3
 


The Upset

NO POLITICIAN COULD devote as many evenings to poker and whiskey as had Henry Clay and expect a decorous presidential campaign. Washington was a tight community, and even those who had no personal memory of Clay wagering a hotel in a game of cards, or gleefully smashing $120 worth of crystal glasses and decanters at the close of a particularly wild party back in the 1820s, knew his reputation for “fun and frolic” full well. His friends rightly protested that the Sage of Ashland had mellowed in his old age. Harriet Martineau, a thirty-six-year-old British social critic renowned on both sides of the Atlantic for her astute observations, asserted in 1838 that Clay’s “moderation is now his most striking characteristic; obtained, no doubt, at the cost of prodigious self-denial on his own part.” She marveled at his “truly noble mastery” of his passions.¹

That mastery went only so far. Clay still liked to drink, and that fact alone was enough to raise questions about his self-control among the many religious Americans who had sworn off intoxicating beverages in the previous decade. And Clay had a reputation to contend with. Stories circulated, not all of them false, that when drunk Clay would lose his temper, slip into self-pity, and display a range of behaviors that were decidedly unmanly and unbecoming in a statesman of his stature. The stresses of presidential campaigns brought out his worst. Not long before the 1840 convention Clay had famously declared, “I would rather be right than be president,” but when told that the war hero Harrison had been chosen as the Whig nominee over himself, he reportedly vented his rage in a drunken tirade that astounded observers. Screaming, cursing, shaking his fists, Clay proclaimed that “my friends are not worth the powder and shot it would take to kill them!”²

Four years later, no expense was spared in the attempt to kill Clay’s candidacy. Polk’s supporters lingered over Clay’s heroic gambling, creative profanity, and drinking binges, and they greatly exaggerated his duels and Sabbath breaking. Democratic processions carried banners inscribed “No Gambler” and “No Duellist.” One particularly creative pamphlet demonstrated how Clay had supposedly violated every one of the Ten Commandments.

Nor were the accusations limited to Clay’s supposed debauchery. Southerners accused him of befriending abolitionists, while abolitionists pointed to Clay’s slave owning to drum up support for a new third-party political organization, the Liberty Party, which directly attacked slavery and the mainstream parties that sustained it. Jackson renewed his old claims that Clay had cheated him out of the presidency in 1824 by making a “corrupt bargain” with John Quincy Adams. The character assaults were unrelenting, but Clay played it cool. “I laugh at the streights to which our opponents have been driven. They are to be pitied.” He was used to scurrilous attacks; they did nothing to shake his confidence.³

Whigs would have slandered their opponent just as violently had they found anything to impugn. But Young Hickory’s general obscurity masked a long career of aggressively wholesome habits. He had been happily married to the same woman for twenty years, and “his private life … has ever been upright and pure.” Polk didn’t gamble, drink, or fight duels. Although he professed no religion, he kept the Sabbath holy anyhow, a fact attributed to the “auspicious domestic influence” of his wife, “his guardian angel amid the perils and darkness of the way.” Sarah Polk’s insistence that her husband attend church with her each Sunday was well known. If he was “engaged in the company of men who, either from indifference or carelessness, forgot the Sabbath and its universal obligation,” Sarah would enter the room “shawled and bonneted” and “ask her husband and his friends to go with her to church, saying that she did not wish to go alone.” Indifferent men quickly came to realize that you didn’t talk politics with James Polk on a Sunday unless you were willing to spend several hours in a Presbyterian church afterward.⁴

Sarah ensured that James conformed to her standards of religious observance, but he actually had stricter “ideas of propriety” than she did, and privately admonished her for not conforming to his “delicate conception of the fitness of things.” If she ventured to make a joke about another person, he rebuked her: “Sarah, I wish you would not say that. I understand you, but others might not, and a wrong impression might be made.” It was customary in the 1840s to view women as the keepers of moral virtue in society, but in this case Sarah attributed her own moral standards to the “strict” moral “school” run by her husband.⁵

His work ethic was just as faultless. Polk’s campaign biography noted that “his course at college was marked by the same assiduity and studious application which have since characterized him.… [I]t is said that he never missed a recitation nor omitted the punctilious performance of any duty.” Nor did he ever miss a vote in Congress, where he “always performed more than a full share of” his work. Since his youth, Democrats claimed, James K. Polk displayed a love of labor and degree of focus that clearly distinguished him from his Whig opponent. Polk’s supporters noted that “habits of close application at college are apt to be despised by those who pride themselves on brilliancy of mind, as if they were incompatible.” But this widespread disdain of hard work was “a melancholy mistake.” What was “genius,” they asked, other than hard work?⁶

Polk’s virtues were many, but they didn’t necessarily make for exciting verse. “Let us poke him in the chair say what they may, for in principles and honesty he excels Henry Clay,” wrote the poet laureate at the University of Vermont.

