Cronyism

CHAPTER 16

RESURRECTING THE AMERICAN SYSTEM: THE GROWTH OF IMPERIALISM

Removing the Indians

The Jacksonians succeeded in eliminating Clay’s American System— save for the imperialist plank that empowered the empire through aggressive acquisition of territory and international commerce. Similar to the Jeffersonian Republicans’ corruption by the Louisiana Purchase, land did the reform coalition in. Although Jackson aggressed on frontier Indians, he and Van Buren pursued a peaceful foreign policy in the 1830s. However, the growing temptation of Texas annexation and the related issue of slavery in the West split the two men apart. Even worse, the lure of California’s coveted western ports pushed Polk to clandestinely maneuver the country into a war of conquest. During the mid-1840s, the party rapidly embraced the debt and land speculators, internationalist merchants, privilege-seeking bankers, and other groups they once criticized. Executive authority primarily facilitated the aggrandizement—a clear sign that power corrupted the Jacksonians into using the presidency to pursue coercive empire building.

Historians increasingly demonize Jackson for enacting “ethnic cleansing,” ranking his Indian removal program as one of the era’s most momentous laws.They ignore the insights of Robert Remini and Sean Wilentz, who emphasize that the truth is far more complicated. First, Jackson genuinely cared about the Indians’ welfare, albeit in a highly flawed manner: condescendingly, impatiently, and coercively. To the president, the savages could either obtain second-class status in civilized society or peacefully maintain their lifestyle by moving to the West. Jackson was actually somewhat unique, since very few Democrats and Whigs cared about the Indians’ plight, and those who did usually hailed from states with no Indian populations. Second, most Americans did not view Indian relations as very significant, weighing banking, tariffs, internal improvements, land prices, foreign policy, and even slavery as far more important. Americans had engaged in heavy-handed Indian relations since the colonial era and saw it as a fact of life.

To Americans in 1829, the basic problem remained: Indian hunters claimed ownership of land beyond those that they farmed, particularly in the Southwest and Florida. This directly conflicted with the heavy influx of westward settlers. As Robert Whaples explains, “Indians’ claims to vast tracts of forested lands made no sense to all [the] European Americans who saw it sitting idle.” Jackson shared these concerns and insisted the Indians either had to assimilate into society—and remain subordinate because they were not white—or relocate to the West, where they could continue their nomad existence.

Consequently, Jackson’s December 1829 message to Congress proposed a new “voluntary” program: Indians could agree to the government’s offers to purchase their land (at a price US officials dictated) and remove to an area west of the Mississippi River (modern-day Oklahoma) or civilize and obey state laws. Jackson knew that settlers would continue to encroach on the lands the Indians claimed, especially given Georgians’ recent discovery of gold. “It seems to me visionary,” Jackson wrote, echoing Adams, “to suppose that . . . claims can be allowed on tracts of country on which [Indians] have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountains or passed them in the chase.”

The Democrats obediently reported on a removal bill in the Senate in February 1830. Whig Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, a religious man who genuinely cared about the welfare and rights of the Indians—albeit those in other states, because New Jersey had previously removed its Indians—criticized the bill for imposing removal on a reluctant people and attacked the executive for interfering in the legislative process. Democrats John Forsyth of Georgia and Robert Adams of Mississippi shot back, accusing northerners of hypocrisy for denying to southerners what they had previously carried out in their own region. Whigs tried to make political capital out of the situation: most notably, the anti-Indian Clay opportunistically opposed removal in the 1832 election. After heated partisan debate, the Senate passed the bill by a party vote (28-19) and the House followed by a narrow 102-97, thanks to Jackson’s personal exhortations with congressmen—clear executive influence. In both votes, New England sided against and the South for, while the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest split. Although the bill’s passage was controversial, the removal issue died down over time and “most Americans accepted what had happened.”

The Indian Removal Act provided executive authority to relocate the Indians and transfer their eastern land claims to a western reserve, with $500,000 appropriated for all necessary expenses. This absurdly low number highlights the eternal truth that politicians will always try to conceal the expense of proposed legislation—the taxpayer must never know the full cost! Far more worrisome was that such a massive government undertaking, inherently hobbled by inefficiency and corruption, could lead to only one result—a crony redistribution of resources from Indians to politically connected insiders. As Robert Remini explains,

The President’s noble desire to give the Indians a free choice between staying and removing, one devoid of coercion, was disregarded by land-greedy state and federal officials, who practiced fraud and deception to enrich themselves and their friends at the expense of the native tribes.

