A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico

by Amy S. Greenberg

  “Reannexation,” however nonsensical, was a brilliant rhetorical move on Walker’s part. A Pennsylvanian who fully embraced both slavery and expansion when he moved to the South as a young man, Walker recognized that lobbying for the “reannexation” of Texas could serve several ends. It might ease the consciences of northerners who felt funny about taking land still claimed by Mexico, since America’s claim supposedly predated Mexico’s, indeed predated Mexico’s independence from Spain. It also discredited John Quincy Adams for “giving away” Texas, and by extension discredited northerners and Whigs as hostile to the interests of the South.

  In reality Adams was one of the foremost expansionists in the early republic; he had even attempted to purchase Texas from Mexico in 1827 when he was president. Since the end of his presidency, however, he had devoted himself to the “sublime and beautiful cause” of abolition and was now the leading voice against slavery in Congress. This made him an easy target for Democrats, and any opportunity to link Adams to more moderate Whigs such as Clay was not to be lost.13

  Polk recognized the value of Walker’s gambit and embraced it. “Let Texas be reannexed, and the authority and laws of the United States be established and maintained within her limits,” Polk proclaimed. The United States needed to seize the present opportunity to be “re-united with a country from which the United States should never have been separated.” He also called for the annexation of the whole of the Oregon Country, envisioning a United States that spread all the way to the Pacific, encompassing British Columbia and Vancouver Island. Polk was quick to perceive that “the Texas question … swallows up all others at present.” As he wrote Cave Johnson, a fellow Tennessee politician, “It is impossible to arrest the current of the popular opinion and any man who attempts it will be crushed by it.”14

  Polk’s views were published but not widely reprinted. Despite twenty-two years as a dedicated Democrat, he was still an obscure figure even within his own party, a nobody outside Tennessee. His statements in support of annexation did nothing to increase his profile among national Democratic power brokers. With Jackson’s help he might still secure the number two slot on a Van Buren ticket. But more likely Polk would get some sort of position abroad in a Democratic administration. One newspaper suggested he might be named foreign minister to Vienna.15 Even with concerns about the Texas issue on the rise, Democratic nominating conventions were predictable things in those days, and Van Buren was still the presumptive nominee.

  It was just two short weeks before the Democratic convention when Andrew Jackson summoned Polk to the Hermitage to confer about Texas. Polk made the first fifty miles of his trip in two days, arriving in Nashville on a Sunday. He spent the night in a hotel, and the next morning he set out on horseback to see Jackson.

  While riding from town to the estate, Polk met Jackson’s nephew, Andrew Jackson Donelson, traveling in the opposite direction with a letter written by Old Hickory for publication. The letter called for the immediate annexation of Texas and openly rebuffed Van Buren, implying that he had dug his own grave on the issue. Jackson had been writing similar letters to members of his party for weeks but thus far had not publicly rebuked the man who Polk still assumed would be the party’s nominee. How would it possibly help the chances of the Democratic Party for the general to issue a statement such as this?

  Polk wasn’t one to criticize Jackson, but he brought both Donelson and the letter back with him to the Hermitage. There he found the ex-president intensely agitated on the subject of Texas and speaking “with almost all his former energy.” Jackson railed against Van Buren, suggested he should withdraw from the race since he couldn’t possibly beat Clay in the general election, and then turned his attention to Polk. “The candidate for the first office should be an annexation man and from the Southwest,” he told the younger man, and Polk himself was “the most available man.”16

  Polk was incredulous. “I have never aspired so high,” he wrote to Cave Johnson afterward. He was only forty-eight, surely too young to be president, certainly too unknown. What madness! Polk concluded that it would be “utterly abortive” to put his name forward.17

  But after he had slept on it, the plan didn’t seem quite so far-fetched. Two days later Polk had entirely come around to Jackson’s view. Perhaps he was the man for the moment. Statehood for Texas had long been his cause; the moment was right to expand freedom’s territory in a great western push not just to Texas but to California and Oregon as well.

