The American Empire Part 6

The incident was taken by the President as a sufficient cause for the declaration of a state of war. The House complied readily with his wishes, pa.s.sing the necessary resolution. Several members of the Senate begged for a delay during which the actual state of affairs might be ascertained. The President insisted, however, and the war was declared (May 13, 1846).

The declaration of war was welcomed with wild enthusiasm in the South.

Meetings were called; funds were raised; volunteers were enlisted, equipped and despatched in all haste to the scene of the conflict.

The North was less eager. There were protests, pet.i.tions, demonstrations. Many of the leaders of northern opinion took a public stand against the war. But the news of the first victories sent the country mad with an enthusiasm in which the North joined the South.

The United States troops, during the Mexican War, won brilliant--almost unbelievable successes--against superior forces and in the face of immense natural obstacles. Had the war been less of a military triumph there must have been a far more widely-heard protest from Polk's enemies in the North. Successful beyond the wildest dreams of its promoters, the victorious war carried its own answer to those who questioned the worthiness of the cause. Within two years, the whole of Mexico was under the military control of the United States, and that country was in a position to dictate its own terms.

The demands of the United States were mild to the extent of generosity.

Under the treaty the annexation of Texas was validated; New Mexico and Upper California were ceded to the United States; the lower Rio Grande was fixed as the southern boundary of Texas, and in considerations of these additions to its territory, the United States agreed to pay Mexico fifteen millions of dollars.

Under this plan, Mexico was paid for territory that she did not need and could not use, while the United States gave a money consideration for the t.i.tle to land that was already hers by right of conquest, and of which she was in actual possession.

The details of the treaty are relatively unimportant. The outstanding fact is that Mexico was in possession of certain territory that the ruling power in the United States wanted, and that ruling power took what it wanted by force of arms. "The war was one of conquest in the interest of an inst.i.tution." It was "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation."[31]

Congressman A. P. Gardner of Ma.s.sachusetts summarized the matter very pithily in his debate with Morris Hillquit (New York, April 2, 1915), "We a.s.sisted Texas to get away from Mexico and then we proceeded to annex Texas. Plainly and bluntly stated, our purpose was to get some territory for American development." (Stenographic report in the _New York Call_, April 11, 1915.)

5. _Conquering the Conquered_

The work of conquering the Southwest was not completed by the termination of the war. Mexico ceded the territory--in the neighborhood of a million square miles--but she was giving away something that she had never possessed. Mexico claimed t.i.tle to land that was occupied by the Indians. She had never conquered it; never settled it; never developed it. Her sovereignty was of the same shadowy sort that Spain had exercised over the country before the Mexican revolution.

The new owners of the Southwest had a very different purpose in mind. No empty t.i.tle would satisfy them. They intended to use the land. The Indians--already in possession--resented the encroachments of the invaders, but they fared no better than the Mexicans, or than their red-skinned brothers who had contended for the right to fish and hunt along their home streams in the Appalachians. The Indians of the Southwest fought stubbornly, but the wars that meant life and death to them were the merest pastime for an army that had just completed the humiliation of a nation of the size and strength of Mexico. The Indians were swept aside, and the country was opened to the trapper, the prospector, the trader and the settler.

The Mexican War was a slight affair, involving a relatively small outlay in men and money. The total number of American soldiers killed in the war was 1,721; the wounded were 4,102; the deaths from accident and disease were 11,516, making total casualties of 5,823 and total losses of 15,618.[32]

The money cost of the Mexican War--the army and navy appropriations for the years 1846 to 1849 inclusive--was $119,624,000. Obviously the net cost of the war was less than this gross total,--how much less it is impossible to say.

No satisfactory figures are available to show the cost in men and money of the Indian Wars in the Southwest. "From 1849 to 1865, the government expended $30,000,000 in the subjugation of the Indians in the territories of New Mexico and Arizona."[33] Their character may be gauged by noting from the "Historical Register" (Vol. 2, p. 281-2) the losses sustained in the four Indian Wars of which a record is preserved.

In the Northwest Indian Wars (1790 to 1795) 896 persons were killed and 436 were wounded; in the Seminole War (1817 to 1818) 46 were killed and 36 were wounded; in the Black Hawk War (1831-2) the killed were 26 and the wounded 39; in the Seminole War (1835-1842) 383 were killed and 557 wounded. These were among the most serious of the Indian Wars and in all of them the cost in life and limb was small. Judged on this standard, the losses in the Southwest, during the Indian Wars, were, at most, trifling. The total outlay that was involved in the conquest of the vast domain would not have covered one first cla.s.s battle of the Great War, and yet this outlay added to the territory of the United States something like a million square miles containing some of the richest and most productive portions of the earth's surface.

