In May 1846, Ulysses S. Grant, a 24-year-old lieutenant in the U.S. Army’s Fourth Infantry only three years out of West Point, saw his first action in Palo Alto, Mexico, in the opening engagement of the Mexican War. “I do not know that I felt any particular sensation,” he told a friend. “War seems much less horrible to persons engaged in it than to those who read of the battles.” The war, in which he served until its conclusion a year later, was a valuable school in which he observed at close hand, and learned much from, two great generals, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, and solidified his friendships with other young officers, some of whom he fought with — and against — a decade and a half later in the Civil War.
(Knopf) - ’A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico’ by Amy S. Greenberg (Knopf)
The Mexican War may have been Grant’s post-graduate university, but he hated it. “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico,” he wrote in 1879. “I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.” That passage serves as epigraph for Amy S. Greenberg’s study of the war, and as inspiration as well for the book’s title. Grant was right. The invasion of Mexico by forces of the United States was an entirely aggressive undertaking, engineered by a stubborn, duplicitous, humorless president — James Knox Polk — who was obsessed with visions of Manifest Destiny and believed it his life’s mission not merely to extend American holdings to the Pacific Coast but to extend the slave territory (he was himself a slaveholder) as far as possible.
Polk’s case for starting the war was trumped up. He insisted that “Mexico had insulted the United States to such a degree that honor required the southern neighbor be punished,” Greenberg writes, and he completely ignored “the many injuries done to Mexico by the United States — the annexation of Texas, the occupation of the Nueces Strip, the repeated insults offered by America’s incompetent and offensive minister.” His reasoning was steeped in racism: “Mexico, inferior in both race and power, must necessarily bend to the will of its neighbor. To those who suggested that it might be unseemly, even un-Christian, to attack a weaker nation, Polk argued that ‘we must treat all nations, whether great or small, strong or weak, alike.’ ” Polk “believed the domination of white over black was part of God’s plan,” that “domination of the strong over the weak, and white over black or brown, was not just the reality of slavery, it was also . . . right.”
Many Americans disagreed, some of them passionately. Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock wrote in his diary: “We have not one particle of right to be here. . . . It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses.” Greenberg writes that around the country “martial ardor cooled as the war dragged on, scores of volunteers died of disease, and reports of bad behavior on the front diminished the glory of volunteering.” An elderly woman in Philadelphia wrote: “I feel so much more sorrow & disgust, than heroism in this war. . . . When we were obliged to fight for our liberty — and rights — there was motive & glory in the strife — but to invade a country and slaughter its inhabitants — to fight for boundary — or political supremacy — is altogether against my principles and feelings.”
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