A Diplomat With Jefferson's Family Behind Him
Nicholas Philip Trist was born June 2, 1800, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point without taking a degree. He met Virginia Jefferson Randolph, Thomas Jefferson's granddaughter, during a summer visit to Monticello in 1817, and the two married there on September 10, 1824, according to Monticello's own biographical entry on Trist. For the next two years, until Jefferson's death in 1826, Trist served as his grandfather-in-law's personal secretary, living at Monticello during Jefferson's final period. He spent the two decades that followed building a career as a career diplomat and State Department official, rising by 1847 to chief clerk under Secretary of State James Buchanan, according to Encyclopedia Virginia's account of his career.
In April 1847, with the Mexican-American War roughly a year old and General Winfield Scott's army preparing to march on Mexico City, Polk and Buchanan sent Trist south with a draft treaty and instructions to negotiate an end to the war quietly, working alongside Scott's army rather than through a formal, Senate-confirmed diplomatic appointment. Trist arrived at Veracruz on May 6, 1847, and made his way to Scott's headquarters to begin what both men expected to be a short assignment.
A Feud With the General He Needed
The assignment did not start well. Scott resented what looked like a State Department clerk sent to oversee, or even undercut, a commanding general in the field, and Trist did little at first to clarify that his role was to negotiate, not to interfere with military operations. The resulting personal conflict produced months of hostile correspondence between the two men; Scott dismissed one of Trist's lengthy letters as a "farrago of impudence, conceit, and arrogance," a phrase that survives in both men's later accounts of the episode.
By the fall of 1847 the two had reconciled and were cooperating closely, an alliance that mattered because Scott's continued military pressure, culminating in the capture of Mexico City in September 1847, was what kept forcing Mexican leaders back toward the negotiating table Trist was trying to hold together.
The Recall Order That Took Six Weeks to Arrive
Watching from Washington as talks dragged on past the fall of Mexico City without a signed treaty, Polk concluded that a tougher negotiator, backed by fresh instructions demanding more territory, could get better terms than Trist was delivering. On October 6, 1847, Buchanan formally recalled him. Mail between Washington and the American army's position in central Mexico took weeks to arrive, and Trist did not open the recall order until November 16, 1847, six weeks after Buchanan had written it.
Trist did not simply comply. He wrote back a letter that ran past 60 pages, arguing that abandoning the talks at that moment would let Mexico's fragile government collapse and take the chance for a negotiated peace down with it. Polk's private reaction, recorded in his own diary, was scathing: he called the letter "the most extraordinary document I have ever heard of from a Diplomatic Representative," and concluded it proved that Trist "is destitute of honor or principle and that he has proved himself to be a very base man."
"The Decision Is Altogether My Own"
Rather than board a ship home, Trist consulted with Scott and with the Mexican government's commissioners and chose to keep negotiating on his own authority, with no government instructions behind him and an active recall order he was openly defying. He explained the choice to his wife in a letter dated December 4, 1847: "Knowing it to be the very last chance and impressed with the dreadful consequences to our country which cannot fail to attend the loss of that chance, I decided today at noon to attempt to make a treaty; the decision is altogether my own."
Two more months of negotiation followed with the Mexican commissioners Luis Gonzaga Cuevas, Bernardo Couto, and Miguel Atristain, and on February 2, 1848, the four men signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the Villa de Guadalupe Hidalgo, just outside Mexico City, in direct defiance of the standing recall order and entirely without Polk's knowledge.
What the Treaty Bought, and What the Senate Cut
The treaty Trist signed transferred roughly 525,000 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States, covering land that became all or part of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, in exchange for $15 million ($3 million paid immediately, the remaining $12 million in annual installments of $3 million at 6 percent interest) plus the assumption of more than $3.25 million in claims American citizens held against the Mexican government. It ended a war that had already produced its own controversy back home, the mass hanging of immigrant deserters who had fought for the other side, though nothing in Guadalupe Hidalgo addressed that episode; the treaty was strictly a boundary and payment settlement.
Despite his fury at Trist personally, Polk endorsed the finished treaty and sent it to the Senate for ratification rather than reject it outright. The Senate ratified it on March 10, 1848, by a vote of 38 to 14, but not without amendment: it struck Article X, which would have explicitly protected existing Spanish and Mexican land grants in the ceded territory, and reworded Article IX so that Mexican residents' path to U.S. citizenship would be set later by Congress rather than promised as "soon as possible," as the original wording read, according to the treaty text and the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center's account of the ratification.
Fired, Unpaid, and Waiting Twenty-Three Years
Trist carried the ratified treaty back to Washington and found no reward waiting for him. Polk had him fired from his clerkship and refused to authorize pay for the months he had spent negotiating after the October 6 recall order, according to the National Constitution Center's account of the episode. The lost income left Trist in financial difficulty for years afterward; Encyclopedia Virginia's biographical entry describes him working a series of ordinary jobs, including in railroad administration, to support his family through the 1850s and 1860s.
The debt went unpaid for more than two decades. Ulysses S. Grant, who had served as a young lieutenant and regimental quartermaster in the same army Scott commanded during Trist's mission, appointed him postmaster of Alexandria, Virginia, in 1870, and Congress finally released the back pay Polk had withheld the following year, in 1871. Trist died in Alexandria on February 11, 1874, a minor postal official rather than the man whose signature had fixed the modern southwestern border of the United States.