For morals and sobriety his character is upright,

Nor in quarrels or wrangles does he ever delight;

In gambling and dueling he never engages,

And a war with his colleagues he never wages.⁷

Truth be told, Young Hickory was somewhat boring: a grind, perhaps, and very liable to charges of being a Jackson sycophant, but personally above reproach. The only dirt the Whigs could dig up was about Polk’s iconoclastic father, who, they claimed, had been a Tory in the Revolution. But it was a feeble attack, and of little impact.

What Clay’s supporters didn’t quite realize was that a boring sycophant didn’t make it to the top of the ticket without being exceptionally canny. Polk ran a very good campaign. One of his first moves was unifying his fractured party by promising to serve only one term in office. His rivals for the nomination had only to look forward four years for their own chance.

He also enlisted Old Hickory in the fight. The general was more than happy to resume his decades-old battle against his nemesis Henry Clay, whom he had long believed to be a “reckless demagogue, ambitious and regardless of truth when it comes in the way of his ambition.” And although he was so weak as to be “scarcely able to wield my pen or to see what I write,” he promised Sarah Polk that “I will put you in the White House you can so adorn if it costs me my life!” Jackson’s greatest service was convincing John Tyler, recently returned from a lengthy honeymoon in New York, that it was time for him to retire. On August 20, Tyler formally withdrew from the presidential race and endorsed Polk. The Whigs could no longer count on the pro-annexation vote being split between two candidates. Polk also did an excellent job convincing immigrants, particularly Catholics, that the Whigs were xenophobic nativists, and that if awarded the presidency, Henry Clay would take away their schools, churches, and political rights, withhold the blessings of citizenship, and ensure that few of their brethren would ever join them in the United States.⁸

Until the end of the summer, Clay ran his 1844 campaign as if domestic issues were all that mattered. Politically, he offered his countrymen the same compelling program of industrialization, modernization, and market growth that his Whigs had successfully used to outmaneuver the Democrats in previous years. For Clay, annexation was a diversion, and war for Texas senseless. Why should the nation risk lives for land when its fate centered on tariffs and trade? Henry Clay promised to stabilize the banking system, institute a tariff for revenue, and support manufacturing. He would ensure governmental economy. He campaigned on the promise that technological progress and economic development would result not merely in riches for a few but a rising tide for all. He was the Whig candidate. What Whig voters wanted and expected from government was not territorial expansion but the construction of a nice macadam road to get them from their village to the city.

One person inspired by Clay’s platform was an ambitious former state legislator in Illinois. The thirty-five-year-old lawyer Abraham Lincoln was a Whig on the rise. Lincoln had grown up worshipping Clay from afar. As a backwoods boy in Kentucky he had read Clay’s biography over and over, as if memorizing the facts of the politician’s life would allow him to emulate it. Although by 1844 he’d still never actually heard the man speak, he’d read and studied almost every important speech Clay had delivered. Clay, Lincoln said, was “my beau ideal of a statesman,” and it was the older man’s sweeping vision of economic progress that had first convinced him to become a Whig.⁹

While the politician from Illinois had no illusions that he was in his hero’s league, he identified with him nonetheless. After all, both were self-made men, attorneys from western states; both had a political realist’s bent, and both held the conviction that economic growth should be America’s priority. Lincoln had no fears of a powerful central government, for he believed, along with other Whigs, that the purpose of government was “to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all or can not, so well do, for themselves.”¹⁰ The fact that Clay was a slaveholder didn’t bother Lincoln at all. In fact, the young Whig seemed generally unconcerned about slavery, viewing agitation to end it primarily as a nuisance that split his party. Illinois, and America, needed what the Whigs had to offer—good roads and bridges and access to credit—so that poor young men of promise, men such as himself, could overcome the humblest of circumstances and make a name for themselves.

Abraham Lincoln grew up poor—poor in a way that other self-proclaimed “common men” such as Clay and Polk could not dream of. With little formal education, he made his own way to the small town of New Salem, Illinois, in 1831, where his lively wit, physical strength (he was a superb wrestler), kindness, and striking intelligence won him friends and supporters. Less than a year after arriving, war broke out against the Sac and Fox Indians when they attempted to reclaim lands in Illinois that had been ceded to the United States in a treaty of dubious legitimacy. Just as war against the Creeks propelled a generation of Democrats in the Southwest to prominence, the Black Hawk War, as it was known, became a springboard for political advancement for young men on the Illinois frontier. Abraham Lincoln was elected captain of a volunteer militia unit in the conflict. In his three months in uniform, he never saw combat, which may have been just as well, since his company was woefully unprepared: when the men were mustered into service, thirty of them lacked firearms.

