In a one-term presidency, Polk completed the story of America's Manifest Destiny -- extending its territory across the continent, from sea to sea, by threatening England and manufacturing a controversial and unpopular two-year war with Mexico that Abraham Lincoln, in Congress at the time, opposed as preemptive.
Robert Merry tells this story through powerful debates and towering figures -- the outgoing President John Tyler and Polk's great mentor, Andrew Jackson; his defeated Whig opponent, Henry Clay; two famous generals, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott; Secretary of State James Buchanan (who would precede Lincoln as president); Senate giants Thomas Hart Benton and Lewis Cass; Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun; and ex-president Martin Van Buren, like Polk a Jackson protégé but now a Polk rival.
This was a time of tremendous clashing forces. A surging antislavery sentiment was at the center of the territorial fight. The struggle between a slave-owning South and an opposing North was leading inexorably to Civil War. In a gripping narrative, Robert Merry illuminates a crucial epoch in U.S. history.
The Emergence of an Expansionist President
Precisely at sunrise on the morning of March 4, 1845, the roar of cannon shattered the dawn's early quiet of Washington, D.C. -- twenty-eight big guns fired in rapid succession. Thus did the American military announce to the nation's capital that it was about to experience the country's highest ritual of democracy, the inauguration of the nation's executive leader and premier military commander. James Knox Polk was about to become that leader and commander. On this morning he was ensconced along with his wife, Sarah, at the National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, known popularly as Coleman's, just ten blocks east of the White House. That night the two of them would be residing at the presidential mansion.
At forty-nine, Polk would be the youngest of the country's eleven presidents -- and, in the view of his many detractors, the most unlikely. Until the previous May of 1844, when he had emerged unexpectedly a ... read full excerpt from A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent ebook
