The Mexican American War

This concise guide is conceived as an introductory scholarly resource. The questions advanced herein are not central to the principal debates of this course; rather, they function as elementary points of departure. The material is presented with the utmost commitment to objectivity, while recognizing that the interpretive framework is not, and cannot be, neutral.

Prof. Jorge Majfud.

“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”

1. What was Manifest Destiny
2. Why did many Northern Americans like Lincoln oppose the war with Mexico?
3. What was the well-known new social-political-religious myth/idea/revelation used by President James Polk to keep expanding Westward?
4. What did American generals (like Scott, Taylor, and Grant) accuse other American combatants of doing in Mexico?
5. What were the ideas of pro-slavery politicians about México and freedom?
6. How did politicians like Calhoun justify the invasion?

Table of contents

Map

We were attacked first

President James K. Polk’s justification for war centered on a disputed border claim. Mexico maintained that the southern boundary of Texas was the Nueces River, while Polk insisted it was the Rio Grande, further south, an area Mexico had never recognized as part of Texas or the United States. In early 1846, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to march troops into this contested zone between the two rivers, deliberately provoking a confrontation. When Mexican forces attacked a small U.S. patrol north of the Rio Grande in April 1846, Polk used the incident, known as the Thornton Affair, to declare to Congress that Mexico had «shed American blood upon the American soil,» and Congress declared war shortly after.

Many contemporaries saw through this framing. A young congressman named Abraham Lincoln famously challenged Polk with what became known as the «Spot Resolutions,» demanding the president identify the exact spot where American blood had been shed on undisputed American soil, implying the land was actually Mexican or at best disputed territory, not clearly U.S. soil. Generals like Zachary Taylor and later Ulysses Grant, who served as a young officer in the war, privately and later publicly criticized the conflict; Grant, in his memoirs, called it one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker one, and admitted he was ashamed of his own participation. Senators and representatives, particularly Whigs like Lincoln and abolitionist figures such as John Quincy Adams, saw the war as a thinly veiled land grab designed to expand slave territory westward, orchestrated by Polk and southern expansionists.

Mexico’s response was to reject Polk’s premise entirely. Mexican officials and military leaders argued that Texas itself was never legitimately annexed, since Mexico had never recognized Texan independence after 1836, and that the Nueces, not the Rio Grande, was the true and long-recognized boundary. From the Mexican perspective, Taylor’s advance to the Rio Grande was an invasion of sovereign Mexican territory, and the Thornton Affair was a defensive response to an armed incursion, not an unprovoked attack. Mexican leaders framed the war as naked American aggression and territorial expansionism, a view that gained significant traction not only in Mexico but among American critics (like David Thoreau) who saw the conflict as fundamentally about extending U.S. territory and the institution of slavery rather than any genuine border dispute.

In July 1846, Henry David Thoreau was arrested and spent one night in a Concord, Massachusetts jail for refusing to pay his poll tax, a debt he had deliberately let accumulate for six years. His refusal was a protest against a government he believed was complicit in two moral wrongs: the institution of slavery and the Mexican-American War, which he saw as an unjust war of conquest designed to expand slave territory. He didn’t want his tax dollars funding either. He turned it into the essay «Resistance to Civil Government,» published in 1849 and later retitled «Civil Disobedience,» in which he argued that individuals have a moral duty to refuse cooperation with an unjust government, even if it means breaking the law and accepting punishment. The essay had little immediate impact but became enormously influential later, shaping the nonviolent resistance philosophies of figures like Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom cited Thoreau directly as an inspiration for civil rights and independence movements.

Reports from U.S. combatants

During the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), generals such as Zachary Taylor, Winfield Scott, and Ulysses S. Grant documented severe atrocities committed against the Mexican civilian population by U.S. volunteer troops, notably including the Texas Rangers and various state militias.

These acts encompassed indiscriminate executions and cold-blooded massacres (such as the Agua Nueva cave massacre), sexual assaults and mass rapes of Mexican women in occupied towns like Matamoros, Monterrey, and Agua Nueva, as well as the systematic looting of ranches and businesses, alongside the desecration and plundering of Catholic churches.

The severity of these events led Grant to characterize the conflict as one of the most unjust wars ever fought, describing the volunteers as undisciplined troops who terrorized civilians, while Scott went so far as to compare the behavior of these irregular militias to that of «barbarians.»

Look up on that banner, it is Columbia’s pride
«Tis glory to guard it neath it have hero’s died;
Those stars so brightly beaming no light can shine like them_
Those stripes so proudly streaming, form Glory’s diadem!
REFRAIN. Justice is our motto kc.
Then on to the battle, where glory waits ye now,-
Her garlands she’s weaving to crown each soldier’s brow;
Again! the trumpet’s sounding no longer boy delay
With hearts with hopes rebounding, let every son obey!
REFRAIN. Justice is our motto &c.
When homeward returning, all fresh from Glory’s fight,
Thy country shall greet thee, and hail thee with delight,
But should the gallant soldier, in deadly conflict fall,
With laurel and cypress, we’ll bedeck his funeral pall.
REFRAIN. Justice is our motto kc.

Some quotes from the time

«It has been, and is, my ambition to redeem Texas from the wilderness, and to lay a solid foundation for its future prosperity. I do not believe that, that object can be effected by any kind of union with the U. S. for such an union would of course intail slavery on this fair region, which may be made the Eden of America— satan entered the sacred garden in the shape of a serpent— if he is allowed to enter Texas in the shape of n[   ]s it will share the fate of Eden,— We have been well treated by the Mexican Govt, and we are bound by our oaths to be faithful to it— I will loose my life before I will forfeit that obligation or do aught which my duty as a Mexican citizen forbids.»

S. Rhoads Fisher to Austin 23 Aug 1830, Stephen Austin Papers

“In regard to New Mexico, east of the Rio Grande, the question has already been settled by the admission of Texas into the Union. Should we acquire territory beyond the Rio Grande and east of the Rocky mountains, it is still more impossible that a majority of the people would consent to re-establish slavery. They are themselves a colored population, and among them the n[  ]ro does not belong socially to a degraded race”.

Lewis Cass speech in the Senate of the United States, February 10, 1847.

“Life of General Cass”

“I fully agree, sir, in all that. It would be a deplorable amalgamation [with Mexicans]. No such evil will happen to us in our day. We do not want the people of Mexico, either as citizens or subjects. All we want is a portion of territory, which they nominally hold, generally uninhabited, or, where inhabited at all, sparsely so, and with a population, which would soon recede, or identify itself with ours. The Senator says, speaking of Mexico, “what are you to do with the territory?” I answer, nothing at all, as a permanent acquisition. “Will you” says the Senator, “incorporate it in your Union?” Certainly not. We shall hold it as a means of procuring an honorable peace. And such a peace it may be made to procure for us.»

Senator Lewis Cass, February 10, 1847. Speech to Congress

https://archive.org/details/mexicanwarspeech00cass/page/2/mode/2up

“We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race. The great misfortunes of Spanish America are to be traced to the fatal error of placing these colored races on an equality with the white race”

John C. Calhoun, Senator from South Carolina and future spokesman for southern secession, delivered the following speech to Congress on January 4, 1848.

The only impartial institution on this subject is the church, for it is made up of both capitalists and laborers, and was founded by Christ, who was a carpenter, and so has a right to speak for all laborers; and who owns the earth and the solar system and the universe, and so can speak for the capitalists.

St. Louis Globe-Democrat of Missouri (first of a series of sermons pronounced by the Presbyterian preacher, Thomas De Witt Talmage, on the “labor question”, on 17th May 1886.)

«One of the most unjust wars ever waged»

Ulysses Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1885.

«Some, if not all, the gentlemen on the other side of the House, who have addressed the committee within the last two days, have spoken rather complainingly, if I have rightly understood them, of the vote given a week or ten days ago, declaring that the war with Mexico was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President. I admit that such a vote should not be given in mere party wantonness, and that the one given is justly censurable, if it have no other or better foundation. I am one of those who joined in that vote; and I did so under my best impression of the truth of the case.

Abraham Lincoln, Speech in United States House of Representatives: The War with Mexico, 12 January 1848.

The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. United States, Langtree and O’Sullivan, 1852.

General Winfield Scott despised volunteer troops and wrote the Secretary of War, William L. Marcy, on January 16, 1847:

…our militia & volunteers, if a tenth of what is said be true, have committed atrocities—horrors—in Mexico, sufficient to make Heaven weep, & every American, of Christian morals blush for his country. Murder, robbery & rape on mothers & daughters, in the presence of the tied up males of the families, have been common all along the Rio Grande. I was agonized with what I heard—not from Mexicans, and regulars alone, but from respectable individual volunteers—from the masters & hands of our camps. Truly it would seem unchristian & cruel to let loose upon any people—even savages—such unbridled persons—free-booters, &c., &c. The respectable volunteers—7 in 10—have been as much horrified & disgusted as the regulars, with such barbarian conduct. As far as I can learn, not one of the felons has been punished, & very few rebuked—the officers generally, being as much afraid of their men as the poor suffering Mexicans themselves are afraid of the miscreants. Most atrocities are always committed in the absence of regulars, but sometimes in the presence of acquiescing, trembling volunteer officers.”

“Truly it would seem unchristian & cruel to let loose upon any people—even savages—such unbridled persons—freebooters, &c., &c. The respectable volunteers—7 in 10—have been as much horrified & disgusted as the regulars, with such barbarian conduct. As far as I can learn, not one of the felons has been punished, & very few rebuked—the officers generally, being as much afraid of their men as the poor suffering Mexicans themselves are afraid of the miscreants. Most atrocities are always committed in the absence of regulars, but sometimes in the presence of acquiescing, trembling volunteer officers.”

Winfield Scott to William L. Marcy, January 16, 1847, The Brazos, William L. Marcy Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Box 12.

“I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it. If the worm-eaten throne of Spain is willing to give it for a fair equivalent, well—if not, we must take it. I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting and spreading of slavery.

“And a footing in Central America will powerfully aid us in acquiring those other states. It will render them less valuable to the other powers of the earth, and thereby diminish competition with us. Yes, I want these countries for the spread of slavery. I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth, and rebellious and wicked as the Yankees have been, I would even extend it to them.

I would not force it upon them, as I would not force religion upon them, but I would preach it to them, as I would preach the gospel. They are a stiff-necked and rebellious race, and I have little hope that they will receive the blessing, and I would therefore prepare for its spread to other more favored lands.

In 1858, Mississippi Senator Albert Gallatin Brown

The Post War

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

igned in 1848, ended the Mexican-American War and transferred roughly half of Mexico’s territory to the United States, including present-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of several other states. Article VIII and IX of the treaty promised that Mexican citizens remaining in these lands would retain their property, be granted full U.S. citizenship, and have their civil, political, and religious rights protected. In practice, these guarantees were routinely ignored or undermined. Land grant titles, though technically recognized, had to be defended in lengthy, expensive U.S. courts under laws like California’s 1851 Land Act, and many Mexican and Californio families lost their holdings to legal costs, squatters, fraud, or outright seizure, even when their claims were eventually upheld. English-only court proceedings, discriminatory taxation, and biased juries further stripped away the practical value of the rights the treaty had promised on paper.

As dispossession accelerated, many Mexican Americans who resisted, or who were simply caught up in the chaotic and often violent transition of power, were branded as criminals rather than treated as the dispossessed citizens they legally were. Figures like Joaquín Murrieta and Juan Cortina became folk heroes to Mexican communities and «bandits» in Anglo-American press and law enforcement narratives, a framing that helped justify vigilante violence, lynching, and the passage of laws like California’s Greaser Act, which explicitly targeted people of Mexican descent. This criminalization served a dual purpose: it delegitimized Mexican American grievances over stolen land and broken promises, while also providing pretext for further land seizures and social exclusion. The gap between the treaty’s formal guarantees and this lived reality of dispossession and racialized suspicion shaped Mexican American communities in the Southwest for generations, and its legacy is still discussed by historians examining land rights, citizenship, and racial formation in the region.

The California Gold Rush

The California Gold Rush began in January 1848, when James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, just days before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. News spread rapidly, and by 1849 tens of thousands of prospectors, known as «forty-niners,» poured into California from across the United States and around the world, including China, Latin America, Europe, and Australia. San Francisco exploded from a small settlement of a few hundred people into a boomtown of tens of thousands within a few years, and the sudden population surge helped push California into statehood in 1850, bypassing the usual territorial phase entirely. The Gold Rush reshaped the American West almost overnight, fueling railroad and infrastructure development, banking, and a new consumer economy built around mining towns, while transforming California from a remote frontier into a rapidly growing hub of American commerce and migration.