He may not have fired a shot, but Captain Lincoln witnessed shocking atrocities by Indian combatants that shaped his views of the rules of war, and proved an unexpected early test of his military leadership and character. Arriving at the scene of a recent massacre along the Fox River, Lincoln and his men gazed upon “scalps of old women & children.” According to a volunteer in Lincoln’s company, “The Indians Scalped an old Grand Mother—Scalped her—hung her scalp on a ram rod—that it might be seen & aggravate the whites—They cut one woman open—hung a child that they had murdered in the womans belly that they had gutted—strong men wept at this—cold hearted men Cried.” Whether or not Lincoln was one of the “strong men” who wept, he refused to respond in kind, even when the passions of his men made restraint difficult. Several under his command testified that when an “old Indian” named Jack appeared in camp bearing a letter of support from Lewis Cass, the volunteers rushed at him. “We have come out to fight the Indians and by God we intend to do so,” they told their captain. But Lincoln defended Jack, warning the volunteers, “Men this must not be done—he must not be shot and killed by us.” Some in the unit considered Captain Lincoln “cowardly” for saving Jack’s life. But he stood by his unpopular decision and refused to bow to the passions of the mob.¹¹

This was Lincoln’s first personal experience with the bloodlust of combat. Unlike many other veterans of Indian wars who justified the wanton destruction of enemy property and life as a reasonable response to the uncivilized action of a savage enemy, Lincoln emerged from the Black Hawk War seemingly committed both to the rules of war and to the sanctity of civilian life. In the face of a murderous enemy, an enemy seemingly inferior in both race and culture, Lincoln was highly unusual in upholding such a scrupulous moral standard. He was unlikely to forget what he saw during the Black Hawk War, or the conclusions he drew about the rights of civilians during wartime.

Immediately after returning to New Salem in 1832, at the age of only twenty-three, he ran for the State House of Representatives. At six foot four, in mismatched clothes too short in both the legs and the sleeves, his outfit topped off with an old straw hat that did nothing to flatter his sunburned face, Lincoln had neither pretension nor, as he put it, “wealthy or popular relatives or friends to recommend me.” But thanks to his militia service he “was acquainted with everybody,” had a good name in the county, and had friends to spare. He came in eighth in that race, but his simple speaking style and support for the Whig principles of a national bank, internal improvements, and a high protective tariff won him admirers. He told audiences that “if elected I shall be thankful; if not it will be all the same,” and he clearly meant it. Failure did nothing to dampen his ardor for office. When he ran again for the statehouse in 1834, on a platform that reflected Henry Clay’s principles, he won, and in 1836 he was not only reelected but chosen minority-party leader. Lincoln moved to the new capital of the state, Springfield, where he trained as a lawyer.¹²

Springfield was good to Abraham Lincoln. He made an advantageous marriage in 1842 to Mary Todd, a staunch Whig partisan who was the daughter of a prominent Kentucky Whig. She was described by her sister as “the most ambitious woman I ever knew.”¹³ The union brought Lincoln social stature and much-needed funds: Mary’s father, Robert Todd, visited the couple not long after their marriage and was so taken by his new son-in-law that he promised them a generous yearly stipend. Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, along with a new baby named after their benefactor, applied some of the funds to the purchase of a modest one-story, five-room wooden-frame structure on the corner of Eighth and Jackson in downtown Springfield. The fifteen-hundred-dollar purchase price also bought them several outbuildings and an eighth of an acre of land. The house wasn’t in the best neighborhood, but it was only four blocks from the courthouse. It was their first real home.

Both Abraham and his wife recognized that he had married up. Mary was a woman who “loved to put on Style,” and while she had absolute faith in her husband’s political future, she was less convinced that he knew what he was doing in some other aspects of life. She recognized, well before her backwoods husband did, that success in Springfield required a certain level of polish and decorum. Springfield wasn’t New York, of course, nor was it Mary’s own hometown of Lexington, but the professional class of Springfield had pretensions to refinement, and although Lincoln was oblivious to those standards, Mary was not. She set to work upgrading Lincoln’s wardrobe in an attempt to make him “look like somebody”—lengthening his pants, coordinating his outfits, and insisting that he purchase a new suit of “superior black cloth,” the most expensive purchase of the Lincolns’ first year of marriage.¹⁴

She started tutoring him in etiquette, demonstrating how to receive guests at dinner and how to interact with servants, begging him please not to come to dinner in his shirtsleeves. Some members of her family thought she had gone too far. One told her, “If I had a husband with a mind such as yours has, I would not care what he did.” But Mary persisted, if only with limited success. As long as Mary dressed him, he looked fine, but if left to his own devices, Lincoln was sure to mismatch his clothes or use the wrong fork at dinner. “I do not think he knew pink from blue when I married him,” she told her sister.¹⁵

Lincoln took on a new law partner, William “Billy” Herndon, and the two opened an office in the Tinsley Building, where the U.S. District Court of Illinois met, not far from the capitol. With modest fees of ten to twenty-five dollars per client and a reputation for honesty and hard work, the law firm flourished. Although Lincoln had almost more work than he could handle, his success as a lawyer allowed him to indulge in his passion for politics. Throwing himself into the coming presidential election, he organized a public meeting in Springfield to refute the charge that Whigs were hostile to foreigners or Catholics.¹⁶ He also spoke in support of the Whig platform at the state convention in June 1844.

