A Country of Vast Designs

James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent

Robert W. Merry

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781439160459
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

President James K. Polk, often overlooked yet ever-consequential, comes to life in this "compelling, perceptive portrait" ( The Wall Street Journal ) biography of the 11th President of the United States, Andrew Jackson protégé, and champion of "manifest destiny." In a one-term presidency, James K. Polk completed the story of America's Manifest Destiny—extending its territory across the continent by threatening England with war and manufacturing a controversial and unpopular two-year war with Mexico. "A crucial architect of modern America, James K. Polk deserves to be elevated out of the mists of history" (Jon Meacham, author of American Lion ).

1 • YOUNG HICKORY

The Making of a Jackson Protégé

BEGINNING IN SUMMER 1717 there arrived upon American shores a new breed of immigrant from the British Isles, far different from the Puritans, Quakers, and Cavaliers who had already settled in their chosen locales. The new arrivals came from the borderlands of northern England, northern Ireland, and the Scottish Highlands, and they emerged in undulating waves that deposited a quarter-million souls in the New World over nearly sixty years. The borderland migrants were a rustic folk, largely Presbyterian in religious provenance. The men were lanky and fit, with faces leathered through outdoor toil. They displayed distinctive habits of dress—hats made of felt, loose-fitting shirts made of sackcloth, wood shoes. The young women displayed a frolicsome sensuousness that seemed shocking to many of the earlier arrivals. They wore tight-fitting dresses with short skirts. Men and women alike showed a notable casualness and openness toward sex and nudity, and social sanctions against wayward personal behavior were mild compared to those of earlier migrants. The menfolk displayed a liberal attitude toward spirituous liquors and a fighting spirit more intense than their work ethic. There was a strain of cultural conservatism among these people; they were strongly attached to their ancestral ways.

The borderland migrants arrived not seeking religious freedom, as their predecessors had done, but rather to escape economic travail. Hence they came largely from a lower socioeconomic station than the folks who had settled earlier in Massachusetts, Delaware, and Virginia. The vast majority were small farmers, farm laborers, and mechanics. But they displayed a defiant pride that would have far-reaching political impact in the New World, particularly in the lush western regions beyond the Alleghenies that would become their favored frontier destination. As one historian would later put it, “Extreme inequalities of material condition were joined to an intense concern for equality of esteem.” They demanded respect, often with a social insolence that surprised and irritated those who considered themselves of higher rank. Ultimately this trait would manifest itself in a powerful strain of political populism—a suspicion of entrenched elites, hostility toward wealth and power, a conviction that the new American democracy should be guided by the virtue and wisdom of ordinary folk. This was the heritage, outlook, and politics of Andrew Jackson—and also of his protégé, James K. Polk, twenty-eight years younger than his mentor.

The two men shared also a similar family consciousness. While the vast majority of borderland migrant families were poor and always had been poor, about one to 2 percent came from the landed gentry of Britain’s borderlands. They migrated to America not to better their station but to retain it, and they remained intensely conscious of their family heritage. However impoverished they may have become in the course of their journey to America or during their struggles once they got there, they never lost their sense that they came from exalted levels of society. Jackson’s mother taught him from earliest childhood to think of himself as a gentleman, and she taught him that his Scots-Irish grandfather had been a well-to-do linen weaver and merchant and his father a comfortable farmer with substantial acreage in the old country. And Polk proudly traced his lineage back eight centuries to a Saxon nobleman named Undwin and to Undwin’s descendants who held sway over vast estates and political decision-making throughout their long Scottish ascendancy.

To Polk all this was vastly more significant than his inauspicious birth in a one-room log cabin at a time of economic transition for his family. The first of ten children, he was born November 2, 1795, in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, to Samuel and Jane Knox Polk. His mother, a rigid Presbyterian of sharp intellect and strong character, came from an established North Carolina family. James’s father, four generations removed from the family’s New World founder, Robert Bruce Polk (or Pollock, as the family had been known up to that time), was a sturdy farmer of simple virtues whose robust drive for advancement overcame a rather limited imagination. When young James was eleven, the family set out on the arduous five-hundred-mile journey to the Duck River region of Tennessee territory, between the Smoky Mountains and the Mississippi River. Beleaguered and angry Indians posed mortal dangers that stirred the combative juices of these borderland settlers, whose fighting spirit was rendered all the more intense by the richness of the prize they sought. The region’s fertile soil promised abundant wealth for those who survived, and the path of betterment was well established in the country’s frontier out-lands: venture forth to a thinly populated area and accumulate large expanses of cheap or free land; develop as much acreage as possible for farming; when land prices rise with the arrival of subsequent pioneers, sell undeveloped lands at elevated prices; use the profit to further develop the retained acreage and perhaps venture also into the law or commercial enterprises.

