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BAJA DEMOCRATS |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Wednesday, 04 November 2009 |
Cabo
San Lucas, Baja California. The balcony view from a suite at the Marquis Los Cabos overlooking the Sea
of Cortez is breathtaking. My wife Rebel and I are here attending a
business conference - but at the moment, we are enjoying a margarita and a
spectacular sunset in the ocean.
Ever-observant, Rebel notices that my eyes have become
unfocused, and asks what I'm thinking about.
"Nicholas Trist," I answer.
"Who's he?" she asks. "One of the
great jerks of American history," I respond.
She takes a sip of her margarita, gazes out upon the shimmering sheet of
sunlit blue in front of us, and waits for the rest of the story.
Well, the story could begin with Cortez, the founder and
creator of Mexico. The Aztec Empire he liberated in 1521 was
about the size of Kansas, some
80,000 square miles. Over the next 200
years, viceroys appointed by the King of Spain expanded the colony of Nueva España, New Spain by twenty times
(through appropriating land from Indian tribes) to 1,650,000 square miles.
When the French lost the Seven Years' War, by the Treaty of
Paris in 1763 they ceded their territory
of Louisianne
(named after Louis XIV) west of the Mississippi
to England
which awarded it to Spain
for being England's
ally in the war. This added another 828,000 square miles to the Viceroyalty of
New Spain.
When Napoleon seized power after the French Revolution, he
wanted Louisianne back for France.
So he made a secret deal in 1800 with the King Charles IV of Spain
(actually with his wife Queen Maria Amelia and her lover Manuel de Godoy for
Charles was retarded) to trade (a "retrocession") all of it for
control of Tuscany in Italy.
It was called the Treaty of Ildefonso.
Thomas Jefferson's spies in Paris
found out about the secret treaty in 1801, and that Napoleon needed some fast
cash. He had lost his cash cow of Haiti
and its sugar exports in a rebellion and might be open to a deal over
Louisianne. The negotiations were concluded on May 2, 1803: 828,000 square miles for $15
million, or about three cents an acre. The Louisiana Purchase.
Charles IV abdicated his throne in 1808, in favor of his son Ferdinand
VII, who was so pro-British/anti-French that Napoleon replaced him with his
older brother Joseph Bonaparte as King of Spain. The people of Spain
rebelled, which left the Spanish government in chaotic breakdown - and which
gave the people of New Spain cause to rebel against
their colonial rulers in Europe.
By the time Ferdinand VII regained the throne in 1814, he
needed money to suppress the rebellion in New Spain. His government had challenged the legality of
the entire Louisiana Purchase, claiming France
had no right to sell it and never owned it anyway, since the secret Ildefonso
treaty was invalid. President James
Monroe saw the opportunity.
By 1819 at Monroe's
instructions, US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams concluded a deal with
Ferdinand's emissary Spanish Foreign Minister Luis de Onis called the
Adams-Onis Treaty. The US
paid Spain $5
million for the 70,000 square miles of Spanish Florida, and Spain
recognized the validity of the Louisiana Purchase, thus settling
the US-New Spain border.
Here's the map of the treaty:
Ferdinand could now suppress the New Spain
rebellion - but the general in charge of the suppression who was infamous for
his brutality, Augustin de Iturbe (1783-1824), decided to rule New
Spain for himself. In 1821,
he made a deal with the rebels and declared himself Emperor Augustin I of
now-independent New Spain, which he renamed Mexico. He promptly repudiated all treaties made by Spain
- Adams-Onis in particular.
Hardly a year passed when a general of Iturbe's army, Antonio
Lopez de Santa Anna (1794-1876) overthrew him.
Years of coups, counter-coups, and chaos followed, with a full dozen
Mexican states in open rebellion against the central government in Mexico
City: Coahuila,
San Luis Potosí, Querétaro,
Durango, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Yucatán, Jalisco,
Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas, and Tejas.
Several of these states formed their own governments. All were brutally suppressed by Santa
Anna. One succeeded in gaining
independence - Tejas, which became in 1836 the Republic
of Texas. Mexico
demanded it back and warned the US
if it annexed Texas, there would
be war.
When James Polk (1795-1849) became president in March of
1845, he promptly moved to accept Texas
into the Union, which is it was that December. In 1846, the Mexican government was such a
chaotic mess that it had four presidents, six war ministers, and 16 finance
ministers - in that one year.
Nonetheless, it got what it said it wanted when 2,000 Mexican soldiers
attacked 63 US
soldiers on a border patrol at the Neuces
River, killing 11, and the
Mexican-American War was on.
By March of 1847, US forces had secured most of northern Mexico. Then General Winfield Scott landed 12,000
soldiers at Veracruz - among whom
were Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and Thomas Jackson, later to be nicknamed
"Stonewall."
After securing Veracruz,
Scott marched to Mexico City to
defeat the forces of Santa Anna - who had by now seized the Mexican presidency
for the sixth time - at the Battle of Chapultepec on September 13, 1847. The war was over. Now the terms of surrender and relinquishing
of Mexican territory had to be negotiated.
