MARTIN VAN BUREN lasted only one term because of the depression, even though he had about as much to do with it as you and I did. That depression, as I’ve said, was caused partly by crop failures but mostly by all the speculation in land that had been opened up for settlement - paper speculation that made the depression inevitable and probably unavoidable.

Some writers have even wondered in recent times why Van Buren became president at all, when there were other people around who seemed more brilliant - Calhoun, Webster, and Clay, for instance. Well, one reason Van Buren was elected was that the Democrats were the popular party in the country at that time and there were few other prominent men in view on the Democratic side at that point - Webster and Clay, as you know, being in the other party. Another reason, and the main one, was that he was Jackson’s vice president and he was elected because Jackson wanted him to be elected; it was a time when it looked as if the country had reached the heights of prosperity, which was the way it appeared just before the Panic of 1837, and he was supported by old Andy Jackson, so he got elected. And a third reason is that in that day, in the period from about 1820 to about 1850, the man who had the most outstanding career as a member of the House of Representatives or as a United States senator or as vice president of the United States was the man most certain to become president - because of his former position and because he displayed the fact that he probably understood better than anyone else what the government stood for.

And the truth is that none of those other men were better qualified for the job than Van Buren. Van Buren had a distinguished career in New York and in Washington, and then he became Jackson’s closest advisor, and I don’t think he ever gave Jackson any bad political advice or bad advice on any other subject. The other three men, on the other hand, developed their reputations mostly on the grounds of their ability to make speeches. Webster, for example, is remembered to this day mostly because he was such a great orator, and he was certainly always making orations, but that’s just another way of saying he was an old windbag, and he certainly wasn’t much else. It’s also coming out now that he was in the pay of the United States Bank all the time he was in the United States Senate, which I guess he had to be in order to pay his bills. It’s true that he later served as secretary of state for Harrison, Tyler, and Millard Fillmore, and I imagine he was a good secretary of state if three different presidents kept putting him into the job, but he was still a windbag. Calhoun had some good points, too, but he was such a states’-rights man that he was all too ready to push for destruction of the Union. And Clay had good points, too, but I think he was tainted permanently by that sneaky deal he made with John Quincy Adams.

I’m not saying, you understand, that Van Buren was a great president or even a good president; on the contrary, I’ve got to say that our country would have done just as well not to have had Van Buren as president. But my reasons are different from the fact that that catastrophe came along in the form of a depression while he was president. My particular reason for not thinking much of him is that he was just too timid and indecisive. I don’t know whether or not he even had any personal philosophy on the role of government; I think he was a man who was always worrying about what might happen if he did this or that, and always keeping his ear to the ground to the point where he couldn’t act as the chief executive, and for that reason he was just a politician and nothing more, a politician who was out of his depth. He was known as the Cautious Dutchman, and he was a cautious Dutchman. But he was just too cautious; he was always too busy listening to what people told him about what might be the result of what he might do, when what he should have done was gone ahead and done what was necessary to be done, and then listen to what happened.

One example is that depression, which Van Buren might not have been able to prevent, but which he could almost certainly have shortened. When the panic of 1837 came along, he just wasn’t there with remedies for the situation. As I’ve mentioned, old Andy Jackson arranged things so that he paid off the national debt, and it was a great thing to do, but there’s one advantage of having a national debt under certain other conditions, which is that it shows the people that the government is functioning and has the funds and the ability to make loans at a time of real emergency. And if Van Buren had just gone ahead and taken the bull by the horns and restored that debt to prevent the panic or at least bring it to an end, I don’t think he would have had any trouble, but he didn’t have the nerve to do it. Maybe it was a little too early in our history to expect a president to be capable of meeting a situation of that kind, but I don’t think so.

And another example was his inability to make up his mind on the admission of Texas as a state of the United States. He kept hesitating and kept hesitating because he didn’t know which side popular opinion would be on. If he had any conviction on what ought to be done, he would have ended up all right, but there he was again, trying to find out what people wanted so he could give them what they wanted, instead of having a policy of his own and telling people that it’s the best policy. And you can’t behave that way when you’re in a position of responsibility, as he was; you’ve got to make up your mind on the basis of what you think is right and then go ahead with it. All the South voted against him on that account, and that’s another reason he was defeated for reelection.

