President Polk, a slightly built, erect man with grave, steel-gray eyes, was approaching fifty years of age. His mind was not of the first order, for he was too tense and calculating to allow his intellect free rein, but he was an efficient, hard worker with a strong will and a tough skin, qualities that stood him in good stead in the White House; he made politics his whole life. It was typical of the man that he developed a special technique of handshaking in order better to cope with the interminable reception lines that every leader has to endure. “When I observed a strong man approaching,” he once explained, “I generally took advantage of him by. . . seizing him by the tip of his fingers, giving him a hearty shake, and thus preventing him from getting a full grip upon me.” In four years in office he was away from his desk in Washington for a total of only six weeks.
Polk was uncommonly successful in doing what he set out to do as president. He persuaded Congress to lower the tariff of 1842 and to restore the independent treasury. He opposed federal internal improvements and managed to have his way. He made himself the spokesman of American expansion by committing himself to obtaining, in addition to Texas, both Oregon and the great Southwest. Here again, he succeeded.
Oregon was the first order of business. In his inaugural address Polk stated the American claim to the entire region in the plainest terms, but he informed the British minister in Washington, Richard Pakenham, that he would accept a boundary following the forty-ninth parallel to the Pacific. Pakenham rejected this proposal without submitting it to London, and Polk thereupon decided to insist again on the whole area. When Congress met in December 1845, he asked for authority to give the necessary one year’s notice for withdrawing from the 1818 treaty of joint occupation. “The only way to treat John Bull,” he told one congressman, “was to look him straight in the eye.” Following considerable discussion, Congress Complied and in May 1846 Polk notified Great Britain that he intended to terminate the joint occupation.
The British then decided to compromise. Officials of the Hudson’s Bay Company had become alarmed by the rapid growth of the American settlement in the Willamette Valley. By 1845 some 5,000 people had poured into the region, whereas the country north of the Columbia contained no more than 750 British subjects. A clash between the groups could have but one result. The company decided to shift its base from the Columbia to Vancouver Island. And British experts outside the company reported that the Oregon country could not possibly be defended in case of war. Thus, when Polk accompanied the one-year notice with a hint that he would again consider a compromise, the British foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, hastily suggested Polk’s earlier proposal, dividing the Oregon territory along the forty-ninth parallel. Polk, abandoning his belligerent attitude, agreed. The treaty followed that line from the Rockies to Puget Sound, but Vancouver Island, which extends below the line, was left entirely to the British, so that both nations retained free use of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Although some northern Democrats accused Polk of treachery because he had failed to fight for all of Oregon, the treaty so obviously accorded with the national interest that the Senate approved it by a large majority in June 1846. Polk was then free to take up the Texas question in earnest.
•••-[Read the Document John O'Sullivan, Annexation at Www. myhistorylab. com
World History
