Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (10 page)

“American blood has been spilled on American soil,” Polk spluttered with righteous indignation, neglecting to mention that Taylor had done everything within his power to invite attack, and that anyway, it wasn’t really American soil—at least not
yet
. Mexico had “insulted the nation,” the president charged, and now must be punished for its treachery, beaten back, relieved of vast tracts of real estate it was not fit to govern.

The simple truth was, Polk wanted more territory. No president in American history had ever been so frank in his aims for seizing real estate; it was a curious time in the history of the settlement of North America, a time when the European powers, though fast losing their purchase on the New World, still held dreams of securing the last great unmapped chunks of a wild continent. Britain had designs on the Oregon Territory, and the Russian trappers and sea otter barons, from their bases in Alaska, still maintained a feeble influence along the Northern California coast. Even waning France and Spain nursed various intrigues.

In this competitive environment, President Polk took the position that the United States should aggressively pursue its territorial interests now or else risk forfeiting them forever. Polk especially had his eyes on the ports of California, but he found it hard to resist any of the lands that lay between the existing United States and the Pacific. Nearly from the moment he took office in 1845, Polk had seemed perfectly willing to fight two simultaneous wars—one with Mexico over Texas and California, and another with Great Britain over Oregon—in order to gain the lands he so brazenly coveted.

The eleventh president of the United States was a sly, misanthropic man with long gray hair swept back from his blocky forehead. His jaw was clenched, his countenance grimly determined. He wore a long black coat that was frumpish and out of style, its pockets stuffed with letters. It was impossible to know what the president was thinking. He kept his prim mouth shut, and his gray eyes, hard and jewel-like, gave up nothing.

Perhaps Polk’s dour nature had something to do with the excruciating medical condition that he long suffered from as a teenager growing up in Columbia, Tennessee. At seventeen, after years of anguish that seemed to imprint a permanent grimace on his adolescent face, Polk was diagnosed with urinary stones. He was taken by horse-drawn ambulance to a famous Kentucky physician, Dr. Ephraim McDowell, and there underwent what was then a state-of-the-art surgery. With nothing more than brandy for an anesthetic, the future president was strapped naked to the operating table with his legs hoisted high in the air. Dr. McDowell bored through the prostate and into the bladder with a medieval-looking tool called a “gorget.” The stones were successfully removed, but the operation is thought to have left Polk sterile and impotent. Polk biographer John Seigenthaler thought that Polk “became a man on Dr. McDowell’s operating table. Here, for the first time, were evidences of the courage, grit, and unyielding iron will that Whigs, the British Crown, and the Mexican Army would encounter once he became president.”

Polk had been elected in one of the closest contests in American history, one from which many claims of election fraud arose. After the dust of the 1844 campaign settled, no one seemed entirely sure how this small, stern political operative had risen from obscurity to defeat the great Whig candidate Henry Clay. As a speaker Polk was plodding and colorless, a master of the single-entendre. John Quincy Adams said that Polk “has no wit, no literature, no gracefulness of delivery, no elegance of language, no philosophy, no pathos, no felicitous impromptus.” Considered the first “dark horse” candidate in presidential history, Polk was nominated on the ninth ballot at the Democratic Party convention in Baltimore. The news of his nomination was shot to Washington by brand-new telegraph lines, the first occasion Samuel Morse’s startling invention had been used for a public purpose.

The debonair Clay, sure of his national stature, had underestimated Polk’s determination and dismissed the upstart with the mocking campaign slogan “Who is James K. Polk?” But in the end, Polk was elected by a margin of forty thousand votes and became, at age forty-nine, what was then the youngest president in the country’s history.

There was about Polk’s presidency an acute sense of deadline: As a candidate he vowed that he would seek only one term of office and he would keep his campaign promise. He had four years to accomplish everything and that was it—he would exit the stage. And so everything in Polk’s administration was compressed, intensified, accelerated. Extraordinarily, Polk succeeded in achieving nearly all of his goals. Despite his insufferable personality, he was possibly the most effective president in American history—and likely the least corrupt. He outmaneuvered his critics. He established an independent treasury. He confronted the British and conquered Mexico. He seized the western third of the North American continent. By the time he left office, the American land mass would increase by 522 million acres.

Four years was all he needed. Polk would limp home to Tennessee exhausted and seriously ill, suffering from what he called a “derangement of the bowels.” In three months he would be dead.

Who was James K. Polk? A stranger, a telegram, a joyless, childless man fueled by an expansionist agenda. A political masochist who gritted his teeth and endured the national growing pains. The populace had picked him to do bold things in a short amount of time. He seemed to spring from nowhere, and there he returned.

Perhaps to dignify the nakedness of Polk’s land lust, the American citizenry had got itself whipped into an idealistic frenzy, believing with an almost religious assurance that its republican form of government and its constitutional freedoms should extend to the benighted reaches of the continent then held by Mexico, which, with its feudal customs and Popish superstitions, stood squarely in the way of Progress. To conquer Mexico, in other words, would be to do it a favor.