The young Whig volunteered to campaign for Clay across Illinois and into neighboring Indiana, and not incidentally build his own political base in the process. Lincoln was a brilliant storyteller, a natural in debates. He loved public speaking, and audiences loved him, something else he had in common with his hero. In 1844 he was already gaining a reputation as “the best stump speaker in the state.” Clay’s positions were entirely Lincoln’s own: credit, tariffs, internal improvements. Like Clay, he generally avoided the subject of Texas, but at one appearance in Springfield he declared annexation of Texas “inexpedient” and supported Clay’s position opposing it.¹⁷

As he rode from town to town young Abraham Lincoln undoubtedly felt baffled by the appeal of Polk’s message among so many of his neighbors. He himself was indifferent about the possibility of annexing Texas. “I never was much interested in the Texas question,” he admitted the following year. “I could never very clearly see how the annexation would augment the evil of slavery. Slaves would be taken there in about equal numbers, with or without annexation.”¹⁸ A pragmatist who believed that what a man needed to do in order to get ahead was settle down, work hard where he was, and develop the resources at his disposal, Lincoln couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for expansionism. He had learned from watching his unlucky father and shiftless stepbrother, who were constantly moving from place to place in search of better land, that success did not lie just beyond the frontier.

To Lincoln’s mind, Manifest Destiny was a smoke screen designed to obscure the superiority of the Whig platform, and Polk’s campaign themes were merely fodder to solidify the Democratic base. The United States would naturally expand its boundaries over time, no doubt, due to the superiority of its social and economic systems. But Lincoln understood the American dream as economic: technological development, access to credit, the growth of markets. Those, he determined, would be the elements of his message when he finally got to campaign for himself. And they would be his issues as a U.S. congressman.

The Whigs were a decided minority in Illinois in the early 1840s, but there were enough of them around the capital that redistricting in 1843 created a safe congressional seat for the party. Lincoln openly coveted it, and wrote to a friend, “Now if you should hear any one say that Lincoln don’t want to go to Congress, I wish you, as a personal friend of mind, would tell him you have reason to believe he is mistaken. The truth is I would like to go very much.”¹⁹ To run, though, he would have to maneuver around a distinct obstacle.

The formidable John J. Hardin was a year younger and had a far loftier pedigree. Lincoln was, by his own description, “a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy” when he arrived in Illinois. Untutored, self-made, and a backwoods campaigner, Lincoln was the original hick, never having traveled east of Kentucky, never even having had the leisure to take a vacation. Hardin was a southern gentleman. He was the stepnephew of Henry Clay, and son and heir of Martin Hardin, U.S. senator from Kentucky, member of the Kentucky Supreme Court, and decorated veteran of the War of 1812.²⁰

He was also, notably, the namesake of his grandfather John Hardin, a Revolutionary War patriot who became famous for his military exploits against Native Americans and the British. The original John Hardin was a man of “great firmness of character, and a ready self-devotion to dangerous enterprises when … country called.” He was also an expert marksman, “famous for the rapidity and accuracy of his shots.” When he first heard the call for troops to “resist” Great Britain, he began recruiting. He joined Daniel Morgan’s Rifle Corps with the rank of lieutenant and became a colonel in General Horatio Gates’s campaign against General John Burgoyne’s British troops. Gates offered him a public thanks for his “distinguished services” at the Battle of Saratoga.²¹

But the original John Hardin’s prowess as a Revolutionary War soldier was far outstripped by his career as an Indian killer. As a lieutenant colonel in the Kentucky militia and a colonel in the Northwest Indian War in the Ohio Territory, Hardin was involved in almost every action against Indians in the region from 1786 to 1791. He was shot in the groin by an Indian at age twenty, and carried both the bullet and thoughts of vengeance with him for the rest of his life. He led a mistaken attack against a friendly tribe, the Piankeshaws, destroying a village near Vincennes, Indiana, in 1786. He brought home twelve scalps from an attack on a Shawnee village in 1789. In a campaign against the Miami in the fall of 1790, Hardin led 180 men into a Miami trap that resulted in 22 American deaths. In response, Hardin’s men burned all the Miami villages near the forks of Indiana’s Maumee River: 300 houses and 20,000 bushels of corn in total. The campaign was a failure, but this persuaded neither Hardin nor the U.S. Army to change tactics. The following year Hardin burned a Kickapoo village along with its cornfield and gardens at the mouth of Big Pine Creek in southern Illinois. It was widely said that “he commanded both the fear and the hatred of the Indians.”²²

So perhaps it is not entirely surprising that in April 1792, while he was traveling under President George Washington’s orders to negotiate a peace treaty with the Shawnee, tribal members murdered him and his slave while they slept. He was only thirty-eight when he died. Before the news made it back to Washington, Kentucky entered the Union as the fifteenth state and the first state west of the Appalachians. John Hardin was posthumously named general of the First Brigade of the Kentucky Militia, and Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois all named counties in the hero’s honor.²³

Abraham Lincoln knew the Hardin name well. Not only was Mary Todd third cousin to young John J. Hardin, but he himself had been born in one of the counties named after the famed Indian killer: Hardin County, Kentucky. Coincidentally, Lincoln was also named after an immigrant from Virginia to frontier Kentucky who was killed by Indians, “not in battle, but by stealth,” as Lincoln later put it.²⁴