The human and environmental costs of the Gold Rush were severe. Native Californian populations suffered catastrophic violence, disease, and displacement, with historians estimating that tens of thousands died as miners and settlers seized land and, in some cases, carried out organized massacres, a period often described as a genocide against California’s indigenous peoples. Foreign miners, especially Chinese, Mexican, and Latin American prospectors, faced systemic discrimination, including the Foreign Miners’ Tax of 1850, which was designed to push non-white miners out of profitable claims. Environmentally, techniques like hydraulic mining tore apart hillsides and choked rivers with sediment, causing long-term damage to ecosystems and farmland downstream. While the Gold Rush is often remembered as a story of opportunity and rapid growth, it left behind a legacy of ecological destruction and deep social inequities that shaped California’s development well beyond the mining era itself.

Further Reading

Notice: The following pages are not mandatory readings. They provide a historical background drawn from «The Wild Frontier: 200 Years of Anglo-Saxon Fanaticism in Latin America« that may be considered for this topic.

1844. Slavery is the basis of peace and progress

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.May 30, 1844—At three in the morning, in absolute silence, sixty men stop in front of the house of the Grand Master Mason, diplomat, and frustrated lawyer George M. Dallas. One of them, Democratic Senator Robert John Walker, knocks on the door. Dallas gets up in his pajamas and looks out the window. Recognizing Walker, he opens the door, prepared for the worst.

To attract votes from others, the candidate of Andrew Jackson, James Polk, is seeking a vice-presidential running mate among northern politicians, but everyone refuses. Walker prolongs the suspense for a few seconds as he takes Dallas by the arm and finally delivers the good news. Dallas, an unknown politician with no future of his own, accepts without hesitation and without consulting anyone, even though he had recently supported President Van Buren for re-election. The proposal to be the running mate of his substitute and rival in Jackson’s preference is too tempting. The dramatic messenger, Robert Walker, will be elected Secretary of the Treasury.

President Martin Van Buren and John Quincy Adams oppose the annexation of Texas because it would tilt the balance in Congress in favor of southern slaveholders. Andrew Jackson, James Polk, and the powerful southern slaveholders campaign in favor of annexation and the greatness of the country. For the few who can vote, the 1844 election is about Texas, but Jackson and Polk know it is about much more. Polk will lose in his own state, Tennessee, but will win in the other southern states and in Pennsylvania, where no one knows him.

Despite having regained its right to slavery, enshrined in its first constitution, the new Republic of Texas cannot sustain itself alone. The accounts do not balance for the successful cotton growers. It is in debt and sends its emissaries everywhere in search of new loans. In London, they are not very successful, but at least the contacts serve to scare Washington. The personal secretary of Sam Houston writes: “We find ourselves in a situation of total precariousness. Powerless and, worse still, without confidence in ourselves. We are weak and on the brink of collapse.” Mired in its internal conflicts between liberals and conservatives, Mexico is unable to recover it. To the north, the mother country, with its contradictions, with its slaveholders and abolitionists within its borders, debates whether to take advantage of the opportunity and expand slavery beyond what was anticipated. As always, the instinct for expansion prevails.

President Martin Van Buren, former President John Quincy Adams, and Senator from Ohio, Benjamin Tappan, among others, oppose the annexation of Texas. Quincy Adams and Van Buren (known to future generations as “the worst president in history”) consider it an unjustified aggression against a neighboring country and with a clear objective: to expand slavery to the south and west, until they stumble upon another ocean. In the south, the Democrats do not agree. They do not agree with anything that comes from the corrupt liberals of the north.

On April 27, Van Buren’s own Secretary of State, John Calhoun, had published an open letter in the newspapers assuring that the annexation of Texas was crucial to the security and expansion of the “peculiar institution.” Slavery, says Calhoun (and all landowners agree), is “a social ideal,” as it is the foundation of peace, security, and prosperity in the states where it exists. Calhoun knows and tells his friends that all the northern outrage against the annexation of Texas and the reinstatement of slavery will pass and be forgotten, because in the long run, the only thing that matters, the only thing that remains, and the only thing that prevails are interests.

On his sickbed, Andrew Jackson (known by the savages as Indian Killer and Old Hickory), despite his weakness, cannot contain his fury. Martin Van Buren, his protégé, is useless, a weakling, he says, while Hannah, his faithful slave, takes his arm to help him back to the chamber pot. Jackson sits down to relieve the diarrhea that, along with tuberculosis, is killing him. He remembers the good old days when he fought against the invading English, when later Thomas Jefferson entrusted him to take the land of the Cherokees and the Red Sticks. His success was not based on weakness. No success is ever based on weakness. After each battle won, the young Andrew Jackson would order the extermination of women and children so that the future would not bring new terrorists who could threaten democracy and freedom.

For these reasons, Jackson had ordered James Polk, one of his former collaborators, to be called. Polk does not hate books like Jackson, but he shares with him the cause of the Tennessee group and the interests of the freemen of the Deep South. They are the wholesome farmers against the corruption of the big cities, the slaveholders and expansionist believers against the atheist abolitionists of the North.

Andrew Jackson had founded the Democratic Party and laid the foundation for conservatives for many generations to come. He had campaigned against the establishment and the press at a time when politicians competed to boast about how many Indians they had killed and how many more than their opponents they planned to kill or deport if elected to serve their country. His new favorite, James Polk, also does not know how to speak, but besides being rich, he knows how to sit in the right place at the right time and possesses the ability to discern the undercurrents of power better than the direction of the wind that brings rain. When he was young, James had been operated on without anesthesia for bladder stones, which is why he could not have children, but he did have an active, prepared, skillful wife with plenty of time to push his political career. Like his father, James is a proud Jeffersonian and a timid atheist. His wife Sarah Childress (if the r is replaced by its closest l, her surname means “childless”) makes him go to church every Sunday with the excuse that she does not dare to go alone to the house of God. Like the rest of his class, his fortune and that of his family are based on the same two pillars: westward expansion and the slavery of African Americans. In other words, on the theft of Indian lands and the theft of Black bodies. Some deserve it for being savages, and others for being ignorant.

But without Andrew Jackson, James Polk, who imitates even the accent of his mentor, had lost almost every election in his state. In this year’s presidential election, his state will not vote for him either, but fortunately, no one knows him outside of Tennessee. When Jackson summons him, he does not hesitate. When he offers him the Democratic candidacy instead of Van Buren, he cannot believe it. “I never dreamed of reaching so high,” he confesses in a letter to a friend, before securing his party’s nomination and before surprisingly defeating Henry Clay in the national election.

The new President James Polk will spend his best hours inventing fake news about alleged offenses by Mexico and stoking the patriotic fervor of a country divided by internal disputes over the legitimacy of slavery. Once an external enemy is established, internal divisions will blur, and the euphoria of a new war will be fueled by abundant cheap liquor in the taverns.^[1] Any critic will become unpatriotic. As a result, Polk and his slaveholders from the South will manage to appropriate more than half of their neighbor’s territory.

In Texas, the three most important cities in the state will be renamed to erase the history they wish to forget. One, Austin, will bear the name of the businessman who fought in Mexico to overturn its anti-slavery laws; another, Houston, the name of the general who massacred the defeated at San Jacinto, sealing the independence of the new republic; the third, Dallas, a city founded in 1855 by French socialists (without masters or slaves, but unable to compete in the new slave state) will bear the surname of Polk’s obscure vice president, who now aids in the plundering of Mexico.

When Mexico loses the war it never wanted, according to Ulysses Grant, Vice President George Dallas will support the idea of taking the entire country. This will not be possible due to the number of mestizos in that country beyond the Río Grande. By law, American citizens are white, and there are already enough problems with Blacks and Indians without adding a few million hybrids to the nation.

Whitened Texas will join the Union in 1845, and twenty years later, when the slaveholding South faces the abolitionist North, it will naturally take sides. One need not be a genius to know which. There will be neither a voice nor a minute of discussion. Nor will censorship be necessary. It will simply be a matter of taking up arms again, though this time confidence will outweigh the weapons.

1844. Founding of the xenophobic party I don’t know what it is

Kensington, Pennsylvania. May 6, 1844—In retaliation for protests against him in the Irish district of Kensington, Lewis Levin organizes a protest of three thousand followers, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Irishmen and the burning of dozens of homes, as well as the Catholic churches of St. Michael and St. Augustine. None of these crimes will be tried, and Levin will be elected Representative for Pennsylvania, a position he will assume on March 4, 1845, from which he will continue his fight against immigrants (undesirable immigrants), responsible for the decline of America.

Christmas, the Roman festival honoring the goddess of the Sun, resisted for a thousand years by Christians of all kinds, had landed in the promised land and now becomes a symbol of Christianity. Protestants in the United States are coming to terms with it but still refuse to accept this horrible tradition of getting drunk and giving gifts in honor of Jesus. This year, for Valentine’s Day, the custom of buying and selling on religious occasions has also reached unmanageable proportions.

For decades, the greatest controversy in the United States was not the issue of slavery but the invasion of non-Protestant European immigrants of a rather odd and suspicious complexion. Immigrants and the children of English and German immigrants do not want the Irish. They are Catholics and represent an impure variation of the white race. In Europe, England has stripped the poorest Irish of their land and the political protection of their church, leading to a million deaths by starvation and another million forced to emigrate to America via the shortest route across the Atlantic. In America, they are and will not be welcome for at least a century. Some are killed while working on the railroad tracks to prevent the spread of cholera and other contagious diseases. Others are barred from entering restaurants that, with signs on their doors and windows, declare: “No dogs or Irish allowed.” It is not uncommon for them to be warned not to apply for job openings. In various jobs that require brute force and salaried slaves, they are eliminated. Irishmen who conspire for the independence of Ireland will be considered terrorists, as the Indians were before, as the German laborers will be at the end of the 19th century, and the Italians a few generations later. During the 20th century, when fear, hatred, and racial paranoia shift once again to the Blacks and the Mestizos of the southern border, the Irish will assimilate into the dominant ethnicity, becoming White and even having a president who, for other reasons, will be assassinated with a shot to the head.

Lawyer Lewis Charles Levin, who in a few more months will become the first Jewish congressman in the history of his country, had founded the American Republican Party (later known as the Native American Party and, above all, recognized as the Know Nothing Party by its own members) in the summer of 1843. Like the future nativist parties that will be re-founded again and again until the 21st century, the Know Nothing Party is openly xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and opposed to taverns and alcohol. Levin, the teetotaler son of immigrants who in 1833 married Ann Christian Hays, a relative of President James Polk, will have a long political career and die in a mental asylum. Among his lasting contributions will be ending the civilized coexistence between Catholics and Protestants in Pennsylvania, identifying a certain group of European immigrants as natives of the American continent, and demonstrating that xenophobic rhetoric is a powerful political weapon for uniting a society divided by the fanaticism of its colors and social classes.

1844. Change the language, and you will change the world

Washington DC. June 7, 1944—The day after Martin Van Buren’s unexpected defeat at the hands of James Polk in the Democratic Party primary, the U.S. Congress rejects the annexation of Texas by a vote of 16 in favor and 36 against. Sanity has prevailed, they say in the halls. The press assures that the Whig Party candidate, Henry Clay, more ambiguous on the issue of Texas and slavery, “only has to walk to the White House.”

But James Polk senses a strategy that will upend all debates about Texas and slavery dominating politics that year. Instead of continuing to argue about annexation, he begins to speak of the re-annexation of Texas. Polk is not a religious man, but his wife Sarah has forced him to present himself as devout. More important than that: Polk is part of a culture of faith where what one believes is more important than evidence, and if what one believed contradicts the clearest evidence, the greater the merit of the believer. Can’t a river be split in two? Well, it can only be split for those who close their eyes and believe it can be split through sheer belief. Religious language has no commitment to reality, and in politics, it matters more than facts, which is why the most important battle is the dialectic one. Words create the past and force the future. Words create reality as God created the world from the Word. Despite his disinterest in God, beyond his own ambitions and scant preparation, these are all the intellectual tools through which President Polk and his subjects view reality.

The idea of beginning to speak of re-annexation of Texas, as always, does not originate with him, but with Mississippi Senator Robert J. Walker. According to the senator, Texas was already included in the Louisiana Purchase. Louisiana had been purchased from the French empire because the vast territory populated by millions of Indians was worth less than a penny compared to the small colony of Haiti. As usual, the indigenous nations were not invited to the Louisiana negotiations, nor was the Spanish empire, so it is highly unlikely that Texas was included in the sale contract with the French. In fact, after the deal with Napoleon Bonaparte was finalized in 1804, the boundaries of these territories had been clearly defined and agreed upon by the Adams-Onís Treaty, signed by President John Quincy Adams and the representative of the Spanish empire in 1819. This treaty defined the Sabine River, the future boundary between the states of Louisiana and Texas, as the limit of the territories acquired from France. At that time, Spain had delayed signing the treaty, so on May 14, 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote to President James Monroe: “I cannot regret that Spain has not signed the agreement, as I believe one day Texas will be one of the richest states in our Union.”^[2] Two years later, Spain and the United States signed the agreement that set the Sabine River as the boundary between the two empires. In Washington, they decided to accept the boundaries “for the time being,” as they believed that Texas and Cuba should be annexed to the Union. On January 12, 1828, in Mexico City, Mexico and the United States formally ratified the boundary agreements of the Adams-Onís Treaty. On April 5, 1932, in Washington, the same countries signed this ratification. The second article detailed the boundaries and their coordinates between the two nations. Among other rivers, the Sabine River, the Red River, and the Arkansas River were mentioned. As if all of this were not enough, the map published in Philadelphia in 1818 was referenced.

