1845

 __________ 

“War and extermination is Inevitable,

Citizens Arise One and All.” 

Warsaw Signal

__________

 

A marvel of speed: “twenty-one miles an hour.” 

SEVEN YEARS PREVIOUSLY, Godey’s Lady’s Book had predicted that, “Steam will annihilate space and time. … Cross the Atlantic in twelve days! And how much time is redeemed!” (113/160)

    It was travel by rail, however, that quickly captured the imagination of most Americans. By 1845, Sarah Hale was assuring readers that the trip from Philadelphia or New York to Niagara Falls could be made by steamboat and steam car in a week, “and the whole expense to each person not to exceed fifty dollars including everything.” Another traveler, describing her experience, marveled at the furious speed of the train on which she rode, “twenty-one miles an hour.” Sadly, there was no lady’s car, “Therefore, none were exempt from the tobacco nuisance.” (113/162) 

    The train was delayed through the fault of the passengers. For at noon, all had disembarked, and “proceeded to a hotel (the word tavern is fast becoming obsolete) for dinner.” And they were slow on returning. 

    Later, Sarah’s husband would suggest that each car on a train “have a tank of drinking water.” And, why not “have ham sandwiches for sale at the stations? They are very good, and very handy, for they can be eaten in the cars.” (113/164)

 

* 

March 4: James K. Polk is sworn in as the eleventh President of the United States. During his time in office he buys an additional nineteen slaves to work his plantation in Mississippi. 

    The historian Lina Mann writes: 

    Out of nineteen enslaved people purchased by Polk during his presidency, at least thirteen were children. Throughout 1846, Polk purchased eight enslaved children: Jane (12-13), Sally (~12), Agnes (13), Calvin (~13), Caroline Henly (16), William (17), Jim (14), and an unidentified enslaved boy (14).

 

    Three years later, as Polk prepared to leave office, he again engaged in the purchase of enslaved children, instructing his agent to remain silent on the matter: “This letter is for your eyes alone...to buy me some property for my Yalobusha plantation.” He also instructed the purchase of enslaved people aged twelve to twenty-one.

 

* 

ON THE DIPLOMATIC FRONT, the new president faces two challenges. Settlement of the border with Canada to the north, and settlement of the border with Mexico to the south. Bernard DeVoto explains the dilemma he faced, regarding the clash over Canada’s border, involving Great Britain. 

    Polk appears to have been willing to fight for “all of Oregon” when he was elected but by Inauguration Day he was not so sure. Closer thought about Mexico had cooled Polk down but among the people the momentum of campaign emotions was not easily braked. Orators who had twisted the lion’s tail on the stump went on twisting it in Congress, the press could not be called off, and the electorate which had been told that Oregon was ours up to 54° 40' kept on clamoring for 54° 40'. Rhetoric had succeeded much too well, the British press was roaring back, and Polk was already embarrassed. His inaugural address delicately receded from the campaign. Our title, he said, was “clear and unquestionable.” What title? Our title to the “country of Oregon.” Not to the campaign slogan, “all of Oregon.” The difference was big enough to let a weasel through. (5/23)

 

    As for the Mexicans, DeVoto says, “all classes and degrees of Mexicans despised the Yankees and knew that they neither would nor could fight.” (5/27)

 

Land claimed as part of Texas.

* 

MCLAUGHLIN commented on the Polk administration’s methods in leading us into war with Mexico: 

    The methods of the administration [of Polk] were many and devious. The whole affair does not furnish the pleasantest reading in American history, for it can hardly be denied that our Government used power with unseemly disregard of a weaker neighbor’s rights, and pressed roughly forward to the goal we wished for. (McLaughlin, loose page.)

 

* 

    Mrs. Polk was a strict Presbyterian, and she shunned what she regarded as “the vanities of the world” whenever it was possible for her to do so. She did not possess the queenly grace of Mrs. Madison or the warm-hearted hospitality of Mrs. Tyler, but she presided over the White House with great dignity…Her usual style of dress was rich, but not showy.

