1. Among the Bolls of Cotton
In the first chapter of McCarthy’s novel, the Kid runs away from his Tennessee home and “wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant on that flat and pastoral landscape” and sees “Blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the garden.” (4)
This is the first reference to slavery in Blood Meridian; it will hardly be the last. The year is 1847 and the United States is at war in Mexico. When the Mexican-American War ends on February 2nd, 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico cedes fifty-five percent of its territory to the US and America adds the present-day states of California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, and Colorado to its “Empire of Liberty.”
The acquisition would lead to the Civil War a decade later, a conflicted that claimed the lives of 620,000 men, or roughly two percent of the nation’s population.1
The issue of slavery caused this American Apocalypse. There are people who say otherwise, but those people have never opened a history book.
When the US acquired all this territory from its war with Mexico, the acquisition at first seemed a great boon. But with these territorial gains came an argument that unbalanced the Republic. As the new acquisitions were organized and admitted to the Union, political factions warred over which would be slave states and which will be free. In 1850, President Zachary Taylor almost ordered the US Army to invade Texas—a move which would have got the Civil War going then and there. But a new compromise was reached (the Compromise of 1850) and the can was kicked down the road for another decade: ten more years of ritual torture and mass murder for enslaved people in both Southern and Northern states.
Most of Blood Meridian occurs in those tinderbox years after the Mexican-American War (1849-51) when America sat atop a powder keg and was primed for detonation. Glanton's Gang rides along a meridian that is actually a lit fuse.