When Andrew Jackson became president in 1829, he instructed his Secretary of State, Van Buren, to negotiate the purchase of Texas or, failing that, to move the border recognized by the 1819 treaty, renaming the Nueces River as the Sabine River. Now his disciple and heir, President Polk, goes even further and confuses the Nueces River with the Rio Grande, and forgets recently signed treaties, much like a pastor interprets biblical commandments with great imagination and in the name of liberty. All for an altruistic cause. Polk and his promoters announce that the time has come to “expand freedom to other territories.” In their sights are also California, Oregon, Canada, Cuba…

In the North, politicians and enthusiasts entertain themselves with discussions about the immigration problem. The newcomers are not welcome. Most are Irish, and it is evident that their race is flawed: their copper-colored hair, their women who look blonde but are not. Restaurants advertise “No dogs or Irish.” Newspapers offer cooking jobs to black people, but not to the Irish, because they are dirty. Dirtier than black people. To make matters worse, almost all of them are Catholic, which proves they cannot read English correctly, the language of the Bible. Even the women of the pretty race begin to organize for their rights. Workers’ unions grow stronger. From his exile in London, Karl Marx publishes a ten-year column in the New York Tribune against British imperialism and American slavery and praises the new working-class culture of the United States. But there are still no communists. It will take almost a century for them to arrive in the lands of the Blacks and the savages to provide other good excuses for God’s chosen ones.

The dialectical war between slaveholders and abolitionists intensifies in the most important election in the history of the United States. At the Democratic Party convention, the expansionists observe that although the Cherokees were Christians who knew how to read and write and some had even learned to keep a few Black slaves, it was their race that made them savages. The newspapers mock their presidential candidate. They also mock his vice president, Dallas. The New York Herald says that never in the country’s history has there been a more ridiculous candidate, lacking all preparation and skill for the highest office, than Mr. James Polk. “Have the Democrats gone mad?” they ask, and they assure that Henry Clay’s victory is at least guaranteed.

Of course, the imagination of the powerful will once again override any law or agreement. The Adams-Onís Treaty will be worth no more than the paper it’s written on, and Texas will be annexed based on better interpretations. Half a century later, the same treaty will resurface in a court to defend its violators. In 1896, Texas, by then another state of the Union, will litigate in the Supreme Court against Oklahoma over the possession of Greer County. Its defense will focus on the recognition of the Adams-Onís Treaty signed by Washington and Madrid in 1821 and ratified with Mexico in 1832, a few years before it was ignored to move the national border from the Sabine River to the Nueces River, first, and then to the Rio Grande. Since Texas is a state of the land of laws, it will quote word for word the same treaty that Austin, Houston, Polk, and the rest of Washington had violated through diplomatic means first, and then through war.

1845. Conflict of men, the same story

Sacramento Valley, California. January 1845—President …

1845. May our diplomacy fail in the best way possible

Mexico City. April 7, 1845—An earthquake originating in Acapulco and of the same magnitude that will devastate the city in 1985, strikes Mexico City, damaging the Congress building. Three days later, the ground shakes again, destroying countless buildings in the capital and in seven other states. The already depleted state coffers run dry. Once again, as centuries ago, neither God nor the gods are with Mexico, or the Mexicans lack the Anglo-Saxon fanaticism to see a sign of divine blessing amidst so much tragedy. To make matters worse, the neighbor to the north is desperate to jump the fence and claim half of the property.

On April 18, the American captain David Conner anchors the Home Squadron along with other warships in Mexican waters, off the coast of Veracruz. In Mexico, the newspapers continue to protest the annexation of Texas by the United States. President José Herrera prefers to negotiate. He knows that the country’s treasury is as exhausted as faith in the future. Ever since Hernán Cortés set foot in Mexico, neither the country nor the various states that compose it have ever had much confidence in their own strength. Long before, the Cosmos was always threatening destruction, and the only way to avoid catastrophe was through self-sacrifice. Christian fanatics have also been awaiting the end of the world for the past thousand years, but if the world remained sacred to the Indigenous people, for the new Christians of Calvin and Luther, it was merely a contemptible lower world, as dead as a stone or a tree or a dark, soulless man to be conquered and exploited while awaiting a sign of ascension to Paradise. The invader always has faith in himself. The invader is a fanatic unstopped even by death. The invaded do not. The invaded, sooner or later, begin to despise themselves. They think they have no future or that catastrophe is inevitable and only aspire to resistance and a dignified extinction.

President James Polk launches the next phase of his plan, which must end in California. Before sending his emissaries to negotiate the boundaries of the new state with Mexico, Polk sends more warships to the Gulf ports. On June 4, he orders Captain John Sloat to position himself off the coast of San Francisco, awaiting orders to take the city and the Mexican state of California, in case the negotiations are not as advantageous as they should be.

Mexico does not attack or declare any war. The people do not want it, and their government cannot. The young colonel and future president of the United States, Ulysses Grant, when he enters the Mexican capital a year later, will be surprised by how civilized and well-organized the southern Mexicans are, but he will lament the “poor Mexicans” who want nothing to do with any war. Polk offers Herrera to forgive his country the two million-dollar debt claimed by the Anglo settlers (the same ones who had received free land from Mexico are now demanding compensation for damages caused by the temporary loss of their slaves) in exchange for setting the new national boundaries. He also orders his emissaries to offer Mexico a few more million for California during the negotiation process. On July 4th, the Texas Congress rejects Mexico’s offer to recognize its independence in exchange for not becoming a new state of the United States. The Mexican government agrees to negotiate the boundaries of the new state and asks Polk not to send John Slidell or William Parrott as emissaries because they are not welcome. Polk sends John Slidell and William Parrott.

Although at that time the United States is not a democracy, its president James Polk is not an absolute dictator and, like so many others to come, must manipulate public opinion by staging a scene that presents the enemy or the victim as the instigator, securing an excuse that legitimizes his goals and ensuring the hijacking of patriotic sentiment, which is very sensitive to wars for honor and justice. He cannot declare war without the approval of Congress and needs to convince a majority of legislators that justice and reason are on his side, so he ensures that all his diplomatic efforts in Mexico fail in the best possible way.

The leaders of the new empire resort to a formula that has been hidden in the nation’s subconscious since its founding: to self-flagellate before attacking with the full force of those who consider themselves morally entitled to invade, take, and exterminate for a good reason. Attacking first is called responding to aggression. Invading is called resisting. Taking what belongs to others is called recovering what is one’s own. Killing preventively is called self-defense.

1845. There will always be patriots willing to repel the invaded

Nashville, Tennessee. June 8, 1845—At six in the evening, at the monumental plantation The Hermitage and just a few months before the start of the war against Mexico, Andrew Jackson dies of diarrhea and other associated ailments. To his children and grandchildren gathered around him, he says not to cry, to be good boys so they may soon meet him in Paradise.

Yesterday, Saturday the 7th, he had received a group of friends. With his face gaunt and the rest of his body swollen, the old general, without losing his lucidity, had given them one last piece of advice on the edge of the grave: “We must take Texas and Oregon, by fair means or foul. If there is no agreement, let war settle it». We can do it because we will always have patriots ready to repel any foreign invasion, as he put it in 1837. “You have no longer any cause to fear danger from abroad… You have a country bounded by the Atlantic and the Pacific, inhabited by millions of freemen… ready at all times to repel invasion and defend their liberties.” Meaning, the rights of slaveholders. For some old acquaintances, the last words of the ailing hero are laced with much sarcasm, what more than a century later will be called Realpolitik. For the rest of the new generations, it will be an unwritten law or one yet to be written.

A few months earlier, the Indian Killer, as he was known among the Indians, had received a visit from his chosen and newly elected president, James Polk, who (like his successor, General Zachary Taylor) will also die of diarrhea four years later. The annexation of Texas is ratified on July 4, 1845, and on December 29, Texas is accepted into the league of slave states. Five months later, after years of searching for the golden opportunity, on May 11, 1846, the United States declares war on Mexico. The rivers of blood and seas of dollars that Andrew Jackson feared would be wasted if Texas was not annexed, will flow in the name of Manifest Destiny, war songs, and cheap whiskey in taverns across the country.

On his deathbed, Jackson confesses to his closest friends that he regrets only one thing in his entire life: not having shot Henry Clay. Jackson struggles to breathe and suffers from a hatred that is not cured even when he defeats his rivals decisively. On December 4, 1844, his protégé had defeated Henry Clay in the presidential election by 1.4 percent of the votes. The narrow victory by a few thousand votes in the most important election in the country’s history had been devastating for the anti-slavery movement.^[3]The former president and ex-expansionist John Quincy Adams had been one of the big losers. A handful of ignorant people, he had said, decided the nation’s future. For generations to come, Americans will be proud and grateful for that “handful of ignorants.” The non-interventionism of the Founding Fathers had tilted toward the racism of the Founding Fathers. It is, Quincy Adams thinks and claims, an act of brutal dispossession that would lead the country into a bloody and unjust war with its weak southern neighbor. He grew even angrier when he imagined his worst enemy, Andrew Jackson, celebrating in the bathroom where he had been exiled for a long time.

The defeated senator from Kentucky, Henry Clay, will remain one of President James Polk’s bitter enemies for the rest of his life. He detests him as a person and detests his strategy to provoke Mexico in pursuit of the war that would give the superior race what Manifest Destiny had promised. To his greatest misfortune, his son, Henry Clay Junior, after being elected as a representative of the lower house, will be seduced by the patriotic wave that called every American to the “defense of the country” and to a return to war laden with glory. The last words of the West Point graduate, Colonel Henry Clay Junior, will be at the Battle of Buena Vista, in Coahuila, later published in the Union of Magazine of Literature and Arts, on page 44: “There should be no battles more worthy of being sung by poets and remembered by historians than those we have fought here.” A famous illustration will recreate the dramatic moment, without blood or dust, in which Senator Clay’s son dies saying, “Take these pistols to my father. Tell him I did all I could with them.” They will say he then expired, but no one will say whether his father ever believed his dying son could have uttered such sentimental words in the war that one of his most celebrated soldiers, Ulysses Grant, would define in his 1879 memoirs as “the Rotten War.” Thousands of massacred Mexican men and raped Mexican women will have no artists to paint them nor poets to sing to them. In the civilized North, official history will ensure enough soil is thrown over the corpses to tell a story of heroism, success, and compassion tailored to its repeated myths.

1845. Manifest Destiny

Washington DC. July 1845—In the July 1845 issue of the Democratic Review, the editor and assistant to President James Polk, John O’Sullivan, invents the idea and the name of Manifest Destiny that will go viral among those seeking a higher justification than the excuses of their president to go to war with a country that does not want it. Although the reason for Texas’s independence and for the annexation of other territories is that they must be turned into slave states, O’Sullivan adds the ever-necessary religious seasoning: “manifest destiny carries the great experiment of liberty and must spread over all the land Providence has given us.” For centuries to come, theologians will search for the deed of cession sent by God to the American politician and journalist. Independent researchers will fail in their attempts to explain the expansion of slavery as an “experiment of liberty” that “must spread across all the land.”

In 1852, the same O’Sullivan, then editor of the New York Morning News, will publish an article titled “The Cuban Debate” in the Democratic Review with an opinion that was reasonable for its time: “this continent and its adjacent islands belong to the whites; the blacks must remain slaves…” The idea and the words will be repeated throughout the United States for generations to come, even after the legal abolition of slavery in 1865.

In May 1858, the magazine United States Democratic Review of New York, in its article “The Destiny of Mexico,” will explain God’s reasons for giving the rest of that horrible country to the Americans: “Many countries accuse us of insisting too much on that Manifest Destiny… We feel the hand of God upon us… Mexico began its history with everything in its favor, except one thing: its people were not white… They had a bad mix of Spanish, Indigenous, and black blood. People of this kind do not know how to be free and never will until they are educated by American Democracy, through which the master will rule over them… We are not taking Mexico for our own interest, which would be a joke impossible to believe. No, we will take Mexico for its own benefit, to help the eight million poor Mexicans suffering under despotism, anarchy, and barbarism.”

In 1872, the artist John Gast will deliver to the public and to history the most famous painting of Kitsch art: his allegory “American Progress” (known as “The Spirit of the Frontier”) will become a visual anthem in which a sensual blonde woman, with a breast about to see the light, points the way to the American pioneers carrying the plow, the telegraph, and the railroad across lands that the beasts and savages are abandoning, frightened by progress and incapable of understanding true freedom. In the middle and beneath the sensual woman flying like an angel, pioneers with their rifles, ready to defend themselves against any invader.

