Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126
Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127
On May 11, 1846, President James K. Polk sent a special message to the Congress of the United States for a declaration of war against Mexico. Polk stated that on April 12, Mexican forces at the small border town of Matamoras under the command of General Pedro de Ampudia assumed a belligerent attitude and notified General Zachary Taylor to break up his camp within twenty-four hours and to retire beyond the Nueces River. If Taylor failed to comply with these demands and he would announced that arms, and arms alone, must decide the question. However, April 24 General Mariano Arista, who had succeeded to the command of the Mexican forces engaged with a large body of Taylors troops, and after a short affair sixteen U.S. troops were killed and wounded while reaming men were surrounded and compelled to surrender.[1] As such, Polk argued for the vindication for the rights and defense of the United States for which Congress must recognize the existence of the war, and to place at the disposition of the Executive the means of prosecuting the war with vigor, and thus hastening the restoration of peace. As result of this, message Congress officially declared war on another nation for the second time in the history of the nation. Nevertheless, the actual decision to go to war provoked controversy among the congressional members and the public alike, which seems to have been swept under the rug, do the notion of history books empathizing America’s victory over Mexico and the observation that the majority of American’s don’t like controversy surrounding military operations like the wars of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
As such scholars today seek, argue that in order to understand any war that the United States find itself fighting we need to present all aspects of how and why America deicide to take up arms against its supposed enemies, even if certain materials are not in favor of going to war or completely bash it. For example, J. Javier Rodríguez argues that the war against Mexico generated not just the stabilizing narratives of racial or national dichotomies but also intense counter-narratives wherein Mexico and Mexicans were either equivalent Americans defending their republic from invasion, or, in a further extension, and far more disturbing, agents of existential disturbance, standing against the very possibility of meaning itself. As such, he points to one of the clearest examples of this kind of agonistic US–Mexican War literature The Biglow Papers. [2] Produced in by James Russell Lowell in 1848, The Biglow Papers are anti-war satire, which are fragmentary diverse pieces that ranged from anti-war critiques, to tongue-in-cheek pro-war rants by immoral politicians, to agonistic essays about language and knowledge. Lowell invents Parson Homer Wilbur who edits the poetry of the equally fictional Hosea Biglow, the titular Yankee farmer whose role in the text is not only to write poetry, but to also rewrite Birdofredum Sawin’s (a fictional Yankee U.S.–Mexican War volunteer) frontline letters into dialect verse.[3] As such, these papers represent a silent side of the war, which give a deeper understanding on the various thoughts, feelings, and observations people had on the events surrounding the conflict between U.S. and Mexico rather than those who outwardly supported it.
However, one must not only look at the public opinion to see the disagreement of the U.S. picking a fight with Mexico but to look at those who fought on the frontlines. According to Dr. Paul what is missing from the grand narrative of the U.S.-Mexican War is the disenfranchise of the many men who volunteer to fight Polk’s war. He argues that the self-conception of soldiers and the differing standards of discipline marked the two branches (regular enlisted men and volunteer) as distinct. Regular army officers were notoriously quick to resort to the lash against miscreant soldiers. In the volunteer regiments solider as the bulwark of national policy, but the despised regulars were chief instrument of those same politicians on launching and prosecuting the Mexican War.[4] Even before the war started, Taylor’s regulars experienced extreme hardships and diseases. Dysentery and fever raged through the camp until one-sixth of the men were on sick report and half suffered from a degree on infirmity.[5] When war was officially declare many cities across the country where divided once the stance of recruitment in regards of the justification on going to war with Mexico. For example, in Ohio anti war feelings ran high. To the point that an anti war partisan wrote scornfully of the mindless enthusiasm shown by the citizenry, with military parades, cannons booming from boats in the river, and even religious revival meeting held by persists of the God of war, in which excitement has been raised by song as well as speech.[6] While other places like down in New Orleans recruiting reflected political and social hierarchies and conflicts where several sectors of the population opposed the war, but their opposition was scattered and muted.[7]
Armed with these scholarly works with addition to other I seek to track how scholars today argue for the need to present, display, and introduce various sources of discontent towards the U.S. conflict with Mexico in order for the public to gain a better understanding of the war itself. Because understanding why people criticized it can expand our understanding of how we remembered it.
[1] Brad Lookingbill, ed, American Military History: A Documentary Reader (Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 112-13.
[2] J. Javier Rodríguez, “The U.S.-Mexican War in James Russell Lowell’s the Bigelow Papers,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 63.3 (2007): 2.
[3] J. Javier Rodríguez, “The U.S.-Mexican War in James Russell Lowell’s the Bigelow Papers,”7.
[4] Paul W. Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the Mexican-American War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 13.