The publishers statement: The first complete biography of a president often overshadowed in image but seldom outdone in accomplishment. James K. Polk’s pledge to serve a single term, which many thought would make him a lame duck, enabled him to rise above electoral politics and to outflank his adversaries. Thus he plotted and attained a formidable agenda: He fought for and won tariff reductions, reestablished an independent Treasury, and most notably, brought Texas into the Union, bluffed Great Britain out of the lion’s share of Oregon, and wrested California and much of the Southwest from Mexico. In tracing Polk’s life and career, author Borneman show a Polk who was a decisive, if not partisan, statesman whose near doubling of America’s boundaries and expansive broadening of executive powers redefined the country at large, as well as the nature of its highest office.
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I saw a review of this recent book in the online Wall Street Journal, so I read it for my Presidential biography project. There was an added element to it since many of the early and late events in the book occurred in places in Tennessee that I have seen.
Well written and researched. Considered judgements and a degree of scepticism. The result is a good book. The last chapter is a model of drawing conclusions. The first and last chapters are book ends. Young Hickory was less violent than Old Hickory but just as determined.
The publisher’s description is accurate, though inevitably it implies that Polk did all that he did singlehanded, whereas he had some trenchant support from some of the giants of the age and a good number of likeminded subordinates. He also had to deal with Henry Clay and John Calhoun, demons that not even Satan wanted in Hell.
The Mexican War seems, in this telling, inevitable. The inward looking and completely self-absorbed elites of Mexico City were incapable of governing themselves, let alone distant Texas, but far too proud to admit it. Santa Ana appears as a consummate survivor on the slippery pole of Mexican politics.
The weeks and months that it took for messages from Texas, Mexico, California, or Oregon to reach Washington and vice versa made diplomacy and war even more happenstance.
Polk took the office declaiming that like his predecessor he would serve only one term and he stuck to that. Moreover, it did not in any way limit his impact. But then his predecessor Tyler was no lame duck after Polk was elected.
What a cast of characters from Calhoun and Clay to Scott and Taylor. Also whetted my appetite for a biography of John Tyler, an accidental president who proved to be his own man. Tyler is my next president.