In 1897, the future president Theodore Roosevelt will publish in “About National Life and Character” that “the democracy of this century needs no further justification for its existence than the simple fact that it has been organized so that the white race may take possession of the best lands of the New World.”

In 2020, President Donald Trump will use the same theory in his State of the Union address, and the same NASA administrator will explain it on February 4th, in case the president and O’Sullivan were not entirely clear: “Manifest Destiny was the belief that the United States was destined to promote democracy and free enterprise in North America. Tonight, President Trump has said in his State of the Union: ‘The manifest destiny of the United States is in the stars’. We will go to the Moon and then to Mars to share those same values with all of humanity.”

1845. It is not out of greed but for the happiness of other nations

Mexico DF. December 29, 1845—James Polk’s envoy for negotiations with Mexico, John Slidell, writes from the capital: “I see no better way to resolve our differences with these people than through war.” On January 13, 1846, Polk sends the army to the Rio Grande, hoping Mexico will respond with fire. But Mexico knows it cannot win any war against the new empire. Its treasury has been depleted by long internal disputes, and its dwindling resources barely suffice to address the destruction caused by the earthquake. Its population has not grown like that of the North, with its cold noses in overpopulated Europe. Its income has been declining since the War of Independence and due to the vain attempts to reclaim Texas.

José Herrera is replaced by General Mariano Paredes, who still considers Texas a renegade state but does not dare to undertake any military venture. Slidell continues sending dispatches to Washington. For the chief negotiator, Mexico is a woman. He writes: “We should not deal with her. Never, until one day she learns to respect us.” Little by little, Mexico and Mexicans become the thieves, those who have offended the proud country of the North. The Sangamo Journal of Illinois, on April 23, 1846, states: “It is urgent to take some kind of action against that country. The government of Mexico has insulted ours and has robbed our people, too much for us to continue kneeling at their feet to claim our rights.”

James Polk convinces himself before convincing the press, which, in a few months, convinces the people that Mexico’s three capital offenses are:

1.  Not receiving our envoy and representative, Mr. John Slidell, as he deserved.

2.  Refusing to pay the compensation for damages claimed by U.S. citizens who years earlier received free land from the Mexican government, only to later be warned that, according to the law, they must free their slaves and, if possible, eventually pay the corresponding taxes.

3.  Refusing to recognize that the United States also owns the strip beyond the Nueces River and not just the Texas wrested from Mexico by Anglo farmers in 1836.

As for any respectable southern slaveholder and according to their codes of honor, these offenses must be punished with war and the deprivation of the rights of others. As in the Middle Ages in Europe, in the prosperous regions of the American South, honor is the pillar of every moral code, very much alongside the pillar of the servitude of others as blessings from Almighty God. Even a northerner like Walt Whitman, from his poetic distance, agrees. On May 11, 1846, the revered poet publishes in the Democratic newspaper The Brooklyn Eagle: “For these reasons of right and before the world, Mexico must be punished with a declaration of war from us. We have sought peace by every possible means; we have closed our eyes to so many offenses. We have forgotten the massacres of our brave men down in the south. Massacres not only against humanity but against the very laws of war and the laws of God. But the time has come to do justice. Let our weapons, charged with the spirit of justice, make it clear that America, though it neither seeks nor desires trouble, knows how to defend itself and knows how to expand.”

On June 6, the recognized sensitivity of Whitman (another celebrated modernist poet, Ezra Pound, will call him “the poet of America”) insists, with joyful enthusiasm: “We know that even in the fertile and beautiful province of Yucatán, in southern Mexico, the people are eager to place themselves under the wings of our protective eagle. Some sources indicate that our government has already sent emissaries to the area to negotiate… Then will come California. Two more stars in our mighty firmament. Let no one make the mistake of believing it is greed. We are not interested in the territorial greatness of the nation but in its happiness and the happiness of nations.” Whitman considers blacks relatives of monkeys and is in favor of slavery. His cohabitation with underage boys is dismissed as a minor detail. What will infuriate puritanical morals is something else. Despite his heartfelt patriotic praises, Whitman will be fired from the Daily Eagle two years later for acknowledging that the interests of workers and slaveholders were opposed. He won’t be imprisoned because the slaveholding democracy applauds and funds its apologists, but it doesn’t eliminate its most well-known dissenters.

President James Polk resorts to the reasonable and equitable principle of treating all nations equally. Although an atheist, or nearly so, the president is convinced by his devout wife, Sarah, that white dominion over the world is part of God’s plan, as evidenced by each of the plantations in the now-powerful South, where the few white masters rule over the many black slaves to bring about the prosperity and wealth that is lacking in other nations like Mexico.

After months under the bombardment of the national press, the powerful public opinion is already convinced of who is responsible for so much humiliation, so much dispossession, and so much injustice. The national Congress must respond to these popular demands, as in any democracy. But not everyone agrees, which shows that justifying someone for being a product of their time is as fragile an argument as a sandcastle. Some abolitionist newspapers in the North observe that President James Polk and his followers are planning an aggression against a country that is weakened and unwilling to enter any war. They insist on the non-interventionist principles of the Founding Fathers and the Christian principles of not succumbing to the temptation of power, wealth, and injustice over the weak. On April 29, 1846, the Daily Sentinel and Gazette of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will put it bluntly: “Slidell’s mission was nothing more than a strategy to insult Mexico and then claim that we were offended, and in that way, typical of the rules of chivalry of the slaveholders of the South, to secure the perfect excuse for our purposes, which is the declaration of war against a weakened country. It doesn’t matter what Mexico says or does. The war will be declared regardless. That day will be the day this country has broken all human and Christian rules to disturb the progress and peace of the world.”

For his part, President James Polk insists that his government and his country treat all nations of the world—small, poor, weak, or powerful—equally. It is simply a matter of justice. Occupied with other matters of state, a few days later he proposes to England to end the dual possession of Oregon, leaving the north region to the British Empire and the southern half to the United States. “It is a kind proposal,” says Polk. It is, in fact, a very convenient proposal for Great Britain, which, distracted and preoccupied with more pressing matters, will not refuse.

But Mexico is not England and there is no need to negotiate with those below. It is a country of hybrids (mestizos), full of corrupt individuals, entirely incapable of understanding the benefits of Anglo-Saxon freedom, and above all, it is not an empire capable of responding to fire with fire. In 1849, a soldier who will testify before the United States Congress of will say that, from Saltillo to Mier, over in Mexico, “the towns full of smiling people greeting our soldiers soon turned into smoldering ruins; nothing remained of their orange groves in bloom, and their inhabitants fled to the mountains… Attila should not have left so much destruction in his wake…”

History does not record, nor will it ever record, an attack by the bald eagle on a country that is not mortally wounded, whether by circumstances or by its size. It will record, instead, hundreds of interventions in poor republics, in small islands, sometimes as tiny as Grenada, which will require a massive invasion for the world to learn of their existence.

1846. At last, we were attacked

Washington DC. May 11, 1846—President James Polk appears before Congress to make an announcement of extreme gravity: Mexico has invaded the United States. The invader “has shed American blood on American soil,” declares the president, and Congress boils with indignation. The indignation spills into the streets, crosses the rivers of the South and the Appalachians to the West. The people clamor for a restoration of national honor. There were hardly any real news to quench the thirst of the new newspapers that sold like hotcakes for a penny (five cents less than the traditional papers) and, suddenly, the news of the century. In every town and city, newspapers barely worth the paper they were printed on flood the country with articles copied from one another, spreading and exaggerating exciting rumors and provoking news that sells more. Nothing is as thrilling and nothing sells more than sex and war, but sex outside the marital bed is forbidden.

The facts, which rarely matter, were somewhat different. Ten months earlier, the same President Polk had ordered Colonel Zachary Taylor and his battalion to cross all borders, real and imaginable: the Sabine River, the border with the Republic of Texas, and the Nueces River, the border of that country with Mexico. This past March, once Texas was annexed by a vote of Congress, four thousand soldiers had crossed the Nueces River, the first declared boundary of the former republic with Mexico, and had settled on the Mexican side, in Corpus Christi. Shortly after, they continued further south towards the Rio Grande.^[4]

On the way, General Ethan Allen Hitchcock wrote in his diary: “To tell the truth, we have no right to be here. It seems more like the government has sent us with so few men to provoke the Mexicans and thus have a pretext for a war that will allow us to take California“. Colonel Ulysses Grant, who only thinks about a position as a mathematics professor in Ohio and his future father-in-law finally agreeing to give him his daughter as a wife, writes to his fiancée Julia that the officers don’t stop talking about the laurels and promotions they will achieve after the “incursion into disputed territories” while the soldiers only think about leaving. The first casualties are due to accidents, young Grant records; one soldier drowned and two black aids sleeping in a tent were hit by lightning that killed one of them and seriously injured the other. With greater enthusiasm, on July 2, 1846, he sent another letter to Julia: “I am sure that now that the Oregon boundaries have been settled, we will soon leave Mexico“.

Colonel and future president, Taylor, is an opponent of the annexation of Texas, but he is a military man. Hitchcock and Grant are also military men and neither questions orders. Against their own ideas of reality and morality, they all proceed to carry out the higher orders with the greatest possible glory and effectiveness. Good old Grant, another future president, is counting on promotions to get married. Taylor camps in front of Matamoros, orders the cannons to be pointed at the small city on the other side of the Rio Grande and blocks it by sea, preventing the entry of supplies.

One night, fifty American soldiers threw themselves into the Rio Grande and disappeared into Mexico, just as black slaves used to disappear into Texas for freedom (when Texas was Mexico). Most are Irish or descendants of those unwanted immigrants. A few days later, twenty miles from Taylor’s camp, one of his battalions encountered some Mexican soldiers, and a brief shootout ensued with no major consequences—at least not at that moment. The American battalion, outnumbered, surrendered shortly after the battle began. The long-awaited war had begun.

The news of the enemy fire took weeks to reach Washington. Today, Monday, President James Polk has reported to Congress: “After repeated threats, Mexico has crossed our border and invaded the country, spilling American blood on American soil.” The precision reveals the intent. Two days later, just before the crucial vote in Congress, at 12:30 in the afternoon, a representative from Kentucky, Garrett Davis, rises and protests: “The Nueces River is the true western boundary of Texas. It was not Mexico that started this war, but our president, who has been seeking and planning it for many months.”

Congress, now with a majority of Southerners, Democrats, and slaveholders, approves the declaration of war with only 14 votes against, including that of John Quincy Adams. Power uses its most important men when they agree and discards them when they don’t. The old Quincy Adams, former president and former expansionist, author of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, now turned abolitionist, denounces the injustice of a dirty war against the southern neighbor. He accuses President Polk of betraying the truth and the most basic moral principles. Too late. The fourteen legislators who oppose the war are accused of something worse. They are accused of treason against the homeland and treason to “Our Troops,” who, even before the vote, had entered Mexican waters off Veracruz in the Gulf and off San Francisco in the Pacific.

In Mexico’s National Palace, distracted by internal disputes, the president and the congressmen will take another two months to realize they were at war with the powerful neighbor to the north.

1846. God has given us this land

Matamoros, Mexico. May 31, 1846—At four in the afternoon, the United States Army finally occupies Matamoros, and General Zachary Taylor appoints a governor. On May 19, the Baltimore Sun, under the headline

“We Are Starting to Win. Matamoros Reduced to Ashes. 700 Mexicans Dead!!”

had made a strange reference to that country’s flag, reporting that “the Mexican serpent has succumbed to the claws of our eagle… General Taylor has ordered the blockade of Mexico from the Gulf.” Seven hundred Mexicans dead and only one of our own fuel the patriotic spirit of millions. The Sun, inventor of the penny press (penny newspaper), states that the brave native of Maryland, Major Samuel Ringgold, killed in the Battle of Palo Alto two weeks earlier, has covered himself in glory, and 17,000 more volunteers are already preparing to fight in Mexico. From now on, history books will be filled with his image falling from a white horse, sometimes black, always assisted by his officers. The illustrations of the death of the legislator and soldier John J. Hardin in the Battle of Buena Vista will be almost a copy in style and meaning.

In Matamoros, Captain R. A. Stewart, a Louisiana slaveholder and pastor of the Methodist Church, delivers a sermon to the victorious soldiers, quoting Jeremiah VII: 3, 6: “Thus says the LORD of hosts: Judge with truth, with mercy, and with compassion, treating all as brothers. “If you do not oppress the foreigner, nor the orphan, nor the widow, nor shed blood in this place, then I will give you this land to live in forever, for I had already given it to your ancestors.” The successive massacres occur without oppressing the foreigner and without shedding blood. In a position of prayer and respect, the soldiers listen as Pastor Stewart justifies the true Christians who have come from the north to “bring light to Tamaulipas and thus compel its inhabitants to accept the blessings of liberty.”

The battalion remains silent. Pastor Stewart closes the Bible and, like any fanatical pastor, continues to make God speak: “this history demonstrates, beautifully and unquestionably, that our struggle has been by the Lord’s command. That God commands us not only for the Anglo-Saxon race to take possession of the entire continent of North America but also to forever change the destiny of the rest of the world.”