Van Buren ran against William Henry Harrison again, with my stubborn old great-great-uncle as Harrison’s vice-presidential candidate, and this time the Whigs got in, with Harrison getting 1,275,017 votes, representing 53 percent, to Van Buren’s 1,128,702 votes, which was about 47 percent. Harrison got 234 electoral votes and Van Buren got sixty. For the first time in our history, the campaigns for both candidates were as brassy as the ones we have today, with political posters, campaign songs, and all the rest, and as I’ve mentioned, with Van Buren pictured as a rich old dandy and Harrison as a plain fellow in a log cabin even though the exact opposite was true. (For the record, Harrison’s boyhood home in Virginia, the Berkeley plantation, was one of the largest and most elaborate in the state, and his house in North Bend, Ohio, his residence while he was running for the presidency, was a structure with a mere twenty-two rooms. He was a very rich man for his time, and the family was a well-known and powerful family. Harrisonburg, Virginia, was named for the family.)

Anyway, as you’ll recall, Harrison didn’t last very long as president. One of the principal campaign slogans on the Whig side was “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,” because Harrison had been a general fighting against the Indians in a battle near the Tippecanoe River, which is above Lafayette, Indiana, on November 7, 1811, and had won that battle, and he’d also fought in a battle or two in the War of 1812. And Harrison was a show-off and insisted on riding to the White House on a white horse and in his fancy uniform. He wouldn’t wear an overcoat because that would conceal the uniform, and he wouldn’t wear a hat or gloves either, and it was a particularly cold March day with an icy wind blowing. And he caught cold on the way to the White House and died a month later, and Tyler was president.

Harrison was the oldest man ever to be elected president,31 aged sixty-eight and two months when he died on April 4, 1841. But that isn’t all that old, and he probably would have survived a little icy wind except for the fact that he also showed off in other ways. He read the longest inaugural speech ever read by an incoming president; he spoke for about an hour and three-quarters and got everybody tired out, including himself, and even Daniel Webster, who had difficulty quitting during his own speeches, said that Harrison killed off two or three Roman councils and a Roman emperor or two in that message, it was that long. And then they had two or three inaugural balls that night, and he kept going from one to the other in his uniform and with no overcoat. And it killed him.

The Whigs had no platform at all during the campaign; Harrison was nominated and elected on the false premise of Van Buren’s prosperity and his own poverty, and on the fact that he was a military hero, and he was against everything that had gone before. (Yes, Virginia, “aginners” sometimes win. It’s happened in our own times as well.) And of course, Harrison didn’t accomplish a thing during the month he was in office. He made no contribution whatever. He had no policy. He didn’t know what the government was all about, to tell the truth. About the only thing he did during that brief period was see friends and friends of friends, because he was such an easy mark that he couldn’t say no to anybody, and everybody and his brother was besieging him for jobs. He had to get up early in the morning because people were sitting on his doorstep and sleeping on the White House grounds in order to get to see him. That wasn’t unusual; it was the same way during Jackson’s and Van Buren’s administrations and continued for a long time. People just showed up and asked the president personally for jobs after he was in office. That continued all the way up to the time of Grover Cleveland, when the civil service bills were passed. Up until then, the president was always importuned for all kinds of jobs. It hasn’t been so bad since then, but it’s bad enough, as I know from experience.

I mentioned that I was going to devote a small amount of space to old John Tyler, and here it comes.

I guess the reason I have a certain amount of grudging respect for old Tyler is that he knew his own mind and stuck to his decisions. He was the first vice president to take over when a sitting president died, and the decision he made at that time is the best example of what I mean. Daniel Webster was the secretary of state at that point, and Webster wanted it to appear that Tyler was just acting president; Webster, in fact, wanted Tyler to call himself acting president. Well, I think I’ve made it clear that I’m not too impressed by Dan Webster, even though he’s probably better known to the general public today than some of our past presidents because he was from New England and those New England historians gave him a lot of space in their writings. As far as I’m concerned, he was just a ballyhoo artist, and my old great-great-uncle shut him up pretty fast. He let Webster know that he knew the Constitution just as well as Webster did, and he said, “The Constitution provides that I’m the president of the United States when the president passes on, and I’ll function in that capacity. And for that reason I’m president and not acting president, and I’ll call myself president, period.”