Sam Polk’s father and uncle had pursued this formula successfully in North Carolina. Then, early in the new century, they had leveraged it further in the West by selling high-priced North Carolina land and purchasing much larger tracts of low-cost Tennessee acreage. They settled in what would become Maury County, south of Nashville, and founded James Polk’s lifelong hometown, Columbia. Hence when Sam Polk followed them there in 1806, the way was paved for him to prosper quickly if he was willing to invest long days of toil and plenty of sweat. Sam’s father, Ezekiel, not only accumulated a thousand acres of rich-soil land but also fathered fourteen children, who in turn produced for him ninety-two grandchildren and 307 great-grandchildren.

One of Ezekiel’s grandchildren, of course, was young James, but he would give the old man no great-grandchildren. Most likely this resulted from a medical development in his young life that must have had a searing impact on the lad’s consciousness. He was a bright and studious boy with an early zest for learning. But he was weak and sickly, unable to do even modest physical chores without wilting under the strain. The boy’s father got him apprenticed to a local merchant so he could pursue a trade that wouldn’t tax his physical strength. James hated the mercantile life and even more so the termination of his formal schooling. Then when he was seventeen the doctors finally diagnosed his ailment—urinary stones, which were slowly sapping his health. The only solution was surgery, a highly risky and painful procedure in those days before modern anesthetics.

Sam Polk bundled up the lad in the back of his wagon and took him to Danville, Kentucky, residence of an acclaimed medical pioneer named Ephraim McDowell. The doctor performed a surgery that can only be described as a necessary barbarity. With brandy his only sedative, young James was placed on his back with his legs secured by straps high in the air. With a knife the doctor cut into the perineum, through what would become known as the pelvic floor. He then used a pointed instrument called a gorget to cut through the prostate and into the bladder. A scoop or forceps was used to remove the stones. However hellish, it was a medical success. But, knowing what we know now about the nerves that line the prostate and control much of the sexual function, it would seem likely the operation left the young man impotent or sterile, perhaps both.

In any event, following his recovery he resumed his formal schooling with enthusiasm. At a small Presbyterian academy near Columbia, he proved “diligent in his studies, and his moral conduct was unexceptional & exemplary,” according to a recommendation submitted later by the school. During subsequent studies at the Murfreesboro Academy, he displayed what a school document called “literary merit and moral worth.” He was admitted to the University of North Carolina as a sophomore and was graduated three years later with first honors in both mathematics and classics. At the university he developed a personal outlook and pattern of behavior that would guide him through life: He never considered himself brilliant, and he knew he lacked the outsized personal characteristics that propelled some others through life with apparent ease. Yet he discovered that he had a highly functional mind, and if he applied himself with diligence and avoided diversions, he could excel beyond his peers. He acquired a seriousness of purpose and intensity of ambition that would become hallmark traits. They complemented the physical appearance that settled upon him in adulthood. Just above medium height, he was not at first glance an imposing figure. But he conveyed a pleasant countenance marked by his strong oval face and prominent chin. He carried himself with a dignity and self-confidence that led many to see him eventually as a man of mark.

Upon graduating, he studied law under Felix Grundy, the state’s most acclaimed lawyer and a former member of Congress. Taking a shine to the earnest young man, Grundy offered social connections and personal guidance as well as legal training. Within two years Polk was admitted to the bar, and with Grundy’s help and his own family’s prominence he didn’t have any trouble acquiring clients. Soon his practice was sufficiently lucrative so he could branch out as clerk of the state Senate at Murfreesboro. It was at this time, in 1819, that he met Sarah Childress, then sixteen. At a high-toned reception to honor a prominent Tennessean named William Carroll (later governor), he saw young Sarah’s reflection in a large mirror. “She’s beautiful,” he thought and began making his way through the crowded room to where she had been talking with General Jackson, a longtime family friend of the Childresses as well as the Polks. By the time he got there she was gone. But then he saw her talking with Anderson Childress, a classmate from his Murfreesboro Academy days. It turned out the young woman was Childress’s sister—the same person Polk had met years earlier when she was a young girl. Anderson asked Sarah if she remembered James from their encounters years earlier.

