A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico
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CHAPTER 1. VALENTINE’S DAY
1. Leigh Eric Schmidt, “The Fashioning of a Modern Holiday: St. Valentine’s Day, 1840–1870,” Winterthur Portfolio 28, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 239; “Valentine’s Day,” Southern Patriot (Charleston, SC), Feb. 15, 1844; thirty thousand figure, “St. Valentine’s Day,” Baltimore Sun, Feb. 19, 1844.
2. Schmidt, “Fashioning of a Modern Holiday,” 214; “Valentine’s Day,” Boston Daily Evening Transcript, Feb. 20, 1844.
3. Frankfort (KY) Commonwealth, May 7, 1844, quote in Robert Vincent Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York: Norton, 1991), 642.
4. “Mr. Clay’s Speech,” Niles’ Weekly Register, Mar. 3, 1832, 11.
5. Madeleine McDowell, “Recollections of Henry Clay,” Century Magazine, May 1895, 768; Gustave Koerner, Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, 1809–1896, ed. Thomas J. McCormack (Cedar Rapids, IA: Torch Press, 1909), 1:349.
6. John S. Littell, The Clay Minstrel, or National Songster, 2nd ed. (New York: Greeley and McElrath, 1844), 261; Octavia Walton LeVert, “A Tribute to Henry Clay,” in Edwin Anderson Alderman, Joel Chandler Harris, and Charles William Kent, eds., Library of Southern Literature (New Orleans: Martin and Hoyt, 1907), 7:32–37.
7. Remini, Henry Clay, xi; Joseph M. Rogers, The True Henry Clay (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1904), 250.
8. “Valentine’s Day,” Southern Patriot (Charleston, SC), Feb. 15, 1844. The news of Texas appeared in “Late and Important from Texas,” New Orleans Daily Picayune, Feb. 14, 1844.
9. Henry Clay to John J. Crittenden, Feb. 15, 1844, PHC, 10:6–7.
10. San Filipe de Austin Telegraph and Texas Register, Oct. 17, 1835, quote in Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: Norton, 1998), 42. See also Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1845 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 661–71; Gregg Cantrell, Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 344–45.
11. Benjamin Lundy (“Citizen of the United States”), The War in Texas; A Review of Facts and Circumstances, Showing That This Contest Is a Crusade Against Mexico, Set on Foot and Supported by Slaveholders, Land Speculators, & c. in Order to Re-establish, Extend, and Perpetuate the System of Slavery and the Slave Trade, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gunn, 1837), prefatory note.
12. Quote in Otis A. Singletary, The Mexican War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 15–16.
13. Paul Lack, “Slavery and the Texas Revolution,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 89 (1985): 181–202.
14. “Treaties of Velasco,” Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/mgt05.
15. “Speech of Patrick Collins,” Ohio Statesman (Columbus, OH), Jan. 26, 1844.
16. “Annexation of Texas,” Albany Evening Journal, May 11, 1843.
17. “Salvation of the Union,” in Edward P. Crapol, John Tyler: The Accidental President (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 202.
18. Murphy to Jones, Feb. 14, 1844, in Sen. Doc., 28th Cong., 1st sess. (ser. 435), no. 349, 4–6.
19. Quote from “The Annexation of Texas,” North American (Philadelphia), Nov. 24, 1843; see also “Annexation of Texas,” Charleston Southern Patriot, Nov. 20, 1843; “Annexation of Texas,” Republican Farmer (Bridgeport, CT), Nov. 21, 1843.
20. Henry Clay letter to Leverett Saltonstall, Lexington, Dec. 4, 1843, PHC, 9:896.
21. See “Election Correspondence,” Emancipator (New York), Dec. 12, 1843; no title, Daily Atlas, Dec. 26, 1843.
22. Henry Clay to Leverett Saltonstall, Lexington, Dec. 4, 1843, PHC, 9:896; Henry Clay to John J. Crittenden, Lexington, Dec. 5, 1843, PHC, 9:897–98.
23. “Annexation of Texas,” Emancipator and Free American (New York), Dec. 28, 1843; “Texas,” Emancipator (New York), Jan. 25, 1844.
24. A. P. Upshur, “Letter of A. P. Upshur to J. C. Calhoun,” William and Mary Quarterly 16, no. 4 (Oct. 1936): 555–57, quote on 557.
25. “Annexation of Texas,” Emancipator and Free American (New York), Dec. 28, 1843.