This domain was won by a process of military conquest; it was taken from the Mexicans and the Indians by force of arms. In order to acquire it, it was necessary to drive whole tribes from their villages; to burn; to maim; to kill. "St. Louis, New Orleans, St. Augustine, San Antonio, Santa Fe and San Francisco are cities that were built by Frenchmen and Spaniards; we did not found them but we conquered them." "The Southwest was conquered only after years of hard fighting with the original owners" (p. 26). "The winning of the West and the Southwest is a stage in the conquest of a continent" (p. 27). "This great westward movement of armed settlers was essentially one of conquest, no less than of colonization" (p. 370).[34] None of the possessors of this territory were properly armed or equipped for effective warfare. All of them fell an easy prey to the organized might of the Government of the United States.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] "The Winning of the West," Theodore Roosevelt. New York, Putnam's, 1896, vol. 4, p. 262.

[28] "American Negro Slavery," U. B. Phillips. New York, Appleton, 1918, pp. 171-2.

[29] "History of the United States," James F. Rhoades. New York, Macmillan, 1906, vol. I, p. 87.

[30] "Personal Memoirs," U. S. Grant. New York, Century, 1895, vol. I.

[31] "Personal Memoirs," U. S. Grant. New York, Century, 1895, vol. I, pp. 115 and 32.

[32] "Historical Register of the United States Army," F. B. Heitman.

Washington, Govt. Print., vol. 2, p. 282.

[33] "The Story of New Mexico," Horatio O. Ladd. Boston, D. Lothrop Co., 1891, p. 333.

[34] "The Winning of the West," Theodore Roosevelt. Vol. I, p. 26, 27, and Vol. II, p. 370.

VI. THE BEGINNINGS OF WORLD DOMINION

1. _The Shifting of Control_

During the half century that intervened between the War of 1812 and the Civil War of 1861 the policy of the United States government was decided largely by men who came from south of the Mason and Dixon line. The Southern whites,--cla.s.s-conscious rulers with an inst.i.tution (slavery) to defend,--acted like any other ruling cla.s.s under similar circ.u.mstances. They favored Southward expansion which meant more territory in which slavery might be established.

The Southerners were looking for a place in the sun where slavery, as an inst.i.tution, might flourish for the profit and power of the slave-holding cla.s.s. Their most effective move in this direction was the annexation of Texas and the acquisition of territory following the Mexican War. An insistent drive for the annexation of Cuba was cut short by the Civil War.

Southern sentiment had supported the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Florida Purchase of 1819. From Jefferson's time Southern statesmen had been advocating the purchase of Cuba. Filibustering expeditions were fitted out in Southern ports with Cuba as an objective; agitation was carried on, inside and outside of Congress; between 1850 and 1861 the acquisition of Cuba was the question of the day. It was an issue in the Campaign of 1853. In 1854 the American ministers to London, France and Madrid met at the direction of the State Department and drew up a doc.u.ment (the "Ostend Manifesto") dealing with the future of Cuba.

McMaster summarizes the Manifesto in these words: "The United States ought to buy Cuba because of its nearness to our coast; because it belonged naturally to that great group of states of which the Union was the providential nursery; because it commanded the mouth of the Mississippi whose immense and annually growing trade must seek that way to the ocean, and because the Union could never enjoy repose, could never be secure, till Cuba was within its boundaries." (Vol. viii, pp.

185-6.) If Spain refused to sell Cuba it was suggested that the United States should take it.

The Ostend Manifesto was rejected by the State Department, but it was a good picture of the imperialistic sentiment at that time abroad among certain elements in the United States.

The Cuban issue featured in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates in 1858. It was hotly discussed by Congress in 1859. Only twenty years had pa.s.sed since the United States, by force of arms, had taken from Mexico territory that she coveted. Now it was proposed to appropriate territory belonging to Spain.

The outbreak of hostilities deferred the project, and when the Civil War was over, the slave power was shattered. From that time forward national policy was guided by the leaders of the new industrial North.

The process of this change was fearfully wasteful. The shifting of power from the old regime to the new cost more lives and a greater expenditure of wealth than all of the wars of conquest that had been fought during the preceding half century.