“Why, of course I do,” replied the self-possessed young lady.

Anderson later offered James a ride home in the family carriage, and the two got to know each other better.

But the young man was slow to pursue her as a marriage companion—until Jackson slyly intervened. When Polk sought the General’s counsel on how he might pursue his political ambitions, Jackson said he should take a wife and become an established member of society. Polk asked if Jackson had anyone in mind.

“The one who will never give you trouble,” his mentor replied. “Her wealthy family, education, health, and appearance are all superior. You know her well.”

“You mean Sarah Childress?” asked Polk. Then, “I shall go at once and ask her.”

They were married on the evening of January 1, 1824. By then the intensely ambitious Polk had been elected to the state legislature and was eyeing a run for Congress the following year. He also had joined the Tennessee militia, in which he eventually would rise to the rank of colonel.

With Jackson’s endorsement he won the congressional seat in August 1825 and headed to Washington the following December. In reaching the capital, he entered into a political crucible defined largely by the political rivalry and personal animosity between two men—Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay. It isn’t possible to understand Polk’s emergence without understanding its political context. And nothing illuminates that context more clearly than the awesome tensions, political and personal, between the men known throughout the nation by their colloquial nicknames Old Hickory and Prince Hal—arguably the two greatest political figures to emerge in the second generation era of American politics.

There were similarities between the two. Born in the Southeast’s Piedmont region, both sought opportunity across the Alleghenies in the boisterous western lands of Tennessee and Kentucky. Both gravitated to the law and gained early prominence in civic affairs—Jackson as judge and military officer, Clay as politician and diplomat. Both hungered for national fame and influence. Both married into prominent frontier families. And both harbored profound feelings of patriotism and viewed themselves as protectors of the Founders’ civic legacy and dream of American greatness.

Beyond such similarities the two men could not have been more different. While Clay was playful in conversation, Jackson was stolid and upright. While Clay viewed politics as a game of intrigue in which the pursuit of victory was nearly as sweet as victory itself, Jackson considered politics a deadly serious business involving unbending principle. While Clay easily could forgive the most cutting rhetoric directed against him and expected the same from his adversaries, Jackson never forgot a slight he considered gratuitous. Clay moved with ease through any crowd or situation and brought forth an audacious eloquence based on his mastery of the language in all of its richness, range, and nuance. Jackson’s eloquence was of a different cast—blunt, no-nonsense, unadorned language aimed directly at ordinary folk and betraying a depth of conviction and passion that moved people with its simplicity and common wisdom. Clay loved the legislative game that called forth his eloquence, wiles, and mastery of issues and people. Jackson hated the ceaseless debates and self-important maneuvering that characterized Congress.

But it was the variance in their political views that framed the pivotal debates of their era. Clay wanted the power of federal Washington brought to bear boldly in behalf of domestic prosperity. Almost single-handedly he crafted a philosophy of governmental activism and devised a collection of federal programs and policies he considered essential to American prosperity. He called it the American System, and it would become the bedrock of his Whig Party. Jackson abhorred the very thought of concentrated power in Washington, which he believed would lead inevitably to corruption and invidious governmental actions favoring the connected and powerful at the expense of ordinary citizens. He wanted political power to remain diffuse and as close to the people as possible. These two outlooks, personified by these two men, would drive political events surrounding nearly all the major issues of their day: protective tariffs, the Bank of the United States, public works, public lands—and, ultimately, American expansion into Texas, Oregon, New Mexico, and California.