26. Invitation to “Hon. Mr. Hardin & Lady,” WFA.
27. “Extraordinary Intelligence from Washington!” New York Herald, Mar. 1, 1844.
28. Hardin to David A. Smith, Mar. 1, 1844, HFP, Box 14:3.
29. “Most Awful and Most Lamentable Catastrophe!” DNI, Feb. 29, 1844; Crapol, John Tyler, 208–9; John Tyler, “The Dead of the Cabinet,” in Lyon Tyler, The Letters and Times of the Tylers (Richmond, VA: Whittet and Shepperson, 1885), 2:389–92.
30. John Tyler to Mary Jones Tyler, Washington, DC, Mar. 4, 1844, in Tyler, Life and Times of the Tylers, 2:289.
31. Henry Clay to Lucretia Hart Clay, Mobile, AL, Mar. 2, 1844, PHC, 10:8.
32. Letter to Henry Clay from “Many of your fellow citizens,” Charleston, SC, ca. Apr. 4, 1844, PHC, 10:17.
33. Daily Picayune (New Orleans), Apr. 6, 1844.
34. Henry Clay to John J. Crittenden, Savannah, GA, Mar. 24, 1844, PHC, 10:14.
35. DNI, Apr. 27, 1844; Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Life of Henry Clay (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937), 365.
36. Clay to John Crittenden, Norfolk, VA, Apr. 21, 1844, PHC, 10:48.
37. Daniel Feller, “A Brother in Arms: Benjamin Tappan and the Antislavery Democracy,” Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001): 66.
38. “The Presidential Question—Troubles of the Democracy!” NYH, May 9, 1844; M. Van Buren to Hon. W. H. Hammet, Lindenwold, Apr. 20, 1844, Macon Georgia Telegraph, May 14, 1844.
39. John C. Calhoun to Richard Pakenham, Apr. 27, 1844, in Meriwether et al., Papers of Calhoun, 18:273–78.
40. A. P. Upshur, “Letter of A. P. Upshur to J. C. Calhoun,” 556–57.
41. Jun. 10, 1844, CG, 28th Cong., 1st sess., 653.
42. Letter from “Franklin,” Washington, DC, Apr. 29, 1844, published in Philadelphia Public Ledger, Apr. 30, 1844.
43. Philip Hone, Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1889), 2:219–20.
44. John Hardin to Sarah Hardin, May 3, 1844, HFP, Box 15:11.
45. “The Whig Procession,” Baltimore Sun, May 3, 1844.
46. “The Following Account of the Whig Assemblage at Baltimore,” Berkshire County Whig, May 9, 1844; “Baltimore Whig Convention,” NYH, May 1, 1844.
47. “The Grand Whig Nomination at Last,” NYH, May 3, 1844; Hone, Diary of Philip Hone, 2:217–18.
48. Henry Clay to John M. Berrien et al., Washington, DC, May 2, 1844, PHC, 10:52; Henry Clay to Thurlow Weed, Washington, DC, May 6, 1844, PHC, 10:54.
49. Letter from “Franklin,” Washington, DC, Apr. 29, 1844, published in the Philadelphia Public Ledger; Apr. 30, 1844.
50. Henry Clay to Thurlow Weed, Washington, DC, May 6, 1844, PHC, 10:54; “The Next Presidency—Mr. Clay’s Prospects,” NYH, May 17, 1844.
51. Quote in Remini, Henry Clay, 646.
52. Francis Blair quote in Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 68–69.
CHAPTER 2. “WHO IS JAMES K. POLK?”
1. Andrew Jackson. The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Daniel Feller, Harold D. Moser, Laura-Eve Moss, and Thomas Coens (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 7:42.
2. On the Jackson “image,” see Andrew Burstein, The Passions of Andrew Jackson (New York: Knopf, 2003), 207–40.
3. Quote in Michael A. Lofarro, “David Crockett,” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, ed. Caroll Van West (Nashville: Tennessee Historical Society, 1998), 219.
4. Robert W. Ikard, “Surgical Operation on James K. Polk by Ephraim McDowell or the Search for Polk’s Gallstone,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1984): 121–31. Ikard argues that the surgery most likely left Polk impotent.
5. Rhetoric quote in George H. Hickman, The Life and Public Services of the Hon. James Knox Polk: With a Compendium of His Speeches on Vario
us Public Measures, Also a Sketch of the Life of the Hon. George Mifflin Dallas (Baltimore: N. Hickman, 1844), 8; Adams quote, John Quincy Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (New York: AMS Press, 1970), 9:64.
