Kurt Andersen

America’s first elective foreign war and first imperial war was our war with Mexico, which ended 159 years ago this month. And like a certain 21st century elective foreign war, the Mexican War was started by a gung ho president claiming that the Mexicans posed a grave and imminent military threat to our national security. The New York Herald editorialized that it was “a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”

One of the expedition’s fierce opponents was Abraham Lincoln, then serving his single term in Congress. After two years of hard fighting, Lincoln gave an extraorindary speech on the House floor insisting that President Polk explain exactly how and why he had dragged America into it, to answer “fully, fairly, and candidly. Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments….

“And if…he can show that the soil was ours, where the first blood of the war was shed— that it was not within an inhabited country…then I am with him for his justification….But if he can not, or will not do this… then I shall be fully convinced…that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong…that originally having some strong motive…to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory…he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where.”

The economic stakes in the Mexican War were not (yet) control of oil, of course, but of land for settlement: the U.S. wanted northern Mexico — present-day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, New Mexico and California — and before we invaded we’d offered the Mexican government $20 million for it. After two years of fighting, we paid Mexico $15 million. In other words, 13,000 Americans died in order to save the Treasury $5 million.

In Heyday, one of my characters, Duff Lucking, is a veteran of the war.

“In the end,” he says bitterly to his journalist friend Timothy Skaggs at one point, “it was all a negotiation for some real estate, wasn’t it? American bankers and Mexican bankers using men with cannon and rifles to bargain hard.”

Yes, Skaggs thinks but refrains from telling his disillusioned friend, and why should this war would be different from any other?