Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  Then along came Franklin Pierce, who was an easy-going, good-looking fellow who liked to be considered a friendly man to everybody and who liked everybody in sight provided people didn’t try to make him work too hard. And after that came James Buchanan, who was an old bachelor from Pennsylvania and believed that the president had no power to lead the country, and that the principal or sole role of the president was to enforce existing laws without considering changing situations.

  That’s one of the reasons, incidentally, that South Carolina was allowed to secede without interference, when the Civil War was getting ready to happen during Buchanan’s administration. There are always people in Congress who’ll try to hedge in the president and keep him from doing his job if he’ll let them, and the presidents I’ve just named were perfectly willing to let someone else do the work. They just didn’t want to do the work themselves. It’s fortunate that Polk was an outstanding president, but he was the only outstanding president of that whole long period, until Lincoln came along.

  It was also a difficult period for Polk because the condition of the nation was a peculiar one at the time, with southern states and northern states struggling against each other to gain control of the Senate. And of course, the entry of Texas into the Union, one more slave state that might upset the balance between North and South, exacerbated things. But Polk was interested strictly in what was good for the country as a whole, not in the wishes of one part of the country or another, and he felt very strongly that it would be the best thing for the country if the whole southwest corner of our area could be made part of the United States. The movement of pioneers and settlers into the West and the Southwest was taking place and increasing all the time, and he was all for an increase in the size of our country.

  Around that time, a fancy phrase began to be used around the country. The phrase was “manifest destiny,” and it expressed the belief of many of our citizens at that time that our country was destined, I suppose by God, to rule the area from coast to coast. Well, I don’t like that phrase, and I don’t think I’d have believed in it if I had been alive during that period, either; I think we were lucky in having people in the areas around us who wanted to become part of the United States, and I think we were smart in buying up some of those areas around us when we had the opportunity to do so.

  Nor do I like the use of that phrase to define the difference between the way some other countries behaved over the years and the way we behaved. Here, for example, is something I’ve just read. “Imperialism implies the conquest of colonial people who would then be kept in a state of permanent subserviency to the mother country, but manifest destiny, on the other hand, proposes the annexation of adjacent territories whose people would then be elevated to a point where they can enjoy the benefits of the American Constitution.”

  Well, it’s certainly true that, when we took other territories into the United States, we did so with the idea that the people would have exactly the same privileges that people had in other parts of the country. But I don’t care much for that “elevated” stuff, since the people we took in were just as good as we were to begin with, and I don’t think “manifest destiny” has anything to do with it. I think we were just doing what’s right.

  Polk was a strong supporter of Texas’ entry into the United States, both as a candidate and as president, so he was blamed when our war with Mexico started up about a year later. The plain fact, however, was that he had to meet the situation or lose Texas right after we’d gained it, and so he met it. Our annexation of Texas made Mexico our bitter enemy for a while; diplomatic relations broke off between our two countries, and we began to snarl at each other, with the United States insisting that our southwest border extended to the Rio Grande and Mexico insisting that it extended to the Nueces River, giving us much less territory. There was also a growing problem because many Americans had claims of various kinds against the Mexican government and kept pressing Washington because the Mexicans just ignored those claims.

  Polk tried a peaceful approach first. He sent John Slidell, who had been minister to Mexico before the two countries broke off diplomatic relations, into Mexico, and Slidell carried in his pocket an offer to pay Mexico for the disputed territory, and at the same time pay additional money for the areas comprising New Mexico and California, which had become populated more by American settlers than by Mexicans. But the Mexican government wouldn’t even give Slidell an audience, and Polk decided that the only thing to do was to send an American military detachment headed by Zachary Taylor into the controversial area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande.

  It wasn’t a big military force, just 3,500 men, but everybody knew that it represented about half of the entire United States Army at the time, and the Mexicans viewed the arrival of Taylor and his men almost with amusement. On May 9, 1846, they sent a much larger force of Mexican soldiers across the Rio Grande and attacked Taylor’s men immediately. This caused Polk to ask Congress to declare war on Mexico, and Congress made it official on May 13.

  The vote to declare war on Mexico was passed by a big margin, forty to two in the Senate and 174 to fourteen in the House, but that didn’t mean that Polk’s decision was popular with everybody. He was called a warmonger and a militant expansionist, particularly by the Whig press, but every good American president has been an expansionist to a certain extent. One Whig newspaper even said it was such a wicked war that they hoped that all the soldiers sent down to fight would drown in the ocean and the country would be rid of them. Didn’t some people say the same thing about our soldiers in Korea later on? The thing that was really bothering the Whigs, of course, was the fear that the accumulation of territory in the Southwest would make the Northeast less powerful, particularly since Texas had come in as a slave state and some other new states might come in the same way. Even Lincoln, who was then thirty-seven years old and an obscure congressman from Illinois who probably didn’t think much about eastern power, was pretty vocal on the subject of the war because he was a Whig at the time and against anything Polk wanted to do. He called the war unconstitutional and an act of aggression and a very dirty business. And then he was the most unconstitutional president we ever had when he got there himself, because he had to be.

