Walter R. Borneman - Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America

N THE FALL OF 1843, James K. Polk appeared to be politically dead. Despite seven terms in Congress, two of them as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Polk's attempt to win reelection as governor of Tennessee had failed miserablynot just once but twice. Even the political power of ex-president Andrew Jackson, now an aging sage ensconced at the Hermitage, appeared unlikely to rescue him.

Yet eighteen months later, this man was inaugurated the eleventh president of the United States. How did this happen? Was James K. Polk really a dark horse who came out of nowhere to win the 1844 Democratic nomination, as conventional wisdom has long suggested, or was he one of the most experienced and astute politicians of his time?

And what of the country? What forcesManifest Destiny some called themwere at work not only to annex Texas but also in the span of four years under Polk's leadership to nearly double the American nation with the acquisitions of Oregon, California, and all of the Southwest?

Unabashedly proclaiming the policy of the United States to be one of continental expansion, Polk welcomed Texas into the union, bluffed the British out of half of Oregon, and went to war with Mexico to grab California and the Southwest. Yet a change of just 5,000 votes in New York would have elected Henry Clay president instead. Clay appeared content to let Texas remain independent and Oregon remain in British hands. How different the map of the United States might look today if that had happened.

Polk announced his intent to serve only one term even before his election. He immediately became a lame duck, but it allowed him to spend his political capital freely and he did so aggressively expanding the powers of the presidency more than any other president before the Civil War.

Along with James K. Polk, this is the story of aging Andrew Jackson, would-be president Henry Clay, cagey Martin Van Buren, feisty Thomas Hart Benton, and a young Whig from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln, who challenged Polk to name the exact spot where American blood had been spilled as his pretense for war with Mexico. It is also the story of bruising presidential campaigns, spoiler third parties, and less than stunning popular-vote triumphsall suggesting that recent presidential politics is nothing new.

It has long been popular to paint James K. Polk as a dark horse, but the record does not square with that tradition. If he was indeed one, he chose to ride boldly across a bright land and in doing so opened up the American West to half a century of unbridled expansion.

A PROLOGUE IN TWO PARTS

March 6, 1836

ONG BEFORE DAWN , the rattle of assembling infantry and the jangle of cavalry cut through the night air on the outskirts of the dusty little village of San Antonio. Inside the adobe walls of a 118-year-old mission, some two hundred mencommanded by William Barret Travis and including the legendary David Crockett and James Bowiewaited uneasily perhaps even impatiently.

For twelve days, this meager band had stalled the northward advance of Mexican president Antonio Lpez de Santa Anna's army of some three thousand. By all tenets of international law, Santa Anna was well within his rights. The Alamo and all of Texas were officially Mexican territory, but these Americansand tens of thousands more spread from the Sabine River to the Brazos and beyondhad other ideas.

Now the reckoning was to be complete. Mexican bugles blared the strains of the chilling degello. No quarter would be given. The first charge was repulsed; a second also failed to carry the adobe walls. But the attacking lines reformed and swept forward again. Minutes later, there were no Americans left alive within the Alamo save for Lieutenant Almeron Dickenson's wife, their infant daughter, and one of Travis's servants. As Susanna Dickenson assumed the role of surviving matriarch and led these survivors away from San Antonio, legend has it that Santa Anna saluted her.

This day, however, was not an end but a beginning. Over the next dozen years, from the bloodstained courtyard of one Mexican mission to the sweeping dictates of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the North American continent changed forever. It was, wrote a journalist named John L. O'Sullivan in describing the American national psyche, the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent.