The debate (at least one of them) about James Knox Polk, the eleventh, and seemingly very efficient, president, has to do with his pro-slavery inclinations mixed with his eagerness for a “war of choice” – rather than one of necessity. Most Polk enthusiasts tend to ignore the fact that he was both a good friend of Sam Houston and a long-time slave master. And though he privately declared he would free his slaves (when the economic moment was right), one of the last things he did as he was dying of cholera in 1849 was to order the purchase, in secret, of six more young slaves.
Regarding his war of choice, his modern supporters have argued that Polk wanted to grab the Republic of Texas, which was pressing for Washington’s annexation. Polk, often alluding to the avid interest Britain (and France) expressed in acquiring the break-away portion of what had been the New Spain province of Coahuila-Tejas when Stephen F. Austin, began bringing 300 American families into the territory in 1821. New Spain had been seeking settlers to form a buffer against roving, highly dangerous, bands of Comanches and other indians who ruled much of the territory north of the Nueces River.
An adamant expansionist – the term “manifest destiny” had not yet become popular – Polk was carrying on delicate if stern maneuvers with Britain regarding the Oregon Territory in what is now the Pacific coast of the United States. He was elected president by focussing on the need to secure the Oregon Territory (today’s states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, parts of Montana and Wyoming, and extending, in his mind, all the way north to the southern boundary of Russian-held Alaska). During his campaign, Polk minimized his true target, the Texas “problem,” until after he was elected.
Polk believed he had to strike as soon as possible. Washington, despite the number of experienced non-government “Mexico hands” available, was amazingly unknowing about Mexico. That lack of knowledge was about to cost thousands of U.S. and Mexican lives, and help lead to the American Civil War.
For instance, beginning a year after Polk became a member of the Tennessee bar in June, 1820, when as a friend of Houston, he would have been well aware of growing border hostilities, to the moment General Zachary Taylor, stationed on the Rio Grande, sent a dispatch to Washington April 16, 1846 – “Hostilities may now be considered as commenced.” Between those two dates, New Spain/Mexico had become increasingly unstable, having had 55 different heads of state. One of them lasted just 26 minutes. Equally significant, noted one historian, is the fact that it was soon apparent that, astonishingly, the deeply flawed Santa Ana was the most capable leader in Mexico – at least the only one canny enough to secure (frequently in the wake of stunning failure, lack of good sense, even courage) sufficient political backing to continue an amazingly checkered career as a leader, politically and militarily.On the other side, Polk, according to some contemporaries, was a man of “upright carriage, piercing gray eyes and a serious high-browed face,” who strode with impressive straight-backed energy – “a man who knew where he was going and knew what he was going to do when he got there.” “His entire appearance indicated dignity, urbanity decision.” But, “on close examination, showed flaws lay beneath that superficial impression.”
“Polk was also an untraveled small-town lawyer whose intense school-book reading had produced a well-rounded man. Humorless, cold, narrow, plodding, secretive, and sly … He displayed much of a Puritan’s self-righteousness and attitude toward ceaseless toil …”
Another wrote that “(His type) is the leading citizen and schemer of the small town, who marches up the center aisle on public occasions with creaking shoes and a wooden smile, to take his seat with a backward, all-embracing glance.”
Yet Polk obviously could look far ahead to a United States that stretched west to the Pacific and up the California coast, and could speak imaginatively about what a lucrative paradise this could mean.
But he could not imagine the nature of a much more immediate – and dire – fact. The significance of Mexico’s chaotic instability and lack of solid political leadership. The constantly changing, fierce, and unrelenting clashes between political groups certainly, after 55 different heads of state, clearly constituted a critical feature of Mexican society that Polk did not fathom. Nor did his successors – until Lincoln.
But to some more imaginative, more well-traveled and experienced observers, Mexico’s political failures indicated the possibility that, well deployed Spanish-speaking U.S. diplomats, commissioners, consuls, emissaries, observers and mere “visitors,” could report whenever Mexican executive chaos signaled that the country was primed for an offer of several million dollars, not only for Texas, but all that land between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, including all of Alta California. Not many years later, the much celebrated President Benito Juarez, heading a cash-strapped and harried government, was to offer the sale of Baja California to Abraham Lincoln. The U.S. Congress declined the offer.