A blatant example of corrupt profiteering occurred with Mississippi’s Choctaws. Thanks to bribes, corrupt Indians chiefs signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in September 1830, ceding ten million acres their people claimed. Enter the young Robert J. Walker and William Gwin, who organized a land speculation syndicate to corner one million acres up for sale in October 1833. Thanks to the work of the local land office register Samuel Gwin (William’s brother), the group snatched up seven hundred thousand acres and resold most of it. Walker kept fifty thousand acres for himself and others, and the state representatives of the settlers graciously elected the aspiring politician to the US Senate. Fittingly, he became chair of the Senate Committee on Public Lands. To compound the punishment, Gwin, with the help of W. W. Corcoran of Corcoran & Riggs, performed legal services for dispossessed Indians at the hefty fee of $56,000. Walker’s involvement with Indian land speculation sullied his image in the eyes of Jackson, who actually advised Polk not to appoint him as Treasurer after he assumed the presidency.

Other Indian tribes resisted the government’s program, but the end result still occurred. By far, the Cherokee had civilized the most out of the southwestern Indian tribes, farming, wearing Western clothing, adopting a written language and constitution, developing schools, and establishing a newspaper. Significantly, some farmers also used slaves. Cherokees even pursued legal avenues in the courts, but the Supreme Court could not save them from Georgia. More to the point, Jackson and his supporters used the information they had available to demonstrate that the Cherokees still inefficiently used the land and had failed to modernize enough for the president. When a delegation pleaded their case in 1835, the president bluntly told them that “a large portion of your people have acquired little or no property in the soil itself. . . . How, under these circumstances, can you live in the country you now occupy?” The Cherokees finally “agreed” to leave, and the Senate ratified the treaty in 1836. Congress gave the Cherokees two years to vacate. When their leader, John Ross, foolishly instructed his people to stay put and wait for a miracle, the result could only mean trouble: in 1838, the Van Buren administration forcibly drove them out. Bad weather and government inefficiency led to numerous deaths, an unmitigated disaster.

The Florida Seminoles refused to abide by the treaties they signed, and when the US government sent soldiers to evict them, a bitter guerrilla conflict erupted—the Second Seminole War. The Department of War’s budget ballooned 111 percent from 1835 to 1836. By the time Jackson left the presidency, the government had spent $10 million on the conflict and each month after required another $460,000. The war only ended in 1842 under General Zachary Taylor. Whigs proved no more generous to the Indians than the Democrats, and this attitude continued in the decades ahead.

In total, the Jackson administration signed roughly seventy Indian treaties and obtained one hundred million acres in return for $68 million and thirty-two million acres west of the Mississippi River. The one hundred million acres was more than twice what Indians had ceded in the prior eight years. If the public had known of the astronomical $68 million cost instead of the stated $500,000, Congress assuredly would have been unable to pass the original law. Despite Jackson’s intentions, the entire process aggravated relations among Indians and settlers, led to rapacious land speculation, and caused costly wars. What had occurred within the United States did not bode well for adjacent countries the Jacksonians covetously eyed.

The Texas Question

Similar to the Louisiana Purchase, Texas annexation drastically increased the United States’ size and thereby exploded the American Empire’s power. Several interests supported annexation. First, debt holders wanted Congress to bail out the Texas government. Second, land speculators desired a US monopoly over cotton. Lastly, slave owners wanted to make it harder for fugitive slaves to escape. Further-more, annexation and the related issue of slavery’s expansion caused Van Buren and Benton to momentously split from Jackson and Polk, corrupting the libertarian Democratic Party into increasingly bellicose and expansionist policies.

Despite the Missouri Compromise, by the early 1830s, slavery had returned to the political realm. The British abolitionist movement and the 1833 gradual compensated emancipation in the West Indies caused this momentous return. Most notably, Massachusetts’ William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator newspaper in 1831 and helped organize the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Garrison declared slavery a moral sin, urging immediate abolition without any compensation to the owners whatsoever. He astutely recognized that the Constitution protected slavery through its crony fugitive slave and three-fifths representation clauses. As a result, he advocated northern secession to induce a massive hemorrhaging of southern slaves and peacefully end the practice. Garrison and William Cullen Bryant informally worked with followers of the British abolitionist Richard Cobden, emphasizing the similarities between free trade and free men as well as protectionism and slavery. The activities of the libertarian Garrison shook up the nation.