Mexico’s hold on its sparsely populated northern provinces was tenuous at best. Having won independence from Spain in 1821, the young country was poor, disorganized, politically unstable, and hopelessly corrupt. Its army was weak, its people demoralized. The remote territory of New Mexico, nearly two thousand miles from a largely indifferent government in Mexico City, lay withering on the vine. What’s more, the Santa Fe Trail had opened up many New Mexican eyes, and pocketbooks, to the benefits of a flourishing commerce with the United States. The Santa Fe trade had convinced many of the superiority of American goods—shoes, textiles, cutlery, tools, rifles—and the burgeoning relationship had bettered their lives in practical ways; for all intents and purposes, much of northern Mexico had already begun to fall within the sphere of American influence.

Whether U.S. expansionism was morally right or wrong, most Americans seemed to believe that it was inevitable—and that there was little point in resisting the tide of history. America and its ideals and institutions were spreading outward, westward, onward. The country could scarcely contain itself. The spirit of expansionism was everywhere in the air, like some beneficent germ. As the volunteers of Missouri marched, they marched with a kind of national giddiness. John Hughes rhapsodized that every soldier in the Army of the West “felt that he was a citizen of the model republic.” Possessed of “a high moral sense and a conscious superiority over the Mexican people,” Hughes wrote, they were embarked on a mission of high romance—west to the Pacific, south to the Halls of Montezuma!

A few years earlier a young New York editor named John O’Sullivan had coined the self-justifying phrase that captured the righteous new tilt of the country. Writing in the
New York Morning News,
O’Sullivan argued that it was the fate of the United States, necessary and quite inexorable, to sweep westward and settle North America from sea to sea, “to overspread and possess the whole continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” In order to advance “the great experiment of liberty,” the American republic must absorb new lands. It was, O’Sullivan suggested, her “manifest destiny.”

At universities across the country, the youth had become smitten with the notion of American exceptionalism, and students began to show their patriotic fervor in a fashionable campus craze called the Young America Movement, which, among other things, unequivocally advocated westward expansion. Even the country’s literary elite seemed to buy into Manifest Destiny. Herman Melville declared that “America can hardly be said to have any western bound but the ocean that washes Asia.” Walt Whitman thought that Mexico must be taught a “vigorous lesson.” Too long had Washington “listened with deaf ears to the insolent gasconnade of [Mexico’s] government,” Whitman argued; now it was time for “Democracy, with its manly heart and its lion strength to spurn the ligatures wherewith drivellers would bind it.” Like Polk, Whitman had his eyes on New Mexico and California, asking, “How long a time will elapse before they shine as two new stars in our mighty firmament?”

At the same time, many critics warned that the war was an enormous mistake. Polk’s enemies in the Whig Party opposed the war for all sorts of reasons—some genuine, some cynically political. Other critics, moved by religious or racial concerns, saw great peril in absorbing a Catholic, Hispanic country. Still others brooded over an even more nettlesome question—namely, would the new lands that would likely be gained by the war ultimately become slaveholding or free? Much of the early dissent came out of Massachusetts from a group of abolitionists who called themselves the Conscience Whigs. Led by Charles Francis Adams, son of John Quincy Adams, these critics bemoaned not only “the iniquity of aggression but the iniquity of its purpose—the spread of slavery.” Perhaps the most eloquent among the war’s opponents was the great Transcendentalist essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. “The United States will conquer Mexico,” he predicted, “but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”

Still other opponents of the war were critical of the land itself: What was the point, they asked, of conquering a godforsaken desert? Apart from the established value of the Santa Fe trade, New Mexico was not thought to be much of an asset. Kearny had people traveling with him from the Corps of Topographical Engineers, trained scientists like Lt. William Emory, who, in addition to mapping the terrain with state-of-the-art geodetic and astronomical equipment, would be homing in on all sorts of nitty-gritty economic questions, like: Was there coal in New Mexico? Was there good hardwood timber? Was the grazing decent? What were the possibilities for industry, trade, and agriculture—and with agriculture, slavery? How good was the soil in the river bottoms?

Yet most officials back in Washington seriously doubted whether the poor desert province was, in and of itself, worth taking. Expansionists like President Polk, however, believed that the main value of this tract was its contiguity to other, more valuable places: For how could America meaningfully own California without all the country that lay between it and the existing United States? What was the point of having Pacific ports, and the hoped-for trade with China and the rest of the Orient, without also having the intervening lands? Manifest Destiny did not countenance geographical gaps and untidy voids—it was an all-or-nothing concept tied to the free flow of an envisioned commerce.

The tantalizing dream already dancing in the heads of tycoons and politicians back east was a transcontinental railway that would connect New York and Washington to Southern California, quite possibly following the same route the Army of the West had just taken, through Missouri and Kansas, cutting south-by-southwest along the Santa Fe Trail. In his extensive notes, Lieutenant Emory, a perspicacious West Pointer, deemed the route promising thus far. “The road from Leavenworth presents few obstacles for a railway,” he wrote, “and, if it continues as good to the Pacific, will be one of the routes to be considered.” Emory saw a day when “immense quantities of merchandise will pass into what may become the rich and populous States of Sonora, Durango, and Southern California.”