3 - “Instructions or No Instructions”

Summary

Chapter 3 addresses the most brazen instance of rogue diplomacy in the annals of U.S. statecraft: envoy Nicholas Trist's all but single-handed forging of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after he had been fired - not once but twice - by President James K. Polk. Trist's epochal act of mutiny obtained all the territory Polk had initially authorized him to demand - California, New Mexico, and Texas as far south as the Rio Grande - and at half the envisioned price: $15 million as opposed to $30 million. It also, I contend, saved the United States from the ordeal of a long, debilitating, and expensive guerrilla war with Mexico that would have poisoned U.S.-Latin American relations for over a century. Although Trist was ultimately arrested for his defiance of the president and spent the rest of his life working dead-end jobs to provide for his children, he did more than any other individual to make Manifest Destiny a reality. Trist's triumph, I argue, was in great part a consequence of his personality, for which the term "rebellious" could have been invented. I dig deep into Trist's life and career(s), establishing a constant pattern of behavior: he could not defer to authority, no matter how essential submission was to worldly success. This character defect, which would seem fatal for a diplomat, ironically facilitated Trist's great work in the winter of 1847-48.