Like his grandfather, John J. Hardin turned heads. Tall, handsome, and elegantly dressed, he walked with a military swagger and cut an “attractive, manly figure.” He had a “winning and amiable character” and, although “somewhat impulsive,” was widely popular among men and women. And he made the most of his advantages. He was a successful lawyer and army officer who upheld the family tradition by burning an Indian village to the ground in the Black Hawk War. He was elected brigadier general of the state militia in 1840. Although he lost an eye in a hunting accident not long afterward, he continued to impress and intimidate. College educated, rich, and well married, as patrician as you could get in the backwater state of Illinois, General Hardin was a natural at politics.²⁵

Lincoln and Hardin had arrived in Illinois at the same time, both eager for advancement. The two got to know each other well while serving in the Illinois House of Representatives. The older man admired the younger and cultivated his friendship, and Hardin seemed happy to include Lincoln in his more elevated social circle. Before courting Mary Todd, Lincoln “never got on well with women” and was “curiously shy, ill at ease, and even perplexed in their presence.” But the debonair Hardin provided a model of how to flirt and win women’s favor. The two men jointly signed a letter in 1839 to one woman promising “as a gallant knight to give you the privilege of hanging up on a peg in my closet whenever it may seem convenient.” Hardin and Lincoln may have been competitors for her favor as well as for political advancement, but the competition was a friendly one. Lincoln declared that Hardin was “more than his father” to him. Hardin repaid him in 1842 by stopping Lincoln’s one and only duel before anyone was injured.²⁶

Hardin, Lincoln, and a third state senator named Edward Baker, a large and easygoing British-born lawyer and good friend of Lincoln’s who also served in the Black Hawk War, were the leading young Whigs in the heavily Democratic state. Once the young men found a route to Congress open to them, all three began to jockey for position. Hardin, the best known of the three thanks to his name and military exploits, won election to a short term in Congress (1843–44) after redistricting took place. Baker received the nomination the following year. As for Lincoln, he won the “honor” of serving as delegate to the nominating convention, which left him, as he wryly wrote a friend, “fixed a good deal like a fellow who is made a groomsman to a man that has cut him out and is marrying his own dear ‘gal.’ ”²⁷

Brigadier General John J. Hardin, as he appeared around 1840. J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, “Lincoln in Congress and at the Bar,” The Century: A Popular Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Feb. 1887): 517. (photo credit 3.1)

To ensure that he would not again be jilted at the altar of Congress, he turned to Baker and Hardin, asking that they agree to a rotating arrangement in which each would get a turn. Baker was game, and Lincoln believed Hardin understood the agreement as well. In 1844 Lincoln couldn’t be sure what the future would bring, but he watched the surge of support for Polk with dismay. He knew that his fate and the fate of Henry Clay were linked. As one Illinois Whig wrote that fall, nothing less than “the nation’s glory or shame—the destiny of an empire” was at stake. “Henry Clay shall be the Joshua of our Army … and lead his chosen people to the chosen land” of peace and prosperity. It was imperative that Henry Clay win the election.²⁸ Polk’s supporters weren’t leaving anything to chance in their effort to prevent that from happening. The Democratic Party had a domestic agenda of its own, focusing on low taxes, a small federal government, and states that protected the interests of their residents. But it wasn’t much, and Polk acknowledged its limitations when he allowed supporters in the key manufacturing states of New York and Pennsylvania to undercut the Whigs with the promise that if elected, President Polk would support a protective tariff to help industry.

But all that was secondary to foreign policy. Democrats made territorial expansion their signature issue, proclaiming the dawn of a “Young America” that would surpass the old and enervated nations of Europe in strength and vitality, spread across the continent, and become the great empire of the future. They contrasted the Whigs, who, “advocating centralization, must wish & have ever wished to narrow our territory,” with their own party, which, thanks to a wise faith in “State’s Rights, know no limit to the possible extent of the Federal Union.”²⁹ They would bring Texas into the Union, but wagered that they could hold the North with a promise to take the entire Oregon Country, including British Columbia, even at the risk of war with Britain.

It was a smart bet. After the Senate’s rejection of the annexation treaty in June, the national clamor for Texas became almost deafening. “Poke & Texas, that’s the thing,” concluded one demoralized Mississippi Whig, “it goes like wild-fire with the folks as kant rede, nor don’t git no papers.” Polk recognized what Clay and Lincoln did not: that Manifest Destiny was everything in 1844. One Illinois Democrat, who admitted that he “dreaded the annexation of Texas” because it “would increase the slave territory” of the country, explained his support for Polk, saying that “a glance at the map was enough to convince one that sooner or later the United States must extend to the Rio Grande.” Manifest Destiny made annexation appear inevitable—“only a question of time”—and the Democratic platform look like simple common sense. Territorial expansion had become the “great and new element which has entered in to this momentous contest, and which by its superior importance, is enough of itself, to determine the vote of every freeman.”³⁰

This election, Polk argued, was really about whether the country would grow or stand still, reach for its future or protect its past. How did America see itself, and what was it willing to risk? Was the nation with God and Manifest Destiny, or would this chosen people simply tend to their garden? Did not Americans owe it to less enlightened nations to guide them to enlightenment? Polk was ambitious for his country, and he was not averse to a call to arms. So it was natural that his eye wandered from Texas to Mexico.

