Secular Morality and International Security by Fanis Maria;

Author:Fanis, Maria;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Debates in Congress: The Neo-Jeffersonian National Identity Gives Way to the New National Identity of Romantic Evangelicalism

James Knox Polk recommended to Congress in December 1845 that the United States abrogate the joint Anglo-American treaty of 1827 on the Oregon Territory. The British offered third-party arbitration, which was unanimously rejected by Polk's cabinet.89 The Oregon issue, therefore, went before Congress. Everyone in Congress wanted an end to the 1827 treaty. What the Congress had to decide though, was how to word the resolution; was it going to be an invitation for an agreement or a declaration of war? In April 1846, the Senate offered a very carefully worded termination of the 1827 joint occupation. The British offered the 49th parallel as the boundary, which was approved by a vote of thirty-eight to twelve that crossed over both party and sectional lines. On April 23, 1846, both houses passed the Oregon resolution with large majorities.90 The two countries resolved a potentially explosive crisis amicably.

Claiming “all of Oregon” territory for the United States was one of the issues on which President Polk ran for president in 1844. He had demanded the line at the 54th parallel and 40 degree latitude as the northernmost boundary for American claims over the Oregon Territory. In his inaugural address, he declared, “Our title to the country of the Oregon is ‘clear and unquestionable,’ and already are our people preparing to perfect that title by occupying it with their wives and children … The jurisdiction of our laws and the benefits of our republican institutions should be extended over them in the distant regions which they have selected for their homes.”91 In his first annual message to Congress in 1845, Polk quoted Monroe's message on noncolonization on the American continent by European powers and argued that the United States had to balance against the Europeans.92 The following discussion of the consequent debates in Congress explain why Congress was not persuaded by Polk.93

At the opening of the Senate discussion, on February 10 and 11, 1846, the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Senator William Allen of Ohio, urged for the “All of Oregon” policy. He said that sixty years after American independence, Great Britain was still continuing with its usual aggression toward the United States by “inciting savages to hack women and children to pieces, impressing American seamen, [and] seizure of half of Maine by chicanery.” Consistent with this intimidating behavior, he argued, Great Britain was still exercising its laws in a vast American territory in the Pacific Northwest, carrying out executions and judging people, while even discussion of American title in that area was deemed out of order. He said that the critical question at hand was whether the American government was ready to demand its rights or was going to “cringe, quail, and cower before the British.” The American people were not ready to surrender this “large part of their country,” he asserted.94 All they needed was to be told that Oregon was theirs.

His views reflected

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