Posted on 11/21/2015 11:35:55 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
Before when free-soil men invoked the right of revolution in defense of their political rights, proslavery men condemned them for defying the legitimate government. But proslavery men feared the loss of their right to own slaves as much as free soilers feared the loss of the right to exclude slavery.
At Hickory Point, [Kansas] a squabble over land claims ignited these political quarrels. A settler named Franklin M. Coleman had been squatting on land abandoned by some Hoosiers, who subsequently sold the claim to Jacob Branson, another Hoosier. In late 1854, when Branson informed Coleman of his legal claim and attempted to move into Coleman’s house, Coleman held him off with a gun. A group of arbitrators later awarded part of the claim to Branson, but the boundaries between his land and Coleman’s were not determined. Branson invited in other men, including a young Ohioan named Charles W. Dow. Branson belonged to the free-state militia, a connection he used to intimidate Coleman, although Branson later testified that there had been no problems between Dow and Coleman – until the day of Dow’s murder.
On the morning of November 21, 1855, Dow went to the blacksmith shop at Hickory Point to have a wagon skein and lynchpin mended. While there he argued with one of Coleman’s friends, but left unharmed. As he walked away, he passed Coleman on the road. Coleman snapped a cap at him. When Dow turned around, he received a charge of buckshot in the chest and died immediately. His body lay in the road until Branson recovered it four hours later. Coleman claimed that Dow had threateningly raised the wagon skein (a two-foot piece of iron) as they argued over their claim dispute, forcing him to act in self-defense. Fearing that he could not get fair treatment at the free-state settlement of Hickory Point, Coleman and his family fled to Missouri.
Nicole Etcheson, “Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Eraâ€
Thanks for this history. It gives me a little of the background for the early episodes of the biography of Crazy Horse by Mari Sandoz which I am now reading. Crazy Horse was a boy of about 12 at the time of these episodes and seems to have witnessed them. Mari grew up on the Niobrara River near the reservation & listened in when the old Indians came to visit & talk with her father.
Excellent, Homer. Thanks.
Yeah. I hear you loud and clear.
This reminded me of a quote from the Lincoln bio that made me smile. The Whigs were debating among themselves about how to address the issue . . .
"When someone asked Justin Butterfield, a leading Chicago Whig, whether he would condemn the Mexican War as he had once denounced the War of 1812, he responded, 'No, indeed! I opposed one war, and it ruined me. From now on I am for war, pestilence, and famine.'"
Unsurprisingly, there are streets named both Harney and Leavenworth in Omaha, Nebraska.
Mexican American War was the training ground for the Civil War Officers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War
Impacts on the American Civil War[edit]
Engraving of young Grant in uniform
Second lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, one of the many officers in the U.S. Army in the U.S.-Mexican War to serve in the Civil War
Many of the military leaders on both sides of the American Civil War were trained at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and had fought as junior officers in Mexico. This list includes military men fighting for the Union: Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan, William T. Sherman, George Meade, William Rosecrans, and Ambrose Burnside. Military men who joined the Southern secessionists of the Confederate States of America were Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, Joseph E. Johnston, Braxton Bragg, Sterling Price, and the future Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Both sides had leaders with significant experience in active combat in strategy and tactics, likely shaping ways the Civil War conflict played out.
President Ulysses S. Grant, who as a young army lieutenant had served in Mexico under General Taylor, recalled in his Memoirs, published in 1885, that:
Generally, the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation was consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.[165]
Grant also expressed the view that the war against Mexico had brought punishment on the United States in the form of the American Civil War:
The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.[166]
This view was shared by the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who towards the end of the war wrote that “The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”[167]
“An Available Candidate: The One Qualification for a Whig President.” Political cartoon about the 1848 presidential election which refers to Zachary Taylor or Winfield Scott, the two leading contenders for the Whig Party nomination in the aftermath of the Mexican–American War. Published by Nathaniel Currier in 1848, digitally restored.
Despite initial objections from the Whigs and abolitionists, the war would nevertheless unite the U.S. in a common cause and was fought almost entirely by volunteers. The army swelled from just over 6,000 to more than 115,000. The majority of 12-month volunteers in Scott’s army decided that a year’s fighting was enough and returned to the U.S.[168]
Veterans of the war were often broken men. “As the sick and wounded from Taylor’s and Scott’s campaigns made their way back from Mexico to the United States, their condition shocked the folks at home. Husbands, sons, and brothers returned in broken health, some with missing limbs.”[169]
For years afterward, U.S. veterans continued to suffer from the debilitating diseases contracted during the campaigns. The casualty rate was thus easily over 25% for the 17 months of the war; the total casualties may have reached 35–40% if later injury- and disease-related deaths are added.[citation needed] In this respect, the war was proportionately the most deadly in American military history.[citation needed] Overall, approximately 1.5% of U.S. soldiers were killed in the fighting and nearly 10% died of disease; another 12% were wounded or discharged because of disease, or both.[citation needed]
During the war, political quarrels in the U.S. arose regarding the disposition of conquered Mexico. A brief “All-Mexico” movement urged annexation of the entire territory. Veterans of the war who had seen Mexico at first hand were unenthusiastic.[citation needed] Anti-slavery elements opposed that position and fought for the exclusion of slavery from any territory absorbed by the U.S.[170] In 1847 the House of Representatives passed the Wilmot Proviso, stipulating that none of the territory acquired should be open to slavery. The Senate avoided the issue, and a late attempt to add it to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was defeated.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was the result of Nicholas Trist’s unauthorized negotiations. It was approved by the U.S. Senate on March 10, 1848, and ratified by the Mexican Congress on May 25. Mexico’s cession of Alta California and Nuevo México and its recognition of U.S. sovereignty over all of Texas north of the Rio Grande formalized the addition of 1.2 million square miles (3.1 million km2) of territory to the United States. In return the U.S. agreed to pay $15 million and assumed the claims of its citizens against Mexico. A final territorial adjustment between Mexico and the U.S. was made by the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. The sale of this territory was a contributing factor in the final fall of Santa Anna in Mexico for having sold Mexican patrimony.