It is extremely important to understand that the abolitionist movement was still a very small, albeit extremely vocal, minority. Yankees, descendants of the New England Puritans, filled the abolitionists’ ranks. These pietists wanted to stamp out sin, which also included restricting Catholic immigration, suspending Sunday mail delivery, prohibiting alcohol, and controlling schools. Most northerners did not share the Yankee’s abolitionist sentiments or care about the plight of blacks, and the French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville actually remarked that northern prejudice was stronger than southern. To the extent the average northerner fought slavery, he fought its westward extension to prevent the three-fifths clause from taking effect and to stop black slaves from competing with white yeomen. Northerners did not want to interfere with slavery in the southern states or increase their small black population, because freed slaves would compete with white workers and lead to an integrated society. Instead, they embraced colonizing the freed slaves.

Equally crucial, the South rapidly changed its sentiments. The death in 1833 of John Randolph, who manumitted his slaves in his will, symbolically marked the end of an era. Paranoid southerners increasingly worried that a small group of vocal abolitionists threatened their property: the “slavery scare” that Antifederalists and Old Republicans had conjured up in years past to discourage federal aggrandizement now seemed like a frightening possibility. As a result, the region suffocated antislavery sentiments, tightened slavery regulations, and transitioned from the “necessary evil” regret to the “positive good” argument. In March 1833, the Richmond Whig wrote that the anti-slavery agitators were doing more to “alienate the south from their northern brethren, than the tariff or any or all political causes, that we complain about.” The South viewed slavery as an issue separate from tariffs, but still one that could cause a massive problem. Soon enough, the philosophy of South Carolina’s Calhoun, who proclaimed that the “great institution” of slavery provided “the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world,” dominated southern sentiments.

Even with changing regional views, to most Americans, the important political issues concerned the American System. The average politician believed slavery agitation by Yankee abolitionists and southern sectionalists could wreck the Whig and Democratic Parties, making it harder to achieve their goals. Consequently, Democrats and Whigs minimized debate. Some vocal holdouts in Massachusetts existed, such as John Quincy Adams, who adopted anti-slavery principles after his humiliating 1828 defeat. But Adams’ actions starkly contrasted with those of the Boston Associates, particularly Abbott Lawrence and their political lackey Webster. The abolitionist emphasis on slavery and calls for secession horrified these men, because their large textile companies depended on cheap slave cotton.

The Democrats led the suppression of slavery debates, because they controlled Congress and wanted to dismantle the American System. In August 1835, the American Anti-Slavery Society flooded the postal system with abolitionist literature. The Charleston postmaster censored the mail, and Postmaster General Amos Kendall allowed this illegal censorship of free speech. Later that year, Jackson, an ardent slave owner, requested that Congress prohibit the distribution of such publications. When the House narrowly refused, Kendall continued to allow subordinates to decide on the delivery of antislavery literature. However, Congress did subsequently institute a “gag rule” tabling various anti-slavery petitions. Kendall’s decision earned the ire of William Leggett, who criticized him for privileging slave owners and restricting free speech. The Washington Globe promptly attacked Leggett and Democrats cast the libertarian out of the party. The experience turned Leggett into a dedicated opponent of slavery and an advocate of northern secession. In addition, Vice President Van Buren and Senator Benton uneasily watched the unfolding proslavery policies. Although they ultimately agreed with the decisions, their acquiescence would not last forever.

The massive elephant in the room, Texas, threatened to amplify the slavery question and destroy the Jacksonians’ classical liberal foreign policy. Americans increasingly brought their slaves to settle in Texas, and annexing the region threatened to resurrect the western slavery controversy and potentially spark war with Mexico. In 1829, when Jackson authorized Van Buren to purchase the region for up to $5 million, Van Buren delayed. By the mid-1830s, Jackson had cooled on the question, realizing that amplifying Texas could sabotage Van Buren’s election and their goal to end the American System. In fact, when Texas seceded from Mexico in 1835, Jackson astutely turned down their pleas for aid. This continued after Texas became an independent republic in 1836 and declared ownership down to the Rio Grande River, land Texans never homesteaded. Jackson would only recognize the young republic if Congress requested it, instead preferring that Mexico or a European power do it first. Unfortunately, despite efforts by Congressman Churchill Cambreleng and Senator Silas Wright, in March 1837, Congress passed resolutions favoring recognition and Jackson appointed a representative to the country.

Fortunately, the noninterventionist President Van Buren rebuffed Texas President Sam Houston’s annexation pleas, insisting that the Constitution did not authorize the acquisition of independent countries. Van Buren might have been able hold the line in the early 1840s if he had won reelection. Instead, Tyler wanted to achieve presidential glory by acquiring Texas. After the Whigs resigned from the cabinet en masse, save for Secretary of State Webster, Tyler surrounded himself with a pro-annexation group of advisors. They included Virginia judge Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, his new Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur of Virginia (who eventually became secretary of state), Massachusetts’ Congressman Caleb Cushing (whom Tyler unsuccessfully tried to appoint treasury secretary three times), and Virginia congressmen Henry Wise and Thomas Gilmer (who later served as secretary of the Navy). Like other annexationists, these advisors had a vested interest in the question.