  It’s the sad truth that political parties, important as they are in certain ways, sometimes impede progress rather than advance things. You’ve got to have a leader with ability and strength to work out the welfare of the country in spite of what any party wants to do for its own purposes. And as far as I’m concerned, Polk was the perfect president for the period because what was needed was a man who was strong enough to meet the existing situation and carry through the program that he felt was right, and that’s what Polk did. The Whigs were perfectly willing to vote a lot of money for matters that involved business, particularly big business, but didn’t want to vote money for men and armaments even though the money was clearly needed. It was just like it is today. There isn’t any difference. The Republicans are just Whigs all over again.

  You’ve heard Nixon say that the Democrats always made war and Republicans always kept the peace. Well, that’s just political conversation, nothing but political conversation.32 Whenever it was necessary for a country to go to war, it didn’t make any difference who was in power. How did the Spanish-American War come out under a Republican administration? It was a situation that had to be met, and it was met. Why did the War Between the States take place, when Lincoln - also, of course, a Republican - wanted to preserve the Union? There isn’t any difference in the situation when emergency comes - it makes no difference which political organization is in control of the White House. The president has to make up his mind and decide what he wants to do and do it.

  And Polk was living in an age when the terrific burdens of making decisions in a war were entirely in the hands of the president. And when that came about, he decided that there were much more important things than going to parties and shaking hands with people, and he became our third real
commander in chief. Washington was our first commander in chief when we were still a collection of colonies and, when he became president, had to make it clear to the British that we intended to be a real country, and then Madison was commander in chief during the War of 1812, and Polk became our third. He acted both as president and as commander in chief because that’s what it took. He insisted that all matters of consequence had to be approved by him, and he didn’t delegate any real authority to anyone else, and he conducted the war right from the White House.

  And he did a good job, even though I’m sure it was a terrible strain and helped contribute to his death at the early age of fifty-three, just three months after he left office. I know exactly how he must have felt, but in my time there were more able and informed people around to help the president, and that made a difference.

  So Polk managed, in time, to get better artillery than the Mexicans and more soldiers than the Mexicans, and it didn’t take too long to win the war once that was all accomplished. Old Fuss and Feathers Scott followed Taylor down into Texas, this time with 10,000 men, took Veracruz and beat Santa Anna at Cerro Gordo. Taylor beat the Mexicans at Palo Alto, Resada de La Palma, and Monterrey. And then Taylor moved deep into Mexico and in September 1847, captured Mexico City, and the Mexicans asked for peace and signed a treaty early the next year.

  The treaty was ratified by the Senate on March 10, 1848, and the Mexicans now took, essentially, what Polk had tried to offer them before the war. The Mexican government wasn’t happy about selling the territory to the United States and encouraged Britain to bid for it. Russia was also in the picture for a while. But Polk insisted that our purchase of the area was an essential part of the treaty that ended the war and finally prevailed. The United States paid Mexico $15 million, just about what Jefferson had paid for the Louisiana Territory, and agreed to take over and pay any legitimate claims that American citizens had against Mexico, which eventually cost our government an additional $3.5 million. In return, we received an area of about a half-million square miles, meaning about two-fifths of Mexico’s original territory. The agreement was that American territory would now extend from the mouth of the Rio Grande to the New Mexico line, then west to the Gila River, then along the Gila River to the Colorado River, and then along the boundary between Upper California and Lower California all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

  And in time, that area formed all of California, all of New Mexico, and substantial parts of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. As you’d expect, some of the usual carpers of the period said he overpaid, but he was perfectly right in deciding that it was the best thing for the country if the whole southwest corner of the United States could be made a part of the nation, and of course, nobody can find fault with that arrangement at the present time. If you include Texas, the settlement with Mexico gave the United States an additional 918,000 square miles.

  Polk also used the Mexican War to settle another territorial dispute, this one in connection with the Oregon Territory and with Great Britain rather than Mexico. Both our country and Britain claimed that territory, Britain saying it was part of Canada and our government saying it was part of the United States, and both countries had soldiers and settlers in the area going as far back as 1818. The United States insisted that it owned the land all the way up to the extreme northern boundary, which was 54°40’ latitude - and one of the Democratic slogans during the election campaign was “Fifty-four forty or fight!” - while the British insisted that American territory ended well below that at the Columbia River. Privately, the United States was completely willing to accept a compromise arrangement that would give us the disputed territory from latitude 42° north to the 49th parallel, and in fact we kept suggesting this to the British going all the way back to John Quincy Adams’ administration, but the British kept turning us down.

  Finally, at around the time Polk was sending troops down in the direction of Mexico, he again approached the British and once more offered to settle the dispute at the 49th parallel, hinting strongly that we were just as willing to take on the British to settle major territorial problems as we were the Mexicans. And this time the British agreed, and we signed a treaty with them in June 1846. We got the area that eventually comprised the states of Oregon and Washington, and the British got the area that eventually comprised British Columbia, and we’ve been friendly with our Canadian neighbors ever since.

