prairie point

I got to thinking about the reference Howard Dean made about Abraham Lincoln’s opposition to the Mexican War. Having gone through public schools in Texas I was required to take Texas History in the sixth grade and then again to graduate high school, so I have a vague recollection of studying the Mexican War, but I did not remember anything about the role of Abraham Lincoln.

So I went googling and found a couple of resources to refresh my memory. This report discusses Lincoln’s opposition and this one gives more information about the war itself. This last document also reminded me that opposition to the Mexican War was what prompted Henry David Thoreau to refuse to pay his taxes, for which he was jailed. He wrote the essay Civil Disobedience while in jail which became the basis for the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.