Polk was a follower of the Southern slave-holder and Indian fighter, Democratic leader Andrew Jackson. Abraham Lincoln’s Whig Party, which was to become the Republican Party, opposed the war. Lincoln, as a young senator, was caustic about the war against Mexico, as was Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War. The influential Democrat Stephen Douglas called the war the “rape of Mexico.”
Polk’s errors: Given his political and strategic myopia, perhaps his other errors concerning the “Mexican War” were to expected: 1) Polk did not believe the war would last long – he seemed to be thinking in terms of months. For he believed the U.S. might could quickly force Mexico to sell him the territories he wanted. 2) Polk unwisely, for a number of well-demonstrated reasons, secretly sent a representative to Mexico’s former, openly corrupt, dictator Santa Ana, who was living in Cuba. The representative carried the message that the U.S. wanted to buy California and other Mexican territories. Santa Ana, of course, said he would agree to such a sale if the U.S. would help him return to power. 3) Polk ordered the U.S. Navy to let Santa Ana return to Mexico. American ships that blocked the port of Veracruz permitted the dictator to land. Of course, once Santa Ana reached the capital, he refused to honor his promises to Polk. He not only refused to end the war and sell California, but organized a new army to fight the yanquis. 4) U.S. army units Polk ordered to fight the war of choice were “inconceivably” small. America’s regular army when fighting began in May 1846 had only 6,562 men, including 637 officers and 5,925 enlisted personnel. It was to grow quickly, which was fortuitous. Decisive victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma (near present day Brownsville, Texas) pushed Mexican forces back from the Rio Grande. They meant that Mexico was going to fight a defense war totally on Mexican soil. The subsequent victory at Monterrey took Zachary Taylor just three days.
And the leaders of these forces – Commanding General Winfield Scott and General Zachary Taylor, in particular – were lucky to have West Point graduates such as Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Braxton Bragg and many other whose resourcefulness, skill and imagination made for the ultimate conquest of Mexico, something that Polk had not envisioned – he was fixated on his early, flawed vision of a “war” lasting six to 12 months, with operations confined to what was then the northern portion of Mexico.
That was not to be. Scott, landing in Veracruz, adopted a hugely risky strategy of cutting his supply of food, ammunition and arms as he rushed toward Mexico City. By isolating his army in the midst of hostile countryside, he was betting that his troops could live off that countryside. And he was right. Yet the American victories veil the fact that U.S. forces were repeatedly placed in precarious positions by Polk’s inclination to proffer others insufficient resources to do their job, to behave niggardly, making American forces fight on a shoestring. A suspicious man, the president didn’t trust his generals, and underestimated the problems and dangers they were facing. Polk was determined to “run the war as cheaply as possible to justify his role in bringing it on,” writes one fair-minded historian with a military background.
Polk’s expansionist war was a success. Yet it sowed some evil seeds by reviving what had been called the “most explosive question” in America at that time: would the new territories be slave or free? Polk wanted to immediately establish territorial government in New Mexico and California. But that clearly unreasonable ambition for congressional action was delayed by the question of slavery. The matter was: did congress have the power to determine control and bar slavery? Until Texas suddenly became a state, nearly all national leaders accepted the idea that congress did.
Congress used the Missouri Compromise as a model, with many exceptions and changes. California, which the “old” South said should be slave territory, became a free state, denying Southern expansion to the Pacific. Geography also played a part. Great portions of the newly acquired lands could not support crops that lent themselves to plantation slave labor. The Missouri Compromise of 1850, drafted by Whig (Republican) Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, and escorted through congress by Clay and Democrat Stephen Douglas, tamped down regional uprisings, dodged secession, and the resulting possibility of civil war for four years. But clearly, nothing dampened the slow-burning fuse of the South’s secession and the resulting catastrophe of 1861-1865 – and the emergence of one of America’s greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln. The debate about Polk’s actions before, during and after his Mexican adventure, and whether his choice made the Civil War inevitable, continues today.