Meantime Polk had gotten himself elected to the U.S. Congress and soon became its Speaker of the House. By then Polk had acquired a wife, Sara, and considerable plantation lands in Mississippi and western Tennessee, complete with the slaves to man them. It is said that his policy toward his slaves was benign, and in various speeches in Congress he referred to slavery—as had Thomas Jefferson—as an “evil,” though he never voted for any measure to ban the institution. In fact, when abolitionists began to bombard Congress with petitions, generating lengthy and acrimonious debates, Polk was institutional in imposing a gag rule on future petitions or debate, which naturally infuriated the abolitionists. As were practically all Americans of his period he was a racist, the present-day term for a concept that, in Polk’s age, had not yet developed.
The following national election saw Andrew Jackson turn John Adams into a one-term president and set the stage for Polk to run himself for that highest of national offices, which he did, successfully, in 1844, beating out Jackson’s old nemesis Henry Clay. What cinched it for the forty-nine-year-old Polk was that he came out for annexing the Republic of Texas as a U.S. state, while his opponents did not. America was clearly on the make at this point, and would not be denied, even though Mexico had threatened war if the United States granted Texas statehood.
Opposition to admitting Texas to the Union might have been a conscientious decision for Martin Van Buren and Clay, running again for president in 1844, but it was impolitic. Already, at that stage, the enemies of slavery had begun to suspect a secret ploy by crafty southerners to consolidate and expand their political power by adding Texas as a slave state, and at least one Senate opponent, Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton, believed it was “an intrigue … to get the Southern states out of the Union.” But most Americans did not believe this; they were enthusiastic about the idea of having a territory so great as Texas as part of the United States. And most southerners especially so, because they assumed it would be a counterweight to the inclusion of more northern or midwestern free territories, which could tip the political balance of the Senate against them.
It is worth a brief digression here to trace a series of fateful events that conspired to pitchfork Texas into the Union, Polk into the White House, and a bountiful and seemingly boundless America to the edge of destruction by civil war.
By the early 1840s the once negligible American abolitionist movement had built up a considerable head of steam and was fraying nerves on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. What had begun as an initiative to demonstrate the moral wrongness of slavery had developed into a multi-pronged political enterprise exerting pressure on all three branches of government as well as on the population as a whole, so that ordinary citizens were forced to choose sides, often against their wishes.
Into this fractious atmosphere came Captain Robert F. Stockton of Princeton, New Jersey, a forty-six-year-old naval officer, sometime politician, and abolitionist,† whose grandfather had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence. In 1841 Stockton convinced then U.S. president John Tyler to let him oversee construction and command of what he claimed would be the world’s most powerful warship. Accordingly, two years later the USS Princeton was launched at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, a 164-foot, thousand-ton screw-sail steamship of the line sporting within her weapons’ system two monster wrought-iron cannons named, respectively, Oregon and Peacemaker, each weighing more than 20,000 pounds and capable of throwing a 225-pound shot more than five miles.‡ The ship and one of its guns, the Oregon, had been designed by the brilliant Swede John Ericsson, famous later during the Civil War for building the USS Monitor; the Peacemaker gun, however, had been designed by Stockton himself, who, against all of Ericsson’s good advice, had failed to strap metal bands, or hoops, around its breach, the weakest point of muzzle-loading cannon. Not only that, but while the Oregon had been proofed (fired) at least a hundred times, Stockton merely towed Peacemaker down the Delaware on a raft and discharged her five times before pronouncing her fit for duty. This did not bode well, considering the gun would have to withstand multiple firings of 50-pound charges of powder.
Meantime, efforts to bring Texas into the Union had been proceeding apace with President Tyler’s new secretary of state Abel Upshur handling the delicate negotiations with the Texans, who had been leaning toward an alliance with Great Britain and/or France, neither of which was anxious to see a piece of property so large as Texas become a part of the United States and were offering inducements to prevent it. The American abolition movement was also trying to prevent it, for fear that acquisition of Texas would only make the southern slave empire stronger and harder to break up, and thus politicians were forced to walk an ever thinning line. Secretary Upshur, however, a courtly and diplomatic Virginian, had worked behind the scenes with Texas representatives and key members of Congress on a transition he hoped would ruffle the fewest feathers over the slavery question.
Which made it all the more noteworthy when, on February 28, 1844, Upshur stepped aboard the USS Princeton along with several hundred other Washington dignitaries, socialites, and their ladies for an afternoon’s cruise down the Potomac so that Captain Stockton could demonstrate the fighting prowess of his mighty battleship. Among the guests in addition to Upshur were President Tyler himself; his secretary of the navy, Thomas Gilmer; and Missouri’s “Lion of the Senate,” Thomas Hart Benton. Also aboard were seventy-six-year-old Dolley Madison, widow of the fourth U.S. president; Tyler’s twenty-three-year-old fiancée, Julia Gardiner; and her father, Colonel David Gardiner of New York.