6. Anson and Fanny Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1892), 68.
7. Ibid., 68, 94.
8. Ibid., 16.
9. Ibid., 50.
10. Samuel H. Laughlin to J. K. Polk, May 30, 1835, Correspondence of James K. Polk, ed. Herbert Weaver and Wayne Cutler et al., 11 vols. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969–2009), 3:209; Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000).
11. Quote in Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist, 1843–1846 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 2:71–72.
12. On Polk’s slave owning, see William Dusinberre, Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James K. Polk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
13. Adams, Memoirs, 4:531; Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 30–31 n. 41.
14. “Col. Polk’s Letter,” Southern Patriot (Charleston, SC), May 9, 1844; James K. Polk, “Letters of James K. Polk to Cave Johnson, 1833–1848,” Tennessee Historical Magazine 1 (Sep. 1915): 209–56, quote on 240.
15. Letter from “Franklin,” Washington, DC, Apr. 29, 1844, published in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Apr. 30, 1844.
16. Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist, 71; Polk, “Letters of James K. Polk to Cave Johnson, 1833–1848,” 240–41.
17. Polk, “Letters of James K. Polk to Cave Johnson, 1833–1848,” 240.
18. On the appeal of Manifest Destiny, see Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012). For a historiographical overview of the economic and social changes of the era, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 856–78.
19. Quote in “The Two Baltimore Conventions,” Daily Atlas, May 30, 1844; “Democratic National Convention,” Baltimore Sun, May 28, 1844.
20. “Texas—The Prospect,” Liberator, May 24, 1844.
21. Quote in Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist, 91.
22. Robert Seager II, And Tyler Too: A Biography of John and Julia Gardiner Tyler (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 228; “The Two Baltimore Conventions,” Daily Atlas, May 30, 1844.
23. “Correspondence of the Express, Baltimore, May 27, Night,” Cleveland Herald, Jun. 1, 1844; “The Baltimore Loco Foco Convention,” Daily Atlas, May 31, 1844.
24. “The Baltimore Loco Foco Convention,” Daily Atlas, May 31, 1844; “Democratic Meeting in Baltimore,” North American and Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), May 30, 1844.
25. “Democratic Meeting in Baltimore,” North American and Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), May 30, 1844.
26. Hickman, Life and Public Services, 26; Ben Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (Tecumseh, MI: A. W. Mills, 1886), 321.
27. For a more flattering portrait of Dallas, see John M. Belohlavek, George Mifflin Dallas: Jacksonian Patrician (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977).
28. “The Responses to the Nomination of Mr. Polk,” Easton (MD) Gazette, Jun. 8, 1844; “The Loco Foco Candidates,” Daily Atlas, Jun. 4, 1844; Benton quote in Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Life of Henry Clay (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937), 367.
29. Henry Clay letter to Willie P. Mangum, Lexington, Jun. 7, 1844, PHC, 10:66; “The ‘Democratic Nomination,’ ” DNI, May 30, 1844.
30. “The Loco Foco Candidates,” Daily Atlas, Jun. 4, 1844; “Washington Correspondence,” (Philadelphia) North American and Daily Advertiser, May 31, 1844; Philip Hone, Diary of Philip Hone, 2:224; “The Responses to the Nomination of Mr. Polk,” Easton (MD) Gazette, Jun. 8, 1844.
31. “The Democratic Nomination at Last,” NYH, May 31, 1844.
32. “The ‘Democratic Nomination,’ ” DNI, May 30, 1844.
33. Washington Standard quote in “The Responses to the Nomination of Mr. Polk,” Easton (MD) Gazette, Jun. 8, 1844.
34. “The Democratic Nomination at Last,” NYH, May 31, 1844.
35. “The ‘Democratic Nomination,’ ” DNI, May 30, 1844; Washington Standard quote in “The Responses to the Nomination of Mr. Polk,” Easton (MD) Gazette, Jun. 8, 1844.
36. Wendy Moonan, “Antiques: A Gothic Tale of a Bedstead Fit for a President,” New York Times, Nov. 3, 2000.
37. Henry Clay letter to Willie P. Mangum, Lexington, Jun. 7, 1844, PHC, 10:66; “The Democratic Nomination at Last,” NYH, May 31, 1844. Issue 152.
CHAPTER 3. THE UPSET
1. Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (New York: Charles Lohman, 1838), 1:174.
2. Henry Alexander Wise, Seven Decades of the Union: The Humanities and Materialism (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1876), 171. David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler refute the veracity of this story, which was widely reprinted by the late nineteenth century. See Henry Clay: The Essential American (New York: Random House, 2010), 310.
