A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent (Simon & Schuster America Collection) by Merry Robert W

Author:Merry, Robert W. [Merry, Robert W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT013000, NAT026000, NAT027000
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2009-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

THOUGH STUNG BY the defeat, the president had reason to celebrate the congressional session just ended. Seldom in American history up to that time had any president dominated a congressional session as Polk had dominated this one or filled any eighteen-month period with so many political accomplishments. Taking power at a critical moment in the Texas annexation matter, he thwarted European efforts and Lone Star intrigues to derail the outcome. Thus he played a decisive role in bringing Texas into the American union. He successfully choreographed a complex and dangerous diplomatic and political dance that brought the most desirable expanses of Oregon into the Union. He pushed through Congress his two most cherished domestic goals—tariff reduction and the independent treasury. And he engineered a war that seemed a necessary step in his aim of acquiring large tracts of Mexican land—territory that, pieced together with Oregon and Texas, would position America to dominate its continent and, eventually, two oceans.

This record was played back to Polk during his late August visit to Fortress Monroe at Hampton, Virginia, during which he held a dinner party that included Virginia’s highly acclaimed Littleton Waller Tazewell, former congressman, senator, and governor. Tazewell had befriended Polk during the Tennessean’s early congressional years, and the president viewed the Virginian as one of the greatest Americans he had ever met—”a man of great purity and uprightness of character,” as he put it to his diary. The governor extolled Polk’s accomplishments and said he had “disposed of and settled more important public subject of great interest” in the first eighteen months of his administration “than any of [his] predecessors had ever done in eight years.”

Polk’s pride in receiving such praise was manifest in his diary entry of that day. “I was surprised but of course gratified to hear these opinions from such a man as Gov. Tazewell,” he wrote, “and expressed my gratification to him.”

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