June 9, 2007
The Still-Important Lessons of America’s War Against Mexico Posted by Allen Barra at 09:55 AM EST America’s 1846–1848 war with Mexico was one of the most important and most consequential events in our history. It is also the least known and understood of our wars. Professor Timothy J. Henderson of Auburn University Montgomery has written A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States, one of the first studies of the war and its impact on the Americas from a Mexican perspective. Professor Henderson answered these questions from his home in Montgomery, Alabama. A very good case could be made for calling America’s war with Mexico the most important in our history. By that I mean that many historians feel that one way or another America would eventually have gained its independence from Britain, which leaves the Mexican War as the one that most shaped the country as we know it today. In addition, it also helped create the conditions for the American Civil War. Would you concur with some or all of this? I would love to be able to say that I think this was the most important war in our history. That might be good for book sales. But when you think about it, in history everything that happens leads to whatever happens next, so I don’t think it’s really possible to take any one event out of context and say it’s the most important. In fact, in the first chapter of my book I make the case that the different ways in which the United States and Mexico gained their independence was crucial to how the two countries developed subsequently. The Founding Fathers of the United States were broadly in agreement on most of the important issues. They wanted independence, they wanted representative government, they wanted certain basic rights to be guaranteed, they didn’t want a state church, and so forth. Mexico’s founding fathers had serious disagreements on those fundamental points, which made it hard for them to get much constructive work done. The result was that as the United States grew stronger and wealthier, Mexico grew weaker and poorer. So from this perspective, the wars of independence look pretty decisive. But then you have to ask what caused the wars of independence to go the way they did. Would U.S. independence have been the same had it not been for, say, the Glorious Revolution? Would Mexico’s independence experience have been the same had the wars of the Spanish conquest gone differently? Of course, if you keep on like this you’re going to end up back with Cain slaying Abel, but I think that’s how history operates. It’s all of a piece. I also think people have a healthy skepticism toward authors who go around crowing about how important their topic is. But then again, let’s face it: The U.S.–Mexican War was extremely important. It doubled the size of the United States, halved the size of Mexico, laid the groundwork for two civil wars, and embittered U.S. relations with the rest of the hemisphere down to the present day. And what’s really remarkable is how little attention it’s received from historians. I think if you go into a bookstore in search of a book on the U.S.–Mexican War, it’s a pretty sure bet you’re going to be leaving empty-handed. Meanwhile, you’ll find truckloads of books on the Civil War and World War II. I’m not exactly sure what accounts for that. May I suggest that the reason so little has been written on it is because Americans have always seemed to be a little guilty about the Mexican War? Ulysses S. Grant, for one, did not seem proud to have served in it; late in his life he called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Congressman Abraham Lincoln and Congressman (and ex-President) John Quincy Adams spoke out against it passionately. In Kurt Andersen’s novel Heyday, which came out earlier this year, his chief protagonist is a veteran who is ashamed to have fought in it. When I first read Andersen’s novel, I thought he was projecting a modern attitude back on the wary, but I was surprised at how many prominent Americans were against it at the time. Do you think the war gave Americans something of an uneasy conscience that has stayed with us? I think there may be something to that, though I wouldn’t want to overstate it. First of all, most professional historians—and by that I mean the type that work in universities and write books they don’t necessarily expect to be widely read—are not likely to shy away from a topic because they think it makes their country look bad. Excessive national pride can be a real liability in a profession that prizes objectivity. Second, while it’s true that there was a lot of opposition to the war at the time, that opposition was for a wide variety of reasons, most of which had little to do with sympathy for Mexico. Some thought the war would weaken the South and slavery; some thought the manner in which the war was started subverted the democratic process; still others fretted about how the addition of more territory might be somehow detrimental to the United States. Some military men took a dim view of the war simply because they deemed their opponents to be racially inferior and hence unworthy. As for our own time, my suspicion is that most people nowadays don’t have many strong feelings one way or another about the war, simply because they know almost nothing about it. I talk to people all the time—intelligent, educated folks—who are genuinely surprised to learn that the Southwest came to us by way of a war with Mexico. That’s true even of people who’ve lived their entire lives in the Southwest, and of people who grew up in towns with names like “Buena