He even sent back letters that came addressed to Acting President John Tyler; he wouldn’t even open them. He was the first man who followed through on that constitutional directive, and there have been six others who’ve done the same since, including me, of course. Webster backed down immediately because he knew that was Tyler’s attitude at all times: “As long as you support me, you can stay, but as soon as you feel you can’t support my policies, you’re free to resign. And if you don’t resign, I’ll kick you out.” That’s another thing I like about him because disloyalty is one of the things I despise most in life; I always tried to be loyal to people around me and expected loyalty in return from them.

And an even stronger example than Dan Webster’s foolishness about the acting-president business showed up in August and September 1841, just a few months after Tyler became president. Tyler came into the presidency as a Whig because he ran as vice president with Harrison, but he was really a Democrat, and he was an admirer of Jackson even though he didn’t agree with all of Jackson’s policies, by any means. So when Henry Clay pushed through a bill to bring the Bank of the United States to life again, Tyler vetoed the bill, and when Clay followed up with a bill to create a Fiscal Corporation, which amounted to the same thing, Tyler made it clear that he felt that the president and not some outside organization should have the final say on the fiscal policies of the country and vetoed that one, too. He vetoed that second bill on September 9, and two days later his entire cabinet resigned - all except Webster, who liked his job and wanted to keep it for a while, though he, too, finally left in 1843 and eventually returned to the senate. Webster felt he was particularly qualified for the office, and the people who hired him apparently felt he was, too, but I never thought so. Anyway, the mass resignation was all right with Tyler, and he just put in other people he thought were as good or better.

Webster also tried to convince Tyler that it was the custom for each member of the cabinet to have one vote and the president also to have one vote, and therefore, if the president was outvoted by his cabinet, that should be it. And President Tyler informed Webster very carefully that if the cabinet had five or six or seven votes or a million votes, and the president’s one vote went the opposite way, then that would be it. Lincoln carried that through in the very same way when his cabinet voted on the Emancipation Proclamation. The whole cabinet voted against it, and Lincoln said, “The ayes have it. There’s one vote for it, and that’s the vote of the president of the United States.” And the cabinet began to find out that they’re employees of the president of the United States, and the president’s decision is the one that counts.

Tyler was also the president who finally brought Texas into the Union. He tried to accomplish it at first by signing a treaty of annexation with Texas in April 1844, about eleven months before he left office, but the Senate wouldn’t ratify the treaty. But later that year, Polk began to campaign and made the admission of Texas one of the strongest planks in his platform, and he was supported and elected so enthusiastically that the members of Congress finally saw the light. They passed a joint resolution okaying Texas’ entry into the Union, and on March 1, 1845, two days before he left office, Tyler signed the important piece of paper. Two days later, on his very last day in office, he signed another important piece of paper that made Florida part of the United States.

Those are some things I admire about Tyler, but there were also plenty of things that weren’t so admirable. He wasn’t overly strong for labor; he thought labor ought to be kept in its place. He had a superior attitude toward the ordinary fellow; he was a big landowner in the state of Virginia, and all those big landowners thought the small farmer was beneath consideration, so he was very careful to see to it that the ordinary fellow who had a small farm didn’t have much of a say in the community. And he was a states’-rights man all the way and finally joined the Confederacy, though he didn’t do so until Virginia seceded, and he went along with his state. It was a bad thing to do, but as I’ve said, he was a stubborn and contrary old son of a gun, and he had his own beliefs and stuck to his beliefs.

Tyler almost died in office himself. On February 28, 1844, he went with a lot of other people to inspect and cruise along the Potomac on the Princeton, a new warship that was very modern and advanced for its time, and a terrible accident occurred that took a lot of lives. One of the things they all went to inspect was a big gun called the Peacemaker, which was the largest naval gun in the world at that point in history, and the gun was fired twice for the visitors without incident. But on the third firing, the gun suddenly exploded, killing Tyler’s new secretary of state, Abel P. Upshur, who took over the job when Webster left, his secretary of the navy, Thomas W. Gilmer, his valet, a close friend, David Gardiner, and a number of other people. Tyler himself was belowdecks at that moment and wasn’t hurt, and he helped carry Gardiner’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Julia, to safety on a nearby rescue vessel. Four months later, he and Julia Gardiner were married, even though he was thirty-one years older than his bride.