JACKSON’S life and legend would serve as inspiration for James Polk throughout his life. Born 1767 in the Waxhaw region of the Carolinas, Jackson grew up in deprivation. His father had died before his birth, and his mother moved with her three boys into the plantation home of her sister and brother-in-law, the Crawfords, who had eight children of their own. With his mother busy earning her keep through household devotions and the Crawfords focused on their own offspring, the skinny lad quickly learned self-reliance. He developed an independent, pugnacious demeanor, always ready to fight for his interests and never willing to surrender even when bigger boys beat him up. He had almost no formal schooling, and his lack of mastery over spelling and grammar would become something of an identity scar in later life, ridiculed by political opponents frustrated by his tendency to rise in society despite these limitations. Young Jackson grew up quickly during the Revolution, when the Carolinas were ravaged by the British force known as Tarleton’s Raiders. Judged too young to carry a rifle, the thirteen-year-old served as courier and scout. At one point, caught in a firefight, young Jackson witnessed a cousin killed at his side. Later he became a prisoner of war. When a British officer ordered the young rebel to polish the officer’s boots, Jackson defiantly refused—and almost lost his life when the enraged officer brought down a sword upon his head. Jackson managed to deflect the blow but gashes on his hand and head left lifelong scars only slightly more apparent than his lifelong hatred of the English.

During these travails, the boy lost his two brothers to war and his mother to cholera. After Independence, orphaned and alone at seventeen, Jackson apprenticed in the law at Salisbury, North Carolina, and developed a reputation as a wild young man who drank, gambled, and roistered. But his commanding presence slowly gained dominance over his wilder tendencies. Tall, well proportioned, and always well dressed, he carried himself in polite society with dignity and courtliness. The intense gaze of his welkin blue eyes suggested an immense self-regard. One young woman of the area wrote that he possessed “a kind of majesty I never saw in any other young man.”

At twenty-one, in search of financial betterment, he left North Carolina for the fledgling outpost of Nashville, in what would become Tennessee. He practiced law, acquired property, became a merchant of eastern goods, married a young divorcée named Rachel Robards, and took up with the territorial militia.^*He became Tennessee’s first congressman in 1796 and later served a one-session stint as U.S. senator. But he thrived particularly in the militia. Frontier citizens could accept a certain lassitude in their prosecutors, judges, and politicians, but not in their elected military leaders. Those were times when the area lost a man, woman, or child to Indian attack every ten days or so, and the tenuous existence of pioneer whites necessitated the highest degree of competence in their military commanders. Jackson possessed the desired attributes—quickness of mind, boldness of action, an ability to gain sway over other men, a deep sense of rectitude. And his occasional impetuousness and flashes of temper only added to his commanding mystique. In 1802, at thirty-five, he was elected major general of the Tennessee militia.

There followed a number of years when his military exploits and personal proclivity for roustabout conduct seemed in conflict. His reputation as a man out of control lingered as a result of a number of duels, that notorious gunfight with Thomas Hart Benton and his brother, and a tendency toward hotheaded reactions to presumed slights and insults. And yet, with the outbreak of the War of 1812, as major general of the United States Volunteers and later in the Regular Army, he ran up a string of military victories against the Creek Indians and the British that brought him national attention and widespread adulation. Displaying a toughness that stirred his troops to identify him with the hardness of hickory, he acquired his famous nickname. A noted example was the day he put down a mutiny of disgruntled troops by ordering artillery guns to be pointed at the troops as he confronted them. He then demanded that the mutineers return to their posts or he would order the guns to be fired, destroying them and himself in one barrage. The action stunned the wayward soldiers into subjection. Bringing his troops back into line, he destroyed elements of the Creek Indian tribe bent on terrorizing settlers in Mississippi. And he devastated a British army seeking to seize New Orleans and its strategic dominance over the Mississippi River Valley. The British reported 2,037 dead, wounded, and missing on that fateful January day in 1815, while Jackson’s troops suffered only thirteen killed. Instantly he became a national hero and potential presidential contender. Subsequent military exploits against the Seminole Indians and a stint as governor of Florida Territory bolstered his countrywide standing. And yet he invited detractors with displays of defiance and a tendency to substitute his own judgment for those of his superiors. Most often he was right on the merits, but these traits provided an opening for critics to suggest he couldn’t be trusted with power. By the 1820s, Jackson was probably the country’s most revered figure, but also one of its most controversial.

