page_title: Mexican–American War
section_title: Opposition to the war
hierarchical_section_title: Mexican–American War / Reaction in the United States / Opposition to the war
caption_attribution_description: Daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass
context_page_description: The Mexican–American War, also known in the United States as the Mexican War and in Mexico as the Intervención Estadounidense en México, was an armed conflict between the United States and Mexico from 1846 to 1848. It followed the 1845 U.S. annexation of Texas, which Mexico still considered Mexican territory since the government did not recognize the treaty signed by Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna when he was a prisoner of the Texian Army during the 1836 Texas Revolution. The Republic of Texas was defacto an independent country, but most of its citizens wished to be annexed by the United States. Domestic sectional politics in the U.S. prevented that since Texas would have been a slave state, upsetting the balance of power between northern free states and southern slave states. In the 1844 United States presidential election, Democrat James K. Polk was elected on a platform of expanding U.S. territory in Oregon and Texas. Polk advocated expansion by either peaceful means or by armed force, with the 1845 annexation of Texas as furthering that goal. For Mexico, this was itself a provocation, but Polk went further, sending U.S.
context_section_description: In the United States, increasingly divided by sectional rivalry, the war was a partisan issue and an essential element in the origins of the American Civil War. Most Whigs in the North and South opposed it; most Democrats supported it. Southern Democrats, animated by a popular belief in Manifest Destiny, supported it in hope of adding slave-owning territory to the South and avoiding being outnumbered by the faster-growing North. John L. O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, coined this phrase in its context, stating that it must be "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."
  Northern antislavery elements feared the expansion of the Southern Slave Power; Whigs generally wanted to strengthen the economy with industrialization, not expand it with more land. Among the most vocal opposing the war in the House of Representatives was former U.S. president, John Quincy Adams, now a representative from Massachusetts. Adams had first voiced concerns about expanding into Mexican territory in 1836 when he opposed Texas annexation following its de facto independence from Mexico. He continued this argument in 1846 for the same reason. War with Mexico would add new slavery territory to the nation. When the question to go to war with Mexico came to a vote on 13 May 1846, Adams spoke a resounding "No!" in the chamber. Only 13 others followed his lead. Despite that opposition, he later voted for war appropriations.
  Ex-slave Frederick Douglass opposed the war and was dismayed by the weakness of the anti-war movement. "The determination of our slave holding president, and the probability of his success in wringing from the people, men and money to carry it on, is made evident by the puny opposition arrayed against him. None seem willing to take their stand for peace at all risks."
  Polk was generally able to manipulate Whigs into supporting appropriations for the war, but only once it had already started and then "clouding the situation with a number of false statements about Mexican actions."  Not everyone went along. Joshua Giddings led a group of dissenters in Washington D.C. He called the war with Mexico "an aggressive, unholy, and unjust war", and voted against supplying soldiers and weapons. He said: "In the murder of Mexicans upon their own soil, or in robbing them of their country, I can take no part either now or hereafter. The guilt of these crimes must rest on others. I will not participate in them.
  Fellow Whig Abraham Lincoln contested Polk's causes for the war. Polk had said that Mexico had "shed American blood upon American soil". Lincoln submitted eight "Spot Resolutions", demanding that Polk state the exact spot where Thornton had been attacked and American blood shed, and clarify whether that location was American soil or if it had been claimed by Spain and Mexico. Lincoln, too, did not actually stop money for men or supplies in the war effort.
  Whig Senator Thomas Corwin of Ohio gave a long speech indicting presidential war in 1847. In the Senate, February 11, 1847. Whig leader Robert Toombs of Georgia declared: "This war is nondescript ... We charge the President with usurping the war-making power ... with seizing a country ... which had been for centuries, and was then in the possession of the Mexicans. ... Let us put a check upon this lust of dominion. We had territory enough, Heaven knew.
  Northern abolitionists attacked the war as an attempt by slave-owners to strengthen the grip of slavery and thus ensure their continued influence in the federal government. Prominent artists and writers opposed the war. The Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson attacked the popular war. Thoreau, who served jail time for his opposition, turned a lecture into an essay now known as Civil Disobedience. Emerson was succinct, predicting that, "The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as a man who swallowed the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us." Events proved him right, as ar
caption: Ex-slave and prominent anti-slavery advocate Frederick Douglass (circa 1847–52) opposed the Mexican–American War.
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