The United States of Mexico in 1847. J. Disturnell, New York. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (photo credit 3.2)

Mexico was certainly vulnerable. The nation won its independence from Spain just a generation after the United States threw off its own European oppressor, but the subsequent development of the neighboring republics differed strikingly. In 1800 the two nations boasted similar populations of around five million people. But the United States, politically stable and economically vibrant, expanded in both population and size, while Mexico’s population stagnated. Mexico emerged from its brutal war for independence a shell of its colonial self. Six hundred thousand people died between 1800 and the end of the revolution in 1820, most from starvation and disease. Agriculture and industry were decimated, and mining output decreased by more than half. In 1845 Mexico’s per capita income was less than half of what it had been in 1800, and its population of seven million was only a third of that of the United States.³¹

The people of the new Mexican nation were divided by region and by race, and there was no compelling ideology that drew them together. They lacked the faith in national destiny and the superiority of their nation’s political and social forms that unified the citizens of the United States. The vast majority were Indians, living in relatively autonomous communities that had existed prior to Spanish conquest three centuries earlier. Their identities were grounded in patriarchal kinship networks. While Mexico’s constitution declared all men citizens of Mexico with equal rights under the law, few Indians felt any allegiance to the nation or considered themselves Mexicans.³²

Nor were the small percentage of Mexicans of European origin, known as criollos, united in a shared vision for the future development of Mexico. The elite proved unwilling to contribute to Mexico’s tax base during the first decades after independence, and different political factions proved unable to fashion a stable political system. Turmoil became the norm, and frequent coups made any hope of developing the nation’s resources a fleeting dream; between 1821 and 1857 the presidency of Mexico changed hands at least fifty times, almost always by coup d’état. A centralized economy and highly limited trade benefited few outside the capital and provided residents of frontier provinces with little opportunity for profit. Nor did the federal government provide residents of the northern provinces with protection from hostile Indian tribes who regularly robbed, kidnapped, and murdered Mexicans. While the United States was thriving in the 1830s and 1840s, Mexico was foundering.³³

Polk’s good friend Sam Houston put bluntly what most Americans, particularly in the South and West, believed to be true: that “Mexicans are no better than Indians.” It appeared evident to Americans that the people of Mexico were incompetent at governing and administering, so much so that the citizens of the country’s northern provinces were eager to break away and merge with the United States. Who wouldn’t want to trade impoverishment for the lifestyle of the American immigrants, settlers who’d brought with them consumer goods and medicines unavailable in northern Mexico? Protestant Americans believed the Catholic inhabitants of Mexico to be inferior in both race and religion and desperately in need of enlightenment.³⁴

Then there was California. Like many Americans, Polk had had his appetite for Mexico whetted specifically by that territory. In 1840 Richard Henry Dana’s best seller Two Years Before the Mast had described in glowing detail the wonders of a beautiful, fertile land on the Pacific Coast, with magnificent harbors, a lucrative cowhide trade, and countless sea otters, whose dense pelts were in great demand in Asia. From California, the United States could gain easy access to the whaling ports of Hawaii, and ultimately to Asia. California should belong to America.

Out on the campaign trail, Polk broadcast in no uncertain terms his determination to remake the American map. His 1844 campaign was the most uncompromisingly expansionistic in American history, with the candidate promising that if elected, he would wrestle the entirety of the Oregon Country from England. “Fifty-four forty or fight,” the Democratic slogan about seizing Oregon, encapsulated his vision of an America that spanned the continent. He offered an openly pugilistic platform and evinced no hesitation about putting U.S. soldiers in harm’s way in order to fulfill what he saw as the nation’s destiny. His was a well-formulated political agenda pumped out by a spirited campaign and an energized Democratic Party. “The Union of our party seems to be perfect,” he marveled to a friend in June. “The greatest enthusiasm is everywhere prevailing.”³⁵

By midsummer the inexpediency of Clay’s Raleigh letter opposing annexation had become clear even to the Sage of Ashland. He began to hedge his bets, to backtrack. He published two letters in July in Alabama suggesting that perhaps his Raleigh letter had been premature and that if annexation could take place without national dishonor or war, and if the country as a whole wanted it, well, then as president he would be happy to bring Texas into the Union. He wasn’t opposed to the annexation of Texas in the abstract, only to the annexation of Texas right now. He also attempted to assuage southern voters by asserting that the questions of annexation and slavery were separate in his mind, that they were not related “one way or the other.”³⁶

Clay’s Alabama letters swayed few voters, but they offered ample fuel for the Democratic charge that Prince Hal could not be trusted. “There is a vein of dishonesty and of double-dealing creeping thro’ Henry Clay’s course on the Texas question, unworthy of an American Statesman,” concluded a Massachusetts paper. “He evinces traits of character which make him an unsafe man to trust with the destines of the nation.” Democrats in Michigan placed his letters on a broadside as a prime example of “that political consistency which has ever characterized ROTTEN HEARTED POLITICAL DEMAGOGUES in all ages of the world.”³⁷