Tyler had had a very happy marriage with his first wife, the former Letitia Christian - the marriage lasted twenty-nine years and gave them seven children - but he had been a widower for about seventeen months at the time of the accident, and he didn’t like the single state. The papers laughed at the couple because of the difference in their ages, but they went on to have seven more children, making Tyler the president with the largest number of children in our history. I admire him for that, too.

Tyler made no effort to run for reelection when he completed his single term on March 4, 1845. He was disavowed by the Whigs because of the stands he’d taken against Whig policy on financial matters, and he knew he wouldn’t be chosen as the Democratic candidate because he was officially a Whig president, so he thought briefly about running as a third-party candidate and organized a party that he called, and I’m not joking, the Democratic-Republican Party. His main motive was to oppose Henry Clay, who was going to run for the third time and as a Whig, and to oppose Martin Van Buren, who seemed likely to run again on the Democratic side, but then the Democrats nominated James K. Polk, and Tyler dropped out because he didn’t want to take votes away from Polk and give the election to Clay. He went down to Sherwood Forest, his 1,200-acre plantation about thirty miles away from Richmond, Virginia, and had those seven more children, five boys and two girls, and lived there happily until his death on January 18, 1862.

In one of those believe-it-or-not incidents, Julia Tyler predicted her husband’s death. He was a member of the Confederate House of Representatives at that point, and the House was meeting in Richmond and Tyler was staying at the Exchange Hotel in that city, and Julia was busy with her family and not planning to join him. But she had a nightmare in which Tyler was mortally ill, and she hurried into Richmond. Tyler assured her that he was feeling fine, but two days later, he became dizzy and nauseated, and he fainted suddenly in the hotel’s dining room and died soon after that. He was seventy-one years old. No official notice was taken of his death because he was the only president to join the Confederacy and considered a traitor. Well, he had those few good points, but all things considered, I think I was right in listing him as one of the presidents we could have done without. And I think maybe I would have listed the man he replaced, William Henry Harrison, as another president we could have done without if he had lived long enough.

Anyway, Polk managed to follow Tyler into the presidency, though he didn’t win by a tremendous margin. Clay was still a very popular fellow around the country, and even though an even more popular fellow, Andrew Jackson, was a good friend of Polk’s and campaigned hard for Polk throughout Tennessee, which was also Polk’s home state, Clay still managed to win the state. (Jackson and Polk were so close and thought so much alike about so many things that Polk was nicknamed Young Hickory. Politics is a funny business, though, and Jackson’s support and the fact that Polk’s birthplace and residence were in Tennessee still didn’t help enough.) But when all the counting was over, Polk had 1,338,464 votes, representing 50 percent of the popular vote, and Clay had 1,300,097 votes, representing 48 percent, with a splinter candidate, James G. Birney of the Liberty-Abolitionist Party, getting 62,300 votes, the remaining 2 percent. Polk racked up 170 electoral votes, and Clay got 105.

Polk was forty-nine when he became president, our youngest president up to that point. (Eventually other presidents were elected who were even younger. Teddy Roosevelt, for example, was forty-six when he became president in 1904. John F. Kennedy was only forty-three when he was elected in 1960. That was essentially a young men’s contest. Nixon was forty-seven in 1960, though I thought those jowls of his and his unshaven appearance made him look about sixty when I watched him on television.) Polk was also supposed to be the first of our dark horse presidents to be elected, but that’s hooey - or at least, if he was a dark horse president, he wasn’t such a dark dark horse. He’d certainly been around, and visible on the political scene, long enough despite his relative youth.

He was born in 1795 and was a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives by the time he was twenty-eight, a member of the House of Representatives in Washington from 1825 to 1839, speaker of the House for the last four years of that period, and then governor of Tennessee from 1839 to 1841. He had his upsets, of course - he was defeated by a Whig named James C. Jones when he ran for reelection as governor in 1841, and Jones beat him again for governor in 1843 - but he was definitely being considered seriously for either the presidency or the vice presidency when the Democratic Convention started up in Baltimore in May 1844. I guess the reason he’s thought of as a dark horse is that he was a sort of compromise candidate, and it took nine ballots to get him picked. Van Buren was back in the running and led on the first ballot, but it would have taken a two-thirds majority to end it right there, and he didn’t get that much; and then Van Buren’s vice president, Richard M. Johnson, started to pick up steam, and so did old James Buchanan and another fellow, Lewis Cass, who had been our minister to France and later became a senator from Michigan.