As late as 1880, the “Republican Campaign Textbook” by the Republican Congressional Committee[171] described the war as “Feculent, reeking Corruption” and “one of the darkest scenes in our history—a war forced upon our and the Mexican people by the high-handed usurpations of Pres’t Polk in pursuit of territorial aggrandizement of the slave oligarchy.”
The war was one of the most decisive events for the U.S. in the first half of the 19th century. While it marked a significant waypoint for the nation as a growing military power, it also served as a milestone especially within the U.S. narrative of Manifest Destiny. The resultant territorial gains set in motion many of the defining trends in American 19th-century history, particularly for the American West. The war did not resolve the issue of slavery in the U.S. but rather in many ways inflamed it, as potential westward expansion of the institution took an increasingly central and heated theme in national debates preceding the American Civil War. Furthermore, in doing much to extend the nation from coast to coast, the Mexican–American War was one step in the massive migrations to the West of Anglo Americans, which culminated in transcontinental railroads and the Indian wars later in the same century.
Without necessarily calling into question the facts presented in that Wikipedia entry, I do get the sense that it was in some degree edited by folks who don’t exactly love America, and might prefer that we give certain formerly Mexican territories back.
An ancestor was running a mill on the Missouri near what is now Hermann. The mill had been reinforced and was called Best’s Mill for use by the militia in the War of 1812. The Sac and Fox Indians were paid by the British to wage war against the Americans. The Indians attacked the fort, stole all of his horses and his household goods.
He filed a claim. Since there was no Claims Court, the claim had to be dealt with first a Commissioner in Missouri, who denied the claim and finally by the Congress who also denied the claim in the 1830’s after Best had moved to the Austin Colony in Texas. The reason for denial: lack of a properly executed assessment of value for the horses. Depositions from neighbors confirmed the numbers and quality of the horses and testified on what the price should be out there on the frontier. Not good enough.
Please add me. The most highly recommendable biography of The Rail-Splitter is unquestionably Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln. You don’t have to worry about any sort of modern revisionism. It was completed in 1940. It is chock full of the personality the man. He drips off the pages — his wit, wisdom and anecdotes. From wrasslin Jack Armstrong, to losing a delivery of pigs when the raft crashed. It goes into the the first time he witnessed slavery at its worst, something he never forgot. He could hold an axe, by the end of the handle, fully extended out to the side and parallel to the ground longer than any man in the county. It goes into his first love, Anne Rutledge. His many years traveling the back country as a lawyer on horseback or afoot. The man was bigger than life.
..........and Sandburg won a Pulitzer for it.
Wow, I feel awesome because I came up with the term first. However, Walter E. Williams has my permission to use it any time he wants.
Add me to the discussion list. Thank you for your earlier work on WWII, it was one of the best features on this forum. Can you, perhaps, do newspaper pages like you did before.
From your tone it sounds like you came up with just a wise-ass name? I thought you were serious - and others HAVE used that term. But obviously you thought it up first! Funny. Now I’m off to do a search on “Lincoln’s War”.
Okay - “Lincoln’s War” is the name of a board game (war-gaming) AND a book!
Wikipedia entry,
My current perception of the times with that there was a lot of power playing going on between the south and north. Slavery was part of the issue and the visible issue. There was much moral objection to slavery but also power and practical aspects. Nothing is pure.
It appears the democrats wanted land expansion and the Whigs more technology?
Lots of power players influence ; railroad, steamboat, etc.
Lots of change which destabilizes everything. Very complicated times and very similar to today............
If we follow this model maybe I should place another order with cheaper than dirt.
Claims Court
So as more complaints arose from the people as to liabilities and process and congress got tired of things, they decided to form a committee. Consequences are separated from decisions for congress and they can do more mischief?
Interesting that the vets of the Mexican American war brought it to a head?
Yes, there was certainly a lot of power-playing going on.
I don’t know know of any better description of the history of that whole era, politically-speaking, than Abraham Lincoln himself gave in his famous “House Divided” speech on June 16, 1858 in Springfield, Illinois.
A speech that almost certainly cost him the Senate race against Douglas, but ultimately gained him the presidency.
http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm
“Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Convention.
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.
We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other.
Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South....”
Truly, any serious student of that era simply must digest this speech well, IMO.
The construction and completion of this bridge came to symbolize the larger issues affecting transcontinental commerce and sectional interests. (from the article on the Mississippi bridge in davenport Iowa.)
The below regards 1890’s but it is something that was going on prior to the Civil War. And still is................
http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/sections.html
I prefer the term “recent unpleasantness”.
I think that title is charming. Seriously. It really captures something important about the character and attitude of Americans.
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