The Texas issue defeated Clay. Like Van Buren, he courted Northern favor and the abolitionist vote by his anti-annexation stance while Polk, criticized as “Jackson’s puppet” and praised as “Young Hickory,” stood steadfast behind the movement to admit Texas to the Union. Jackson favored the measure, and the outgoing President, John Tyler, had signed the treaty of annexation just the month before the Polk-Clay campaign opened.
Polk won the election in true dark-horse fashion. The November, 1844, results showed him nudging Clay out by 37,000 votes out of 2,600,000 cast. In electoral votes, Polk had 275, representing twenty-six states, to Clay’s 105 and eleven states.
“Young Hickory,” age forty-nine years and 122 days, took office as the eleventh President of the United States on March 4, 1845, three months before Andrew Jackson died in Nashville at age seventy-eight. Polk’s inauguration was the first reported by telegraph.
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His religion, it was said, was politics, and had been so since 1820 when he had been admitted to the bar in Tennessee. He had no discernible interests other than politics. He had no hobbies, sports, or pastimes, was neither a reader, a dreamer, a talker nor a laugher—“no wit, no literature,” in John Quincy Adams’ words. In a place and pursuit in which men mingled, drank and smoked and made promises, Polk did none of these things and had no intimates other than Sarah Polk.
He was lean, thin-lipped, morose, walked erectly, and dressed scrupulously. He had deep-set gray eyes and a high-browed head with graying hair brushed straight back behind his ears. To many, he gave the appearance of a formidable schoolmaster, cold, suspicious, pompous, narrow. It was believed that his distant and humorless nature was the product of his lifelong delicate health, worsened by his years in Washington. The miasmal swamps bordering the Potomac and their infestations of mosquitoes and flies gave rise to malarial and typhoid fevers, and dysentery, dangerous to a healthy man, murderous to one of such a delicate constitution as Polk’s.
One attribute was granted to him by even his most vociferous opponents: James Knox Polk had focus, an utterly clear vision of what he intended to accomplish in his single term as President.
In his inaugural address, he spoke of the Republic of Texas and its impending annexation. “Our Union is a confederation of independent States,” he said, “whose policy is peace with each other and all the world. To enlarge its limits is to extend the dominions of peace over additional territories and increasing millions.” He seemed to hint that there were other lands that would benefit from annexation but said, somewhat abstrusely, that the rest of the world had nothing to fear from American military ambition and that the Texas example should be looked upon “not as the conquest of a nation seeking to extend her dominions by arms and violence, but as the peaceful acquisition…”
He also advocated free trade and was determined to lower taxes on imported goods, but few, other than trade-and-tariff authorities, cared about such dull matters. What Polk only hinted at in his inaugural speech was a breathtaking plan to nearly double the geographical size of the United States: he intended to preside over statehood for Texas (which included all the territory north from the Rio Grande to the Arkansas River and as far west as Santa Fé); he would push the British out of Oregon; and he would “acquire,” preferably by purchase through diplomacy, Mexico’s territory lying between the Continental Divide and the Pacific, with California the ne-plus-ultra objective.
In accomplishing all this, he hoped to avoid war, but he was willing to wage war if diplomacy failed.
2
In the expansionist 1840s, there were many “questions”—a word used in political and diplomatic circles to denote the conflict between one or more nations over some other nation’s property. In Europe, the “Eastern question” had to do with England’s concerns that Russia might swoop down Central Asia to Constantinople and threaten British India. This question eventually resulted in the Crimean War.
James Knox Polk, when he took office in March, 1845, had several questions to answer, the most important of them focused on Mexico. Even the “Oregon question” had a Mexican connection.
