How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [76]
WASHINGTON, IDAHO, MONTANA
JAMES K. POLK
Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!
On the nomination of Mr. Polk we hardly know what to say. A more ridiculous, contemptible and forlorn candidate was never put forth by any party.… Mr. Polk is sort of a fourth or rather fortieth-rate lawyer and small politician in Tennessee.
—NEW YORK HERALD, MAY 31, 1844
What, if anything, is generally remembered about President James K. Polk is that his campaign slogan was “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!” In fact, it wasn’t. The issue (involving present-day Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia) was central to his campaign, but there is no evidence that the slogan existed at that time.1
During Polk’s presidency, the American map changed dramatically, its boundary expanding to include Texas, the Oregon Territory, and everything in between, from the Rockies to the Pacific. Many factors contributed to the change, but a key element was that, at critical moments, Polk was a prodigious political poker player.
To follow how Polk’s moves resulted in these gains, we need to know who else was at the table, since each player’s strategy affected the others. Following his election in 1844, Polk found himself in a high-stakes game already in progress that included Mexico, Britain, and, reflecting public opinion, Congress. He also found himself having been dealt cards that were not particularly good.
James K. Polk (1795-1849) (photo credit 23.1)
United States when Polk entered office and when he left
In the case of Mexico, Polk began with a crisis over Texas. Texas had battled itself free from Mexico in 1836, though Mexico had not recognized its independence and therefore never agreed to particular borders. Texas claimed that its border with Mexico was the Rio Grande. But its southern border as a Mexican province had been farther north, at the Nueces River. Four days before Polk’s inauguration, President John Tyler signed a congressional resolution admitting Texas to the Union, “subject to the adjustment by this government of all questions of boundary that may arise with other governments.” Mexico, whose objections went considerably beyond “questions of boundary,” recalled its ambassador during the first week of Polk’s presidency, thus upping the ante on the prospect of war.
War with Mexico was not militarily intimidating, particularly since Mexico was in the midst of one of its many revolutions. War with Britain was another matter. And that possibility was another of the cards Polk had been dealt.
Until the presidential campaign that resulted in Polk’s election, the United States and Britain had agreed to disagree about a boundary dividing the Oregon Country, a region far more vast than the present-day state of Oregon. Under an extension of a ten-year joint occupancy agreement included in the 1818 Anglo-American Convention negotiated by Richard Rush, Britain and United States shared the area bounded on the south by the 42nd parallel (below which, at that time, was Mexico), on the east by the crest of the Rocky Mountains, and on the north at 54°40’ (the border with Russian Alaska that Britain negotiated in 1825). By the 1840s, the region’s population had grown to the point that the United States and Britain picked up where they had left off in seeking to determine a boundary. The Tyler administration proposed an extension of the 49th parallel—the line already in place from Minnesota to the Rockies. But the British sought a boundary farther south at the Columbia River.
Texas: disputed border
Negotiations crept along cordially enough until the Democratic Party seized upon the issue as a possible means of defeating its formidable opponent in the upcoming election, Henry Clay. Clay’s reputation was that of a creative compromiser, an invaluable skill in a nation fundamentally divided over the issue of slavery. The Democrats sought to outfox Clay by including in the party’s platform a totally uncompromising position regarding Oregon. “Resolved, that our title to the whole of the Territory of Oregon is clear and unquestionable,” it asserted,