A DECADE YOUNGER than Jackson, Clay soared to national prominence at a younger age. Born in 1777 into a comfortable Virginia family of yeoman farmers, he was one of eight siblings, four of whom died in infancy. His father, a planter and rousing Baptist minister, died when Henry was four. His mother remarried a plantation owner and militia captain named Henry Watkins. Aside from witnessing the ransacking of his home by Tarleton’s Raiders shortly after his father’s death, the boy grew up in comfort amid trappings of culture and learning. He didn’t apply himself much to the meager formal education then available in rural Virginia. As he later explained with characteristic self-absorption, “I always relied too much upon the resources of my genius.” Indeed, it was clear to all who knew the strapping youngster that he possessed special qualities of intellect and spirit. At sixteen, he became secretary to George Wythe, one of the state’s top jurists, who gave the lad a sterling education in the law and civic affairs as well as entrée to the highest Richmond society. Four years with Wythe and another with Richmond lawyer Robert Brooke provided young Clay with enough background to pass his bar examination. He then set out for Kentucky, where his mother and stepfather had gone some years before.

He settled in Lexington, connected with other Wythe protégés, established a law practice, married, and prospered. He became known as brilliant, industrious, and dependable, and the town’s residents soon were exchanging stories about this exciting young man who seemed always ready with an amusing quip or flight of eloquence on some intriguing topic. He was not without character flaws. His wit sometimes veered into the outrageous, and he displayed a weakness for gambling, dueling, and indulgence with women. He also harbored a certain intellectual arrogance, manifest in a biting invective directed at those he considered less brainy than himself. Bored by a loquacious man who suggested he spoke for posterity, Clay interjected, “Yes, and you seem resolved to speak until the arrival of your audience.”

Gravitating inevitably to politics, he served a number of terms in the Kentucky legislature and twice was elected to fill vacancies in the U.S. Senate before settling on a House career in 1810, at age thirty-three. Such was the young westerner’s reputation as a legislator that his colleagues promptly elected him speaker upon his House arrival. He thrived in the role and distinguished himself further when President James Madison sent him to Europe to help negotiate the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812. There he encountered John Quincy Adams, who didn’t much care for Clay’s inveterate dissipations. An early riser, Adams became increasingly disgusted to see, at the start of his day, Clay heading off to bed after a night of drinking and card-playing. When his diplomatic mission en...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Ritual of Democracy: The Emergence of an Expansionist President
• 1. Young Hickory: The Making of a Jackson Protégé
• 2. Tennessee and Washington: The Rise and Fall of a Presidential Loyalist
• 3. The 1844 Election: Searching for a Means of Political Recovery
• 4. Texas: Dawn of a New Era
• 5. Baltimore: America’s First Political Dark Horse
• 6. Polk vs. Clay: Answering the Question, “Who Is James K. Polk?”
• 7. The Victor: Preparing for the Mantle of Leadership
• 8. Taking Charge: America’s Zest for Grand Ambitions
• 9. Annexation Complete: Diplomacy, Intrigue, and the Force of Politics
• 10. The United States and Oregon: “The People Here Are Worn Out by Delay”
• 11. The United States and Mexico: Divergent New World Cultures on a Path to War
• 12. Britain and Mexico: Playing with Prospects of a Dual War
• 13. The Twenty-ninth Congress: Polk Takes Command of the National Agenda
• 14. End of a Treaty: Diplomacy and Politics at War with Each Other
• 15. War: “Every Consideration of Duty and Patriotism”
• 16. Vagaries of War: “And May There Be No Recreant Soul to Fail or Falter Now”
• 17. Presidential Temperament: “I Prefer to Supervise the Whole Operations of the Government”
• 18. Wilmot’s Proviso: Transformation of the War Debate
• 19. The War in the West: Patriotism, Duty, Adventure, and Glory
• 20. The New Face of War: “We Are Yet to Have a Long and Wearisome Struggle”
• 21. The Politics of Rancor: Constitutional Usurpation vs. Moral Treason
• 22. Dilatory Congress: The Challenge of Presidential Leadership
• 23. Veracruz and Beyond: Grappling with Mexico’s Military Defiance
• 24. Scott and Trist: A Clash of Policy and Temperament
• 25. Mexico City: The Pivot of Personality
• 26. The Specter of Conquest: “Have We Conquered Peace? Have We Obtained a Treaty?”
• 27. Treaty: From Trist to Polk to the Senate
• 28. Peace: California, New Mexico, and the Union
• 29. Final Months: “Solemnly Impressed with the … Emptiness of Worldly Honors”
• Epilogue: Legacy: The Price of Presidential Accomplishment
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Insert
• Footnote