A History of the American People

if on cue, the same evening, May 9, the Mexican army attacked a US unit on the American' side of the Rio Grande, killing eleven, wounding five, and taking the rest prisoner. The next day Polk was able to go to Congress boiling with simulated wrath. Even before the murders, he said,The
cup of forbearance had been exhausted.' Now Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory, and shed American blood upon American soil.' One of the few to protest about the provocation and hypocrisy of Polk was a new character on the American public scene, freshman Congressman Abraham Lincoln (1809-65), who argued that Polk had in effect started the war motivated with a desire formilitary glory ... that serpent's
eye which charms to destroy,' and that, as a result, the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.' A good many New England intellectuals, antecedents of those who would protest against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, agreed with Lincoln. On the other hand, it is difficult now to conjure up the contempt felt by most Americans in the 1840s for the way Mexico was governed, or misgoverned, the endless coups and pronunciamentos, the intermittent and exceedingly cruel and often bloody civil conflicts, and the general insecurity of life and property. It made moral as well as economic and political sense for the civilized United States to wrest as much territory as possible from the hands of Mexico's greedy and irresponsible rulers. The Mexican War of 1846 was important because of its consequences. But it also had a lot of high, and sometimes low, comedy. Polk tried to play politics with the war from start to finish. In the first place he allowed the slippery Santa Ana, who was in exile in Cuba, to return to Mexico, the general having promised him he would usurp power and give America the treaty it wanted. In fact Santa Ana, who always broke his promises, broke this one too and provided such serious resistance as the American army encountered. Polk, as Senator Benton wrote, wanteda small
war, just large enough to require a treaty of peace, and not large enough to make military
reputations, dangerous for the presidency.’ Polk also wanted to fight the war on the cheap,
starving Taylor of supplies at first, and putting volunteers on short engagements. Taylor
protested, refused to budge until supplies arrived, then won a brilliant three-day battle at
Monterey, taking the city. That worried Polk, who feared Taylor would get the Whig nomination
in 1848. Polk then tried to appoint Senator Benton, of all people, as a political general to control
the army. Congress would not have that. So he turned instead to General Winfield Scott (1786-
1866), general-in-chief of the army. Scott was a Whig and politically ambitious too, but he
served to balance Taylor and take some of the glory from him. He was known as 'Fuss-and-
Feathers' because of his insistence on pipeclay and gleaming brass. Scott immediately got into a
row with Polk's Secretary of War, William L. Marcy-the man who had coined the term the
spoils system'-again over paucity of supplies, and, in reply to a quibbling letter from Marcy, he wrote that he had received it in campas I sat down to take a hasty plate of soup.' This self-
pitying phrase circulated in Washington, and got Scott dubbed `Marshal Tureen.’
Fortunately for Polk, both Scott and Taylor were competent generals, and there was a dazzling
supporting cast under them-Captains Robert E. Lee and George B. McClellan, Lieutenant
Ulysses S. Grant and Colonel Jefferson Davis, all of whom distinguished themselves. In some
ways Mexico was a dress-rehearsal for the professional military side of the Civil War. Taylor
was supposed to strike for Mexico City across 500 miles of desert, with inadequate means. On
March 9, 1847, Scott's army, also starved of equipment, landed at Vera Cruz without loss, the
first big amphibious operation ever mounted by US forces. This was the short route to Mexico
City. On May 15, having taken the second city, Puebla, Scott had to let a third of his army return
home as their enlistments had run out. He insisted on waiting for more. Thus reinforced, he won