Oregon territory (including the present states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming west of the Continental Divide) had been under “joint occupancy” by the United States and England since Secretary of State John Quincy Adams had negotiated a treaty between the two countries in 1818. Oregon became a “question” when the first Americans, most of them Methodist missionaries, came to the Willamette Valley, south of the Columbia River, in the 1830s. This advent was followed by the “Oregon Fever” emigration a decade later, when reports of cheap land there arrived in the eastern United States. The British moved their Hudson’s Bay Company headquarters to Vancouver Island, virtually conceding control to the Americans of the territory between Puget Sound south to the boundary with Mexican California.
But England still hovered over the territory, its presence an American expansionist’s nightmare. British warships paid visits to the Oregon coast and were sighted as far south as Acapulco. Did the British covet California? Might they seize it from Mexico, or purchase it? And what were the Russians doing plying the sea-lanes of the northern coasts? And the French and the Prussians?
American claims on Oregon rested on the 54°-40’ line of latitude, encompassing all of Vancouver Island, and one of the campaign slogans that helped Polk’s election was “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!” The President, while willing to negotiate the latitude, said our “title” to Oregon was “clear and unquestionable,” and one of his first moves as President was to ask Congress to give England one year’s notice that the United States would assert its claim to Oregon.
A convention signed on June 15, 1846, ended the joint occupancy and Oregonians were notified that they were now American citizens.
This was the resolution of the first of Polk’s objectives as President.
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The “Texas question” had been hanging in the air for a decade and it was on the Texas experience, and the precedent set by it, that Polk’s designs on California pivoted.
In 1821, soon after winning its independence from Spain, Mexico had welcomed several hundred American settlers to its northern province of Texas y Coahuila. These emigrants, most of them Southerners from slave states, won important concessions from Mexico—they were allowed to keep slaves, were protected from debts they had incurred in the United States—and by 1830, some thirty thousand Americans had posted notice that they were “Gone to Texas.” But Mexico’s internal turbulence, its changes in leadership and policy, eventually led to harsher laws, trade restrictions, and attempts to control the flow of emigrants to its Rio Grande territory. Out of Mexico’s anarchy grew the Texas independence movement that culminated in the American setback at the Alamo on March 6, 1836, and Sam Houston’s annihilation of the Mexican army at San Jacinto six weeks later.
Mexico never relinquished its province to the Americans, nor did it recognize the existence of the Republic of Texas. Offers by the United States to purchase the province were rebuffed. It was a certainty that the American annexation of Texas would mean war, and it was this eventuality that faced President Polk when he took office. His predecessor, John Tyler, as the last act of his administration, sponsored a resolution to annex the Republic of Texas.
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In the first summer of the Polk presidency, John Louis O’Sullivan’s extraordinary “Manifest Destiny” call to arms appeared in the July–August issue of his paper, The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, arguing in favor of the annexation of Texas. The lawyer-editor articulated the doctrine with some prescience in writing that after Texas was absorbed into the Union, “California will, probably, next fall away from the loose affiliation which, in such a country like Mexico, holds a remote province in a slight equivocal kind of dependence on the metropolis.”
He said that “the Anglo-Saxon foot” was already on California’s borders, and what he called “the advance guard of t
he irresistible army of the Anglo-Saxon emigration” was already pouring down into the province “armed with the plough and the rifle” in the first stage of a process, not far distant, “when the Empires of the Atlantic and the Pacific would again flow together into one.”
3
While the phrase “Manifest Destiny” did not appear in the President’s speeches, journal, or correspondence, the essence of the concept to James Knox Polk was political scripture. Oregon’s boundary was in negotiation, and joint sovereignty of the territory with England would soon end; the annexation of Texas had all but been accomplished in the month he took office. But he knew that Mexico was unlikely to yield to diplomacy or a cash offering for its territory north of the Rio Grande and west to the Pacific—New Mexico and, the Koh-i-noor in the crown, California.
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Seventeen days after Polk took office, he had a special meeting with his secretary of the navy, George Bancroft. This urbane Massachusetts Democrat, a distinguished historian and author1 who would soon see his dream of a naval academy at Annapolis come true, had among other distinctions that of being as close to a confidant as the President allowed. On March 21, 1845, as a result of their meeting, Bancroft sent a secret message by warship around Cape Horn to the Peruvian coastal port of Callao ordering Commodore John D. Sloat, commander of the navy’s Pacific Squadron, to proceed to the west coast of Mexico.
