Wednesday, December 28, 2022

BY POPULAR REQUEST: LINCOLN, TAYLOR, LEE, ET AL

"The Mexican War did two things though. We got a lot of Western land, damned near doubled our size, and besides that it was a training ground for generals, so when the sad self-murder (U.S. Civil War) settled on us the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible." From "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck


By Juan Montoya
George Washington never made it to Brownsville. 

For that matter, neither did Abraham Lincoln. 

And while it's true that we have no cherry trees that young George could have cut down along the Rio Grande, the events that happened along its banks 177 years ago last May made a definite impact on the budding political career of Lincoln and his subsequent nightmare to keep the Union intact.

And two future presidents, Zachary Taylor and Ulysses S. Grant, fought the Mexican Army on the grassy lowlands just north of FM 511 where the Palo Alto National Battlefield center stands today. 

The closest Robert E. Lee - the general of the Confederacy - got to Brownsville in 1846 was on a ship steaming off the shore of Brazos Island awaiting the arrival of officers who had been among the forces campaigning with Taylor in northern Mexico. President James Polk – angry at what he considered Taylor's slow progress in northern Mexico – took them from Taylor to invade Veracruz with Gen. Winfield Scott and march from there to force the capitulation of Mexico City. 

Lee later returned in early 1860 to Brownsville prior to the Civil War as a Union officer to assist with the "bandit" wars against Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, but failed to capture or kill him.

As Steinbeck correctly concludes, the U.S. soldiers who fought here and who were stationed on the fort that Taylor built on the banks of the Rio Grande went on to lead the ranks of the northern and southern armies in the Civil War that was to come less that two decades later.
No less than 37 future generals fought the Mexican army at Palo Alto May 6, 1845 and Resaca de la Guerra (Palma) the day after.(23 Union and 14 Confederate).

Another 15 future generals (six Union, nine Confederate) were present during the siege of Ft. Brown across from Matamoros, next to the golf course at the college.
It can be safely said that the seeds of the Civil War were planted at Palo Alto and at Resaca de la Guerra the next day, although the field was watered with both U.S. and Mexican blood and not exclusively American as it was during the Civil War.

Although Lincoln, never set foot on South Texas soil, the events that unfolded here linked his life inextricably to our area.
Lincoln’s biographers say that the first utterances Lincoln gave concerning South Texas came some three weeks after Mexican and U.S. forces clashed May 7, 1846, at Palo Alto and ignited the war that ended with more than half of Mexico in possession of the United States.

At that time he is said to have been given a “warm, thrilling, and effective” speech at a public meeting that he gave to encourage volunteering. However, he was of like mind with most young white males of the day in that he considered most Mexicans ”greasers,” according to historian Mark E. Neely in a paper he presented in 1981.

When he got to Washington as a newly-elected congressman in 1847, he thought that whether one agreed with President James K. Polk on the Mexican War, “should...as good citizens and patriots, remain silent...at least till the war should be ended.”

But all that changed when Lincoln, the Whig congressman, arrived in Congress.  In his annual message of December, 1847, Polk asked Congress for additional funds to bring the war to a close, claiming the vast territories of New Mexico and California as partial indemnity. In that address, he repeated the claim that Mexico had initiated the war by “invading the territory of the State of Texas, striking the first blow, and shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.”

Shortly thereafter, on December 22, Lincoln introduced a series of resolutions requiring that Polk provide the House with “all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed, was, or was not, our own soil.”

Had that spot, Lincoln queried, ever been a part of Texas and whether its inhabitants had ever submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas...by consent, or by compulsion, either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying taxes, or serving on juries, or...in any other way?”
Lincoln even joined 85 other Whigs led by Massachusetts representative George Ashmun who introduced a resolution declaring that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally began by the President of the United States.”

Lincoln’s anti-Polk tirades in the House eventually earned him the wrath of the Democratic press, who chided the new congressman by calling him “Spotty” Lincoln, in reference to his insistence that Polk name the spot where hostilities had begun. His two predecessors in the congressional district – John H. Hardin and E. D. Baker – both had served volunteered to serve in the Army when the war broke out.

This apparent contradiction didn’t go unnoticed by Missouri representative John Jameson who professed astonishment that the successor of Hardin – killed at Buena Vista – and Baker, a hero of the battle Cerro Gordo, should utter such unpatriotic speeches.

The reaction in the press was partisan as it was pointed. Precious few Whigs came to Lincoln’s defense, but pro-Democratic newspapers took umbrage with his views in no uncertain terms. The Illinois State Register warned that Lincoln predicted that he would have “a fearful account to settle” with the veterans when they returned from Mexico.

