61. Quoted in Charles Going, David Wilmot (New York, 1924), 174.
62. Eric Foner, “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited,” JAH 56 (1969), 262–79; Michael Holt, The Fate of Their Country (New York, 2004), 26; Michael Morrison, Slavery and the American West (Chapel Hill, 1997), 40–45, 72–81.
63. Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, 1993), 143–47 quotation from 146. See also Jonathan Sassi, Republic of Righteousness (New York, 2001), 185–95.
64. Originally published in newspapers, the collected poems then appeared as James Russell Lowell, The Biglow Papers (Boston, 1848), quotation from 6–7.
65. Whitman in the Brooklyn Eagle , July 7, 1846; the other quotations come from Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas , 291, 294. See also Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).
66. Van Buren, quoted in Holt, Fate of Their Country , 18.
67. Holt, Rise and Fall of Whig Party , 238–45.
68. “Second Annual Message” (Dec. 8, 1846), Presidential Messages , IV, 471–506, quotations from 473; Daniel King quoted in Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War , 79.
69. Quoted in Milton Meltzer, Bound for the Rio Grande (New York, 1974), 111.
70. Charleston Mercury , March 2, 1847, quoted in Foos, Short, Offhand, Killing Affair , 116.
71. For an eyewitness account, see John Chamberlain, My Confession , ed. William Goetzmann (Austin, Tex., 1996; written 1855–61), 132–34.
72. Eisenhower, So Far from God, 111.
73. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas , 138.
74. Meade quoted in Meltzer, Bound for the Rio Grande , 128; Stevens, Rogue’s March , 103, 143–44, 156–58.
75. Zachary Taylor to R. C. Wood, Sept. 16, 1846, Letters from the Battlefields , 62; William Marcy to Zachary Taylor, Oct. 13, 1846, quoted in Dufour, Mexican War , 163.
76. Polk, Diary , II, 242–44 (Nov. 18, 1846); Paul Bergeron, The Presidency of James K. Polk (Lawrence, Kans., 1987), 92–94.
77. Parker Scammon, “A Chapter of the Mexican War,” Magazine of American History 14 (Dec. 1885): 564–65.
78. DePalo, Mexican National Army , 109–10.
79. Quoted in Dufour, Mexican War , 172.
80. Quotations from Joseph Chance, Jefferson Davis’s Mexican War Regiment (Jackson, Miss., 1991), 98, and Eisenhower, So Far from God , 188.
81. On the Battle of Buena Vista, see Eisenhower, So Far from God , 166–91; Bauer, Mexican War , 206–18; Dufour, Mexican War , 171–84.
82. Quoted in Eisenhower, So Far from God , 191.
83. Quoted in Robert Remini, Henry Clay (New York, 1991), 685. Daniel Webster, another Whig critic of the war, also lost a son in it.
84. DePalo, Mexican National Army , 115. Santa Anna’s own after-action report appears in “Letters of Santa Anna,” ed. Justin Smith, Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1917 (Washington, 1920), 413–14.
85. Allan Peskin, Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms (Kent, Ohio, 2003), 59; Robert Smith, “The Impossible Campaign Attempted,” Military History 10 (1993): 34–42, 92–96.
86. Peskin, Winfield Scott , 147–50.
87. Quoted in John Weems, To Conquer a Peace (Garden City, N.Y., 1974), 338.
88. Peskin, Winfield Scott , 160.
89. Estimated by DePalo, Mexican National Army , 223, n. 113.
90. Working with only fragments of evidence, historians have given various accounts of this mission; the fullest is Anna Nelson, Secret Agents (New York, 1988), 72–95.
91. Michael Casteloe, “The Mexican Church and the Rebellion of the ‘Polkos,’” Hispanic American Historical Review 46 (1966): 170–78; Pedro Santoni, Mexicans at Arms: Puro Federalists and the Politics of War (Fort Worth, Tex., 1996), 171–207.