 A few months later, General Winfield Scott, in his report to the Secretary of State, complains about his own militias and the volunteers coming from the north: “the theft, murders, and rapes of mothers and daughters in front of their bound husbands have been common throughout this region of the Rio Grande.” In his diary, Captain Daniel Harvey Hill, who in the Civil War will join the Confederates, recalls that “American volunteers assaulted homes, looted them, murdered the men, and raped Mexican women in broad daylight.” A few months later, on February 9, 1847, a member of the Arkansas regiment in Agua Nueva, Coahuila, under the supervision of the former governor of Arkansas, Archibald Yell, and under the command of General John Ellis Wool, will rape a young Mexican woman, for which her relatives will seek revenge and kill the aggressor.^[5] As revenge for the revenge, a hundred men from the same regiment will pursue a group of local refugees hiding in a cave in Catana, near Saltillo. When the American battalion finds them, the women and children will plead for mercy, but they will still be raped by the soldiers and then massacred until the blood stains their uniforms.

Similar testimonies abound regarding rapes, murders of unarmed civilians, and the destruction of churches and cemeteries. However, in the United States, readers do not even entertain the idea that their uniformed boys could be capable of such indecent acts. Public opinion has fossilized. In Washington, some of the staunchest opponents of President James Polk, such as Senator John McHenry, bow to the unquestionable victories on the battlefield and congratulate the glorious American army that has defeated the invading forces. The press is even more graphic. On May 20, the Jacksonville Republican of Alabama reproduces the same article printed in other states: “our heroic soldiers have made the perfidious Mexicans bite the dust of defeat… All honor to General Ringgold and his Third Battalion of Artillery and their brave soldiers, nine times nine, for defending our country and the freedom of our institutions!”

From enemy territory, the general and future president Zachary Taylor struggles to handle the flood of claims regarding abuses, murders, and rapes. He retreats to his tent and writes a letter to his son-in-law: “I have heard rumors of President Polk’s death. I wish death upon no one, but the death I would least regret would be that of this gentleman.”

The former governor of Arkansas and adventurer Archibald Yell will die in the Battle of Buena Vista two weeks later, on February 23, 1847. His regiment will become infamous for its lack of discipline and its rapes of unarmed Mexicans. Some of his soldiers and volunteers will fare better. John Selden Roane will become governor of Arkansas. Others, such as General Albert Pike, Solon Borland, and James Fleming Fagan, will be recognized as valiant heroes of the southern Confederate army in the Civil War of the United States, in their struggle to maintain the noble tradition of slavery abroad.

Letters from soldiers and volunteers sent from Mexico to their families describing crimes and rapes against the unarmed population of the country that did not want war will not be taken seriously by the press for being unrealistic. Many will not even be published before the outraged responses to such honesty. An Anglo-Saxon Christian is a representative of civilization, law, and order, incapable of an act against morality and justice. Much less against sexual morality.

1846. The Political War and the Cultural War

Springfield, Illinois. June 4, 1846—The Sangamo Journal insists that hostilities were not initiated by Mexico but by President James Polk. However, as the war progresses, the same Illinois newspaper patriotically supports the attack and dispossession of the southern neighbor. The days of the Whig party are numbered. Just as the Federalist Party disappeared for opposing the war in 1812, now the Whigs will disappear for opposing the war with Mexico.^[6]

After the repeated military failures to annex part of Canada thirty years earlier, the smartest business is to continue the dispossession of indigenous nations first and then Mexican territories. President James Polk has a good argument: “To obtain California, the full power of Christendom must be applied.” A new crusade, another with the cross but without the crucified. Great works require sacrifice and courage, like his abandonment of atheism upon entering the White House. The Democratic newspaper State Register clarifies and warns against excessive optimism: “Mexicans are racially inferior, but they are one step above blacks.”

Theories and faith are not enough. Popular morale must be lifted, and at a certain point, despite the self-censorship of most newspapers, the news that makes it into print has the opposite effect. Some newspapers begin publishing reports from their correspondents in Mexico along with the letters of soldiers, as will happen in other invasions throughout generations to come. Illinois Congressman and volunteer soldier John J. Hardin is surprised not to have seen a single drunk Mexican. “In other respects, they are not much different from blacks,” he writes and laments because he expected to find gardens with beautiful women fanning themselves, “offering the delicious fruits of the land,” and instead, they had to march for long days across deserts filled with cacti. Worse than all that, Hardin could not stand encountering Mexican hybrids uninterested in the war. Others, like the young paramedic Alexander Somerville Wotherspoon, are annoyed when, instead of fierce natives, they encounter rather friendly people.

In the civilized North, readers, from the commissioner to the prisoners, anxiously await the newspapers each morning or read them aloud in the streets, as if it were the final of a great tournament. When they fail to fill the pages with heroic tales of soldiers and volunteers, the editors entertain themselves by turning any fallen Protestant family son into a hero, like the unfortunate son of Senator Martin D. Hardin, John, who died in Buena Vista, Coahuila, on February 23, 1847. In Illinois, his funeral will gather 15,000 men and women who will mourn him. Even the young Abraham Lincoln, defeated in the 1844 elections by John Hardin, changes his anti-war speech into an apology for his political adversary and the fallen in the war against Mexico. He does not spare patriotic speeches or praise for the fallen hero. Historians will not agree on what John Hardin’s military contribution could have been, but Lincoln will be elected this same year to take his seat in the House of Representatives.

On July 24, Henry David Thoreau, the most important philosopher and activist in the United States of the 19th century, is arrested and spends a month in jail for refusing to support the war against Mexico with his taxes. In his defense, he says it is “a war perpetrated by a few for their own benefit and at the expense of the government of all… A war carried out with the purpose of extending slavery into foreign territories.” In his book Civil Disobedience, he will insist that no individual should surrender their conscience to their government or to the powers that govern their society. Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell (author of the anti-war book The Biglow Papers), and Frederick Douglass also spare no effort in writing articles against the war. But one is a philosopher, another a poet (like Thoreau, who, to make matters worse, is both), and the last is black.

The political war will be won by power, this time the power of the slaveholding states of the South, but the cultural war threatens once again to be won by the radicals of the books. James Polk hurries and writes letters that his wife Sarah will read and correct before they are sent to one of the president’s few journalist friends.

Sarah pauses. She stands up and looks out the window. It is a sweltering summer day, and outside it must be unbearable. Even more so in the sun, like the blacks working in the White House gardens. Sarah fans herself and reflects aloud:

“Those who wrote the Declaration of Independence lived in a world of fantasy…”

The president looks up and gazes at her. Another of his beloved Sarah’s many notions. James Polk smiles, and Sarah takes notice. She turns and looks at him with indifference. Polk, like his father, is a faithful Jeffersonian, atheist, or nearly so, and still a believer in those things of humanism and some failed French ideas about equality, liberty, and democracy. But more than in Jefferson’s words, Polk trusts in the political pragmatism of his wife. She calls it instinct, because it is more fitting for a woman, and without stopping, she recites sarcastically from memory:

“We, the people, hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

James Polk shrugs and signs the solemn declaration, like in the Middle Ages when priests ended a discussion by quoting Aristotle:

“Thomas Jefferson. July 4, 1776.”

But Sarah is not impressed.

“Look at those men,” she says, pointing to the blacks bent over the ground under the worst July sun. “They did not choose to be there, bending over all day to preserve the beauty of this house and this country. Nor did we choose to be here, you writing and me fanning myself as I watch those men under the sun. Each of us was created to occupy the place we occupy. Each one is in the place they must be.”

On June 5, 1845, the New York Herald repeats a common phrase: Mexicans are a race resulting from all kinds of mixtures, which has produced “an intellectual imbecility characteristic of their race… rendering them incapable of self-governance.” On the other hand, “the Anglo-Saxon race has always abhorred the mere idea of mixing with other races… Wherever the Anglo-Saxons have advanced, they have displaced the inferior races, replacing barbarism with civilization”. Any peace treaty with Mexico “must guarantee the protection of immigration from the United States to gradually displace the imbecile race that inhabits that country with the energetic Anglo-Saxon race.”

In Congress, claims multiply about the imbecility of non-Anglo-Saxon races and the incapability of Mexicans, like the Indians and blacks, to understand the concept of liberty. Starting with Andrew Jackson, politicians and presidents of the country are, in a critical number, Southerners; far more religious than the founding generation and less educated in the culture of the Enlightenment and humanism. In the slave-holding South, sincerity emerges from the back. In the face of inferior races or unpleasant individuals, they are more amiable than in the North; they smile more easily and, trained in the culture of the Master, know how to avoid conflict when it is unnecessary and when to provoke it when the fruit is ripe.

The racist and slave-holding mentality that governs the country will govern the world. For the Southerners of the North, the white race (almost non-existent in the Bible, except for some pagans of the Roman Empire) was chosen by God to dominate the world. Christianity, like the human race, upon passing through Europe would have lost its color and its converts, from being barbarians and Slavic slaves they became civilized slaveholders; from being persecuted and tortured by the Empire, they became fearsome persecutors and torturers of other defenseless peoples. For the new generations of Southern, slave-holding politicians, the rest of humanity (the black slaves, the rebellious Indians, the corrupt Mexicans) must be treated as what they are, inferior beings incapable of managing their own affairs. If they do not behave as subjects or slaves, they are considered guilty of some unacceptable offense and deserving of the punishment that extends borders and the sacred right of one’s own commerce.

On August 8, President James Polk requests two million dollars from Congress to negotiate with a devastated, occupied Mexico with no possibility of negotiation. David Wilmot, a representative from Pennsylvania (black sheep of the Democratic Party and later of the new Republican Party) proposes that, in exchange for the approval of the requested funds, the prohibition of slavery be maintained in the new territories wrested from Mexico. The Senate, with a majority of the Southern slaveholding Democrats, rejects the proposal. Texas and the new states will not only be an inexhaustible source of land to extend slave plantations, but will end up breaking the balance in Congress between states for and against slavery that still threaten to abolish slavery in the United States as the barbaric republics of the South did decades ago.

In February of the following year, Wilmot’s proposal will be considered once again. Once more, as it will happen for ten generations to come, the bill will pass the House of Representatives and be rejected by the Senate, dominated by rural, conservative, and practically uninhabited states.[7] Slavery will take a few more decades to be abolished, but it will require the bloodiest war the United States will suffer within its borders in its entire history. Blacks will become U.S. citizens in 1868, but not free individuals. Mexican-Americans will not either. The electoral system for choosing presidents, the disproportionate power of conservative senators, a legacy of the slave system since the founding of this country, will survive intact until the 21st century. The legal discrimination of natives, blacks, and Hispanics in the Southern states will last another century. Discrimination, racism, Anglo-Saxon self-victimization across the country, invasions and interventions in foreign countries in the name of self-defense, at least another century.

1846. Those who arrive are criminals, rapists

Monterrey, Mexico. September 20, 1846—Despite his conscience and due to military obedience, General Zachary Taylor marches on Monterrey. After his troops passed through, taking three days to do so in the city, one of the witnesses (on August 11, 1848, Manuel Payno will publish his testimony in Mexico as Apuntes para la historia de la guerra) recalls that the inhabitants who survived left the city carrying their children in their arms, and one of the most beautiful cities of the republic “was turned into a vast cemetery. The unburied corpses, the dead and rotting animals, the desolation of the streets, everything gave a dreadful aspect to that city”.

Another future president of the United States, Ulysses Grant, then a young colonel on July 25, writes from Matamoros to his fiancée Julia: “Since we arrived in Matamoros, there have been great and repeated massacres, and nothing has been done to prevent them. Some of our volunteers, especially those from Texas, believe they have the right to do whatever they want with the people of a destroyed city. They think they can murder any Mexican, shielded by the darkness of the facts, and they seem to enjoy it greatly. I don’t even want to tell you how many poor Mexicans have been killed in this way, but the number would astonish you”. Different volunteer soldiers acknowledge the massacres of defenseless people, but they justify them due to the “offenses committed by Mexico“, as President James Polk had determined. From Matamoros, Frank Hardy, a volunteer from Ohio, writes to his brother that “although the Mexicans seem to share respect for the institutions of the United States, they are nonetheless nothing but snakes crawling on the ground. They are friends of the United States only to do business. They are a disgrace to their race and have hearts as dark as their skin”. General Winfield Scott writes directly to the Secretary of State: “If we report a tenth of what is known, we must say that our militias and volunteers have committed atrocities, horrors in Mexico, enough to make heaven and any Christian ashamed of our country. Theft, murders, and the rape of mothers and daughters in front of their bound husbands have been common throughout this region of the Rio Grande”.