One constituency remained unmoved by all the commotion: Clay’s female supporters. Perhaps because Texas had never fired their imaginations as it had that of their husbands, fathers, and brothers, they remained as devoted to Clay and his protective tariffs as ever. As one popular “Workingman’s Song” asserted,

The Ladies—bless the lovely band—Our country’s joy and pride,

They go for Harry, hand in hand, Maid, matron, belle, and bride,

To gain “Protection” for themselves; They’ll marry, and marry away,

And tell their lovers and husbands, and sons, To vote for Henry Clay.³⁸

Women around the country sewed flags and banners for Clay processions regardless of their husbands’ political leanings, attended Whig meetings and conventions, and took the lead singing Whig songs. As one favored ditty from the Clay Club in Germantown, Pennsylvania, asserted, “There’s not a lass in this broad land but vows she’d scorn to marry / The lad who don’t give heart and hand to glorious gallant Harry!” In Litchfield, Connecticut, “3000 Whig ladies” turned out in matching outfits for a pro-Clay rally, while in Bangor, Maine, a young mother taught her eighteen-month-old daughter Agnes to answer the question “Who’s going to be president?” with “Henry Clay.” The wife of the president of the Democratic National Convention made her Pennsylvania home a meeting place for Clay women and proudly told her husband’s Democratic friends that “though my husband is a Polk man, I am a Clay man; in fact the ladies are all Clay men.”³⁹

The problem was that none of these female “Clay men” could vote, and not enough of the voting men favored Clay. The candidate was now sixty-seven, repeating the same message that had driven him for decades. He’d had a heart attack two years earlier, and now looked old and worn-out. He discounted the “colds” that frequently attacked him, but quite likely Clay was suffering from the early stages of tuberculosis, known at the time as consumption because of its wasting effects on the body. Tuberculosis, a slow and relentless killer that attacks the respiratory system, was widespread, untreatable, and misunderstood in the nineteenth century. Virtually no one realized it was communicable, but everyone recognized the symptoms. Clay’s grandson Martin Duralde was a sufferer. He had been living at Ashland at the height of his contagiousness, but Clay might have caught the disease at any point during the campaign or years earlier.⁴⁰

In the face of Polk’s determination to remake the American map, both Clay and his message seemed faded. The Democrats took note and, playing on Clay’s reputation as the cunning “old coon,” taunted:

Their coons are dead, their cabins down,

Hard cider grown quite stale, sirs,

And at the people’s with’ring frown,

Their leader grows quite pale, sirs.⁴¹

The election results were remarkably close, a difference of just 38,000 votes out of more than 2.7 million cast. Polk carried the South, with the exception of North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. At another point in his life, Polk would have mourned this third rejection by his home state, but not this year. He did well in the West. Despite Lincoln’s best efforts, everything west of Ohio went Democratic. Polk did surprisingly well in the Northeast also.

Polk won Pennsylvania, not because of any groundswell of support for Texas in the Keystone State but because of the repeated promises of native son George Dallas that Polk would pass a protective tariff. Polk also won New York. His victory there was achieved by a razor-thin margin of only 5,000 votes. Abolitionist James Birney, candidate of the antislavery Liberty Party, earned almost 16,000 votes. Had just 5,000 Liberty Party supporters voted for Henry Clay, whose views they most certainly preferred to Polk’s, Clay would have won the state, and with it the electoral vote and the national election.⁴²

Henry Clay was at a wedding in Lexington when he heard the news. The daily mail from the Northeast to the Southwest traveled through Cincinnati, on the Kentucky border. It reached the Lexington post office around ten at night. Several guests, anxious for election news, left the wedding for the purpose of retrieving the mail from the post office the moment it materialized. They returned with a letter, consulted among themselves, and then brought it to Clay, who was, as usual, surrounded by a group of women. Among them was Abraham Lincoln’s mother-in-law, Betsy Todd. She described Clay’s reaction in a letter to her stepdaughter, Mary Todd Lincoln:

He opened the paper and as he read the death knell of his political hopes and lifelong ambition, I saw a distinct blue shade begin at the roots of his hair, pass slowly over his face like a cloud and then disappear. He stood for a moment as if frozen. He laid down the paper, and, turning to a table, filled a glass with wine, and raising it to his lips with a pleasant smile, said: “I drink to the health and happiness of all assembled here.” Setting down his glass, he resumed his conversation as if nothing had occurred and was, as usual, the life and light of the company. The contents of the paper were soon known to everyone in the room and a wet blanket fell over our gaiety. We left the wedding party with heavy hearts. Alas! Our gallant “Harry of the West” has fought his last presidential battle.⁴³

