The Mexican War
Similarly to the War of 1812, the Mexican War destroyed reform. Admittedly, the Republicans had turned into a party of power long before the conflict, but their war swept away most remaining pockets of dissent. The Mexican War’s effects occurred far more suddenly, but the consequences remained the same: the Democrats completely lost their drive to create a limited confederation. The Jacksonians engaged in military maneuvers for merchants, established corrupt alliances with bankers, increased the public debt, and embraced transcontinental internal improvements and new programs for land speculators. The entire enterprise was truly a gigantic catastrophe, and once again, liberty lost and power won.
Polk undisputedly initiated a war of conquest and ruthlessly achieved his goal. The ramshackle Mexican government stood no chance of preventing the United States from capturing strategic ports and large swaths of territory. Furthermore, the conflict was undeniably what Whig Congressman Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia called an “Executive war,” and what others labelled “Mr. Polk’s War.” Polk dragged the nation into the confrontation and, along with his cabinet, commanded the planning. The strict constructionist Polk, corrupted by the Jacksonian presidency, justified his control by arguing that congressmen were only pliant tools for the executive, who was elected by the overall public. Unlike past presidents, Polk defended absolute executive secrecy in foreign policy and actually tried to set up a clandestine Mexican coup d’état without any congressional authorization. Clearly, he envisioned himself an emperor conducting the war effort.
From the beginning, the Polk administration focused on the ultimate prize: California’s ports. The administration initially wanted only San Francisco and Monterey, but prominent merchants soon persuaded it to secure the rest. In June 1846, Secretary Bancroft wrote to Samuel Hooper, the merchant son-in-law of the Boston Associate William Sturgis, hoping that the navy had seized northern California, “never to be given up.” The acquisition pleased Hooper, but he urged Bancroft to also take the southern ports down to San Diego. Only in this way, Hooper noted, would the United States control the California coast’s lucrative trade. Bancroft dutifully relayed the orders, and by July Commodores John Sloat and Stockton had seized California’s ports. Although the administration kept up the charade of temporary occupation, Sloat told his men that “it is not only our duty to take California, but to preserve it afterwards as a part of the United States.” In his December 1847 message, Polk triumphantly proclaimed that California would “shelter . . . merchant vessels employed in the Pacific ocean, [facilitating] . . . an extensive and profitable commerce with China.”
In fact, by January of that year the army had conquered California and New Mexico, moving into Mexico proper. The administration hoped for a lightning-strike victory, but Mexican guerrillas resisted. This only emboldened Polk and his cabinet to demand more land and drive deeper into enemy territory. By September, the army had moved into Mexico City. Treasurer Walker championed the All Mexico annexation movement, but most Democrat expansionists balked at such a massive acquisition—at least until enough Americans settled in the region—and the president settled for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in early 1848, which “only” ceded California and New Mexico.
But even this was not enough. In spring 1848, Polk flirted with invading the Yucatán Peninsula and even offered Spain an astronomical $100 million for Cuba (recall that Polk previously valued California at $25 million). Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi argued for both acquisitions in the name of “complete control of the Gulf of Mexico, and of all the commerce that floats over its surface . . . [and] the rich monopoly of the East India trade.” Unfortunately for Polk and Foote, the upper chamber provided too much resistance to enter the conflict. Spain also flatly refused the paternalistic and domineering offer to purchase Cuba.
These setbacks aside, the president still acquired a considerable amount of land. Including Texas annexation, Oregon, and land taken from Mexico, Polk’s acquisitions totaled approximately 800 million acres, more than the Louisiana Purchase’s 500 million. The American Empire now had enough territory to dominate surrounding nations and control world trade. No wonder, then, that in 1850 Caleb Cushing, a staunch supporter of the war, declared land “the footstool of our power” and “the throne of our empire.” However, the additions required a new nationalizing American System to bind the extremities, providing opportunities for special privileges and redistribution.