Vista” and “Monterrey.” If more people knew the circumstances under which the United States began the war with Mexico, they might have cause to cringe. But my impression is that folks who like to read about wars tend to favor military history, and from a purely military standpoint the United States acquitted itself very well in Mexico. The bottom line, I think, is that for Americans—and most peoples of the world, I would guess—winning counts for a great deal, and the United States won the war with Mexico decisively. In the bargain, it achieved the objective of territorial expansion, which I think most Americans broadly supported. And when I read some of the rhetoric in the debate on immigration, I don’t see a nation wracked by guilt over past injustices to Mexico. The most enigmatic Mexican of the war period is Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. To most Americans he is simply the man who killed Davy Crockett at the Alamo and who surrendered Texas to Sam Houston. It’s astonishing to read about Mexican history and find out that a man so seemingly unprincipled could have been such an influence on Mexican politics for so long. What was the secret of his longevity in Mexico? Were there no better and stronger candidates to rule Mexico? Good question. If you look at some of the lowlights of Santa Anna’s career, it’s really hard to understand how anyone could have taken him seriously. Among those lowlights were the notorious massacres at the Alamo and Goliad; the elaborate state funeral he held for his amputated foot; his marriage, at age 50, to a girl of 15, and that coming only a few weeks after the death of his well-regarded wife of 19 years. And then there was the way he insisted on being treated as Old World royalty in what was supposed to be a republic. All of that makes him look to us like a monster or a buffoon. I think there are several reasons for his longevity. First, Mexican politicians of the day were extremely divided between conservatives, who wanted to preserve the old society inherited from colonial days, and liberals, who wanted to change just about everything. There were very talented men on either side, but there was practically no possibility that either side would cooperate with their opponents. Santa Anna wasn’t identified with either side (or, more accurately, he was identified with both sides at different points in his career). People tended to see him as a man of action, someone who would do things while the politicians bickered. His reputation for decisiveness, by the way, was not undeserved. He did tend to take action, even if his actions were not always based on sound judgment. Also, he was very good at cultivating support within the Army and in his home region of Veracruz, which was strategically very important. But in the end I think the crucial factor is something we will never quite understand, given that we will never have the opportunity to actually meet the guy. You can find lots of statements from people who knew the details of Santa Anna’s career and had every reason to be cynical about him, but when they met him face to face they reported that he was nothing like what they’d expected. He seemed to them to be very sober, serious, and impressive, someone you instinctively trust and are inclined to follow. A born leader. His contemporaries obviously saw something in him that gets lost in any mere account of the details of his career. Not to defend the concept of Manifest Destiny, but given the burgeoning power of the United States and the relative weakness of Mexico, was the seizure of Mexico’s northern territories inevitable? Was there a point in the history of Mexican-American relations where things might have been handled differently, possibly resulting in a more amicable settlement of problems? I think Mexico was bound to lose its northern territories one way or another. In fact, Mexico never really had effective control of those territories. If Mexico had had the wherewithal to populate and defend those lands, it probably would never have invited a bunch of Anglos from the United States to settle in Texas in the first place. What military resources Mexico had were being squandered largely on domestic squabbles, and they clearly lacked the capacity to defend those faraway places from predatory nations. And strong nations were indeed predatory. If the United States hadn’t taken those lands from Mexico, some other power likely would have. As for whether the dispute could have been settled more amicably, I think it could have, but there are an awful lot of ifs involved. If the United States had truly understood what a sensitive political issue this was for Mexicans, or at least for Mexican politicians, it might have found a way to purchase Mexico’s lands that would have allowed Mexico to claim some honor and dignity. If Mexico’s leaders had found a way to compromise with one another, they might have found a way to negotiate a deal and claim it as a victory. They might even have found a way to actually populate and defend their northern territories. But the United States was impatient, aggressive, and arrogant. Mexicans were understandably alarmed at the U.S. tendency to lump Mexicans in with those “inferior” races that deserved to be despoiled and dominated. For their part, Mexican politicians were quick to play the blame game. Since successes in Mexico were so few and far between, it was essential to blame someone else for the failures, whether it be rival politicians or the evil United States. José Joaquín de Herrera, who was president of Mexico in 1845, during the crisis over the annexation of Texas, wanted to negotiate the matter and was overthrown for it. For many Mexican politicians and military men, compromise signaled weakness. Showing weakness in a confrontation with the United States could, many Mexicans felt, result in the end of their existence as a nation. So in the end, given the prevailing attitudes on both sides at the time, an amicable solution seems pretty unlikely. Still, the U.S.