Sloat, age sixty-five, a New Yorker and forty-five-year veteran of the navy who had fought pirates in the West Indies and the British in the War of 1812, moved cautiously. His squadron consisted of the fifty-four-gun flagship Savannah, the Congress, of sixty guns, the sloops-of-war Warren, Portsmouth, and Levant, each carrying twenty-four guns, the armed schooner Shark, and a transport, Erie. One additional ship later joined Sloat’s flotilla as a reinforcement, the sloop Cyane, which sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, that summer, taking fifty-six days to reach Rio de Janeiro and another fifty-three battling the Horn to Valparaiso.
The Cyane joined Sloat’s squadron in November, and by then the commodore had received additional orders from his government: Bancroft’s new messages said that if Sloat learned “beyond a doubt” that the United States and Mexico were at war, he was to sail north immediately, seize San Francisco Bay, and blockade or occupy other California ports as he deemed necessary. In so doing, he would “preserve, if possible, the most friendly relations with the inhabitants” of the province and be “assiduously careful to avoid any act which could be construed as an act of aggression.”
Since no transcontinental telegraph system existed in 1845, nor a canal across Central America to the Pacific, Bancroft’s secret orders to Commodore Sloat were carried by courier on a sailing ship and were many months in transit. Even more months passed before Sloat could provision his Pacific Squadron and make his voyage north from Callao to Mazatlán, the principal seaport on the west coast of Mexico.
In mid-June, before Bancroft’s orders reached Sloat, other orders, these to the army, were carried from Washington to Fort Jesup, in the Red River Valley of Louisiana. The dispatches, from Polk’s secretary of war, William Marcy, to the Fort Jesup commanding officer, Brigadier General Zachary Taylor, represented an even more overt acknowledgment of impending war than Bancroft’s directive to Sloat. Taylor was instructed to move his force of about two thousand men to a camp below New Orleans, where they would embark on steamers down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, thence to another camp on Corpus Christi Bay in Texas. Taylor had commanded Fort Jesup and its euphemistically named “Army of Observation” for over a year, since, during the Tyler administration, Texas annexation had seemed imminent and with it, anticipated troubles with Mexico on the Rio Grande. The potential for such difficulties was exacerbated by the appearance in the Gulf in May, 1845, of a particularly warlike naval officer commanding the flagship Princeton and a small flotilla. Commodore Robert Field Stockton of New Jersey seemed to be an emissary for President Polk as he visited Galveston and spent his time assessing local attitudes toward annexation and sending urgent but unnecessary messages to Washington warning of Mexican threats if the United States interfered in Texas.
By the end of July, Stockton had returned home, the government of the Republic of Texas had approved the annexation treaty, and General Zachary Taylor had disembarked his force—now renamed the “Army of Occupation”—at Corpus Christi, just below the mouth of the Nueces River. By October, this army of over thirty-five hundred men had been divided into four infantry regiments, one of which was comprised of dragoons (cavalrymen who fought dismounted as infantry), and four of artillery. At the time, the entire standing army of the United States numbered only eight thousand, most of whom were Indian fighters scattered around frontier posts from the Florida swamps to the Kansas plains.
Taylor had no detailed orders or plan, no idea of the size or whereabouts of the Mexican army; he was camped in country where firewood was scarce, the water brackish. An enormous train of camp followers trailed the army and sold liquor to the troops, nearly half of which were Irish and German immigrants, tough fighters but owing no particular allegiance to the United States. Desertions were commonplace.
The general and his restless army stayed put for six months.
4
By the end of his first nine months in office, President Polk had a squadron of warships cruising off Mazatlán and an army camped in Texas. His War and State Departments had generated other significant missions as well, several adding to the country’s war footing, one a forlorn attempt to avert war.