Polk sent the State Department's chief clerk, Nicholas
Trist, to negotiate the terms. It was a
bizarre choice. From Charlottesville,
Virginia, he had managed to marry Thomas
Jefferson's granddaughter, Virginia Jefferson Randolph. This connection enabled him to become Andrew
Jackson's private secretary, and from that to be named US
Consul in Havana, Cuba
in 1833.
Trist was fanatically pro-slavery - and corrupt. Spanish slavers in Cuba
put him on their payroll to forge documents covering up illegal sales of
Africans into slavery. In 1839, captured
West African slaves on the Spanish ship La
Amistad sailing out of Havana
to a Cuban plantation broke free, gained control of the ship, tried to sail
back to Africa and got captured by the US Navy.
The owner of La
Amistad paid Trist to forge documents saying the slaves were Cuban-born,
which was legal, not African, which was illegal as the slave trade by then was
banned. A Congressional investigation
revealed Trist's corruption, he was recalled - but not fired - and the Supreme
Court in a famous trial in 1841 set them free to return to Africa.
Steven Spielberg tells the story in his 1997 film Amistad (starring Morgan Freeman
and Anthony Hopkins) - but there is no mention of Trist.
Rather than imprisoned, Trist through his friendship with
Andrew Jackson was made chief clerk at State.
Polk was close to Jackson,
so maybe that connection is what prompted Polk to send him to Mexico
City. It was a
decision he was to regret.
When Trist arrived, General Winfield Scott was military
governor of Mexico City, the
Mexican government existed in name only, and many a US
Congressman and Senator was demanding the US
annex the entire country of Mexico.
Polk turned this demand down. He instructed Trist to inform Santa Anna that
he upheld Mexican independence, that he wanted to end the US military
occupation, that Mexico was to relinquish any claim to the territory of Texas
and the Louisiana Purchase, that Mexico was to grant the US transit rights
across the Isthmus of Tehauntepec (the "waist" of Mexico 125 miles wide between the
Caribbean and Pacific), and that Mexico was to cede to the US its territory
between the western border of the US (meaning Texas and the "Missouri
Territory" of the Purchase) and the Pacific Ocean.
The last meant, most importantly, California
- all of it, Alta or Upper California and Baja or Lower
California.
Trist made some headway, but Polk soon realized he had made
a mistake. When informed that the
Mexicans refused to grant the transit rights and cede Baja
California, he recalled Trist and ordered him to
return to Washington. Incredibly Trist refused - he overtly
disobeyed the order of the President of the United
States.
Trist then quickly gave in to the Mexican demands. No transit rights. He agreed to a border from El
Paso, Texas to the junction of
the Colorado and Gila
Rivers (near what is now Yuma,
Arizona), then in a straight line to the
Pacific below San Diego Bay. All of Baja California
was to remain part of Mexico.
He and his Mexican counterparts formally signed the treaty
on February 2, 1848 at the
basilica of Guadelupe in the village
of Hidalgo on the outskirts of Mexico
City - thus it's known as the Treaty of
Guadelupe-Hidalgo. Trist presented it to
Polk as a fait accompli.
Although Polk immediately fired Trist and
refused to pay him, he wanted an end to the whole affair. 525,000 square miles added to the US
would have to be enough, without Baja's additional 30,000. So Polk accepted the treaty which the Senate
then ratified on March 10.
And ever since, Mexicans have demanded the treaty be
renounced.
In the entrance
foyer of the Museo Nacional de Historia,
the Museum of National
History in Mexico City,
there is an enormous mosaic map depicting Mexico Integral - Greater
Mexico, Mexico Integrated and Whole. Every class of students on a field
trip from their school to the museum is made to sit down and gaze up at the
huge map, while the teacher explains how so much of Los Estados Unidos
was stolen from Mexico
and really belongs to them.
Every Mexican schoolchild is taught that just as all the treaties signed by Spain
ceding territory to the US
are illegal, so is the Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo. Every Mexican national legally or illegally
in the US is
told by the Mexican government his or her allegiance is to Mexico
- not America.
Thus we have the rise of the Reconquista movement by such groups as Aztlan, La Raza, and MEChA. Thus we have 20 million illegal aliens in the
US from Mexico,
waving signs like this:
And thus we have Democrats who aid and abet them, who could
care less about their threat to US
security and sovereignty if it helps keep them in power.
We could call them Baja Democrats. We should think of them as Nicholas Trists.
Principles that are depraved. Corrupt to
the core. Always willing to appease America's
enemies, always willing to sell America
out.
Baja has over 2,000
miles of spectacular coastline. Can you imagine what it would be like today -
what its real estate would be worth - if it were part of America
and not Mexico? That difference in value - in negative value,
what it's worth now compared to what it would be - is the same difference Democrats
make. They are of negative value.
They destroy potential.
They'd rather have power than get out of the way and thereby enable
prosperity. They bring nothing of positive value. They are just in the way.
Other than these pockets of paradise like the Marquis los
Cabos made possible by American money and American tourists, Baja is still an
uninhabited wasteland. Such a waste of
what could have been. This land is an
appropriate symbol for Baja Democrats.
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