This despatch and the President's recent Message[1] were to guide our foreign representatives in conversation about the war.[2]
By the Spanish-Americans the outbreak of hostilities was received with surprising calmness. Mexico endeavored to make them feel that a conflict of races had begun, and that she was leading the van in a common cause; but whether dissatisfied with her course in the past — especially with reference to preferential trade relations — thankful to the United States for the shelter of the "Monroe Doctrine," or simply indifferent to outside concerns, they held aloof. Guatemala alone displayed a strong sympathy. The official gazette of New Granada printed Polk's war Message in full without a word of criticism.[3]
The mother-country, Spain, would naturally have been expected to take a deep interest in the contest; but Mexico had been a rebellious daughter, had treated the Spanish subjects within her borders with cruel unfriendliness, and had recently shown a fierce aversion to the scheme of subjecting her to a Spanish prince. For commercial reasons that power desired an early termination of the hostilities, and signified as much to our government;[4] but at the same time she pledged herself to "the strictest neutrality," and she refrained from even offering mediation. Her minister at Mexico, Bermúdez de Castro, assisted the authorities there with advice, but before the war ended he turned over the legation to a chargé, and went home. A band of Carlist officers talked of going to the scene of action in May, 1847; but if their plan was carried out, they successfully avoided publicity. About the same time El Heraldo of Madrid asked whether Europe would permit the United States to absorb, little by little, all of America; but this was academic, and the journal admitted that Mexico was then practically beyond relief.[5]
Baron von Canitz, the Prussian minister of foreign relations, when officially notified of the war, said it must be far from easy to live on amicable terms with a country like Mexico, "where anarchy reigns and where the Supreme power was constantly contested by a succession of military chieftains, who were compelled to maintain their usurped authority by the same unworthy means by which they had obtained it."
