From The End of the Myth (Greg Grandin, 2019) pp96-9
The Jacksonian consensus was powerful. It unleashed market capitalism by stealing Indian property and celebrated a minimal state, even as it increased the capacity of that state to push the frontier forward. During the first half of the nineteenth century, until Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, a series of Jackson’s successors continued to unite slavers and settlers under a banner of freedom defined as freedom from restraint – freedom from restraints on slaving, freedom from restraints on dispossessing, freedom from restraints on moving west. As they did, the nation’s sense of morality became dependent on outward movement; the virtuous commonweal was defined as expansion and the common woe as anything that stood in the way of expansion (like that federal agent who stood in the way of Andrew Jackson on the Natchez Trace). This is what Octavio Paz meant when he said that for the United States “evil is outside, part of the natural world, like Indians, rivers, mountains, and other obstacles that must be domesticated or destroyed.”
Expansion, though, had a corrosive effect, habituating, as Adams feared, the nation to war. The Mexican-American War helped overcome what could be called Seminole Syndrome. Just a few years prior to invading Mexico, the United States had fought its exhausting “second war” against holdout Seminoles in Florida. The war dragged on for years, with troops, including those led by Zachary Taylor, literally bogged down in an everglade quagmire. As the fighting continued, disillusionment set in among the officer class, a sense that politicians were using the fight for domestic politics but not giving them the resources needed to win. The public even began to show some sympathy toward the enemy, turning against the brutality of U.S. soldiers. The army eventually removed most Seminoles from Florida, though a small band remained undefeated. The U.S. claimed victory in 1842, but it was as many said, an “inglorious” victory that cost thousands of lives and millions of dollars. In contrast, triumph over Mexico wasn’t easy, but when it came it was total, helping to restore, especially among upper-class officers, a romantic vision of war. Martial style became associated with republican virtue, with a praetorian class increasingly involving itself in democratic governance, best symbolized by Taylor and his “war clan.”
Common soldiers developed a personal investment in military nationalism, as war became an even more effective venue of social mobility. Not only were veterans of the Mexican campaign promised “bounty land” for their service, but the sudden annexation of new territory led veterans of‘past wars – many of whom had been promised, but had never received, similar bounties – to demand compensation. Republican civic life took on a militaristic cast, as old soldiers, including veterans of the War of 1812, began organizing pressure groups and marching on Washington. Few questioned this new militarization of public sentiment, or the increasingly commonsense notion that soldiers deserved exceptional deference. Between 1850 and 1855, Congress, suddenly the executor of a near-entire continent to dispense, overwhelmingly passed a series of laws that granted land to all veterans of any past war, going back to 1790. Hundreds of thousands of veterans, or their widows and heirs, received warrants for over thirty-four million acres (if they didn’t want the land, they could redeem the warrants for cash).
At the same time, serial wars greatly buttressed the power of the federal government. “There is no king, prince, or sultan more thoroughly above and beyond all legal restraint,” a Whig journal complained of President Polk in 1847, “than the President of the United States.” As war expanded the power of the presidency – to mobilize men, spend money, tax, extend contracts, make appointments, and distribute land – so it expanded corruption. Yet rather than criticizing the way war enabled profiteering, graft, and patronage, many started holding up more war as an antidote to corruption: war, especially war to spread liberty across the continent, would provide the transcendent purpose needed to curb avarice. Walt Whitman strongly supported Polk and the taking of much of Mexico for such a reason. “Less liberal” governments were motivated by “greediness,” Whitman wrote in 1846. But the United States made war to “reach the truer good, the good of the whole body of the people.” In the years ahead, the expected virtues that would come from the next war were regularly prescribed as the solutions for the vices generated by the previous one.
Constant expansion continued to blur the line between foreign and domestic politics, bringing a battle-hardened brutalism back to an evergrowing homeland. When the war was over, some soldiers went back east, to New England’s manufacturing towns or to New York’s Bowery, their war-sharpened racism working its way into local politics, labor associations, and the Free Soil movement. Others spread out into the newly conquered western land, into California and up into Oregon. They were armed with federally supplied rifles and an ample stock of bullets, ready to deal with Native Americans the way they had with Mexicans. “A war of extermination,” the first U.S. Anglo governor of California predicted in 1851, “will continue to be waged between the races, until the Indian race becomes extinguished.” The Mexican-American War had been fought in an extremely decentralized manner, with officers barely exercising control over their troops. In other words, soldiers experienced the violence they committed – “the repetition of the most heinous offenses, murder, rapine, robbery, and rape,” as one newspaper wrote of U.S. atrocities committed on Mexicans as a form of liberty. As they gave up soldiering for settling, they carried this blood-soaked entitlement forward. “Popular sovereignty”- a rallying cry for settlers who wanted to be free of federal control – had become a “synonym for racist brutality and wanton usurpation,” advancing the sectional crisis that would soon lead to the Civil War. In this sense, then, war came to be both valve and throttle, with each conflict simultaneously venting the hatreds produced by the last while creating the conditions for the next.
Some reformists, including Christians, labor radicals, and writers. reached for a definition of the general welfare as more than an increasingly strident defense of minimal government and property rights. They wanted a national identity based on something other than the letting loose of “twenty millions of monarchs” to do as they pleased. A “monster of a million minds” was how Melville described a society founded on radical individualism. Writing from intellectual exile in Europe, Margaret Fuller criticized what she called a “boundless lust of gain,” which she held responsible for the “wicked war” the United States waged on Mexico. A “new, undefined good is thirsted for,” as Reverend William Ellery Channing wrote a bit earlier. But what would that good be, other than martial nationalism?
For many, abolition was a primary, nonnegotiable demand. Beyond that, though, there weren’t many practical options upon which to organize a national identity that were not inherently exclusionist or supremacist. Radicals continued to hope for a society in which both chattel and wage slavery would be abolished, and a few founded more utopian communities, but they were a minority. Others who supported emancipation still imagined putting into place some kind of removal scheme, where freedmen and freedwomen could be relocated to Africa or somewhere in the west. Jefferson once talked about stocking the continent with people who spoke and looked like him, “descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” Settlers in Oregon, which officially joined the United States as a territory in 1848, didn’t want slavery. But they didn’t want black people either, passing a number of expulsion laws calling for the deportation of all people of color and prohibiting them from owning property or entering into legal contracts. They wanted their arcadia white.
The reality of the country, however – its sudden gaining of tens of thousands of former citizens of Mexico, its soon-to-be emancipated four million African Americans, its growing population of already free people of color, its rising numbers of migrants, including many Irish Catholic workers, and its multiplicity of faiths – meant that the United States would be populated by something other than Saxons to the thousandth generation.
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