–Mexican War was so unnecessary and it involved so many dumb decisions—it was like most wars in that respect, I guess—that it’s hard not to think a better outcome could have been reached with just a wee bit more wisdom and patience. You write in your preface that “the immigration issue periodically flares into heated debate, as it did while I was completing this book. On the American far right, some hysterically characterize Mexican immigration as an ‘invasion.’ One fringe group even conjures the specter of a ‘Conquest of Aztlan’–a term often used by Chicano right activists for the territory of northern Mexico ceded to the U.S. by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848—charging that the Mexican government is actively abetting a conspiracy to retake the lands it lost to the United States in 1948.” How can a study of the Mexican War help us to understand and better deal with the immigration controversy of our own time? I’m struck by how similar the debate on immigration is to the debates that preceded the U.S.–Mexican War. The debate tends to treat Mexico as if it were at best irrelevant to the issue, or at worst an agent of evil. It seems that the debaters seldom take into account that the problem now is identical to the problem then, namely the vast disparity in wealth and power between the two countries. Many of the migrants who come here have to abandon their families and endure tremendous hardship. It’s not as if they want to do that; they’re merely behaving as perfectly rational economic actors, going where the jobs are. So it’s offensive when people portray them as an evil brown-skinned horde intent on subverting our nationality and sapping our prosperity. Obviously, if Mexico were to become a prosperous and stable country, then the flow of illegal immigrants would slow to a trickle. Problem solved. During the negotiations on the formation of the European Union, the problem of disparities in wealth was taken into account, and the wealthier countries invested billions to develop the economies of poorer countries like Spain and Portugal. That’s worked out very well for all concerned. By contrast, when the United States, Canada, and Mexico negotiated NAFTA, it seemed that all parties took it for granted that Mexico would be a permanent junior partner, mostly a source of cheap labor and lax environmental rules. The idea that the three countries might one day achieve parity, perhaps even be joined into a single economic unit, was not admitted even as a distant goal or a wild fantasy. It seems to me that there is a fatalistic assumption—and unfortunately it’s an assumption made by many Mexicans as well as Americans, by defenders of immigration as well as its critics—that nothing can be done to make Mexico more prosperous. Such assumptions poison the entire debate. People who want to defend immigration happily point out that Mexicans are willing to do nasty, low-paid jobs that are just too hard or disgusting for Americans to do—and they say it as if this is a good thing. I have a hard time seeing that as a positive. Do we really want to encourage the formation of a permanent underclass of ethnically distinct people doing disagreeable menial labor? Isn’t that kind of what slavery was all about? And yet the notion that Mexicans might aspire to well-paid, non-menial jobs is downright horrifying to many Americans, who apparently assume Mexicans were created for the very purpose of doing grunt labor. Other defenders of immigration argue that it’s beneficial to Mexico, since Mexican workers in the United States send about $20 billion a year to their families back home. That sum is equal to the amount Mexico gets from selling oil, its most lucrative export. That money supposedly aids Mexican development and stability. But here again, is it really healthy for an economy to be so dependent on money sent home by low-paid immigrants living in a foreign country? Wouldn’t it be better for both countries to seriously explore means to achieve mutual, and mutually reinforcing, prosperity? Just asking. I really think one of the reasons there’s so little progress on the immigration issue is that the old concept of Manifest Destiny, although it may have morphed a bit over the years, is still alive and well. In a recent interview with John McCain, Bill O’Reilly suggested that immigrants are breaking down the “white, Christian, male power structure” of the United States. And McCain, a contender for the Presidency of the United States, agreed with him. I’m actually kind of impressed that these guys would come right out and say what so often is an unspoken subtext. There’s an enduring and extremely smug assumption that the lands of North America were bestowed upon Anglo-Americans by God himself, and the presence of non-white, non-English-speaking people in our midst, in a condition anywhere approaching equality, is tampering with something that was divinely ordained. I don’t get much sense that these folks are aware that our Southwestern lands were actually taken at gunpoint in a war that was waged on a notoriously bogus pretext. And McCain’s from Arizona. Someone should ask him about that.
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