In October, 1845, when reinforcements were reaching Zachary Taylor’s Army of Occupation in the Texas sand dunes, Polk’s secretary of state, James Buchanan, sent secret instructions to Thomas O. Larkin, consul for the United States at Monterey and the most influential American in Mexican California. Now age forty-three, Larkin had ventured to Monterey in 1832 and with a capital of five hundred dollars, opened a small store and flour mill. From this modest beginning grew a prosperous trade in horses, furs, lumber, and flour with Mexico and the Sandwich Islands. Remarkably, he never took Mexican citizenship and managed to stay aloof from provincial politics. Described as “prudent and praiseworthy,” he was tactful, practical, and honorable, a pleasant man of sound, conservative judgment. As consul since 1842, he had from the beginning assiduously reported his somewhat alarmist views on the activities of his British and French counterparts.
The Buchanan dispatch, dated October 17, 1845, and carried on the frigate Congress around Cape Horn to the Sandwich Islands, reached Larkin via a merchant vessel. It appointed him a confidential agent of the State Department at a salary of six dollars a day, and instructed him to take advantage of any signs of unrest among the Californios, to “conciliate” them and urge their support of annexation by the United States. In these efforts he would be aided by the American vice consul, William Leidesdorff at Yerba Buena, the settlement in San Francisco Bay. Larkin was to make clear to his influential contacts that the United States could not interfere in matters between California and Mexico City, but that in the event of hostilities between Mexico and the United States, if California asserted its independence, Washington would “render her all the kind offices in our power as a Sister Republic.” Larkin was also to spread the word that if Californians wished to unite “their destiny with ours, they would be received as brethren.”
Larkin leaked this information to a number of American influentials and worked to win the support of Don Mariano Vallejo. This powerful and independent jefe político of Sonoma, north of San Francisco Bay, Larkin described as “very studious for a Californian … formal, stiff, pompous and exacting … pleasant and condescending, anxious for popularity and the good will of others.” The consul felt that he would be a valuable ally and would support annexation. Colonel Vallejo, whose two sisters were married to Americans and who had many American friends, was a wealthy man. He owned 175,000 acres of land stretching from San Francisco Bay north to the Valley of the Moon. He had encouraged emigration to Cal
ifornia since, he said, he was powerless to prevent it. He was a Californio patriot, not a Mexican patriot, who felt that the future of California lay with friendly relations with the United States.
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In the executive mansion in May, 1845, Polk’s guest list included the Senate’s most impassioned expansionist, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, and Benton’s son-in-law, the celebrated explorer Captain John Charles Frémont, recently returned from an army Topographical Corps expedition to Oregon and California.
Frémont gave the President a detailed account of his journey west, spoke of the limitless potential of Oregon and California, and of the importance of continuing the exploration of the region toward preparing accurate data and maps. He told Polk that existing maps were not dependable and gave as an example a map he had examined in the Library of Congress that depicted the Great Salt Lake as being linked to the Pacific by three large rivers. None of these rivers existed, Frémont said. He had been there.
The President listened, asked questions, and in his journal noted only that Frémont was “young” and “impulsive.” But since Mexico and its provinces of New Mexico and, especially, California preoccupied him that summer, he must have closely questioned the explorer, who was preparing to embark on a new westward expedition. There had been disturbing reports circulating in Washington that the British, whose presence in Oregon was problem enough, had designs on California and perhaps were even being welcomed there by Mexico. Polk may have viewed the impulsive captain of topographers as an instrument to upset those plans. Frémont might be able to determine, in the event of war with Mexico, the degree of resistance the United States could face in California and how much assistance could be expected from the American settlers there.
Frémont himself later noticeably omitted mention of the President when he wrote of the meeting: “California stood out as the chief subject in the impending war; and with Mr. Benton and other governing men at Washington, it became a firm resolve to hold it for the United States.…”
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