92. Prescott quoted in Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas , 245; Santa Anna quoted in Eisenhower, So Far from God , 271.
93. Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen, The U.S.-Mexican War (San Francisco, 1998), 180.
94. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, journal entry for April 20, 1847, in Fifty Years in Camp and Field , ed. W. A. Croffut (New York, 1909), 253. The song parody can be viewed at www.ku.edu/carrie/docs/texts/mexwar.htm.
95. Christensen and Christensen, U.S.-Mexican War, 187.
96. Emma Blackwood, ed., To Mexico with Scott: Letters of Captain E. Kirby Smith (Cambridge, Mass., 1917), 155, 183, and 9.
97. Grant, Memoirs , 115.
98. Pletcher, Diplomacy of Annexation , 504–11.
99. Smith, War with Mexico , II, 87.
100. On Churubusco, see Bauer, Mexican War , 296–300, and for a contemporary Mexican account, Ramón Alcaraz et al., The Other Side , trans. Albert Ramsey (New York, 1850), 291–98.
101. Winfield Scott to William Marcy, Aug. 18, 1847, in Bauer, Mexican War , 301.
102. Quoted in Otis Singletary, The Mexican War (Chicago, 1960), 94.
103. Stevens, Rogue’s March , 270–76, 295–301; Miller, Shamrock and Sword , 178–85; Wynn, San Patricio Soldiers , 286.
104. “The Journal of William Joseph McWilliams,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 52 (1969): 388.
105. William Davis to Elizabeth Davis, Jan. 11, 1848, in Chronicles of the Gringos , ed. George W. Smith and Charles Judah (Albuquerque, N.M., 1968), 411; Thomas Barclay, journal entry for Sept. 27, 1847, in Volunteers: Mexican War Journals , ed. Allan Peskin (Kent, Ohio, 1991), 195.
106. Wellington quoted in Bauer, Mexican War , 322; Eisenhower, So Far from God , xxv.
107. Lee in a letter to his brother, Sidney Smith Lee, quoted in Dufour, Mexican War , 281; McClellan to his mother, March 22, 1848, in Chronicles of the Gringos , 440.
108. Bauer, Mexican War , 371–74. “Whitewashing” was Scott’s term, quoted in Peskin, Winfield Scott , 203.
1. New York Sun , May 6, 1848, attributed to Storm in Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York, 1963), 200n.; James Knox Polk to Richard Rush, April 18, 1848, quoted in Michael Morrison, “American Reactions to European Revolutions, 1848–1852,” Civil War History 49 (June 2003): 117.
2. Margaret Fuller, “These Sad but Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe , ed. Larry Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New Haven, 1991), 165.
3. Timothy Roberts, “The American Response to the European Revolutions of 1848” (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1997), 125–28.
4. Alexander Taggart McGill, Popery the Punishment of Unbelief (Philadelphia, 1848); Orestes Brownson, “Legitimacy and Revolution,” in his Essays and Reviews (New York, 1852), 389–415; John Hughes, The Church and the World (New York, 1850).
5. See John Belcham, “Irish Emigrants and the Revolutions of 1848,” Past and Present 146 (1995): 103–35.
6. Democratic Platform of 1848, National Party Platforms , ed. Kirk Porter and Donald Johnson (Urbana, Ill., 1966), 12.
7. Calhoun quotations from Morrison, “United States and the Revolutions of 1848,” 119; Taney’s opinion is in Luther v. Borden , 48 U.S. (7 Howard) 1–88 (1849).
8. With permission of my co-author, this section reuses passages from Timothy Roberts and Daniel Howe, “The United States and the Revolutions of 1848,” in The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–49 , ed. Robert Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (Oxford, 2000), 157–79.
9. Roberts, “American Response,” 159–65.
10. See also Richard Rohrs, “American Critics of the French Revolution of 1848,” JER 14 (1994): 359–77; Timothy Roberts, “Revolutions Have Become the Bloody Toy of the Multitude,” JER 25 (2005): 259–83.