First, and most importantly, the military conquests required money. From 1845 to 1848 increases in the military caused government spending to explode by 98 percent, completely wrecking the Jacksonian drive to control expenditures. Commodore Stockton tossed rational cost-benefit analysis to the winds when he declared that it did not matter “if the war were prolonged for fifty years, and cost money enough to demand from us each year half of all that we possess.” However, Walker knew that financial difficulties could torpedo the war effort and settled on a simple method of finance: Mexico will pay. Walker proposed that the military seize needed supplies and levy “onerous” and “burdensome” tariffs on Mexican ports. The administration instructed Congress about how the war’s yoke must be saddled “upon our enemies, the people of Mexico, and not upon ourselves.” But Mexico imported little during the conflict, and Secretary of War William Marcy estimated that captured property totaled less than $4 million (military expenditures for 1847 alone totaled $46 million). These setbacks forced the Treasurer to borrow: the public debt ballooned from $16 million in 1845 to $47 million in 1848 (a 194 percent increase), a serious setback for the Jacksonian economic program. In doing so, Walker greased the wheels for his banker friend W. W. Corcoran of Corcoran & Riggs.
The banking house of Corcoran & Riggs, a previous holder of government deposits during the pet banking system, fought against reinstituting the Independent Treasury. Corcoran previously accrued valuable political capital by befriending Walker and Polk (as well as Walker’s nephew James Knox Walker), serving as the president’s investment advisor, lending money to his brother William H. Polk, wining and dining leading politicians, and even financing White House refurbishments. Corcoran saw the Mexican War as his opportunity, and earlier predicted that if hostilities broke out his “field for making money will be greatly enlarged.” When Walker needed to borrow, Corcoran helped him sell debt. The banker underwrote $15 million of an $18 million loan in 1847 and then another $14 million of a $16 million loan in 1848. From selling both loans, Corcoran personally collected $755,000 in profit, an enormous increase compared to the meager $15,000 he previously earned. After the war, Corcoran served as the Democratic Party’s preeminent banker and lobbyist, working behind the scenes for speculators (particularly the holders of Texas debt). Samuel Swartwout referred to him as “the American Rothschild.” Corcoran’s cozy relationship sabotaged the party’s previous victories against the crony banking-government partnership.
Wartime finance aside, a crucial issue emerged over the conquests. Previously, the Louisiana Purchase required internal improvements to keep the environs around the Mississippi River linked with the East. Now, with the coveted western ports on the Pacific Coast, expansionists argued for transcontinental internal improvements. Of course, gradual settlement and annexation would have ensured O’Sullivan’s solution of private companies performing the job, but violent and swift conquest prodded the Democratic Party into railroad and steamship subsidies.
These schemes even appeared before the war in late 1845: Stephen Douglas advocated land grants to build a railroad from Chicago to San Francisco while James Gadsden at the Memphis Convention urged subsidizing a southern railroad across Texas. In essence, these men wanted Congress to hand them unappropriated land they could construct a railroad on as well as sell at artificially high prices to settlers. The most vigorous proponent of such cronyism was China merchant Asa Whitney, who lobbied Congress to get western land grants for a railroad from Lake Michigan to Oregon.
In 1846, Democrat Senator Sidney Breese of Illinois, chair of the Committee on Public Lands, presented Whitney’s petition to the upper chamber. Based on the advice of explorer John C. Fremont, Whitney asked for a land grant sixty miles wide and twenty-four hundred miles long (roughly ninety million acres) to finance the $50 million construction cost. During the war, the merchant pled to Walker that the United States could “for[ce] tribute” and “dictate to all the world.” Unfortunately for Whitney, the Mexican War depleted the Treasury’s funds and Walker prioritized a railroad through Central America. His proposal also got short shrift in the Senate. Benton, perpetually torn on internal improvements, sided against his son-in-law Fremont, blasting the land grant proposal as “one of the most absurd and ridiculous that could be presented to Congress.” But the damage was done, and in the ensuing years, Democrats across the country, not just in the West, supported mass subsidization of railroads to facilitate transportation to the Pacific.
