A Country Of Vast Designs

Robert W. Merry “A Country Of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, The Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent,” Simon & Schuster., 2009, 477 pps  

President James Polk, a protégé of Andrew Jackson, was elected our 11^th president in 1844 as a compromise candidate who promised to serve only one term, which he did, and then dying three months after his one term.  Yet, in those four years presiding over the only democratic republic in the world, a country not ruled by monarchs or despots, he secured the Oregon territory, slashed tariffs, reformed the national banking system and seized the whole Southwest from Mexico—an area that now comprises the states of California, Nevada and Utah, as well as parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming. 

Mexico, far from being an innocent victim of America’s lust for power and land, was ruled by a succession of corrupt, conservative, and autocratic governments that administered a republic in name only, one that was distorted by centuries of domination by the Spanish crown and the Roman Catholic Church. Polk was not blameless, Merry writes, especially in owning up to his larger territorial ambitions, “but the critics of Polk’s war consistently ignore the role of Mexico in these momentous events.”

However, this large expansion of the nation’s area opened anew the arguments over slavery and the territories that had seemingly been settled by the Missouri Compromise of 1820-21. Pro-slavery Southerners demanded that slavery be given the equal opportunity to spread into the southernmost of the newly acquired areas; antislavery Northerners demanded that slavery be halted. These clashes were the opening battles in the sectional political struggle that led, a dozen years after Polk left office, to the Civil War.

My Notes:  (kind of skimpy this time as I did not come across much I did not already know)

Pg. 49:  James Polk began his presidential campaign just two weeks after he had been defeated for the second time in seeking to be governor of Tennessee.

Pg. 180:  Mexico in 1840’s was place of social and economic rigidities, governmental despotism, massive illiteracy, and high mortality.  This generated two political realities—a rumbling discontent among the masses and feelings of hostility toward the Anglo-Saxons to the north.  In 1800 total income in the U.S. was about twice that of Mexico’s, half a century later it was thirteen times greater.  In 1790, Mexico’s population approached five million compared to fewer than four million in the U.S.  By 1840, the U.S. population had soared to seventeen million while Mexico’s had reached just seven million.

Pg. 347:  The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 ceded Texas to Spain in exchange for Florida.