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One Massachusetts Whig lamented after Henry Clay's shocking defeat. His despair about the party's continued viability was widely shared. Many historians have accepted these Whig obituary notices as correct, if slightly premature. They have interpreted the reasons for Clay's loss as auguries of the Whig party's eventual death and as the beginning of that end. Supposedly, President James K. Polk's policies would greatly inflame tensions over slavery expansion and thus split the Whigs along sectional lines. Allegedly, Clay's defeat had also shown that the Whigs' economic platform was not popular enough either to bring them victory at the presidential election or to divert public attention from the fatal sectional issues. The appeal of Whig economic issues purportedly continued to deteriorate after 1844, thereby exposing the feebleness of Whig ideas and destroying the fealty voters paid the two-party system.

The Civil War era posed profound challenges to the six presidents. There is widespread agreement that Abraham Lincoln met that test in a superlative manner while Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan responded to it abysmally. It is also widely held that Millard Fillmore's performance was pedestrian and James K. Polk's was unusually effective. This chapter reviews the way each of these protagonists rose, or failed to rise, to the challenges of his times. It then explores the ways in which the leadership criteria employed in this book figured in the period under consideration. It concludes by discussing a pair of theoretical issues implicit in Allan Nevins' assertion in the epigraph to this chapter that if the nation had “possessed three farseeing, imaginative, and resolute” chief executives “instead of Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, the [Civil] War might have been postponed.”

This chapter focuses on James K. Polk, a Jacksonian Democrat from Tennessee who was often called “Young Hickory.” His assertive philosophy of presidential power mirrored that of his colloquial namesake Andrew Jackson. Polk articulated a Jacksonian notion that had infused the unitary executive arguments of Jackson's protest message vis-a-vis the Bank of the United States. This was the argument that the president was the only true representative of the whole people of the United States, because he alone had been elected by the whole people. Clearly, Polk was committed to the Jacksonian notion that the president was uniquely a spokesman of the whole people of the United States. As one historian has noted, he “undertook to make reality of the principle sought to be established by Washington, that the executive branch of the government was one whole to be managed by the President alone.”

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to use the period from the Mexican–American War to the Civil War (1846–1865) as a stage to assess the strengths and weaknesses of six American presidents: James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. These men merit attention because of the demands placed on the chief executive in this momentous era and because they varied so greatly in the caliber of that leadership. The chapter then provides context by discussing the background against which these six presidents performed their duties, followed by a discussion of the causes of the Civil War.

This chapter shows how the Whig Party both in and outside of Congress strongly opposed the war, often accusing President James K. Polk of provoking Mexican retaliation. Yet Democrats were generally behind the president. Northeastern merchants, northwestern farmers, and Southern slaveholders, in particular, advocated expansion westward. Thus, as the conflict opened in 1846, Polk hoped that a speedy decisive victory would result in negotiations to end the war and cede Mexican territory to the United States. On August 8, he expected the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress to push through the $2 million war appropriation bill in the waning hours of the congressional session. Yet Polk did not account for the actions of a small group of antislavery Democrats, all of whom belonged to a wing of the party headed by former president Martin Van Buren. This group was inordinately frustrated by the lack of power it held in the Polk administration.

This chapter follows the events of the contested Democratic nominating convention of 1844 in Baltimore, Maryland. Martin Van Buren entered the convention as the favorite but faced stiff competition from Lewis Cass. After several ballots, a third candidate rose above Van Buren and Cass: James K. Polk. Polk was eventually nominated to run on the Democratic ticket against the Whig candidate, Henry Clay. This chapter also considers the small convention held by supporters of President John Tyler, who had been expelled from the Whig Party two years earlier. Meanwhile, in Nauvoo, the Mormons had a nominating convention of their own and formally nominated Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon to be an independent ticket for the presidency.