3. “Warn the Committee!” American Antiquarian Society, 1844; Henry Clay to John M. Clayton, Blue Licks, Aug. 22, 1844, PHC, 10:102.
4. “The Democratic Nominations,” Barre (MA) Gazette, Jun. 14, 1844; Anton and Fanny Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1892), 96, 43–44.
5. Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 49.
6. George H. Hickman, The Life and Public Services of the Hon. James Knox Polk: With a Compendium of His Speeches on Various Public Measures, Also a Sketch of the Life of the Hon. George Mifflin Dallas (Baltimore: N. Hickman, 1844), 4, 6; “The Democratic Nominations,” Barre (MA) Gazette, Jun. 14, 1844.
7. Enos Cobb, “Eulogy on Polk and Dallas,” Burlington, VT, 1844, AAS 14254, American Broadsides.
8. Andrew Jackson, Correspondence, 6:275; quote in Augustus C. Buell, History of Andrew Jackson, Pioneer, Patriot, Soldier, Politician, President (New York: Charles Scribner, 1904), 2:384.
9. Edwin Erle Sparks, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Dansville, NY: F. A. Owen, 1918), 32.
10. Fragment on Government, Abraham Lincoln, CW, 2:220–21.
11. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements About Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); 372, 390, 18. Many thanks to Mark E. Neely Jr. for bringing this to my attention.
12. Communication to the people of Sangamo County, Mar. 9, 1832, CW, 1:9; William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Welk, Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life (New York: Appleton, 1892), 90, 95.
13. Quote in Albert Jeremiah Beveridge, Lincoln, 1809–1865 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 1:309.
14. Harriett Chapman quote in William E. Gienapp, Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America, A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 37; Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln (New York: Norton, 1987), 133.
15. Quote in Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, 133.
16. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010), 77.
17. Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865, ed. Earl Schenck Miers (Washington, DC: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 1960), 1:227, 2:229.
18. Abraham Lincoln to Williamson Durley, Oct. 3, 1845, CW, 1:347–48.
19. Lincoln to Richard S. Thomas, Springfield, IL, Feb. 14, 1843, CW, 1:307.
20. Quote in Herndon, Lincoln, 254.
21. Mansfield Tracy Walworth, “Colonel John Hardin,” Historical Magazine and Notes and Queries Concerning the Antiquities, 2nd ser., 5 (1869): 237, 235; Ellen Hardin Walworth, “Charter Member, Application for Membership #5,” Dec. 1890, Manuscript Collection. Daughters of the American Revolution Library, C
entennial Hall, Washington, DC; Mary S. Lockwood, Lineage Book of the Charter Members of the Daughters of the American Revolution (Harrisburg, PA: Harrisburg Publishing, 1895), 1:2–3.
22. Robert Ralston Jones, Fort Washington at Cincinnati, Ohio (Cincinnati: Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Ohio, 1902), 28; Andrew R. L. Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 149–56.
23. Walworth, “Colonel John Hardin,” 237.
24. Abraham Lincoln to Jesse W. Fell [with enclosure by Lincoln], Dec. 20, 1859, ALP.
25. Beveridge, Lincoln, 1:180; Gustave Koerner, Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, 1809–1896, ed. Thomas J. McCormack (Cedar Rapids, IA: Torch Press, 1909), 1:499.
26. Beveridge, Lincoln, 1:306; William Henry Milburn, The Lance, Cross and Canoe; The Flatboat, Rifle and Plough in the Valley of the Mississippi (New York: N. D. Thompson, 1892), 672.
27. Lincoln to Speed, Mar. 24, 1843, CW, 1:201.
28. John J. Brown to John J. Hardin, Nov. 8, 1844, Danville, IL, HFP, Box 15:3.
29. Quotes from Alexander Anderson in Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 31.
30. James E. Winston, “The Annexation of Texas and the Mississippi Democrats,” Southwestern Historical Review 25, no. 1 (1921): 5; Koerner, Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, 1:488; Morrison, Slavery and the American West, 31.
31. Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 248–59.
32. On Mexican development, see Philip L. Russell, The History of Mexico from Pre-Conquest to Present (New York: Routledge, 2010), 161–64, 182–83.
33. David A. Clary, Eagles and Empire: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle for a Continent (New York: Bantam, 2009), 24; Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
34. “The Great War Meeting,” New York Herald, Jan. 30, 1848; on Americanizing cultural forces in northern Mexico, see Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities on the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).