Right above Mount Vernon Stockton ordered Peacemaker fired and the crowd oohed and aahed when the big spherical shot smacked the river surface three miles down and skip-bounced out of sight. On the trip back upriver, Stockton ordered the gun fired again. Fortunately most of the passengers were below having lunch when, shortly after three p.m., the Princeton shuddered with a violent explosion—Peacemaker had blown up, just as Ericsson had feared, and the carnage was dreadful. A 2,000-pound iron chunk of the breech had swept the deck, leaving a bloody jumble of bodies and parts of bodies. Among the nine dead were Secretaries Upshur and Gilmer, the navy’s chief of construction, the U.S. chargé d’affaires to Belgium, David Gardiner, and the president’s own valet. A score of others were badly injured, including Stockton, who had severe powder burns on his face and all of his hair singed off. Nevertheless, the captain (of whom we shall hear much more later) ironically managed to deflect responsibility for the mishap onto Ericsson, who had warned him in the first place that the gun was not safe.
Among the consequences of the accident was that Tyler replaced his dead secretary of state with a fellow southerner, Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, whose most immediate task was to finish out Upshur’s negotiations for the incorporation of Texas into the United States.
Calhoun was one of the giants of the Senate, along with Benton, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay. A graduate of Yale and a lawyer, he was once known as “Young Hercules” and later the “Cast-Iron Man” of the Senate, but as he grew older Calhoun also became something of a crank whose hard-line views on slavery kept abolitionists in an uproar all over the world.
In the years following the Revolutionary War, slavery—what the South called its “peculiar institution” and what Thomas Jefferson described as “a necessary evil”—appeared to be on the road toward extinction. It was basically a wasteful, costly, and inefficient system, in addition to the moral aspects, which were just then beginning to come into question. But then, in 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which meant that short-staple cotton, the variety capable of being grown over practically all of the South, could be proficiently cleaned (ginned) of its seeds and debris, which heretofore had consumed so much human labor that it wasn’t worth the effort. In 1807 Congress had passed a law banning further importation of African slaves, and by 1810 most northern states had abolished the practice of slavery altogether. There were, however, by that time, already some one million slave
s in the United States, and the newfound bonanza of cotton growing revived the practice and produced an extraordinary demand for their labor in the fields.
Thus Calhoun’s home state of South Carolina went from producing fewer than a hundred thousand pounds of cotton in the year the Whitney gin was invented to exporting more than 30 million pounds twenty years later. Furthermore, this story was being repeated all over the South as “men whose fathers were pioneers or subsistence farmers were suddenly able to amass fortunes rivaling those of the wealthiest lowcountry rice barons.” But because cotton growing was among the most labor intensive of agricultural crops, slavery, which had seemed to be on the way out, became very definitely in, a fact that was reflected in the sharp uptick in slave prices.
And as the abolitionists’ cries predictably became more shrill, they were answered in the main by firebrands such as Calhoun, whose rhetoric became ever more bellicose.§ Far from Jefferson’s almost apologetic notion of slavery as a necessary evil, Calhoun actually began defending it as a “positive good,” arguing that it raised blacks from their primitive natural state by giving them civilization, intelligence, and Christianity, as well as allowing them to serve a useful purpose.
Infuriating as these notions were to the abolitionists, it was nothing compared with the furor that erupted when Calhoun expressed them, and more, in an infamous and somewhat threatening letter to the British minister Sir Richard Pakenham, in which he accused England of trying to coerce Texas into abolishing slavery as a condition for aid or annexation by Great Britain and stated that an American acquisition of Texas was necessary to protect southern slavery from British meddling. In support of his argument that slavery was a “desirable” condition for blacks, Calhoun claimed that freed blacks in northern states had twice the ratio of deafness and dumbness, retardation, even insanity as those in the South.
When the contents of the letter got out reaction was swift and predictable. Where the late, unfortunate Upshur had tried diligently to sweep the matter of Texas slavery under the rug, Calhoun used the occasion to turn it into an inflammatory issue, not only in U.S. political circles but in international forums as well, since the abolitionist movement had in fact been born in Great Britain, which had only recently freed its slaves. And of course the news came as a direct affront to the Mexicans, who not only had also outlawed slavery but claimed their own proprietary interest in what the United States was calling Texas.
The upshot was that national support for Texas annexation evaporated, the treaty was rejected by an embarrassed Senate, and Calhoun was roundly denounced for his intemperate remarks and outlandish opinions. Nevertheless, the question of what to do about Texas hung over the nation like a pall, and soon worries reemerged that England or France or both might suddenly snatch her up with lies and promises. It wasn’t a year from the election of Polk when both houses of Congress agreed to annex Texas by joint resolution, which might not have been the right protocol but it got the job done, even at the expense of Mexico’s threat of war.
The abolitionists naturally put up a howl because Texas came in as a slave state, and the acrimony between the antislavers and the South had been irrevocably ratcheted up by Calhoun’s fiery rhetoric. All of which leads us back to Captain Stockton’s decision to ignore shipbuilder Ericsson’s warnings about the megacannon Peacemaker that killed Secretary Upshur and his nonconfrontational ways and gave us the volatile Secretary Calhoun, who set the boiler to going with threats and rumblings of secession from the Southland.
