REVISITING JAMES POLK: HIS WAR LEFT BORDER LEGACY

POLK: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America

By Walter R. Borneman
Random House, New York
422 Pages
By Juan Montoya

Which president aggressively planned to make war against another nation even before there was any proof that the country posed any threat to the United States?
Given the condition in which a former president left the Middle East, one could very well be tempted to think that the answer to the question might be George W. Bush. And in a way, the similarities between the 11th president and No. 43 are striking.

Author Walter K. Borneman, whose former historical works focused on the French and Indian Wars and the War of 1812, makes a strong argument that both Polk and W assiduously courted the god of war even as they worked the political machine in Washington to gain the authority from the U.S. Congress to justify their aggression.

In a sense, both Polk and Bush actually only asked for concurrence from the congress that a state of war existed rather than a deliberation about whether one would be declared. In Polk’s case, however, his belligerency was directed at our southern neighbor, who stood between the U.S. and its designs on California and the Southwest.
This has been the standard line about Polk: that his embrace of the Manifest Destiny doctrine prompted his invasion of a peaceful nation without any provocation. This line of thinking has been the thrust of historians like John D. Eisenhower (So Far From God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846-1848), and earlier, of iconoclasts like Bernard De Voto (The Year of Decision: 1846). Both these works made Polk out to be the quintessential imperialist set to grab as much real estate as he could by force of arms, if need be.

But Borneman makes clear that there were many forces at work that prompted Polk to order Zachary Taylor and the U.S. Army from the mouth of the Nueces to the Rio Grande. To begin with, when the presidential aspirants to the Democratic nomination of 1844 were quizzed on their stand on the annexation of Texas, only Polk responded in the affirmative. John Quincy Adams, who only 17 years before the declaration of the Republic of Texas in 1836 had negotiated the Adams-Onis Treaty recognizing the territory as part of Mexico, came out publicly against its annexation.

Martin Van Buren, who was vying for a second presidential term, also wrote against the inclusion of Texas as a state. And when even Henry Clay, a Whig (later the Republican Party), wrote his famous “Raleigh Letter” in opposition to annexation, the die was cast.

With no one else championing Texas, the Manifest Destiny mantle fell comfortably in Polk’s shoulders. Curiously, the popular support for the nationwide movement toward westward expansion was evidenced by the fact that it was Polk’s predecessor, John Tyler, who sent the question of Texas’s annexation to the Congress. But Tyler did not submit the act as an outright treaty of annexation, but rather a joint resolution of the Congress before Polk was even inaugurated.

Before then, the petition by the Texans (Sam Houston, of Tennessee, was president) was rejected twice by the previous administrations. Even after Texas declared her independence in 1836, the president and the congress refused to act.

There are many fascinating tidbits of historical fact in this biography that bear directly upon the start of the U.S.-Mexico War. Borneman makes it explicitly clear that the annexation of the state stoked the fires of secession and eventually, the Civil War, as sectarianism laid bare the division between the North and South on the matter of slavery, that “peculiar” institution.

That the historical forces that were sweeping the land at the time would one day come together to directly impact the space between the Nueces and the Rio Grande that we call home makes for a fascinating read.