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

by Amy S. Greenberg

  But for Polk that was all in the past; there was destiny to consider, and California was “destined to control the destinies of the Pacific.” The lauded commander of the newly returned U.S. South Seas Exploring Expedition, America’s first great voyage of discovery, had proclaimed it so. If the election of 1844 had proved anything, it was that James K. Polk could accomplish what lesser visionaries considered impossible. Through force of will and hard work, because no one worked harder than he, Young Hickory would conquer the continent. And he would do it in one term.2

  But first he needed to assemble a cabinet. This wasn’t as simple a matter as it might appear, and three days before his inauguration he had filled only two of the six cabinet posts. There were powerful blocs in the Democratic Party that needed to be appeased, supporters of Van Buren in New York and of Calhoun in South Carolina—men whose relations with one another were less than cordial. He needed to strike a pose of sectional balance in the cabinet, and he definitely needed a Pennsylvanian to help calm the storm that would inevitably erupt when the good people of the commonwealth discovered that Polk’s tariff plans were miles away from what he promised during the campaign. He also needed to purge all of the Tyler supporters from the administration, as well as from the government jobs that were now his to distribute, thanks to the spoils system so brilliantly instituted by Andrew Jackson. Jackson had claimed that replacing Washington office employees would help prevent corruption, but it was also a wonderful way to reward one’s own supporters.

  There were other complicating factors. Despite his remarkable victory, far too many in Washington still saw him as a little man. Not just physically, although those who had known him in his congressional days noted that he had lost weight, and his coats were now two or three sizes too large. “He would be but the merest tangible fraction of a president,” one woman noted, “if his clothes were made to fit.” They questioned his political stature and told one another, quietly, that he “cannot go through what is before him without some strong man to lean on.” Van Buren had the gall to say as much to his face, warning him that “the man who is suddenly & unexpectedly raised” to the presidency “has to remove apprehensions which will in such cases always arise” about his fitness for the job.3

  If someone had dared insult Henry Clay this way (not that anyone would, because nothing could be more expected than for Henry Clay to become president), he might find himself embroiled in a duel, or so mocked that a duel might seem preferable to the social death Clay was so expert at imposing. But Polk wasn’t one to lose his temper. Unlike other politicians he could name, Polk knew how to control his emotions. He felt the insult nonetheless, and under no circumstances could he allow a “strong man” or the supporter of a “strong man” into his cabinet.

  There was also his promise to serve only one term. Polk certainly couldn’t allow any presidential candidates in his cabinet, because that person would naturally put his personal advancement ahead of the good of the administration. What Polk needed, and would have, was nothing less than absolute loyalty and subservience from “a united and harmonious” cabinet, one that put “the existing administration and the good of the country” first. “In any event,” he wrote longtime political crony Cave Johnson, “I intend to be myself President of the U.S.”4

  Given this long list of considerations and the slowness of the mail system, perhaps it isn’t surprising that Polk’s cabinet was at once striking in its mediocrity and offensive to many important members of his party. Three able men who had been instrumental in his success at the nominating convention in Baltimore won plum positions: dapper bachelor James Buchanan of Pennsylvania became secretary of state, brilliant Massachusetts historian George Bancroft was named secretary of the navy, and aggressive expansionist and proslavery ideologue Robert J. Walker of Mississippi became secretary of the Treasury.

  Few found much to praise in the rest of Polk’s appointments. In a supposed attempt to appease Van Buren supporters, Polk appointed William Marcy, the former governor of New York, to be secretary of war. Perhaps Polk was oblivious to the fact that Martin Van Buren hated the man. He appointed college chum John Mason of Virginia as attorney general and Cave Johnson as postmaster general, rounding out a cabinet that many, and particularly Van Buren’s supporters, did not view as being particularly well rounded. But whatever the liabilities to the harmony of the party, Polk’s appointees were assets to his political program. Each man believed in Manifest Destiny. Walker, in particular, could be counted on to enthusiastically support any plan to divest Mexico of its territory. His brother had been a Texas settler who died after serving time in a Mexican prison.

  Polk’s cabinet in 1846. Photo by John Plumbe Jr. When the early photographic technique known as daguerreotype was less than ten years old, Sarah Polk arranged for a photographer to be present just after a cabinet breakfast. The result was the first photograph ever taken in the White House, and the first of a presidential cabinet. From left to right: Attorney General John Y. Mason, Secretary of War William Marcy, Postmaster General Cave Johnson, President Polk, Navy Secretary George Bancroft, and Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker. Secretary of State James Buchanan is absent. Courtesy James K. Polk Memorial Association, Columbia, Tennessee. (photo credit 4.1)

  In the appointment of his cabinet, Polk displayed a tendency that would prove to be one of his trademarks. He would solicit advice, appear to assent to it, and then, as often as not, do the exact opposite. He snubbed important members of his party with seeming reckless abandon. He would be himself president. “He had no confid[a]nts except from calculation and for a purpose,” one contemporary noted. “His secretiveness was large, and few men could better keep their own secrets.”5

