgia newspaper heightened abolitionist suspicions of a slave power conspiracy

when it wrote in support of seizing Mexican territory, “it would “secure to the South

the balance of power in the Confederacy, and for all coming time…give to her the

control in the operations of the Government.”

B. THE WILMONT PROVISO, 1847

1. Northern Democrats and Northern Whigs feared that slavery would march into the new

territories if allowed to do so. To make sure that it didn’t, they voted for a resolution

introduced by Democratic congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania to exclude

slavery there. This was the fateful ______. This

bipartisan northern coalition in the House passed it over the united opposition of

southern Democrats and Whigs. This was a dire omen.

2. The significance of the Wilmot Proviso was that it transformed the ______

______into a ______.

3. But the South’s greater number in the Senate (15 slave states versus 14 free states

comprised the Union in 1847) enabled it to block the Wilmot Proviso there.

C. FREE-SOIL SENTIMENT IN 1847 CAN BE VISUALIZED AS THREE

CONCENTRIC CIRCLES

1. Center: ______who considered slavery as a sinful violation of human

rights that should be immediately removed.

2. Larger circle: ______people who looked upon bondage as an evil.

3. Outer circle: all those who had voted for the Wilmot Proviso but who did not consider

slavery as the most crucial issue facing the country. This outer circle included such

Whigs as Abraham Lincoln who believed slavery “an unqualified evil to the negro, the

white man, and the State” which “deprives our republican example of its just influence

in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as

hypocrites.” But Lincoln also believed, at this time, that “the promulgation of

abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils” by uniting the South

in defense of the institution.

4. All “free soilers” agreed on the following: [55]

a. free labor was ______.

b. slavery ______and thereby degraded white labor.

c. slavery inhibited ______and ______.

d. the institution mired all southerners, except the slave owning gentry, in ______

and repressed the development of a ______economy.

e. slavery must be kept out of the new territories so that free labor could flourish there.

D. SOUTHERNERS BRISTLED AT THESE ATACKS ON THEIR SOCIAL

SYSTEM

1. By 1840, the South no longer viewed slavery was no longer a necessary evil but “a

great moral, social, and political blessing—a blessing to the slave, and…to the master.”

2. For these reasons, southerners wanted to extend the blessings of this institutions to the

new territories. Any effort to exclude it was viewed by southerners as an insult to their

honor.

E. SUMMARY & ASSESSMENT OF THIS UNIT

1. James K. Polk presided over the acquisition of more territory than any other president

in American history. During his one-term administration the country expanded by

two-thirds with the annexation of Texas, the settlement of the Oregon boundary, and

the seizure of all Mexican provinces north of 31 degrees. It was this huge addition that

used in a period of intensified sectional conflict that erupted into civil war a decade and

a half later.

2. The Wilmot Proviso, though defeated, transformed the division by parties into a

conflict of sections each espousing a radically different system of values.

3. By 1847, the South was launching a vigorous counterattack against the northern thesis

that slavery was an evil institution, making deeper the cultural divide separating the

two sections.

Copyrighted 1/19/04: AFR

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B. FOR SOUTHERN LEADERS LOOKING DUE WEST FROM CHARLESTON OR

MONTGOMERY, THE POLITICAL HORIZON LOOKED BLEAK.

1. California, despite considerable southern population and sympathy, entered the

Union as a free state in 1850.

2. New Mexico, which adopted a slave code in 1859, was kept in territorial status

until 1912.

3. Mormon Utah, where pre-civil war slavery was uncommon but legal, stayed a

territory until 1896.

4. Pro-slavery forces lost in Kansas in 1858. After California, then only new

admissions of the 1850’s were two other free states: Minnesota in 1858 and Oregon

in 1859.

5. Even Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, free states but southern in their early settlement,

tipped toward a more antislavery politics in the 1850’s (giving rise to Lincoln) as

Yankee settlers flooded west through the canal and railroad systems.

C. NORTHERN STRATEGISTS, IN TURN, WITH VICTORY IN SIGHT, SAW

SHUTTING THE SOUTH’S DOOR TO MEXICO AS MANDATORY.

1. After California, Minnesota, and Oregon, only a few more territories were ripening

for statehood: Kansas (finally admitted in 1861), and Nebraska (1867).

2. In short, the political math worked out the same way on either side of the

Mason-Dixon line. Should the South add Cuba and six to eight Mexican states to

the slaveholding side, the North would be hard put to match them. Without Cuba

and Mexico, though, the South was blocked--not simply checked but checkmated.

Thus, by 1859-1860, Southerners, not suprisingly, were also talking about pursuing

Caribbean acquisitions as an independent nation.

a. The Charleston Mercury assumed that “we shall have all of the Gulf country once

we have shaken ourselves free from the puritans.”

b. US Senator Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi summed up his region’s

ambition: “I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it....I

want Tamaulipas, Potosi and one or two other Mexican states--for the planting

and spreading of slavery.”

C. UNTIL THE DISAPPOINTMENTS OF THE MEXICAN WAR, THE SOUTH

SEEMED TO BE WINNING

1. From 1801 to 1850, eight men souther-born and-raised occupied the presidency for

forty-two years. The two Northerners--John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren

served a total of just eight years. Democratic presidents turned expansionism into

almost a religion.

a. Native Americans were moved from Florida, Georgia and Alabama to Oklahoma.

b. Spaniards were pushed aside.

c. large numbers of slaves were sent west to the new cotton fields of the lower

Mississippi, the Red River, and the Brazos. So large was migration from the

south Atlantic states that by 1850, about 40% of the free persons born in South

Carolina were living elsewhere, and 83,000 slaves had also been sold out of the

state, mostly to the new southwest.

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