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Chapter VIII - Victory or Defeat? Dire Predictions
Victory or Defeat? Dire Predictions
Polk's "small war" killed 1,721 Americans, wounded 4,102 and left 11,555 dead of disease. In addition, the extensive military and naval excursions into Mexico and California cost $98 million. In exchange for this vast expenditure of blood and money, the United States took five hundred thousand square miles of new territory when Mexico gave up all claims to Texas above the Rio Grande and resentfully ceded California and New Mexico to the United States. In return, the United States agreed to pay Mexico fifteen million dollars and assume the claims of American citizens against Mexico for up to three and one quarter million dollars.
Men of such widely differing opinions as former Vice-President John C. Calhoun and author Ralph Waldo Emerson sensed that the Mexican War would bring disaster to the United States. Calhoun called Mexico "the forbidden fruit" and warned that the "penalty of eating it would be to subject our institutions to political death." Emerson predicted victory over Mexico, but ominously added, the United States will be "as the man who swallows arsenic . . . Mexico will poison us." As both men clearly foresaw, the war against Mexico set in motion serious political disputes that would brutally divide the Union by 1861.
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