  We’ve also been friendly with Mexico since that time, of course. During the Mexican War, the Mexican government changed several times, and at one point old Santa Anna was in exile in Cuba, and we helped him by letting him through our blockade at Veracruz and getting him back into Mexico, in return for a promise that he’d help end the war and convince Mexico to sell us the territory we wanted. He then proceeded to break that promise, when he became president again, by fighting us harder than ever. But I can’t agree with people who call him a charlatan for this reason, because some parts of Mexico didn’t go along with him, and it turned out that he didn’t have the power he thought he had. And when he organized his people to fight against us, he felt he was just defending his country, which I think he had every right to do.

  And as far as Mexico itself is concerned, my only thought, when I visited that country, is how happy I was about our friendship with the Mexican people. The secretary of state of Mexico rode along with me and asked me if I would be willing to put a wreath on a monument to the heroes of a battle there, and I said of course I would. I didn’t see any reason why heroes, wherever they are, shouldn’t be recognized by both their friends and their former enemies. The secretary of state didn’t think I knew anything about the battle, or the fact that it was a battle against the United States, but I did.

  Polk left office on March 4, 1849, planning to tour for a month or so through the South and then live out the rest of his life quietly in a house in Nashville he had just bought from Senator Felix Grundy, and which he and his wife, Sarah, renamed Polk Place. But there was a cholera epidemic in New Orleans, and Polk contracted the disease there and died at Polk Place on June 15. The Polks had no children, so he left his estate entirely to his wife, requiring only that all their slaves be freed upon her death. It was the right requirement, but it proved unnecessary. Sarah Polk lived until August 14, 1891, and died at the age of eighty-seven, long after the Civil War brought the much better result of freedom for all slaves.

  OLD ABE LINCOLN is the president I want to look at next, and for me as with nearly all Americans, he’s a president I admire tremendously. In a way, it’s surprising that I feel the way I do about Lincoln because I was born and raised in the South, of course, and a lot of southerners still don’t feel that way about him at all. And that included the Truman family, all of whom were against him. Some of them even thought it was a fine thing that he got assassinated.

  I realized even as a child that that was pretty extreme thinking or worse; let’s just call it dumb thinking, or no thinking at all. But it still took me a while to realize what a good man Lincoln really was, with a great brain and an even greater heart, a man who really cared about people and educated himself to the point where he knew how government should work and tried his best to make ours work that way. I felt just the opposite of the rest of the Truman family after I studied the history of the country and realized what Lincoln did to save the Union. That’s when I came to my present conclusion, and that was a long, long time ago.

  I suppose, too, that I shouldn’t even refer to him as old Abe Lincoln, because he really wasn’t old at all at any stage of his career. He was only twenty-three when he was a captain of Illinois volunteers serving under Zachary Taylor, twenty-four when he got a job as postmaster of New Salem, Illinois, twenty-five when he was elected to the Illinois legislature, thirty-eight when he was elected to the House of Representatives, and only fifty-one when he became our sixteenth president. And saddest of all, he was only fifty-six when he was murdered by John Wilkes Booth.

  Probably the most surprising thing about Lincoln
is the fact that he became president at all, because, by every standard and every rule of the game, the odds were totally against him. His grandfather, also named Abraham Lincoln, was a totally uneducated man who settled in Kentucky because a pal of his of whom you may have heard, a fellow named Daniel Boone, told him that land could be bought there for just a few dollars, following which the first Abe Lincoln was promptly shot dead by an Indian. Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, was illiterate, too, and I’ve read in some books that she was also illegitimate. She died when Lincoln was only nine. The future president’s father, Thomas Lincoln, was totally illiterate, too, a man who couldn’t read or write, could only barely scrawl his name when he had to sign some paper or other, and spent his whole life scratching out a bare living as a farmer and occasional carpenter.

  And though Thomas Lincoln survived his first wife by thirty-three years, living until the age of seventy-three, he wasn’t an especially good influence on his son, either. He married for a second time a year after Nancy Lincoln’s death, this time to a widow named Sarah Bush Johnston with three children of her own, and seems to have become more interested in Sarah’s kids than his own two children. Abe Lincoln and his father became increasingly distant, and Lincoln didn’t even attend his father’s funeral when the old man died in 1851.

  Lincoln also seems to have been beset by tragedy all of his life. His only sister, Sarah Lincoln Grigsby, died in childbirth, aged twenty-one. The great love of his young life, some historians say, was a red-haired beauty named Ann Rutledge, but she died of typhoid fever at the age of twenty-four, and those historians maintain that Lincoln never really got over it. (I do want to mention, though, that other historians say that that story was all hooey and that Ann Rutledge was actually engaged to a friend of Lincoln’s named John McNamar. And the woman Lincoln eventually married, Mary Todd Lincoln, always insisted that the story was completely false and was invented mostly by William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s onetime law partner and biographer, just to hurt her by hinting that Lincoln really loved the memory of someone else more than he loved her. It’s certainly true that Mary Lincoln and Herndon’s wife despised each other, and that the so-called evidence about the Lincoln-Rutledge romance presented in Herndon’s book was full of contradictions. Well, you can make up your own mind about that one.)