Informing Congress in May of 1846 that “American blood has been spilled on American soil,” James Polk blamed Mexico for dragging the U.S. into an unnecessary war. The statement was, as his critics pointed out, factually dubious. The President, who had ruffled feathers by annexing Texas the previous year and by sending a particularly hated diplomat to the Distrito Federal to make a cash offer for New Mexico and California, had already written most of it before a skirmish in a disputed border territory finally provided him a compelling pretext for war. All the same, the repercussions of the war (1846-48) and the ambiguity of the concepts of “American blood” and “American soil” remain with us today.
Opponents of “Mr. Polk’s War” faced an uphill climb as volunteers rushed to the front and those remaining at home eagerly consumed sensational ‘you are there’ journalism, romantic novels about brave Texas rangers, beautiful señoritas, and swarthy banditos, and lithographic prints of military heroes like Taylor and Scott. Critics were accused of offering “aid and comfort to the enemy” and likened to the disgraced Federalists of the Row era. But as expenses and casualties mounted in the grueling campaign of 1847, two distinct currents of anti-war opposition emerged.
Mainstream anti-war rhetoric operated within the consensus of the second party system, in which satire functioned as a regulatory mechanism that confined political conflict to nuanced economic issues like banking, infrastructure spending, and tariff rates and away from the more fundamental dilemmas of slavery and territorial expansion. Whigs railed against the Democratic president’s war and saw it as an electoral gift horse but nonetheless assented to most of Polk’s appropriations requests. A crop of Manhattan-based satire publications like Yankee Doodle, Judy, The Elephant, and The John-Donkey found the war a perfect platform for their quest to synthesize a number of emerging styles of American ‘humor’ and thus capture a stable national audience, while the nation’s most popular satirist, Seba Smith, used his Jack Downing character to skewer Polk as a vain, petty, and rash pretender to the populist legacy of Andrew Jackson. The strength of the U.S. consensus is easily seen by comparing these works to contemporaneous Mexican publications like Don Simplicio and El Calavera, in which satire plays a more genuinely polemical role.
A more radical anti-war rhetoric emerged in the U.S. from the mishmash of reform-minded civic and religious movements centered in New England. Temperance, pacifist, women’s rights, and abolition groups seized on opposition to the war as a way to bring their particular concerns into public view. As Frederick Douglass observed in 1854, satire (“scorching irony”) was essential to any U.S. reform movement, a lesson anticipated by abolitionist James Russell Lowell, who used dialect humor to critique the racist logic of ‘Manifest Destiny’ jingoism in The Biglow Papers, a touchstone for American anti-war rhetoric as late as World War One.
*** “Seeing the Elephant” meant realizing that one had been duped, whether by Barnum or Polk.