On April 11, General Scott announces in a written statement addressed “to the honorable people of Mexico“, that an American has been “hanged by the neck” for dishonoring his country’s army by raping a Mexican woman. Scott asks, “Is this not clear proof of the good faith and discipline by which we govern ourselves?” Two days later, on April 13, The American Eagle, from Veracruz, reports on the execution of a black man (“colored man”) named Kirk, a “citizen” of the United States, accused of raping a Mexican woman. “The execution took place on Saturday afternoon. A large crowd gathered to witness the first execution under American occupation ever recorded. This act will prove to the world what happens to those who violate the good customs of upstanding citizens”. In Matamoros, a Kentucky officer warns: “If they are going to send servants to the border, they better be white”. The U.S. Army does not accept blacks, and the Navy only up to five percent. The reason was very simple: whites are more patriotic. All other races, including the Irish, desert easily as soon as they can. They have no country.

When General Scott proclaims to the world that an American has been hanged for rape, he does not clarify that blacks are not even citizens of his country. Blacks will remain slaves in the United States until the 13th Amendment of 1865 and will not be citizens of that country until 1868. In 1847, they were the private property of their masters, like bayonets, pigs, and horses, without the right to citizenship or a fair trial, but with all the moral responsibilities of a free man or woman, in addition to their particular obligations under the peculiar institution. The crimes of the Anglo adventurers will never be punished. Justice is blind. The multiple murders of Mexicans fleeing the war and the rapes of women with their children in their arms will go unpunished, barely lamented in letters and testimonies from both sides.

The newspapers on the other side of the border, such as the North American of Philadelphia on May 25, 1846, celebrate the “spirit of the nation” by which “the government can trust in the moral values of its soldiers and volunteers, men capable of leaving the best of their land to fight honorably for their country.” In a letter dated June 30, General Zachary Taylor himself laments being unable to control the volunteers in their murders and rapes, more characteristic of barbarians than of civilized beings.

A year later, General Scott will enter Mexico City, imposing conditions to negotiate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which will hand over half of Mexican territory to the United States and consign the atrocities of Manifest Destiny of the superior race to near total oblivion, even as he himself had denounced them in his time.

1847. Our country is always right

Matamoros, Mexico. March 22, 1847—As Moctezuma had opened the doors of the empire to Cortés, José Herrera opens the doors to James Knox Polk. In his journals, which, shortly after being sent to Europe, became bestsellers, Hernán Cortés wrote that his massacres had been blessed by God with victory. Polk and all the presidents of the United States are also certain that they are God’s envoys, and all the lands and the men and women they take in their path are part of Manifest Destiny. The landing in Veracruz and the path to Mexico are the same in 1519 and in 1847, which is why some call it “The Route of Cortés,” with one difference: Hernán Cortés sank his own ships, and General Winfield Scott rained fire for five days upon the city condemned to imperial bombardment.

Like the Aztecs, the Mexicans are demoralized. Like the Spanish conquistadors, the American Marines are bursting with euphoria because they have their gods on their side. On February 23, soldier Theodore McGinnis writes a letter to his family in Wisconsin: “We are going to descend upon Vera Cruz like a tornado. Europe has never known a feat like this.” On March 9, General Scott decides to blockade the port of Veracruz. He knows that the Mexican army is distracted in the capital, and the capital, wrapped up in its internal struggles, fails to gauge the seriousness of the situation. Scott introduces a novel military strategy that will become a rule in future wars. As he did in the war against the Cherokee people, he knows that civilian casualties decide the course of history, and he bombards the city on March 22. In four days, he rains 220 tons of cannonballs upon streets, plazas, churches, and businesses. The few buildings left standing burn in flames for several days. On April 3, soldier Turner Crooker writes to his mother about his excitement at seeing the stars and stripes flag flying over one of the most important cities of the enemy, now in ruins.

In Monterrey, John E. Durivge, correspondent for the Picayune of New Orleans, denies that an American is capable of raping a Mexican woman. On May 13, he reports the indiscriminate massacre of Mexicans in Mexico “by people who call themselves Americans.” The Anglo volunteers, whom even General Zachary Taylor cannot control and whom the young Colonel Ulysses Grant considers unpunished murderers, massacre entire families in retaliation for the unjust invasion of Mexicans into Mexico. Durivge writes: “Two or three weeks ago, an American was shot dead and his friends decided to avenge his death. A group of at least twenty men went to the area and killed twenty-four Mexicans. In May, the Rangers hanged forty Mexicans for similar reasons.”

Some congressmen from the Whig Party criticized these killings, and President James Polk accused them of being traitors to the homeland. Some women go even further. Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm, an abolitionist and feminist in difficult times, and Rebecca Gratz, a 67-year-old Jewish teacher, publish articles against the war. They sign with pseudonyms.

But the taverns of the United States are filled with popular songs in favor of the war. Nothing excites a country’s patriotism more than a war. War, the eternal emotion where we kill and others die. The lyrics celebrate and honor national heroes fallen in combat and denounce “the atrocities of the Mexicans.” “Look up on that Banner” and “The Dying Soldier of Buena Vista” are the great hits of the season.

Look up on that banner, it is Columbia’s pride

«Tis glory to guard it neath it have hero’s died;

Those stars so brightly beaming no light can shine like them_

Those stripes so proudly streaming, form Glory’s diadem!

REFRAIN. Justice is our motto kc.

Then on to the battle, where glory waits ye now,-

Her garlands she’s weaving to crown each soldier’s brow;

Again! the trumpet’s sounding no longer boy delay

With hearts with hopes rebounding, let every son obey!

REFRAIN. Justice is our motto &c.

When homeward returning, all fresh from Glory’s fight,

Thy country shall greet thee, and hail thee with delight,

But should the gallant soldier, in deadly conflict fall,

With laurel and cypress, we’ll bedeck his funeral pall.

REFRAIN. Justice is our motto kc.

(Horace Pratt “Look on that Flag.” Song of a patriotic mother to her son.)

Obviously, Horace Pratt was not a mother. The war is so popular and has such power to silence any dissent that, in addition to James Polk (principal instrument of the war against Mexico and disciple of the proponent of the dispossession of Indian territories, Andrew Jackson), the next presidents will be war veterans. General Zachary Taylor, who hated politics and, above all, hated President Polk for considering the war against Mexico a crude excuse to take more territories, would become one of the heroes of the war against Mexico and was elected president in 1848. Franklin Pierce, although a lawyer, participated in the same war as a Brigadier General and was elected in 1852. General Ulysses Grant, a critic of the war against Mexico and outraged by the rapes and crimes of his compatriots against those people, would become a hero of the Civil War and was elected president in 1868 and reelected in 1872. The same with William McKinley in 1896. Although it will be Franklin Roosevelt the president of the recovery and refounding of the United States, after the Second World War, General Harry Truman, responsible for the only two atomic bombs dropped on two cities in all history, and later, in 1952, General Dwight Eisenhower will be elected president. Eisenhower will be the last general president and veteran of a major war, but the vocation for war as a patriotic instrument will never pass. Especially when leaders no longer need to wear a military uniform or get stained with foreign blood or their own sweat but be good communicators, dressed in impeccable dark suits and smiling with their mouths full of perfect super-white implants.

1847. The dream of a super powerful revolver

Huamantla, Tlaxcala. August 31, 1847—Five days after arriving in Mexico, Samuel H. Walker, a hero of the wars against the Indians in North America and inventor, along with Samuel Colt, of the famous Colt Walker revolvers, is sent to

(…)

1847. Poor Mexicans, they want nothing to do with the war

Veracruz, Mexico, April 18th, 1847—Scores of Irish deserters, who did not understand the Manifest Destiny, fight on the Mexican side. They are known as the Battalion of San Patricios, one of the fiercest in the war.

On April 19th, General Winfield Scott defeats Santa Anna at Cerro Gordo. Santa Anna loses a third of his troops and, on the brink of victory, abruptly retreats. Newspapers in the United States praise “the sacrifice our soldiers make for our nation.” In Puebla, the American troops encounter a stumbling block that prevents them from advancing due to the difficulty of fighting local guerrillas. The Philadelphia North American reports the death of thirty Americans at the hands of guerrillas, whom the Mexicans call “rancheros.”

The Anglos who arrive in Jalpa find a city that reminds them of cities in their own country. But they are not in the land of laws, and the volunteers, protected by the invading soldiers, continue to rob in the streets in broad daylight. Carl von Grone, a Prussian in the service of General Scott, writes to his brother in Germany: “each passing day the Americans assault women in the streets, in broad daylight. They enter their churches and steal whatever they find.”

The San Patricios Battalion is definitively defeated. 72 are sentenced to capital punishment. General Scott pardons five, but the spectacle of the 52 Irishmen hanged in a square provokes the indignation of the locals while Santa Anna’s prosthetic leg is taken to Illinois as a war trophy and displayed at the Illinois State Military Museum, where it will remain for generations to come. Shortly after, the American soldiers enter Mexico City and are disappointed: as the Spaniards of Hernán Cortés found it more than three centuries ago, the city is well-organized, everything is clean, everything functions like any Yankee city, and the women are of “unexpected beauty.” One of the soldiers writes that “the people seem smarter than we thought.” Ulysses Grant never tires of praising the climate and the people of the place. On April 24, he writes to his fiancée that the route from Veracruz to Mexico “is one of the best in the world,” the town of Jalpa “is the most beautiful place I have seen in my entire life; Julia, I wish our house were here for the rest of our lives.” In another letter from September, he writes that the capital, Mexico, “is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.”

Otto Birkel, a volunteer from Ohio, writes in his diary: “The Founding Fathers were right to recommend strict neutrality in the affairs of other countries. But their grandchildren believe themselves wiser than them… In the United States no one thinks taking over the entire continent is madness. On the contrary, they are encouraged by their demagogues.”

On December 19, the Picayune newspaper of New Orleans, Louisiana, under the title “Massacre of Mexican citizens” reports that, to avenge the death of a ranger in Mexico, his fellow soldiers approached a village where the guerrilla was supposedly living and killed 17 people, leaving another 40 wounded. Days later, Ulysses Grant writes to his fiancée: “Mexico is a pleasant place to live because it is neither too cold nor too hot. But it seems that its people want nothing to do with war. I feel sorry for them; poor Mexico!”

1847. As with the Indians, this too is a just war

Illinois Journal, Springfield. November 18, 1847—Multiple newspapers have already adopted President James Polk’s axioms as unquestionable revelations, and just as a pastor elaborates at will upon a sacred paragraph from the Bible, the journalism of the time does the same with every word from the White House. Like the faith of any religion, patriotism transforms the deepest desires into more words that justify, promote, and ratify every convenient action. On Thursday the 18th, the Springfield newspaper in Chicago analyzes the offense of the Mexicans for having given tax-free land to American citizens, forced by barbaric laws to free their slaves: “Our compatriots had the right to visit Mexico based on the sacred right of commerce. And how were they treated? Did the Mexican authorities show any consideration for the dictates of justice and humanity? No. They respected neither the persons nor the property of American citizens. They robbed them and sent them to jail. They insulted them. Some died from their privations. They trampled our name on their soil and insulted our flag at sea. These outrages constitute, according to the known law of nations, a just cause for war. It has been said that the Mexican authorities recognized all their errors and offenses and promised to compensate us to the extent that this could be done with money, but they never fulfilled it. They say they have no money. But what efforts did Mexico ever make to fulfill its commitments? Isn’t it a terrible excuse to plead poverty as a reason for not fulfilling commitments, which, in any case, they would never have done, even if only out of fear of being whipped? This is not all. Instead of repairing the wounds it had inflicted on our citizens and which it had promised to repair, it continued to perpetrate similar outrages. For these reasons, we always thought the war against Mexico was just and unavoidable. They were made to bite the dust. Had it not been for Mexico, President James Polk, in his noble struggle for glory, would not have turned his gaze from Oregon to focus on Texas. This was also said by General Jackson: it was a just war. All our patience and magnanimity was for the Mexicans, who are incapable of understanding these things. On the contrary, while we acted with prudence, they took advantage to continue robbing and looting our citizens.”

Not everyone thinks the same, but the art of delegitimizing and silencing is more effective than any censorship. A few months later, on January 12, 1848, the Illinois State Register will report on the scandalous words that the young, forty-year-old politician named Abraham Lincoln will utter in his speech in the House of Representatives about the unjust situation to which his country has forced its neighbor: “The God of the heavens has forgotten to defend the weak and innocent, allowing bands of murderous demons, arriving from hell itself with all their power, to kill men, women, and children while stealing the land of the righteous.” Immediately, the Democratic representative from Missouri, John Jamieson, will rise from his seat and shout at him: “A patriot never questions his president, especially when we are at war. It doesn’t matter if the war is just or not.”

 Lincoln’s words will resonate in every corner of the country. Several newspapers will agree with the strength of his arguments, but not with his right to question the war. The slaveholder Democrats will accuse Lincoln (the substitute for the fallen war hero, Hardin) of being a demagogue.

Lincoln will have to suspend his political career to dedicate himself to law for a time.