To make matters worse, during the war, Congress sympathetically listened to other proposals for transcontinental internal improvements, particularly steamship subsidies, justifiable on grounds of military necessity. Edward K. Collins wanted government appropriations for his steamships to compete with the British steamships in the Atlantic. Corcoran served as his preeminent lobbyist, and in 1847 and 1848 Collins secured a ten-year contract for $385,000 in annual assistance to his New York & Liverpool United States Mail Steamship Company. Prominent stockowners included Corcoran & Riggs and Texas debt speculator William S. Wetmore. Congress also doled out $500,000 in annual assistance to the US Mail Steamship Company and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to connect the coasts via a railroad through Panama. Congress’ actions once again showed that it could not pick winners and losers: the subsidized companies, numb to cost cutting, built expensive and inefficient ships that languished against the private lines of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Democrats also wanted to secure the western domain by handing it to speculators. In particular, Walker advocated for a new Department of the Interior to administer the booty. The recent discovery of gold in California only magnified the rewards from the new conquests. The Treasurer stressed that new “valuable mineral lands” will increase “the business of the Land Office.”In early 1849, Congress responded accordingly and established the new executive department. Furthermore, the legislature equipped a new Commission on Mexican Claims with $3.25 million to handle American claims against Mexico lost during the war. Soon, speculators swooped in and purchased land titles at depreciated rates, hoping to wrangle a bailout. One such speculator and claims agent, Corcoran, proudly admitted that without his lobbying efforts the act “would not have been passed.” Indeed, Corcoran relished his newfound prestige and looked forward to similar dominance in the 1850s.
The Mexican War delivered a fatal blow to the Jacksonians. Conquests in the name of imperial commerce blew up the debt and corrupted the Polk administration and the Democratic Party toward banking privileges and transcontinental public works. Before, libertarian Democrats fought statist Whigs, steadily weakening the American System. No more. To add insult to injury, the spoils of war—those massive acquisitions of western territory—dramatically amplified the slavery controversy that had emerged during Texas annexation. Missouri was one thing, and Texas another, but potentially spreading slavery to the Pacific increased sectional tensions like never before.
The Deathknell of Reform
Polk and his cabinet were not motivated to invade Mexico to spread slavery; the Pacific ports always reigned supreme. Even Senator Calhoun remained hesitantly sympathetic to the conflict and absented himself from the initial war declaration, worrying that conquering Mexico would hurt slavery. But this did not stop antislavery activists from insisting on the conflict’s pro-slavery cause, such as Congressman Adams, who voted against the war. Critics of slavery formed the significant opposition, albeit a minority: for the most part, Democrats and Whigs supported the war effort and partisan Whigs concentrated their ire upon the Democrats’ management.
Opponents of slavery decided to make an early stand. In August 1846, Democratic Congressmen Preston King of New York, a Barnburner, and David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, a Van Burenite sympathizer, attempted to add to a war appropriations bill a proviso forbidding slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso set out to accomplish what the Tallmadge Amendment tried to do for the Louisiana Purchase: stop the spread of slavery. But the ever-present desire for a strong and vast empire, and the immense privileges it could grant, led to the defeat of the proviso.
Despite this setback, a revolution in the Democratic Party was in the making. After the moderate Hunker Democrats seized control of the New York party and the nationwide organization rallied behind the expansionist and slavery advocate Lewis Cass of Michigan for the presidency, Barnburners allied with other opponents of slavery and formed the Free Soil Party to oppose the spread of slavery in the West. The party chose none other than Van Buren as its presidential candidate. The Free Soilers remained optimistic, but in 1848, Van Buren failed to carry a single state, amassing only 10 percent of the popular vote against Cass and the victorious Whig candidate, General Zachary Taylor of Virginia.
Van Buren described his decision as “an exceedingly unpleasant but unavoidable sacrifice.” Surely the New Yorker did not exaggerate: by leading the Free Soil ticket, he broke with the Democratic Party, the network of anti-crony activists he worked so hard to forge. Put more forcefully, “this tragic split in the Democratic Party,” explains Murray Rothbard, cost the organization “its libertarian conscience and drive.”
The party fell under the sway of aggressive southern expansionists who wanted to continue extending the American Empire into the West and the Caribbean, fortified by a vast system of internal improvements. This certainly could not muster any real anti-crony resistance to the equally pro-slavery Whigs, who also wanted to strengthen the American Empire through protective tariffs and their own transportation projects. No significant laissez-faire party remained, only two groups in favor of special privileges.
The Mexican War, the emergence of the slavery controversy, and Van Buren’s Free Soil candidacy led to the ideological disintegration of the Democratic Party and the collapse of reform. Jackson’s party remained, but it lost all motivation to weaken the central government, destroy the American System, and stop the American Empire dead in its tracks. The reason for the failed Jacksonian Revolution, as with the ratification of the US Constitution and failed Jeffersonian Revolution, was simple: “[P]ower tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