  America needed it. Polk was smart enough to see the great opportunity before him, one that his country would embrace. As Polk surveyed America in 1844, he saw a young nation experiencing growing pains and at the same time desperate to claim its place among leading nations. Nearly everything was in transition, and there was no clarity about the future. Economic developments that heralded a “market revolution” were increasing class divisions between the newly and ostentatiously rich and poor people with little opportunity for upward mobility. Great waves of immigration from Europe were changing the country’s ethnic profile, and xenophobia, then called “nativism,” was on the rise. Women had begun demanding recognition and power, undermining male authority at home and in public. Religious revivals emerging out of the Second Great Awakening gave birth to reform movements that dared insist society radically change. Workingmen were forming trade unions. And there were the hotly contested issues of slavery and temperance, so divisive that few dared truly engage with them. No wonder, then, that a shifting electorate, one whose electoral participation had expanded dramatically in the 1820s and 1830s to encompass virtually all white men, regarded the values and assumptions that had once defined the two political parties as less and less meaningful.

  In the midst of these shifts, Polk understood, one core belief remained that could both galvanize his party and unite the nation: Manifest Destiny. The push west could solve all of America’s problems. It could provide the immigrant masses crowding American cities with land of their own to farm and a stake in society, as well as reinforce patriarchy by providing men with a means of supporting their families in an environment where strength and physical skill mattered. It would buttress American democracy by reducing the growing strength of manufacturing in the economy and the influence of the northeastern urban elite who profited from that system. And Alta California, on the far west coast, was home to harbors that might allow the United States to compete with Europe for control of trade with China. Expansion would make America strong. Expansionism was a winning political issue and the best policy for the country. But—and Polk believed this in his very soul—it was also right.

  He saw clearly that the long years during which cool heads had prevailed on Texas were over. There had been a quick romance and Americans had fallen for Texas, even mythologizing the Alamo’s dead. The American people were ready for annexation; indeed, they believed just what Polk did—that the United States was destined to expand and should take every opportunity to do so. Didn’t everything in America’s short history point to that conclusion, from the Puritan understanding of America as a city on a hill, a model to be replicated by others, to previous territorial acquisitions (the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the purchase of Florida from Spain in 1819, the displacement of the Five Civilized Tribes in the 1830s), and finally the nation’s incredible population growth (from four million to seventeen million people between 1790 and 1840)? The nation’s very character made expansion inevitable. Americans had a go-ahead, get-ahead nature, with strains of ambition and individualism that led them to constantly push westward, to and beyond the frontier.18

  Polk instinctively grasped all of this. Expansion was a winning political issue, at once a promise of national glory and a symbol of dynamic change. Still, he was not its standard-bearer merely to sway voters. He truly believed that Americans were exceptional, that his country was marked for greatness. Manifest Destiny was not a matter of if but merely one of how. And it justified almost any tactic. The issue was, for him, a perfect marriage of poli
tics and conviction. Tyler had done him the enormous favor of bringing the statehood of Texas into the mainstream, and now he would do the rest.

  Still, something else was at work in Polk’s vision, something that held great appeal for the majority of southern Democrats. For he was a slaveholder. Ever wary of the growing power of the North and the agitations of abolitionists, men such as Polk scorned an interfering central government and were desperate for new slave states to buttress the strength of their “peculiar” institution. They believed not only that territorial aggrandizement was the key to national vigor but also that slavery itself meshed well with democracy. Polk and his fellow southern Democrats did not believe that a nation of liberty was one in which all men were literally free. True independence instead consisted of a community of landholders thriving through ownership of their farms and self-determination of their rights.

