Seizing Destiny How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea

Chapter 11: The lost virtue of their better days, 1846-1850 The great irony of James K. Polk's career as territorial expansionist extraordinaire, the one-term President under whom the United States acquired more land than any other, is that he was personally the least expansive of men. A slight, clenched, deeply suspicious individual, he was a classic stay-at-home, certainly when compared with the Founding Fathers and his predecessors in the White House. All had seen a good deal of America, and a number of themFranklin, the Adamses, Jefferson, and Monroeknew much of Europe. The determinedly insular Polk knew nothing beyond a narrow belt of the middle South and Washington, hardly a cosmopolitan place at the time; the farthest he ventured was an occasional trip to his Mississippi plantation. He never went to Europe, never saw the wildly beautiful western reaches of North America that he so coveted for his country. He never served in the military, never went in for fun and games, was rarely seen even to smile. His idea of a high old time was to take a brisk walk or horseback ride at dawn or duskand while President, he infrequently found time for even these escapes from his duties. He was so immersed in the minutiae of the nation's highest office that he almost never took a vacation or a whole day offthough he did go to a Presbyterian church some Sundays with his wife, Sarah. He did not read for pleasure or to broaden his frame of reference; as a result, he squinted xenophobically at the world and perceived political issues in stark black and white. To him, all Whigs were blackguards, fellow Democrats who challenged his policies were traitors, abolitionists were wicked, the British were predatory bullies, and the Mexicans, like other nonwhite peoples and races, were unworthy of and ill-equipped for democracy. And yet James Polk, longtime Andrew Jackson stooge, party hatchetman, and pedestrian thinker, in a feat of colossal and altogether unexpected imagination, came to power consumed by a grand vision of a continental nation that he intended to see realized within the single presidential term he had allotted himself. And no foreign power would be permitted to stand in the way of America's destined ascent to global greatness. If that meant war, then he would wage it, though he had no experience in military matters and scant respect for professional warriors. He nonetheless understood what war was, and knowing the strength of the British, he managed to avoid war with them over Oregon. Knowing the weakness of the Mexicans, he all but invited combat with them to gain the American Southwest. And when the war came with Mexico, he supposed that its fractious, woebegone people would thank him for liberating them from their long suffering at the hands of military tyrants, demonic clerics, corrupt bureaucrats, and a disdainful landed gentry. What Polk failed to understand was that the Mexicans' fierce pride in their nationhood was the binding element in their survival as a sovereign people. The appropriation of Mexico's heartland and subjugation of its people were never Polk's purpose. Having all but ensured the inclusion of Texas within the Union by his election to the presidency and then stared down the British to gain all of Oregon that the nation could usefully digest, the President now dedicated himself to winning American dominion over the fragrant, primeval Shangri-la that formed the choicest stretch of the hemisphere's Pacific shoreline. California, with its dazzling, craggy 800-mile coast, long, lush central valley quilted between two soaring mountain ranges, and an ideal climate for growing fruits, grains, and vegetables of infinite variety, had languished in its virtually unspoiled state of nature since Spanish explorers had claimed it in 1542. The mostly Franciscan fathers who inKluger, Richard is the author of 'Seizing Destiny How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea', published 2007 under ISBN 9780375413414 and ISBN 0375413413.