“We Are Engaged in a War of Conquest”: Opposition to the War Against Mexico

Background: These excerpts from a lecture by Charles C. Shackford, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Lynn, Massachusetts, criticize the premises and results of the U.S. war against Mexico and the lack of vocal opposition to it by northern citizens and politicians.

 “We are engaged in a war of conquest. All the resources of our nation for to-day and many days to come, are applied to inflict the horrors of war upon a neighboring people. We are recorded in the book of history, as the murderers of thousands whose only crime was living upon their native soil. . . . Truly is this matter the question of to-day; and the question not of politicians merely, but of every individual who has heart, or thought, or conscience. . .

With the cancer of slavery feeding upon our system, this war was inevitable. . . . The North, with a fatal spirit of acquiescence, has submitted to one encroachment after another upon the spirit of freedom; and now, floated upon the surface, it is borne along to share the retribution. There remains but one way of escape. Slavery, that hydra, which but gains in strength from every act of feeble opposition and tame submission, must be slain. . . . At every new victory of the accursed system, some feeble cry is raised, ‘that this encroaching evil must be opposed henceforth,’ and then all is still. . . . A war in [our country’s] defence, however iniquitous, a measure however wrong, has but to be entered upon, and then they pronounce it right to aid in its completion. . . .

Glorious government! which can spend millions. . . to subdue a weak, divided, miserable country, while a deaf ear is turned to a whole people of noble-hearted workmen dying for bread. . . . No money for charity, none for justice, none for the payment of claims long due our citizens, none for internal commerce, for science, for the promotion of the means of human comfort; all must be taken to pay the hirelings in this war of slavery! Such is the glory that encircles our nation’s brow!

Source: Charles C. Shackford, Citizen’s Appeal in Regard to the War with Mexico. A Lecture, Andrews & Prentiss, 1848.