 

    Mrs. Polk would not permit dancing at the White House, but she did all in her power to render the Administration popular. (Benjamin Perley Poole, Reminiscences; Volume 1, p. 331)

 

* 

An Gorta Mór. 

The Potato Blight sweeps across Ireland, caused by a pathogen known as Phytophthora infestans, a fungus-like mold. The same pathogen wiped out the potato crop in the Netherlands, and famine there killed 60,000. The disaster in Ireland, known as An Gorta Mór, “The Great Hunger,” proved much worse. In the next decade, 1.5 million Irish sailed for North America – with hundreds of thousands more heading for Australia or crossing into Britain. In Ireland, another 1.5 million people died. 

    Over the course of several centuries of English and British rule, most land had come to be owned by often absentee landowners, many of whom lived in Britain part-time or all year, almost all non-Catholics. Land was rented out to Irish farmers, almost all Catholics, who sublet ever smaller plots to desperate peasants. By this time, 4,000 people owned 80% of the land and 2.7 million Irish were surviving on potatoes, the only crop that could provide enough food on small plots of land. 

    Religious animosity, disdain for the Irish peasants, whom many British people considered ignorant and lazy, made it even less likely that the government in Britain would offer adequate help. 

    The situation would only grow more dire over the next two years. Gustave de Beaumont, a lifelong collaborator with Alexis de Tocqueville, was one of several travelers to describe what he saw during these grim years. 

    Or tried to describe it, at least. 

    Writing in the third person, he explained, 

 “Shall he relate what he saw? – No. There are misfortunes so far beyond the pale of humanity, that human language has no words to represent them.” If he were to “recall the sinister impressions produced” by the contrasts between the wealth of the Irish landowning aristocracy and the destitution of the rural poor, “he feels that the pen would fall from his hands, and that he would not have the courage to complete the task which he has undertaken to accomplish.”

 

    The following year, Nicholas Cummins, a magistrate in Cork, did his best to describe the horrors he saw in a settlement outside Skibbereen. “I was surprised to find the wretched hamlet apparently deserted,” he wrote. “I entered some of the hovels to ascertain the cause, and the scenes which presented themselves were such as no pen or tongue can convey the slightest idea of. … It is impossible to go through the details.” 

    Asenath Nicholson, an American from Vermont, could never forget the moment when a distraught Irishman invited her to inspect a cabin where a mother, father, and two children lay dead: “The man called, begging me to look in. I did not, and could not endure, as the famine progressed, such sights . . . they were too real, and these realities became a dread.” 

    De Beaumont would later blame much of the horror on the actions and inactions of a “bad aristocracy.” 

    And so, many of the Irish had no choice but to leave home.

*

Fall: Hatred, anger and fear roil Illinois, with much bad feeling directed at the Mormons. The governor suggests to Brigham Young that he take his people to California where “none but the Indian or imbecile Mexican Spaniard” bars the way, and there build a nation of their own. Once it became clear that the Mormons might be picking up and leaving Nauvoo, attacks by their neighbors intensified. 

    “More than two hundred houses, barns, shops, and granaries were destroyed in the fall of 1845 and some Mormon men were murdered and their wives and daughters raped.” (Leonard J. Arrington, Mormon historian) 

    Bernard DeVoto calls this the time of “the Burnings.” 

    The Warsaw Signal carries this anti-Mormon headline: “War and extermination is Inevitable, Citizens Arise One and All.”

Bringing home another wife.

* 

December 29: Texas is admitted as a new state. It is agreed that the new lands might someday be divided into  four additional new states, but in any new states so formed “there should be no slavery north of 36° 30'.” (56/357) 

    This possibility lived on – a political dream, if you will – depending on how Texans felt about the national government at any given moment. 

    Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, John Nance Garner, known as “Cactus Jack,” espoused the idea as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and then as Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president. He told the New York Times in April 1921, “An area twice as large and rapidly becoming as populous as New England should have at least ten senators.”