  But it wasn’t just that Polk was secretive. In the chilly first months of 1845, many Democrats came to believe that the president-elect had a predilection to make promises, or appear to make promises, that he had no intention of keeping. At least five senators agreed in February to vote in favor of admitting Texas as a state after Polk privately convinced them that he would force Texas to back down from the Rio Grande boundary claim. They left his office believing that just as soon as he was president, he would send skilled diplomats to Texas in order to implement a compromise. When asked why he voted in favor of annexation, newly seated senator John A. Dix of New York explained that Polk’s “assurance was given to others as well as myself” that negotiators would be sent to Texas. Dix trusted Polk, because “his honor is a sufficient Security” to prevent him from lying.6 Dix believed Polk, because he assumed that the president, like other men of his profession and class, cared about his reputation as an honorable man. Honorable men did not lie, at least not without plausible deniability.

  Dix and many others quickly learned, however, that James K. Polk’s “honor” offered very little security. Of course Polk had no intention of negotiating with Texas and had never had any such intention; remarkably enough, he seemed uninterested in providing cover for his dishonesty. Before he was even inaugurated he had won a reputation as a man who couldn’t be trusted. It was becoming clear that Polk’s “mind was narrow, and he possessed a trait of sly cunning which he thought shrewdness, but which was really disingenuousness and duplicity.” No Democrat would dare say it out loud, not yet anyhow, but the new president was a liar.7

  But he didn’t lie to everyone. Polk took a strikingly different approach with his cabinet than with the external political world. Rather than preside in an authoritarian manner, the president strove for consensus, and generally achieved it. Polk’s cabinet became a remarkably cohesive unit, and he made the most of it. The president held twice-weekly meetings that all members were expected to attend, and he made it clear that every member had the right to speak on any issue. He delegated work to members, and felt free to take over their duties when necessary. There were markedly few divisions among cabinet members on issues of importance, in large part, perhaps, because the men of the cabinet shared Polk’s worldview. Polk referred to his cabinet as
his “own political family,” and his cabinet proved crucial to his success in office, second only, perhaps, to his real family: his wife, Sarah.8

  When Polk was first nominated, one wise advisor encouraged him to put Sarah to work. James might lack the “time or tact, to conciliate and please,” but Sarah had plenty of both. “The wife of a man aspiring to the white house is no minor circumstance,” he pointed out. “Mrs. Polk should be visited by Whigs and by Democrats of her own sex … as the ladies of the other side uniformly speak well, and generally highly of her.” Even Polk’s allies recognized that Young Hickory’s personality required management. Fortunately, Sarah Polk, unlike her husband, “was ever a good listener.”9

  The candidate didn’t need prompting; he already knew his wife’s political value. She took her job seriously and was willing to work every bit as hard as her husband to advance their agenda. Washington hadn’t forgotten Sarah Polk. Her self-possession, conversational skills, and elegant appearance impressed virtually everyone. A young antislavery Whig from Massachusetts named Charles Sumner seemed surprised when “her sweetness of manner won me entirely.” During her husband’s tenure in Congress, Sarah became such a favorite among the political class that when the couple left Washington a justice of the Supreme Court wrote a poem in her honor, praising her “playful mind.” Members of both parties knew that Polk’s election would be a two-for-one, and that it was Sarah alone who could counter Polk’s political isolation.10

  In fact, her influence had only grown during the dark years of James’s political career. By the time he became president he depended upon his wife to read and analyze all the national news, and he left her piles of newspapers each day. Sarah diligently worked through them all, and then, “carefully folding the papers with the marked pieces outside, where a glance might detect them, she would place the pile beside his chair, so that whenever a few moments of leisure came, he could find and read without loss of time.”11

  He asked her to write letters for him, delegating to her virtually all of the work that a less secretive chief executive would give a secretary. On evenings when they entertained, the two worked late into the night, regularly putting in twelve to fourteen hours of work. “None but Sarah knew so intimately my private affairs,” Polk admitted near the end of his life. But even at the height of his power, President Polk was open about the degree to which he and his wife had always worked as a team. Typical was his comment when Sarah broke up an impromptu concert given by Democrats in his honor on the Sabbath: “Sarah directs all domestic affairs, and she thinks that is domestic.’ ”12

  Though her religious piety required that she shun the “follies and amusements of the world,” and therefore ban hard liquor, dancing, and card playing from the White House, she managed to pull off entertaining executive dinners at which gracious hospitality shamelessly combined with ceaseless lobbying. Dressed in simple but meticulously tailored gowns of deep-hued velvets and satins, Sarah cultivated a restrained elegance in keeping with her democratic ethos. She held two regular evening receptions every week, and added a third on Saturday mornings when Congress was in session. When James was unable to attend, she hosted these events alone. Powerful men cultivated her goodwill: more than one leading politician openly declared that he would rather discuss the issues of the day with her than with her dour husband.13

