SEVEN
SEA TO SHINING SEA
These Spaniards [Mexicans] are the meanest looking
race of people I ever saw, don't appear more civilized
than our Indians generally. Dirty, "filthy looking creatures.- Captain Lemuel Ford, 1835
That the Indian ra ce of Mexico must recede before us, is quite as
certain as that that is the destiny of our own Indians.
-Waddy Thompson Jr., 1836Captain Lemuel Ford of the First Dragoons, United States Army,
made the above observation in his diary, referring to Comanche
ros, Mexican traders in northern Mexico who traded and intermar
ried primarily with Comanches on the plains. Waddy Thompson Jr.
served as a US diplomat to Mexico from 1842 to 1844.1 Army offi
cers like Ford and diplomats like Thompson were not exceptional in
their racist views. Indian hating and white supremacy were part and
parcel of "democracy" and "freedom."
The populist poet of Jacksonian democracy, Walt Whitman, sang
the song of manhood and the Anglo-American super race that had
been steeled through empire. As an enthusiastic supporter of the US
war against Mexico in 1846, Whitman proposed the stationing of
sixty thousand US troops in Mexico in order to establish a regime
change there "whose efficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed
by the United States. This will bring out enterprise, open the way for
manufacturers and commerce, into which the immense dead capi
tal of the country [Mexico] will find its way." 2 Whitman explicitly
grounded this prescription in racism: "The nigger, like the lnjun,
will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history .... A superior