The change was complete. The slaves were liberated by Presidential Proclamation. The Southern form of civilization--patriarchal and feudal--disappeared, and upon its ruins--rapidly in the West; slowly in the South--there arose the new structure of an industrial civilization.

The new civilization had no need to look outward for economic advantage.

Forest tracts, mineral deposits and fertile land afforded ample opportunity at home. It was three thousand miles to the Pacific and at the end of the journey there was gold! The new civilization therefore turned its energies to the problem of subduing the continent and of establishing the machinery necessary to provide for its vastly increasing needs. A small part of the capital required for this purpose came from abroad. Most of it was supplied at home. But the events involved in opening up the territory west of the Rockies, of spanning the country with steel, and providing outlets for the products of the developing industries were so momentous that even the most ambitious might fulfill his dreams of conquest without setting foot on foreign soil. Territorial aggrandizement was forgotten, and men turned with a will to the organization of the East and the exploration and development of the West.

The leaders of the new order found time to take over Alaska (1868) with its 590,884 square miles. The move was diplomatic rather than economic, however, and it was many years before the huge wealth of Alaska was even suspected.

2. _Hawaii_

The new capitalist interests began to feel the need of additional territory toward the end of the nineteenth century. The desirable resources of the United States were largely in private hands and most of the available free land had been pre-empted. Beside that, there were certain interests, like sugar and tobacco, that were looking with longing eyes toward the tempting soil and climate of Hawaii, Porto Rico and Cuba.

When the South had advocated the annexation of Texas, its statesmen had been denounced as expansionists and imperialists. The same fate awaited the statesmen of the new order who were favoring the extension of United States territory to include some of the contiguous islands that offered special opportunities for certain powerful financial interests.

The struggle began over the annexation of Hawaii. After numerous attempts to annex Hawaii to the United States a revolution was finally consummated in Honolulu in 1893. At that time, under treaty provisions, the neutrality of Hawaii was guaranteed by the United States. Likewise, "of the capital invested in the islands, two-thirds is owned by Americans." This statement is made in "Address by the Hawaiian Branches of the Sons of the American Revolution, the Sons of Veterans, and the Grand Army of the Republic to their compatriots in America Concerning the Annexation of Hawaii." (1897.) These advocates of annexation state in the same address that: "The revolution (of 1893) was not the work of filibusterers and adventurers, but of the most conservative and law-abiding citizens, of the princ.i.p.al tax-payers, the leaders of industrial enterprises, etc." The purpose behind the revolution seemed clear. Certain business men who had sugar and other products to sell in the United States, believed that they would gain, financially, by annexation. They engineered the revolution of 1893 and they were actively engaged in the agitation for annexation that lasted until the treaty of annexation was confirmed by the United States in 1898. The matter was debated at length on the floor of the United States Senate, and an investigation revealed the essential facts of the case.

The immediate cause of the revolution in 1893 was friction over the Hawaiian Const.i.tution. After some agitation, a "Committee of Safety" was organized for the protection of life and property on the islands.

Certain members of the Hawaiian government were in favor of declaring martial law, and dealing summarily with the conspirators. The Queen seems to have hesitated at such a course because of the probable complications with the government of the United States.

The _U. S. S. Boston_, sent at the request of United States Minister Stevens to protect American life and property in the Islands, was lying in the harbor of Honolulu. After some negotiations between the "Committee of Safety" and Minister Stevens, the latter requested the Commander of the _Boston_ to land a number of marines. This was done on the afternoon of January 16, 1893. Immediately the Governor of the Island of Oahu and the Minister of Foreign Affairs addressed official communications to the United States Minister, protesting against the landing of troops "without permission from the proper authorities."

Minister Stevens replied, a.s.suming full responsibility.

On the day following the landing of the marines, the Committee of Safety, under the chairmanship of Judge Dole, who had resigned as Justice of the Supreme Court of Hawaii in order to accept the Chairmanship of the Committee, proceeded to the government building, and there, under cover of the guns of the United States Marines, who were drawn up for the purpose of protecting the Committee against possible attack, a proclamation was read, declaring the abrogation of the Hawaiian monarchy, and the establishment of a provisional government "to exist until terms of union with the United States have been negotiated and agreed upon." Within an hour after the reading of this proclamation, and while the Queen and her government were still in authority, and in possession of the Palace, the Barracks, and the Police Station, the United States Minister gave the Provisional Government his recognition.