  Sarah and James Polk. This daguerreotype portrait of the Polks was taken in 1849, during their last months in the White House. Their close relationship and Sarah’s concern for her husband’s health are apparent in their posture and her gesture. Courtesy James K. Polk Memorial Association, Columbia, Tennessee. (photo credit 4.2)

  She was a brilliant entertainer but had little interest in other domestic matters. Lucretia Hart Clay, by contrast, who rarely left Kentucky, was renowned for her domestic prowess. She gave birth to eleven children and was said to cure the best ham in the county. During the presidential campaign a “lady remarked to a friend of Mrs. Polk’s that she hoped Mr. Clay would be elected to the presidency, because his wife was a good housekeeper, and made fine butter.” When Sarah heard this story she proudly replied, “If I should be so fortunate as to reach the White House, I expect to live on twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and I will neither keep house nor make butter.”14

  Twenty-five thousand dollars was the president’s salary and would have been a fortune, except that the president was expected to pay most of the expenses of the White House, including the salaries of fifteen or twenty servants. The Polks, far from rich, had gone into debt during the presidential campaign. Sarah’s plan for living within their income was simple, but it didn’t include making her own butter. She replaced the White House staff with her slaves, moving them into the basement, which she renovated for the purpose.

  The Polks’ slaves shocked northern sensibilities but allowed Sarah a certain freedom from the day-to-day details of household management, or at least she acted as though this was the case. “She said the servants knew their duties, and she did not undertake the needless task of directing them.” But social events didn’t always run as smoothly as they might had the First Lady been in the kitchen rather than in the parlor with Mr. Polk. She once presided over a dinner with no napkins on the table, and failed to notice. On another occasion, when Senator Thomas Hart Benton came to dinner and the appointed hour had passed with no sign of a meal, he asked Sarah if he had come at the right time. “Colonel Benton,” she responded, “have you not lived in Washington long enough to know that the cooks fix the hour for dinner?”15

  Yet despite her strengths in what was then known as the male sphere of politics and her weakness in the women’s sphere of domestic matters, Sarah Polk seemed to threaten no one. This was because, as one approving commentator put it, “she lived behind her husband as a politician.” In an era of increasing agitation for women’s rights, Mrs. Polk cultivated a persona of subservience that powerful men found intoxicating.16

  Sarah was careful to always downplay her political skills. “She was better informed than it was her disposition to make known … early learned to be silent where anything was at stake … never told more than she knew, and seldom made an effort to display what she said as wisdom.” She conferred about matters of national importance with her husband’s associates but was always careful to say “Mr. Polk thinks so” when expressing her opinions to them. She was “familiar with the great matters exercising the minds of public men” and was sure to read books by writers visiting the White House so that she could converse with them about their work. But she also had what a contemporary called “intuitive tact.” She was “too delicate and reserved to proclaim political opinions, or to join in the discussion of party differences. Being so intelligent and well informed, yet so unobtrusive, she was a charming companion.”17

  Sarah’s talents did not go unnoticed by the public. She was held in high esteem by Americans of both parties and during the first year of the presidency garnered nothing but positive coverage in the daily press. Some Whigs who were skeptical or outright hostile to her husband’s election hoped that she might have a positive influence on his administration. Sarah Preston Hale of Massachusetts, a forty-eight-year-old supporter of Henry Clay, wondered if “perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Polk together will make a very good President.”18

  Sarah was a woman who venerated the work of men, and excelled at it, in large part because she publicly embraced an almost reactionary standard of female subservience. By brilliantly manipulating the gender codes of the day, Sarah Childress Polk became one of the most powerful First Ladies in history. Were it not for her political skills, James Polk might never have won office. Together they made, if not a good president, certainly a successful one.

  Among the politicians most enchanted by Sarah was George Bancroft, the new secretary of the navy. Bancroft was in many ways a strange choice for the cabinet, an aristocratic Harvard intellectual who held a Ph.D. from a German university and wrote serious works of history. Despite hailing from a stronghold of Whig powe
r, Bancroft commanded respect within the Democratic ranks, but he probably wouldn’t have made it into the cabinet had he not helped mastermind Polk’s nomination in Baltimore. He yearned for a diplomatic appointment in Europe and was uninterested in the cabinet. But Polk ignored Bancroft’s requests, despite the fact that they were reasonable and easy to fulfill.

  Not long after the inauguration, Polk called him into his office. Bancroft had no suspicion that anything out of the ordinary would be said, since it was already obvious that “no man was the depository” of the president’s “secrets, further than he chose to entrust them for his own purpose.” But Polk had something singular to say, and he wanted Bancroft to hear it. Slapping his leg for emphasis, Polk told him that “the acquisition of California and a large district on the coast” was one of the priorities of his administration. It was God’s will that Mexico’s richest lands, especially the fertile stretch by the Pacific, pass from its current shiftless residents to hardworking white people better able to husband their resources. Bancroft was shocked. Did the president intend to start a war?19