Southern secession certainly wasn’t what Polk wanted, nor was war with Mexico, but he would take it as it came, for he had a greater plan—what Polk called his “great measures,” which he shared with his new secretary of the navy, the eminent historian George Bancroft.
There were four of them, constituting Polk’s vision for America, he told the startled Bancroft one afternoon, “striking his thigh for emphasis.” The fact that he achieved them all during the single presidential term he chose to serve is remarkable, for they were indeed significant, even colossal, goals fraught with many dangers.
First, Polk told Bancroft, he would lower the so-called Tariff of Abominations that had nearly caused South Carolina to secede from the Union. This he hoped would defuse some of the hostility and antagonism that had been building between the two sections of the country.
Second, he would establish an independent treasury, instead of re-creating Nicholas Biddle’s National Bank in Philadelphia (the precursor to today’s Federal Reserve), which had caused so much controversy and angst during Jackson’s administrations; nor would he revert to putting the government’s funds in what were called “pet banks,” which had stirred up endless troubles during the Tyler administration.
Third, Polk said, he would get the British out of the Oregon Territory, which comprised what are presently the states of Oregon, Washington, and parts of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, as well as a huge slab of land in what the British thought was Canada. The British and the United States had agreed to jointly hold this vast place, but Polk was concerned that the mere presence of Englishmen in that part of the country would prove not only unhealthy but permanent. In recent memory Americans had fought two wars with the British, in 1776 and in 1812, and feelings then toward the mother country were anything but amiable.
Lastly, Polk informed Bancroft, he intended to acquire the California province from Mexico. This of course would be a tall order, for the Mexicans would never give it up cheaply, but Polk’s vision called for an America stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He could almost feel the nation growing, he told Bancroft, as immigrants poured in and babies were born. From a mere 4 million in 1790, the year of the first census, to 10 million in 1820, to nearly 20 million by the time of Polk’s presidency, the American population was expanding, people were moving westward, and they needed room.
And California needed the United States, as well, Polk felt. There were barely five thousand whites living in the province, most of them men who were not taking much advantage of their bounteous territory. Here is the way Richard Henry Dana Jr. dismissed them in his adventure Two Years Before the Mast (first printed in 1840): “The Californians are an idle, thriftless people, and can make nothing for themselves. The country abounds in grapes, yet they buy, at a great price, bad wine made in Boston.” They received little in the way of assistance from the government in Mexico City, which in any case was too far away to do much good. And ominously, it was known that both Great Britain and France had an eye on the province and were looking for some opportunity to acquire it.
In the summer of his first year in office Polk’s world turned bellicose over the Mexican and Oregon questions. In July, he had his secretary of state, James Buchanan, send a note to British minister Pakenham offering to divide the Oregon Territory once and for all and settle on the 49th parallel as the borderline. It wasn’t 54°40’ but at least he wouldn’t have to fight over it. Pakenham turned him down flat in a reply Polk found highly insulting, and without even sending the offer to the foreign office in London, which was then eight years into the reign of Queen Victoria.‖
Polk’s response was to order Buchanan to send another note to Pakenham withdrawing the offer, which brought the matter much closer to hostilities, since Pakenham had made no counteroffer, and thus the issue became a casus belli. Buchanan resisted such a course, especially since war with Mexico over Texas seemed imminent. But Polk ordered his secretary of state to deliver the note anyway and stop worrying about war with Britain, because the message in the note “is right in itself.”
“Foreign powers do not seem to appreciate the true character of our government,” he wrote in his diary.
It would not be the last time the timid Buchanan tried to thwart Polk. He can probably be forgiven on the grounds that the post of secretary of state is a diplomatic one and by its very nature seeks to avoid conflict through diplomacy rather than force of arms. But Polk was a stubborn customer, especially since he grew up under the wings of Andre
w Jackson, who had a dedicated hatred for the British after they killed almost his entire family one way or the other during the Revolution, and then had the temerity to invade New Orleans in the War of 1812 when he was in charge there. British foreign policy then could most charitably be described as shifty, with a special talent in meddling and intrigue, and Polk, through his association with Jackson, had been made well aware of it.a
With their lust for colonies to exploit and the world’s largest navy, the British were always looking for opportunity, and during this time they sensed several in the new world in addition to their stake in the Oregon Territory. The Republic of Texas, for instance, had been a possibility, until the Americans annexed it as a state. But the British were also very much aware of the fragile condition of Alta (upper) California and its tenuous ties to the government at Mexico City. Adding that rich and fertile land to their colonial string of pearls would be a coup of the first magnitude, or so it was thought by many Americans.
In the meantime, after consulting with his cabinet, in August of 1845 Polk had ordered Major General Zachary Taylor to move his 2,500-man army into Texas and station it at Corpus Christi. Taylor at first had seemed to Polk an ideal choice to lead the army. A descendant of Mayflower pilgrims, the sixty-one-year-old Kentuckian was a thirty-eight-year veteran of the army, having served in the War of 1812, the Seminole War, and the Black Hawk War, in which he had captured Black Hawk himself. But most attractive of all to Polk was that the poker-faced Episcopalian was apolitical, or so it seemed. That would change, leading to a dramatic outbreak of bad feelings between the two men.
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