1848. Washington, gold is discovered in California

Sierra Nevada, California. January 24, 1848—A carpenter from New Jersey finds two gold nuggets at the foot of the mountain. The discovery is accidental, because James Marshall is engaged in the construction of a sawmill by the river for a German named Johann Sutter. Marshall knows nothing about gold, but he …

1848. Why Not Take All of Mexico?

New York, NY. January 30, 1848—A few days after the peace treaty with Mexico, that country has already lost more than half of its territory, and the invading troops rest at the entrance of the former capital. The Democrats propose annexing all of Mexico as a way to claim offenses and exercise international law. On Sunday the 30th, the New York Herald headlines on its front page:

Public Meeting on the War

Tremendous Turnout by the People

Should We Take Mexico Entirely?

The central article reports on the inspiring intervention of Samuel Houston, former governor of Texas, current senator for that state, and undisputed hero of San Jacinto. The crowd does not let him speak amid the chants of “Houston, Houston!” According to the newspaper, “the applause shook the very foundations of the building.”

Houston responds to such an impressive reception by praising “the patriotism of those present and the unbreakable power of the people, always ready to uphold their rights and the continuous authority of our country (deafening applause). Always ready to support the sacrifices of our troops and the wisdom of our statesmen… We, dear citizens, never rebelled against Mexico. It was Mexico that violated our constitution, violated all our laws, oppressed us with all its despotism, forcing them to fight for our rights as free men. But the enemy has not recognized that a law passed in 1836 by the civilized world (not in a dark corner) established the boundary of the new state at the Rio Grande and not at the Nueces River, as the Mexicans say. This boundary was not recognized by Belgium, but it was by France, despite all that, Mexico crossed the Rio Grande and invaded our country. So the President of Texas told the Mexicans: ‘we will cross into Mexico just as you crossed our territory.’ Mexico has marked our border with blood, and the United States will never surrender (Never! Never! the crowd shouts). Does anyone imagine that we could have started this war on our own, just to oppress the poor Mexicans? (uproarious laughter). They are their own enemies while they lament and play the victim… As obvious as the sun will rise tomorrow, it is the right of the Anglo-Saxon race to dominate the entire continent according to God’s will, to dominate all its resources and to civilize all its peoples. Just as others sacrificed their lives taking land from the Indians for the prosperity we enjoy today, so nothing in this world can stop our march now… When your ancestors arrived at Plymouth, they were not content with that piece of rock. They wanted to conquer all the land… They had to deal with the Indians, and they cleared them from this land. Now, Mexicans are no better than the Indians. There is no reason why we should not take their lands for the benefit of their population. Look at California, Sonora, New Mexico, and all those territories populated by Indians and Mexicans. There are not many souls there, so we must take those vast territories. Why should we leave all those territories up to Potosí at the mercy of the Indians who would take all the women, with their perverted intentions to make them their wives? So, let the white men tell all those unprotected people, ‘we will protect them from the savages. We will do it!’ (deafening applause). Mexicans are incapable of governing themselves. That’s why we are in this war, to liberate those poor oppressed people. May God bless the Americans who carry out this war (applause). I believe we can see the hand of God in this war through the victories of our soldiers. We have given Mexicans liberal principles, we have elevated them. And though I am not a religious man, I must say that, as sinners, we have every authority to wage war just as the people of Israel did, to whom God granted the power to take the lands of the Ammonites and exterminate them with the edge of the sword (applause).” General Samuel Houston concludes: “During the time of President Jackson, I went to Texas against my will, but seeing that the American race was oppressed, I fought against the enemies of freedom until Texas was finally free.”

The second column of the New York Herald confirms it: “We had to take their land. All efforts to achieve lasting peace have been in vain. We did what we had to do before God to protect the people of Mexico.” The assembly at Old Tammany on the war ended at nine in the evening, full of applause and patriotic enthusiasm. Only at ten at night were the lights turned off. The halls of Old Tammany had never in their history recorded a meeting so enthusiastic and lasting so long.

When in about ten more years the Texan hero Sam Houston does not show the same enthusiasm and conviction to separate from the Northern States and fight for pro-slavery ideals, he will be forcibly removed. That is, through a coup d’état.

1848. Ours is the government of the free white race

Mexico City. February 2, 1848—With the American army at the gates of Mexico’s capital, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is signed. For its offenses and grievances, Mexico cedes more than half its territory in exchange for 15 million dollars to end a war that was never theirs to fight.[8] The Senate in the United States, dominated since the Jacksonian Era by the fearsome pro-slavery factions of the South, suspects that the new Western states are not Texas. Some, like New Mexico, Arizona, or California, with a majority of Mexican inhabitants, could become states in favor of the abolition of slavery, like the poor country that now remains to the south. With some reservations, the Senate approves the generous peace treaty, but New Mexico and Arizona will still have to wait seventy years to become full states of the Union with voting rights, when their population of mixed-race people incapable of self-governance is reduced to one-fifth of the total.

When Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny marched from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (for now, military bases on foreign soil are called forts), and occupied Santa Fe in New Mexico, he encountered resistance from the population.[9] This inconvenience was overcome, as in the times of the Spanish conquest, thanks to the collaboration of the upper class of Santa Fe, who preferred a peaceful occupation by the powerful country of the United States to an uprising from below. Farther south, the same story. In January, the wealthiest Mexicans had offered General Winfield Scott more than a million dollars to accept the presidency of Mexico and take charge, once and for all, of annexing their country to the great nation of the north. The British ambassador to the United States had informed London that the complete annexation of Mexico by its former colonies was inevitable. But in the streets of the defeated and humiliated country, the people, who do not understand how the world works, as in the various bombings of Veracruz in this century and the last, continue to throw stones at the saviors of the superior race from balconies and street corners.

To negotiate the end of the war, Mexicans and Americans meet in the village of Guadalupe, where in 1531 the Virgin appeared to the Indian Juan Diego, right where the protector goddess Tonantzin, which in Nahuatl means Our Sacred Mother, was venerated. On Wednesday the 2nd, in the sacred cathedral, Mexico signs and confirms its own dispossession. When the American delegation arrives, a Mexican tells them: “You will feel proud of this moment, just as we will feel humiliated.” Nicholas Trist, a West Point graduate and the favorite secretary of Andrew Jackson in the good old days of killing Indians, downplays it and responds: “Now what matters is achieving peace.” The powerful always know when to wage war and when to fight for peace.

President James Polk had sent his emissaries with the promise of paying the defeated 30 million dollars if they also managed to keep Baja California. There was no agreement, and the Mexicans now have to accept only 15 million for what they have already lost (five less due to a spontaneous idea from Nicholas Trist) and with the promise that the northern soldiers will withdraw from what remains of their territory. But President Polk is not satisfied. He looks at the map, reads the data, and laments not having claimed Sonora, Chihuahua, and Coahuila as well, considering that those states may have interesting mineral reserves. Soon after, he understands that it is better not to engage in new discussions with the Congress of his country. Moreover, the new treaty gives him possession of the most desired jewel, California, a territory that, though too populated by the undesirable race, is the great gateway to the eternal Orient and hides an incalculable fortune of gold that, as if by magic, will be discovered a few months later. The adjacent territories are also won, and one must be satisfied.

When Trist writes to his family, he will acknowledge: “if the Mexicans had been able to read my thoughts, they would have realized the extent of my shame for what we have done to them”. But morality and justice are weak matters. In reality, Trist had done Mexico a favor by hastening the signing of the dispossession treaty before the growing enthusiasm about taking everything could win the debate in Washington. The reasons for not taking everything did not stem from humanism, nor from law or compassion, but from the same racism that had previously led to Texas independence first and the war of annexation of northern Mexico afterward. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a timid abolitionist, had warned before the invasion: “The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be like a man drinking arsenic. Mexico will poison us.” Journalists and their readers have clearly formed opinions about a country where they have never been or merely passed through. Twenty years earlier, the first U.S. proconsul, Joel Poinsett, had defined Mexicans as “an immoral and ignorant race… capable of mixing with their own Indians, the most degraded class of beings on the human scale.”[10]

Although Texas was a breath of fresh air for slaveholders in Congress and for tavern patriotism, the rest of the incorporated territory reignited the debate over slavery and race. Thirty years after the treaty of dispossession was signed, one of the heroes of the war against Mexico (later a hero of the Civil War against the southern secessionists and eventually president of the United States), General Ulysses Grant, would acknowledge that the fabricated war against Mexico “was one of the most unjust wars that has ever existed, waged by a powerful nation against a much weaker one.” A hundred years later, the advisor to President Ronald Reagan and ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, an advocate for military intervention in weaker countries like Grenada or Nicaragua to win achievable battles, would explain the world in a different way and without the laments of Ulysses Grant: political legitimacy is not determined by justice and morality, but by the power of the winner.

Now, after tripling the territory for the third time in just over half a century, why sign such a generous annexation agreement with the defeated country? A single order from Washington and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo would not even have been necessary. Some politicians and several journalists wanted more. Everything. Signing a total annexation treaty with a destroyed country and the invader’s army in its own capital would have been like taking a coin from a child. What could this act of generosity have been due to?

General and Senator Lewis Cass had anticipated the reason a year earlier, on February 10, 1847: “Mixing with them would be deplorable. That evil will not fall upon us. We do not want Mexicans as citizens or as subjects. The only thing we want is a part of their sparsely populated territory, a population that will gradually retreat”.^[11] In the pamphlet “Right of Search” Lewis Cass discusses the “right to exploration” of the seas initiated by the British Empire, which combines, according to the senator, its own interests with philanthropy. The senator cites Mr. Walker who, in 1844, had already understood the problem: “Should we go beyond the Río Grande and the Rocky Mountains? The problem is that most people there will not want to restore slavery. They themselves are not white, and among them, Blacks are not considered a degraded race.” The hero’s ideas will be collected in the book Sketch of the Life and Public Services of General Lewis Cass, in 1852. On January 26, 1848, a northern anti-slavery representative, Senator John Clarke of Rhode Island, agreed with his southern slaveholding peers on the reasons for not taking what remains of Mexico, a smaller but much more populated territory: Mexicans are “a degraded people, even inferior to the Aztec race, accustomed to obey… incorporating that mass of inferior people, even with a very restricted right of participation in our political life, would be fatal for our country; those people possess a moral pestilence that is as contagious as leprosy.” Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky reasoned: “I would not want to see our Anglo-Saxon race involved in such relationships.” John Bell, senator from Tennessee, also had no doubts in arguing against the annexation of old Mexico and Central America, as “it would add to our country twelve million people, mostly perfect idiots.”

Until not long ago, the slaveholding Democrats of the south had lamented that for a good while they had been losing the demographic war against the anti-slavery states of the north. Fortunately, geographically, the north is closer to Europe and the waves of the world’s poor whites arrive through its ports. Demography has no consequence in the powerful Senate, but it does in the lower house. For their part, the inhabitants of the north are against slavery, but they do not want to be invaded by Black people. For many, the solution consists of taking the northern part of Mexico and letting the free Blacks, who now are the majority of Blacks in the north, go to those tropical lands and, from there, continue further south, where they say nine out of ten inhabitants are Black.

In case the above was somewhat ambiguous for patriotic historians, on January 4th the senator from South Carolina, John Calhoun, before his peers in Congress explained it in an even clearer and simpler way: “we would not have accepted, even in dreams, integrating into our Union another race that is not Caucasian. Ours, Sir, is a government of the white race, of the free race. Incorporating all of Mexico would be incorporating a race of Indians and mestizos. If the mission of our nation is to spread civilization and religious freedom, if what we desire, with anxiety, is to impose free governments in other countries, incorporating all of Mexico into our Union would be a grave mistake.” Apart from racial disgust, there exists a strong practical reason. The congressmen agree that the system of slavery is impossible in old Mexico, not only because of the mentality of the Mexicans, who can neither be masters nor slaves, but because there is neither a social structure nor even a class of whites capable of administering slaves as in the United States.

Three months after paying 15 million dollars for a third of their current territory, President Polk instructs his ambassador in Madrid, Rómulo Saunders, to offer Spain one hundred million for Cuba.[12] The slaveholders of the south were concerned about the new states wrested from Mexico, whose population neither understood nor accepted the so-called “peculiar institution” of slavery and wanted to add two more pro-slavery senators with the acquisition of Cuba. For their part, others saw the island as one of the natural places to send the few free Blacks from the north who were spreading bad examples in the south. Anthony Kennedy of Maryland, acknowledges: “I will not criticize the institution of slavery, which many here do not understand as well as I do, so I am free to declare that for Africans that is the best condition in which they can live… the slaves of our country are the happiest workers in the world.”

Of course, in every flock there is a black sheep. The following week, on Wednesday, January 12th, a representative from Illinois by the name of Abraham Lincoln takes the floor in the same chamber of representatives and, once again, denounces the war against Mexico. “Ah, military glory, that attractive rainbow that emerges after the rain of blood,” he says sarcastically and the glances cross.