The daily eastern mail made it to Nashville about the same time it arrived in Lexington. The Nashville postmaster, a personal friend of Polk’s, discovered a handwritten note from the Cincinnati postmaster attesting to the election results when he opened the mail package that night. He quietly called the Democratic proprietor of a “large livery service” and asked him how quickly he could get a letter to the Polks’ home in Columbia, fifty miles away. James Polk was called from bed before dawn the next morning with the news. For the twenty hours between when the Polks learned of their altered circumstances and the regular delivery of the mail from Nashville, James and Sarah went about their business as usual, without letting on that they had any special news or any reason to celebrate.⁴⁴

No doubt they were enjoying their last moments of serenity. When the election results became public, “the joy of the Democrats knew no bounds.” Skinned raccoons hung from trees on major thoroughfares, and torchlight victory processions illuminated towns and cities across the country. Polk received a delegation of Democrats who had come all the way from Alabama to congratulate the president-elect in person, and orators at public meetings in Nashville and Columbia answered the question “Who is James K. Polk?” by introducing the new president. Congratulatory letters came from around the country, including one from Harry, a slave owned by Polk and hired out as a blacksmith in Mississippi. “I have been betting and lousing on you for the last several years but I have made it all up now,” Harry wrote. “I am in hopes that you will come to this state before you go to the white house & let me see you once more before I die.” ⁴⁵

James K. Polk, demonstrating the unwavering self-righteousness that would mark his presidency, embraced the slim victory as a mandate. Like Old Hickory, he believed his election reflected the will of the virtuous citizenry. Polk would ensure that their will would be done.

Nor was it only Polk who saw a mandate in the 1844 election results. On February 26, 1845, after elaborate maneuvering and several dubious promises made on behalf of both Tyler and Polk, Congress passed a joint resolution to admit Texas as a state. It was a controversial tactic, since a joint resolution enabled passage with a simple majority in both houses of Congress, as opposed to the two-thirds of the Senate constitutionally required for the adoption of treaties. Democrats had failed to muster the support of two-thirds of senators and might not have gained a majority of both houses were it not for the fact that so many opponents of annexation understood further objections as futile once Polk became president-elect. On March 1, just days before leaving office, a vindicated John Tyler invited Texas to join the United States.

President-elect Polk began his journey to the White House with an overnight stop at the Hermitage to pay his respects to General Jackson. Jackson, racked by old wounds, tuberculosis, and diarrhea, was barely hanging on, sustained only by rice and milk. But Polk’s election had made him blissfully happy. Jackson was confident that Polk would not let him down, that he would “fearlessly carry out all his principles.” Both men knew that it was the last time they would meet.⁴⁶

As Polk continued on to Washington he no doubt remembered the trip the two Hickories had made in the opposite direction at the close of Jackson’s presidency in 1837. Miraculously, Jackson’s prophecy to Sarah Polk that she would one day be queen had come true. It would now be up to James Polk to fulfill Jackson’s legacy during his own term in office.

Andrew Jackson passed away just four months later. Some of his final words to his family were about Texas and Oregon. He hoped both could be settled amicably, but if not, “let war come. There would be patriots enough in the land found to repel foreign invasion come from whatsoever source.” He also mused that one of his few regrets in life was that he “didn’t shoot Henry Clay.”⁴⁷

The weather on Tuesday, March 4, 1845, was inauspicious for an inauguration. Overcast skies had turned into a steady rain by the time the soon-to-be eleventh president of the United States made his way down Pennsylvania Avenue in an open carriage drawn by four horses. A record crowd was on hand to witness the ceremony. His escorts carried batons of young hickory. The First Lady, dressed in a gray and red striped satin gown, carried an elaborate ivory-handled fan, wholly unnecessary given the weather, but too beautiful to lay aside. On one side it featured portraits of all the presidents, including James, and on the other a picture of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Polk mounted a platform on the steps of the Capitol and in a clear, firm voice offered his vision of the future to the assembled mass of umbrellas. The greatest portion of his speech focused on Manifest Destiny, the issue that had won him the presidency. Predictably, he promised to bring the annexation of Texas to a speedy close, but he made it clear that Texas was hardly the extent of his vision for America. “Our title to the country of Oregon is clear and unquestionable,” he asserted. And although he said nothing about California specifically, the most lyrical portion of his address involved “pioneers” and “distant regions” and how “our people, increasing to many millions, have filled the eastern valley of the Mississippi, adventurously ascended the Missouri to its headsprings, and are already engaged in establishing the blessings of self-government in valleys of which the rivers flow to the Pacific.”⁴⁸

At that very moment, U.S. ships were en route to the Gulf of Mexico to protect the newest state from its southern neighbor. Polk knew well that Mexico was unlikely to accept the new political reality. But he had no fear for the future. Here he was, about to enter the White House, and the opportunity to dismember Mexico was being handed to him like a gift.

As for Henry Clay, he retreated to his Kentucky plantation, humiliated and deeply bitter. No matter—he was convinced he’d already beheld the future. In Raleigh, North Carolina, almost a full year earlier, Clay had written that “annexation and war with Mexico are identical.”⁴⁹ Those words had cost him the presidency. Now it looked like his prophecy was about to come true.