By the fifth ballot, Cass was in the lead, and Polk didn’t get a single vote right through the first eight ballots. But then people began to line up behind Polk, and on the ninth ballot, he received 233 votes while Cass got only twenty-nine and Van Buren only a miserable two. Polk’s running mate was George Mifflin Dallas, a former mayor of Philadelphia, senator from Pennsylvania, minister to Russia, and after his term as vice president under Polk, minister to Great Britain. I’ve also been told that Dallas, Texas, was named after George Dallas, though I’m not sure why because I’ve read a number of things about the man and didn’t see any mention that he ever went near the place.

The news of Polk’s nomination, incidentally, was telegraphed to Washington, the first official use of Samuel F.B. Morse’s newfangled invention. But nobody believed it because they were so sure that Van Buren or Cass would get the nod.

People always look surprised when I mention that I consider Polk one of our greatest presidents. In fact, you can almost see them thinking, “James Who?” as though they hardly recognize the name. Well, I suppose I can understand that reaction because Polk wasn’t one of the presidents who had a hundred books written about him, but there are a lot of reasons I feel the way I do.

I’ve already mentioned the main reason, which is that he was the ideal chief executive in the sense that he knew what he wanted to do and had to do, and he did it and left, and in the sense that he said that his program could be accomplished in a single term and was accomplished in a single term. But let me expand on that a little bit.

Polk became president at a particularly crucial period in our history. First, he followed a whole string of weak presidents, Van Buren and Harrison and Tyler, and he had a lot of catching up to do because of the lack of activity of his predecessors, who hadn’t really measured up to the presidency. And I think he suspected that the same situation might develop, with more mediocre presidents, after he left office, particularly since he knew that two of his generals, Zachary Taylor and Old Fuss and Feathers Winfield Scott, both of whom were Whigs, had presidential ambitions. Polk didn’t think much of either man; he referred to them as “super-pampered” and living high on the hog and loving their lives of luxury, and I’m sure he got a certain amount of satisfaction out of putting them to work when the Mexican War came along. He made them disturb themselves: Old Winfield Scott, in particular, didn’t want to go to Mexico and command our troops down there, but he had to go.

And Polk was right about those presidential ambitions, of course. Both men became candidates for president, and though Old Fuss and Feathers never got his ambition accomplished, Taylor became the next president of the United States in 1848. (Scott ran against Franklin Pierce in 1852 and was defeated.) Polk was also correct if he did have that suspicion about the quality of the presidents who followed him. Exactly the same situation occurred after Polk’s administration as had been the case before it; we had four presidents who were just there. And then, when Lincoln came along, he had to catch up on all the rest of them to save the Union.

We had some very, very poor sticks as presidents during that period. Taylor was a military man and nothing more, and the only reason he didn’t do a whole lot of harm is that he didn’t last very long; he died a little over a year after he got into office, aged sixty-five. There are conflicting theories on the cause of Taylor’s death. Some reports say he died of typhoid contracted while he was in Mexico; other reports say he died of heat prostration because he sat in the sun for hours listening to some long speeches at the Washington Monument, which was being built at the time; still others say he ate a whole bowl of cherries and drank a whole pitcher of milk after those speeches, which was a dangerous thing to do because sanitary conditions were terrible in Washington in that period and dairy products and raw fruit were usually avoided. I guess, in view of the way I sometimes felt after listening to long speeches, I’d pick the middle explanation.

That put his vice president, Millard Fillmore, into office, and Fillmore was a nonentity who’d only been put on Taylor’s ticket because he was a Know-Nothing and the Taylor people wanted to pick up that part of the vote. The Know-Nothings, for those of you who aren’t familiar with that sorry bunch, were a political group of people who were anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. The official name was the Native American Party, which sounds like some of those hate organizations that sprang up in our own time.

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.