Leadership Quote by William H. Wharton

The sentence wears the stiff collar of “demonstration,” but its real work is emotional triage: convert a messy political break into a moral emergency. Wharton’s phrasing is a classic move from the 19th-century annexation and secession playbook: declare the other side unfit for self-rule, then recast separation (and likely U.S. absorption) as reluctant self-defense.

“Wholly incapable” is absolutism doing strategic labor. It shuts down any argument about reform, negotiation, or shared governance by portraying incapacity as inherent rather than situational. The claim isn’t just that Mexican institutions are failing; it’s that Mexicans, as a people, cannot govern. That leap smuggles in racialized hierarchy under the pretense of sober political analysis, a precursor to the broader Anglo-American habit of treating “self-government” as a credential some groups possess and others perpetually lack.

Then comes the clincher: “our liberties, our fortunes and our lives.” The escalation is deliberate. Liberties flatters ideology, fortunes reassures landholders and speculators, lives activates fear. It’s a triad designed to unify elites and ordinary settlers under a single, anxious “we,” implying that continued connection is not merely inconvenient but existentially dangerous. “Connected with them” is also tellingly vague: it can mean Mexican sovereignty, legal constraints (including debates over slavery), taxation, or military authority. Vagueness broadens the coalition.

Context matters: as tensions sharpened between Anglo settlers in Texas and the Mexican state, this rhetoric functioned as permission structure. Once the other side is defined as incapable, any action taken against them can be framed not as aggression but as rescue - of “our” civilization from “their” chaos.