  “Matty Meeting the Texas Question,” 1844. This satire of the disorder in the Democratic ranks was most likely produced by a giddy Whig in the summer of 1844, not long after Polk’s nomination. Andrew Jackson prods a very unwilling Martin Van Buren in the direction of Texas, represented here as a hideous hag propped up by Thomas Hart Benton and John C. Calhoun. Calhoun offers to “introduce you to the Texas Question, what do you say to her Ladyship?” Van Buren replies, “Take any other shape but that, and my firm nerves shall never tremble.” In the background, Polk suggests to Dallas that although Texas might not be “the handsomest lady I ever saw,” she was worth $25,000 a year (the amount of the president’s salary) and a “little stretching of conscience.” By representing Texas as a nonwhite, monstrous, knife- and chain-wielding woman, the printmaker clearly expressed his view that the Republic of Texas would make an undesirable addition to the United States, and anyone who felt otherwise was ignoring his “conscience.” Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (photo credit 2.3)

  He could be the instrument of Manifest Destiny. Polk put pen to paper and began offering a case for his nomination, not for the vice presidency but for the great prize itself. Polk would not attend the Democratic convention; it was considered unseemly for politicians to push forward their own candidacies. But if the opportunity arose, his supporters would be ready.

  May 27, 1844. It had been a month since the Whig convention, and the Clay posters, coats, ribbons, and garlands were long gone when the Democrats gathered in Baltimore for their own convention. The weather had turned hot and spirits were low. On Monday morning a great crowd gathered outside the Odd Fellows Hall on North Gay Street. Democratic delegates had chosen the elegant Egyptian Saloon within the hall, the largest in Baltimore, for their meeting, but the space was clearly too small. Although “every possible arrangement had been made” for “the business of the convention,” the animated crowd spilled out into the street.19 Martin Van Buren clearly commanded a majority of delegates, but this was no unified assembly. The rifts among the Democrats were obvious to all.

  At exactly noon, the hour set for the start of the convention, a minority group committed to the annexation of Texas, and led by “reannexation” promoter Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, seized the floor and changed the convention rules so that a winning nominee required two-thirds of all votes. In their haste to pull the rug out from under Old Van, his opponents had forgotten to bring a minister forward for the customary prayers offered up at meetings of this sort. After rectifying this oversight, which struck some delegates as a bad omen, the annexationists returned to the work of overthrowing Martin Van Buren.

  Their favored candidate was Lewis Cass of Michigan, a stolid, serious man of tremendous girth with a pronounced sympathy for the South. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called him “lick-spittle to southern power, and base panderer to slave traffickers.” Van Buren’s supporters were hardly more positive, deriding the Michigan senator’s supporters as “Jack Casses.” But Cass’s expansionist credentials were above reproach. He had been instrumental in the Indian removal of the 1830s, arguing loudly and repeatedly that the “savage” Cherokee were undeserving of their lands, despite the tribe’s wholesale acceptance of the norms of their southern neighbors. The Cherokee were literate Christians and profitable farmers, and some even owned slaves. The only thing that made them savage was their race, but that was enough.20

  Cass’s invective had only increased since then, along with his open disdain for virtually all residents of North America lacking his skin color and citizenship. His views could not be further from Van Buren’s: he would annex Texas, just as he hoped to annex Canada, Cuba, and any other territory in the Western Hemisphere that might be available.

  To the astonishment of Van Buren’s many supporters in Odd Fellows Hall, Cass quickly began to gain on the front-runner. By the seventh ballot he was firmly in the lead. At that point, however, the Jack Casses were faced with the unpleasant reality that their man was no more likely than Van Buren to win the votes of two-thirds of the assembled delegates, particularly given that most of Van Buren’s delegates would sooner vote for Clay than allow “the damned rotten corrupt venal Cass” the victory of the nomination. Tempers flared, and the Van Buren delegates threatened to return home. The convention deadlocked.21

  Complicating matters for the Democrats was the fact that Tyler supporters had chosen to hold their own convention over on Calvert Street at the exact same time. Tyler no longer hoped to win the presidency; that dream had died with Abel Upshur and the Princeton explosion. That was fine with him; newly engaged, Tyler had a ravishing young bride to focus on. But he was desperate to save his Texas treaty, which had been drowning in a sea of criticism in the Senate for the previous three weeks. Tyler’s presidential convention was designed to do one thing: blackmail the Democratic Party into embracing Texas.