Likewise, the Peoria Press denounced Lincoln as the “Miserable man of spots” and pilloried him for his “traitorous course in Congress.”
In public meetings, Democratic speakers chastised Lincoln for “base, dastardly, and treasonable assault upon President Polk” and prophesied that “henceforth will this Benedict Arnold of our district be known here only as the Spotty Ranchero of one term.”

Lincoln only served one term, in large part as a result of his stand on the Mexican War and his attack on Polk. But before he left office, he became the driving force who pushed for Taylor – victorious at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Guerra and then Monterrey  and Buena Vista – to be drafted as the Whig candidate for president.

“Our only chance is with Taylor,” he cautioned voters on the presidential campaign trail.
After he left office, Lincoln could not have known that the men who had served with Taylor in Texas and Northern Mexico would play large roles in his future and that Taylor and later Grant would go on to become presidents themselves.

Grant would become Lincoln’s leading general, providing the Union with victories when things looked darkest. Besides Grant, other future Union generals who would later served under Lincoln that were present at Palo Alto included Gen. Benjamin Alford, Gen. Christopher Augur, Joseph K. Barnes, William Brooks, Robert Buchanan, and Don Carlos Buell, among others.

Future Confederate generals at the battle included Bernard Bee, Braxton Bragg, Samuel Gibbs French, Robert Selden Garnett, Bushrod Johnson, Edwin Kirby Smith, and James Longstreet. 

Joseph K. Barnes, Taylor's medic, went on to become the U.S. Surgeon General and was serving in the position when Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theater. He was one of the physicians who tended to the fatally wounded president before he died. 

In fact, on April 14, 1865, Barnes attended the death bed of Lincoln and ministered to the successful restoration of Secretary of State William H. Seward. In 1881, during the long struggle of President James A. Garfield to live following his shooting, Barnes was one of the surgeons who for weeks served in the chamber of the dying president.

However, as it relates to Lincoln's ties to our area, while president he and his cabinet grappled with the blockade of southern ports, including shipping from South Texas. Considerable fortunes (such as those of Charles Stillman and Robert King's) were made running the blockade to deliver cotton to British and American mills. As the Union tried to stem the flow of cotton from the South and arms from abroad, they found themselves helpless to stop the flow of Confederate cotton from Puerto Bagdad, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.

David Herbert Donald tells of the Peterhoff incident just off the coast of Brownsville in his Lincoln biography. Union forces captured the ship suspecting that it carried contraband intended for the Confederacy. Secretary of War Gideon Welles defended the Navy and urged Lincoln to open the mails so that proof of the ship’s intentions could be verified.

The British protested claiming the inviolability of the mails under international law and demanding that the Peterhoff be released.
Secretary of State William Seward backed the British position and things were at a stalemate until Lincoln interceded and laid the issue to rest. Telling his cabinet members that the U.S. could fight only “one war at a time,” he ordered the blockade-runner released.

Lincoln never visited South Texas, or Texas for that matter, but his presence looms large over this area. His contention that an unjust war and the inclusion of Texas as a slave state would further the divide that would lead to the Civil War was justified, and his relationship to those who fought here make him an important figure in this area’s history.

16 comments:

BobbyWC said...

THE VA IN HARLINGEN NEEDS TO BE SHUT DOWN.

Yesterday while doing labs for a CT with contrast on my Caridad Arteries I met a man who was just sent packing by Dr. Garcia, an alleged psychiatrist. He was in total meltdown, paranoid and suffering hallucinations. He had his 15 minute appointment and sent on his way. I was horrified for this man. I just kept on telling him to take it an hour at a time. I do not think he understood but I told him to go to the window around the corner and demand to change doctors. They have no choice but to change his doctors.

What kind of quack releases a man in a total meltdown, with extreme paranoid and suffering extreme hallucinations? He was at the lab waiting on more labs. He should have had someone with him considering the condition he was in. I did my best to comfort him because no one at the VA was going to comfort him, but I had to leave for an appointment in Mission.

Until March 1st when my Medicare kicks in my healthcare is being run through McAllen. But they are not communicating with Harlingen and Harlingen is trying to clean up its mess. On Friday when my blood pressure hit 202/97 again while with a bariatric surgeon, they refer me to a cardiologist. I just saw the cardiologist. You have to see a vascular surgeon for my blockage, but the VA doctors cannot read a simple note from the Cardiologist.

