The incoming president sounds like a traditional American expansionist.
The incoming president sounds like a traditional American expansionist.
D uring his first term, Donald Trump chose a portrait of Andrew Jackson to hang in the Oval Office. Given his stated interest in annexing Canada, taking back the Panama Canal, and buying Greenland, perhaps this time around he should go with a portrait of a Jackson acolyte, President James K. Polk.
“Young Hickory,” as he was known after he defeated a political adversary of Andrew Jackson in a Tennessee congressional race, lacked the charisma or eloquence of other giants of the 19th century. Yet he added more than 1 million square miles to U.S. territory and extended the country all the way to the Pacific, making him the most successful president not celebrated as part of the American pantheon.
Trump is not going to match that — although Canada, at 3.8 million square miles, would be a handsome prize — or, very likely, add anything to U.S. territory.
Yet what we’ve heard from Trump in recent weeks is a (particularly bumptious and trolling) version of a traditional American geopolitical voice that seeks dominance in our immediate environs and that is highly sensitive to overseas powers — in this case, China — on our periphery.
Indeed, these are concerns that animated early American expansion. The geostrategic imperative was clearing out European powers on or near our borders that might challenge us on this continent, or at the minimum cause mischief.
John Quincy Adams, the great statesman, remarked on the “physical, moral, and political absurdity that such fragments of territory, with sovereigns at 1500 miles beyond sea, worthless and burdensome to their owners, should exist permanently contiguous to a great, powerful, enterprising, and rapidly growing nation.”
It is in this context that we considered the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi. The French had given that immense, strategically vital area to Spain in 1762; then they got it back in 1800. During a momentary pause in his constant warfare with Great Britain, Napoleon hoped to establish a North American empire.
Americans reacted with outrage. Everyone agreed on the importance of access to the Mississippi for American commerce and for binding western settlers to the American nation.
When war with the British was once again looming, Napoleon decided the North American gambit was more trouble than it was worth and dumped all of Louisiana for $15 million, including cash and debt relief. Thomas Jefferson doubled the size of the country at a stroke. So much for the French.
The faltering Spanish still held the Floridas, both west (the panhandle) and east (the peninsula). Alexander Hamilton believed the United States would take over those territories “by the natural progress of things.” He was right, although it took a push. The Spanish, too, were soon on the way out.
In 1844, Polk unexpectedly won the Democratic nomination for president and ran on an aggressively expansionist platform.
One flash point involved the Oregon Territory. It included the future Canadian province of British Columbia and the future U.S. states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, among other territories. Both Great Britain and the United States claimed Oregon and agreed in 1818 on “joint occupancy.”
Polk adopted a truculent posture, insisting on a boundary of 54 degrees, 40 minutes north, which included everything up to the border of Russian Alaska. But when war with Mexico loomed, the affair was wrapped up quickly with a compromise at the 49th parallel — what Trump referred to the other day as the “artificially drawn line” separating Canada and the United States.
The contention with Mexico was over the status and boundaries of Texas after its revolution. The Mexicans were furious when the U.S. made moves toward annexation (which Texas wanted) and they insisted that Mexico’s border with Texas was at the Nueces River, 200 miles north of the Rio Grande.
Polk sent troops into the area between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. He thus took the initiative in the disputed territory and pressured Mexico to deal or fight. When 1,600 Mexican cavalry ambushed a party of 63 U.S. dragoons north of the Rio Grande, it was a fight — and an extraordinarily foolhardy one for Mexico.
After repeated defeats, the U.S. occupation of its capital, and farcical negotiations, Mexico conceded to the United States a border at the Rio Grande, running all the way to the Pacific, giving us California inclusive of San Diego, in exchange for the assumption of Mexico’s debts and the price of $15 million.
There’s no doubt that Polk had been spoiling for a fight. The historian Robert Merry has pointed out, though, that the United States had a perfect right to deal with Texas once it had achieved independence via an entirely just revolution. “But Mexico said no,” he wrote, “withdrew its ambassador, cut off relations with the United States, and declared Texas annexation an act of war. That clearly was tempting fate by any reckoning. Then Mexico fired the first shots, inflicted the first casualties, and dared the United States to accept this bloodletting as a natural and acceptable outcome of the dispute.”
The U.S. vacuumed up very lightly governed territories with very few Mexicans in them. We brought political stability, democracy, the rule of law, and a prosperous economic system to these territories (although the Native Americans, of course, were treated shamefully).
In completing the continental outline of the United States, Polk bestowed an untold bounty on future generations of Americans in terms of land, natural resources, and our geopolitical position — we became not just an Atlantic but a Pacific power. If nothing else, the ports of Texas and California were an incredible windfall from which we still benefit today.
Polk is little remembered, and his methods weren’t always admirable, but his legacy is formidable.
Today, borders in North America aren’t as plastic as they were in the early 19th century, and the prime real estate is all taken. The U.S. is also a global power that is committed to the idea that national boundaries are sacrosanct; Polk didn’t have to worry about how NATO would react to his threatening posture toward Britain, let alone his occupation of a neighboring country.
None of this means that we can’t buy Greenland if it is on offer, but Trump should be looking for better negotiated deals over Greenland and the Panama Canal rather than hoping to emulate James K. Polk’s example.
But maybe his portrait in the Oval would send a message.
This article is partly drawn from the book The Case for Nationalism.