  There was no problem with crowding at Tyler’s convention. Since being dismissed by the Whigs, “His Accidency” had surrounded himself with sycophants from the Democratic Party, many of whom were profiting handsomely from government contracts and other spoils of office. A select assortment of these officeholders and friends of the president gathered in Calvert Hall to nominate the president on his own ticket and a pro-annexation platform.

  What they lacked in numbers they more than made up for in enthusiasm, as well as “large supplies of brandy and water, whiskey and gin.” Tyler’s sham convention may well have been as “contemptibly ridiculous” as critics claimed, but at least the proceedings moved quickly. “Tyler and Texas” were unanimously endorsed by the assembled delegates, who then drifted over to Odd Fellows Hall to see how matters stood with the Democrats. Face-to-face with gloating and inebriated Tyler supporters, Van Buren’s distressed delegates had no choice but to acknowledge that Texas would be the leading question in the coming election.22

  After “an anxious day of strife discord, intrigue, and factious cabal,” the Democrats adjourned for the evening. Several thousand of the most enthusiastic—“men’s men,” as one account put it—headed off to smoky taverns and to Monument Square, where a pro-Democratic rally was set. Unfortunately Tyler’s supporters had the same idea. The Democrats took up space in front of the courthouse, while Tyler supporters colonized the front stairs of P. T. Barnum’s City Hotel. The two groups sized each other up and proceeded to hold dueling rallies within earshot, “with the most discordant voices, and with gesticulation violent and threatening.”23

  The Democrats themselves were far from a unified front. Some speakers proclaimed in favor of Cass, others for Van Buren. The crowd shifted between the two podiums, with one particularly inebriated Tyler supporter, “as gloriously happy as need be,” drawing the lion’s share of the crowd. The Democrats took offense, and “at one time the signs threatened a general row” complete with “bloody nose or a cracked skull. But the discord confined itself to words.”24

  Disgruntled Democrats eventually seized the space and forced the outnumbered Tyler supporters to retreat. But it wasn’t much of a victory. The majority of delegates had arrived in Baltimore ready to support V
an Buren, yet the majority had not ruled. One speaker summed up the crowd’s sense of powerlessness when he pointed up to a window in Barnum’s City Hotel and with the force of “one of the furies” asked that “these shouts could reach the ears of the conclave that is now assembled in a room above … who are now in concert endeavoring to concoct a scheme to cheat the people out of the nomination of their favorite, Martin Van Buren.”25 They might have intimidated Tyler’s supporters, but the crowd recognized that the real power lay elsewhere that night.

  About 1:00 a.m., the “men’s men” headed back to their hotels and boardinghouses, hardly knowing what the next morning might bring, besides the expected headache. Their convention was wide open. Just as Andrew Jackson predicted, Old Van had been thrown over. Now the Democrats needed a compromise candidate. He would have to be acceptable to supporters of both Cass and Van Buren, and he would have to favor annexation. Ideally, he would also be able to charm John Tyler out of the race.

  Jackson’s plan was coming together perfectly.

  The men’s men in Monument Square were right: the important decisions were being made elsewhere that Monday night. Democratic operatives cloistered themselves in a nearby hotel room and hammered out a solution to the deadlock between Van Buren and Cass. By dawn they had settled on a candidate who had the power not only to unify the fractured and angry delegate pool but also perhaps to pull out a victory against Henry Clay in November. He wasn’t particularly well known, he hadn’t received a single vote on the first day of the convention, and his reputation was shaky even in his home state. But he had no enemies and was a true believer in annexation. James K. Polk had been anointed.