To keep me asleep for 5-6 hours I take diazepam at bed time. A side effect is to lower your blood pressure. They times a day I take 20 mg of Viagra for pulmonary hypertension. I take the last at bed time because it reduces the number of sleep apnea events. Each even damages the heart. A well know side effect is it lowers your blood pressure. I take a blood pressure medicine. With all of this my BP keeps on going up. These quacks at the VA cannot make the connection between the blocked carotid arteries and my blood pressure. The test they ordered for tomorrow is disfavored by the National Institute of Health, with a preference for an MRA [MRI with contrast] But because the techs at the VA are not trained they will not do the MRA because of my brain shunt. This is very old science. I keep in my wallet all the information related to the model of my shunt and the date it was placed in my brain. If you look up the model it says and MRI is fine, but to just check the value setting afterword. It is done with a simple head x-ray. It is like a clock. If the notch is between 5 and 6, my cerebral pressure is fine. It is so obvious I can see it. I forced the VA to train the techs in how to do the simple head x-ray, but they did not train the radiologist assigned to Harlingen so the techs cannot do the 5 minute x-ray, which anyone who is not blind can read in seconds.

Guys these doctors are quacks. The chief medical officer for Coastal Bend cannot get them to stand down in favor of McAllen. So today, I go to her boss.

Directives from the White House mean nothing to them.

Oh, I have spent years seeing one bad eye surgeon after another. Yesterday I saw a new one. He looked at my medical history and the macular pucker and was done. The problem cannot be solved with surgery.

My brain disorder causes the gel in the eye to shrink from vitamin D deficiency. I have proof for three years I have been begging the VA to start testing for the Vitamin D deficiency again. They refuse. He was able to link the entire loss of my vision to the endless malpractice of the VA.

Guys if you qualify for Medicare even though you may have to pay a penalty at this point, it is better than the VA.

Bobby WC

Anonymous said...

who cares!

NEWS, PUTO.


Anonymous said...

You know what you've never written about in regard to the U S Mexican War? You never written about how the Mexican soldiers were slaves during this period...just a thought.

Anonymous said...



John Lennon never made it to Brownsville, either.

For that matter, neither did Shaquille O'Neill.





Anonymous said...

No one I know cares about any of this.


fact.


old shit is like old women.


Anonymous said...

How about some writing about Valley history, about the farmworkers and about the abuse they suffered at the hands of Whitey.

This shit you focus on is ancient shit.


No one cares.


I thought you were a farmworker, dude.



Anonymous said...

The Greatest Pool Players of All Time -

#1. Efren “Bata” Reyes. If you ask anyone who is the greatest pool player in the world, Efren Reyes is the most well-known and top-ranked player.
#2. Allison Fisher
#3. Willie Mosconi
#4. Ralph Greenleaf
#5. Jeanette Lee
#6. Earl Strickland....
#7. Rudolf Wanderone (aka Minnesota Fats)
#8. Mike Sigel

Bolas!!!


Anonymous said...

Joe Biden and Tamala Harris did not make it to Brownsville either.

Anonymous said...

In regard to the negative comments about Juan Cortina, if you do not have an interest in blog that address Juan Cortina than read another blog. This is called freedom of choice.

Anonymous said...

This article about Juan Cortina is real Texas history. The interesting issue compared to hundreds of years of injustice is that Texas still uses Mexico to complete its corruption all for the love of money. We land grant heirs know for a fact that Charles Stillman, Mifflin Kennedy and Richard King were not heirs to the Sovereign King of Spain, nor were they Mexican land grant heirs. The land where these corrupt so-called leaders planned, willingly, knowingly, purposely and intentionally stole the land to grow the cotton that they cowardly were sending to Mexico, for a profit no doubt, then sending it to the enemy which was the Union. These so-called cowards have for years been honored and praised by Texas. These corrupt setup schemes are still what runs South Texas. First it was the land to grow the cotton for an enterprise, then it was the railroad, and now it's our oil and gas. Let's not forget to give praise and thanks to our so corrupt Texas congressman Cuellar, Filemon Vela, Vicente Gonzales and Eddie Lucio for making sure we South Texas Heirs stayed ignorant. Love of money is what runs South Texas and Mexico. This is my opinion

Anonymous said...

Joe Biden hasn't made it to the border either.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for bashing President Lincoln. He made a big mistake! He should have never gotten involved with the issue on slavery. You see, we're all slaves to something or someone. Yet, only the blacks get all the attention. Today every other commercial has a black. Where are the other minorities? Where are the Hispanics? I guess they're in line some where waiting for a handouts.

Anonymous said...

December 29, 2022 at 10:36 AM
behind the whitey hillbilly idiota.

Anonymous said...

December 28, 2022 at 10:52 AM
Jotingo open your own idiota quit bitchin' maricon

Anonymous said...

Only the homeless gringos make it to the border y las ratas blancas of course. Cocos were always here mamando..

Anonymous said...

December 28, 2022 at 4:58 PM
How about opening your own blog mamon pinches llorones quien te esta pagando por poner tus pendejadas un gringo o un coco... lambiscon

rita