This chapter outlines Polk’s war strategy and summarizes the first two months of the war, including the Siege of Matamoros and the Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. The main focus is the call for volunteers and the relationship between religion and recruitment. As recruiters sought to entice men to volunteer to go fight the Mexicans, they did so within a milieu shaped by strident Manifest Destiny rhetoric. In many conflicts sacred or ideological language might be used as people begin to beat the drums of war. The contextualization of American expansionism within the discourse of the Beecherite Synthesis was such that in the case of the Mexican-American War, American recruiters drew on specifically anti-Catholic, Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric. This interplay between religion and recruitment was just the beginning of American attempts by Protestants and Catholics to negotiate the meaning of the war.

Coming on the heels of over ten years of heightened anti-Catholic activity, the Mexican-American War held explosive religious implications from the very beginning. By 1846 the vocabulary of anti-Catholicism had given new direction and definition to American exceptionalism under the term, “Manifest Destiny.” The war forced American political leaders to negotiate the web of meaning connecting race, religion, republicanism, war, and the meaning of America. Whigs and Democrats concluded that the best way to explain their wartime polices was through theological and nativist language borrowed from the anti-Catholic movement. Meanwhile, the war revealed the deep religious underpinnings of the upstart Native American Party, proving that there was more to the nativist movement’s appropriation of the Beecherite Synthesis than a Machiavellian exploitation of an advantageous political tool.

1. With Congress unable to decide on Texas annexation before its summer recess, the elections of 1844 promised to double as a referendum on Texas. Whigs and Democrats realized they would have to choose carefully their positions and presidential candidates. This was less true of the new group of anti-slavery advocates: the Liberty Party. Democrat James K. Polk barely won the election, pledging to “reannex” Texas (which was accomplished before he took office), purchase California, and abrogate the Oregon treaty with Great Britain. Americans now recognized that any expansion outside of Oregon would come at the expense of Catholic Mexico. By 1845 the literature had shaped American views of their southern neighbor as a decrepit pseudo-republic cursed by despotism and superstition, complementing extant stories involving priests, nuns, and confessionals and fitting older ecclesiastical and theological arguments against the Catholic Church. By the time war erupted, Americans were accustomed to a rhetoric of anti-Catholicism and Anglo-Saxonism that had become inseparable from Manifest Destiny sentiment, while giving them the most effective means of understanding their role in advancing republican principles. This rhetoric soon proved flexible enough both to support military conquest, the denigration of the enemy, and annexation and to oppose them.

This epilogue details events following the annexation of Texas to the United States. Topics covered include President James K. Polk's efforts to wrest California from Mexico—and all the lucrative trade opportunities that would come with it—for the United States; Congress' declaration of war against Mexico on May 13, 1846; the three waves of migration that transformed the shared edges of the United States and Mexico; how the US-Mexican War remade both nations; and the unprecedented arrival of thousands Americans in Texas following annexation and the close of the U.S.-Mexican War, and with it massive forced migration of enslaved men and women, who were brought into the region to toil on the farms and plantations.

San Francisco Bay in the early 1850s presented a sight seldom seen in the history of the world: a veritable forest of masts rising from hundreds of abandoned ships. With the gradual stabilization of conditions for trade, however, maritime commerce was revived until the rapid increase in shipping made necessary the immediate building of extensive piers and docking facilities. Prior to the Gold Rush all cargoes had been lightered ashore in small boats, usually to the rocky promontory of Clark's Point at the foot of Telegraph Hill. When in the winter of 1848 the revenue steamer James K. Polk was run aground at the present intersection of Vallejo Street and Battery Street the narrow gangplank laid from deck to shore was considered a distinct advance in harbor facilities. The brig Belfast was the first vessel to unload at a pier: she docked in 1848 at the newly completed Broadway Wharf—a board structure ten feet wide.

This chapter describes the aftermath of the assassination of Joseph Smith. This aftermath includes mourning and a funeral in Nauvoo, debates over who should succeed Smith as the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who the Mormons should vote for in the election, and the decision to leave the United States altogether. The Mormons were contemplating leaving the United States before Smith’s murder, but the violent act seemed to make this departure the only way forward in the minds of many church leaders. They had come to realize that without significant reform, the United States was incapable of protecting them. This chapter also considers the result of the presidential election of 1844 and what became of each of the candidates in the years that followed.