The president who started the war, James Polk, saw the sweet fruit of his plans, but died a few months later, at 53 years old, after losing the battle against a long affliction of diarrhea, just like his mentor, former president and national hero Andrew Jackson, known as Indian killer among the Indians and died after a long confinement in the toilet, assisted by one of his slaves. On November 7, 1848, General Zachary Taylor, the man who opposed the annexation of Texas and considered his own mission as a provocation to push Mexico into war, the military man whom his colleagues considered mediocre and without ideas, the sudden hero who defeated the Mexican hybrids and secured for his country the recently independent Republic of Texas and another portion of Mexican territory beyond the Nueces River, the military man who despised politics and was despised by a large number of politicians in his party, with no clear idea of what a good government would look like or what he would do if he were president, wins the election for the Whig Party and becomes president of the United States. Taylor will die a year later, at the age of 65, also due to uncontrollable diarrhea that neither prayers nor the best doctors in the country could stop in time. Back then, Washington still had open sewers, and cholera spared neither the president nor the hero of the war against Mexico, who brought so much territory and wealth to his country as God was capable of bestowing.

In 1848, the majority of California’s population is Mexican, but waves of Anglo-Saxon immigrants seeking the promised land, where gold springs from the mountains, will become the true subjects of the new laws and rights and will decide the expulsion, harassment, and discrimination of the native population. The Indians and Mexican creoles who had occupied those lands for centuries will quickly be reduced to an eighth of the total, enough to consider them foreign invaders. By the 1850s, twenty men for every woman will populate the great western state. On their journey from one coast to the other, seekers of quick fortune with guns on their hips will spend months and years without seeing a woman. Every now and then, they will encounter a lone carriage and force the man to show his wife in exchange for not taking her by force. The woman will bare her breasts and her fears to calm the civilized men who sometimes leave, without asking for more, to masturbate among the lonely cacti.

In San José, the Squatters’ War will begin, spreading to other regions. The newly arrived Anglos in California will displace Mexican ranchers and occupy the lands that now and always belong to them, by the grace of God and who knows for what other reason. Five years later, in 1853, due to technical needs in the tracing of railroad lines, the northern neighbors will once again push the agreed boundaries further south at Guadalupe. Once again, the acquisition of the southern strip of Arizona and New Mexico will not be a free agreement but the commercial legitimization of an imminent threat, aided by bribes for President López de Santa Anna. The new railroad line connecting the East Coast to California cannot pass through the Rockies, especially in winter, and the solution will be to pressure and take another part of Mexico, La Mesilla. Similarly, half a century later, it will save time for merchants who go around Nicaragua by wresting the province of Panama from Colombia, a country full of “despicable little men” and “idiotic murderers,” according to President Theodore Roosevelt.

1852. The beginning of the new international policy

San Francisco, California. December 14, 1852—Reyes Feliz, a native of Sonora aged 15 or 16, declares he never knew General Bean and …

1853. A Thousand Murrietas, One Zorro

San Francisco, California. January 29, 1853—The Daily Alta California headlines: “Great Enthusiasm in Calaveras. Mass Expulsion of Mexicans. Thieves Executed.” In small print, it explains: “It is known that during the winter, bands of Mexican assassins have infested Calaveras County. In San Andreas, they stole seventy horses in a single night. This band is led by Joaquín Murrieta, a desperate man, accused of killing four Americans in Turnersville, surviving by extorting the Chinese community, a community of peaceful and hardworking people. On Friday, another man was killed at Yankee Camp and a Chinese man in Bay State. We are pleased to report that one of the bandits was captured at Yankee Camp and another at Cherokee Ranch. Both were hanged immediately and the entire Mexican population has been expelled from San Andreas and Calaveras. If an American encounters a Mexican, he can take his horse, his weapon, and force him to leave. We have been informed that on Wednesday morning a popular assembly held at Double Spring approved the actions taken and resolved that it is the duty of every American to exterminate the Mexican race from this country in any place and circumstance. Foreigners will be granted the right to leave the country and their properties will be expropriated. Fear has spread to the rest of the foreign population.”

On May 16, the Sacramento Daily Union reports: “The Senate has approved the resolution for Captain Harry Love to organize a troop of rangers to capture Joaquín Murieta, the leader of the band of the five Joaquins (Joaquín Murrieta, Joaquín Carillo, Joaquín Ocamarenia, Joaquín Valenzuela, and Joaquín Botillon).” On August 11, the Marysville Daily Herald confirms: “Joaquín, dead in Mariposa. Joaquín Murrieta was caught by surprise, riding his horse and unarmed. Before he could mount his horse, he was shot. They are searching for a glass container to display his head and a hand, so that the people of Stockton can see them. The murderer of Glasscock is dead. The rangers were led by a Mexican woman who always saw a man taking food to a hidden place.” According to The Star of Los Angeles, Joaquín is not dead, “he is in the city of San Francisco, along with 25 other men armed with revolvers, swords, and lances.” Another newspaper, the Los Angeles Star, on August 20 reports Joaquín Murrieta’s last words: “Stop shooting. I’m dead.” Two weeks later, on September 3, 1853, the same newspaper details the exhibition of his head in San Francisco: “It is the head of a man between twenty and twenty-five years old. The high forehead, the prominent cheekbones, the lips revealing sensuality, firmness, and cruelty. The hair of a beautiful light brown color with golden highlights, the straight nose, the dark eyebrows. It is said that the eyes, now closed by death, were a dark blue, restless and fierce like those of a tiger. The beard of a young man who never shaved… The death of this monster is public rejoicing and all honor is due to those brave men who have freed the State from such a monster.”

When Murrieta is betrayed for a part of the irresistible reward that will never arrive, the rangers give him barely enough time to mount his horse. They riddled his body with bullets and took his head and a hand to claim the reward. The head and hand of the dangerous bandit are first exhibited to the public. But his head (like that of Tupac Amaru II in 1781, far away and long ago; like the heads and hands of so many other rebels) will disappear and the bandit will return to life in various forms. Many doubt that the head in the glass jar is Joaquín Murrieta’s. Of the hand, nothing can be said. His brother and some acquaintances confirm that it is his head, but they likely do so to protect him.

On Sunday, August 6, 1854, the Daily Alta California, will announce the appearance of the book The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, published and sold by William R. Cook & Co. on Montgomery Street. Its author, John Rollin Ridge, or Yellow Bird, is the first Native American to write a novel, and Murieta is the first novel published in California. Before necessity corrupts the Cherokee writer, from the first pages, the author’s visions of injustice permeate this book displayed in the shop windows of San Francisco: “Mexicans, without exception, were seen as subjects of conquest, trophies of war with no rights before a superior race… The prejudice of color, racial hatred, which are always stronger and more bitter among the ignorant, could not be overcome; and if they could, it was not advisable, because they served as an excellent excuse to exercise cruelty and oppression.” As a child, Yellow Bird had lost his father in a dispute with another Cherokee over the treaty signed with the whites in Georgia. His white mother took him to Arkansas first and then to California, where Yellow Bird became a renowned poet, but it is now that he publishes the work for which he will be remembered for generations and ignored by the critics of his time. Yellow Bird will die on October 5, 1867, at the age of 40, leaving behind a wife and a daughter. Although he will become a writer read by many, he will never earn a dollar from his novel. For a brief time, he will have more luck as an editor of the Sacramento Bee, writing for the San Francisco Herald and betraying his own ideas against racism in exchange for a few dollars.

No one will ever know what happened to the real Murieta or whether there was one or thousands. But myths are more powerful and more important than reality, and this one, contrary to the norm of powerful official myths, is a rebel myth, a myth of the loser, the dispossessed. On August 8, 1911, the San Francisco Call, on its fourth page, will reprint a story more or less invented half a century earlier: “Joaquin Murieta was a bandit from the early days of California, born in this state. As a young man, he was accused of stealing horses. When one of his companions, accused of the same crime, was executed by hanging, Murrieta vowed to take revenge on the Americans and organized a band of thieves and criminals. At the time, a reward of one thousand dollars was offered for his capture, but it later had to be increased to 5,000. One day, Murrieta passed through Stockton, saw the notice, and wrote below: I will offer 10,000 for my capture.” It is, of course, Zorro.

In 1919, the writer Johnston McCulley, with better luck in sales, will publish the first version of Zorro, the first masked hero of the many who will populate the entertainment industry in this country, from the Lone Ranger (a ranger, of course, a man of the Law) to a hybrid military figure, Captain America, Batman, The Incredibles and a long list of good guys always fighting against the bandits who want to take over the world that doesn’t belong to them because it already has an owner.

On its journey from the margins, from illegality to the center of American superhero power, The Zorro, the Joaquín Murieta of McCullough, will amass millions of dollars and create a less uncomfortable, more entertaining, and entirely functional story: the bandit had not fought against the dispossession by the gringo invaders during the early years of California’s annexation, but half a century earlier, when California was a province of the Spanish Empire or the Republic of Mexico. Thus, Johnston McCullough, a police reporter and later public relations officer for the U.S. Army during World War I, was able to create Zorro, the shaven Murrieta with a mute butler, who fought against the despotic and corrupt Mexican government.

[1] The consumption of whisky and liquor is more than double what Americans will tolerate in the next century, even though in the 20th century it will remain a central and progressively taboo element in Anglo-Saxon culture.

^[2] The father of American democracy, Thomas Jefferson, will die on July 4, 1826, lamenting that his greatest personal enemy, former president John Adams, was going to outlive him. John Adams died lamenting the same thing, on the same July 4, 1826, while Independence Day was being celebrated. The paranoia of power is this vain and ridiculous.

^[3] An unprecedented number of the population, 11 percent, had turned out to vote. All were white male property owners. As will be the case until the 21st century, the votes of the conservative and slaveholding states of the South will be worth more than the votes of the North.

[4] The Rio Grande (Rio Bravo for Mexicans) will be defined and defended as “the natural border limit”. Natural like the limit of the central states or the border with Canada, a straight line on paper that cuts across half a continent.

^[5] This regiment was known by their compatriots as “Mounted Devil” and “Ransacker” for their penchant for amusing themselves with the local population. Some of its soldiers had gathered similar experiences in the war of dispossession against the Indians in the north, following the Removal Act passed in 1830, which decreed that Indians were not friends of liberty.

[6] The burning of the White House in 1812 by the British army was retaliation for one of a dozen expansionist attacks by Washington on Canada, which left similar destruction of ports and cities. The government house was painted white to cover the marks of the fire, history would speak of a brutal British invasion, and the national anthem’s lyrics would condemn slaves for their lack of patriotism.

[7] In the 1844 elections, a total of 2,639,498 eligible voters participated. Despite a record turnout, the total only represented 11 percent of the population. The details are even more significant. In New York, almost half a million voted, while in the slaveholding states of the south, none reached a hundred thousand votes. Arkansas barely tallied fifteen thousand, but its two senators held the same weight as those of New York, Pennsylvania, or Massachusetts. In the most pro-slavery state of the Union, South Carolina, open elections were not even held to choose its delegates. Blacks were a clear majority (they would remain so until 1915).

^[8] Equivalent to 475 billion dollars at its real 2020 value adjusted for inflation. In 2017, the U.S. government approved a tax cut more than double that figure, and in March 2020, it approved a two-trillion-dollar stimulus package.

[9] For centuries to come, like other cities, Fort Leavenworth in Kansas will remember and celebrate in monuments and museums the Frontier Tribute Trail, the glorious spirit of the frontier at the heart of what would become the United States. The soldiers (as always, all anonymous, without their own existence) will be remembered or suggested in obscure bronze statues, with generic faces and over stone inscriptions that will speak of their patriotic courage in the name of the Nation. In the Frontier Army museum, there will be no shortage of reconstructions of caravans pulled by white horses.

^[10] In 1881, the Secretary of State, James Gillespie Blaine, from Lima will report that “all the Spanish conquerors took Indian women as wives and even had harems of Indian women, but their children were not slaves. That is why most Peruvians are mestizos or mulattos”.

^[11] This fear of degrading the Caucasian race, chosen by God, will increase throughout the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, articulated by presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and writers like Madison Grant until it returns to Europe with Nazi ideology. Adolf Hitler will acknowledge this American tradition as an inspiration for his crusade in Germany.

^[12] An inverse case, but for the same reasons, had been that of Haiti. The new president, Alexandre Pétion, had offered France 15 million francs to recognize the independence of that country obtained in 1804, the same sum that Thomas Jefferson had paid in 1803 for a territory 75 times larger. King Louis XVIII refused. In 1825, Charles X agreed to recognize the independence of the rebel colony if it agreed to pay France 150 million francs in damages and compensation. Just like in the case of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo against Mexico, the “treaty” was signed with the French navy surrounding Port-au-Prince with 500 cannons. Haiti will finish paying in 1947.

Related Topics

• Brief Introduction to the Reconquista
• The Year 1492
• The Fall of the Native World
• The Independence of Texas
• The Mexican Revolution
• US Occupation of Caribbean and Central American Countries. Banana Republics (1900–1930)
• Anglo Immigration to Latin America and Latino Immigration to the US

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