The holders of Texas debt formed the first pro-annexation group. During its war for independence, Texas sold bonds at highly depreciated rates. In the early 1840s, the debt sold for less than 10 percent of its face value, standing at $10 million. Speculators, most prominently Nicholas Biddle, who bought debt for himself and the Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania, hoped for a Hamiltonian bailout. Admittedly, financial distress after the Panic of 1837 forced the Whig to sell much of his personal holdings, but he still vigorously pushed for annexation to benefit his former central bank (after the institution failed in 1841, its creditors owned the Texas debt). Other prominent speculators included James Hamilton, a former governor of South Carolina; John Slidell, a Louisiana congressman; William S. Wetmore, a New York merchant involved in the China trade; Samuel Swartwout, Jackson’s corrupt collector at the New York ports; and Tyler advisors Gilmer and Tucker, the latter of whom candidly admitted that “his own large interests” influenced his view on Texas. These men were not fringe lobbyists.

Land speculators also pushed for annexation. If the independent Texas joined the Union, the decrease in international cotton competition would increase land values. Biddle, who acquired large Texas landholdings, also led these lobbyists. He ardently wanted the United States to control the Atlantic, Pacific, Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and Isthmus of Panama. After annexation, Tyler candidly credited Biddle’s “bright and accomplished mind” with emphasizing the “value of the virtual monopoly of the cotton plant.” Other important land speculators included Gilmer, Tucker, and Senator Walker, who acquired large Texas landholdings from his brother. In the early 1840s, financial difficulties forced Walker to sell his investments, but he successfully convinced his two close friends Gwin and John F. H. Claiborne to purchase six hundred thousand acres. Like Biddle, Walker stressed that an independent Texas would turn into “a great rival in the cotton markets of the world,” a threat that had to be stopped.

Lastly, the slave interests desired Texas. Southerners feared that an independent Texas would be susceptible to British abolitionism, leading to a significant drain of escaping southwestern slaves. In reality, southerners widely overestimated the extent of British antislavery designs, but that did not stop paranoid southerners from wanting to acquire the region to strengthen the Constitution’s fugitive slave protection. Prominent southern politicians, most of whom owned slaves, raised the slavery argument. Jackson, firmly on the annexationist side in the mid-1840s, noted that a free Texas would make “slaves in the great valley of the Mississippi worth nothing, because they would all run over to Texas.” Tyler, Upshur, Gilmer, and Walker agreed. Above all, pro-slavery clamor came from Calhoun, who became Tyler’s secretary of state in March 1844. In a letter to the British ambassador to the United States, Calhoun described slavery as a “wise and humane” institution and annexation as “the most effectual, if not the only, means of guarding against” British abolitionism. Calhoun’s remarks served as a veritable bomb scare that brought the slavery issue to the forefront of American politics.

Matters rapidly reached a fever pitch in 1844, when Calhoun presented an annexation treaty that included debt assumption. Opponents knew it would lead to war because Mexico held a better claim to the Rio Grande lands. Clay announced opposition to immediate annexation to prevent hostilities with Mexico. However, after securing the Whig nomination, he weakened his stance because of campaign manager Leslie Combs, a significant owner of Texas debt. At the same time, Van Buren, the presumptive Democratic nominee, announced his opposition. Heroically, the New Yorker refused to give into “the lust of power, with fraud and violence in the train, [which] has led other and differently constituted governments to aggression and conquest.” Van Buren’s supporters, particularly Wright, Tilden, and Francis Preston Blair, knew they witnessed his finest hour. Surprisingly, Benton, formerly a staunch annexationist, agreed with Van Buren, because proponents of “Texas scrip and land speculation” had joined forces with southern sectionalists. Disastrously, the pro-annexation Jackson and Polk split with Benton and Van Buren, depriving the latter of the nomination.

In the Senate, Benton unleashed what William Chambers described as “a pyrotechnic attack.” He thundered that the administration, in agreeing with Texas’ land claims, attempted to seize “two thousand miles of a neighbor’s dominion.” The “ratification of the treaty,” he roared, would lead to “war between the United States and Mexico.” This war would be “unjust in itself—upon a peaceable neighbor—in violation of treaties and of pledged neutrality—unconstitutionally made.” The Missourian also declared that while he supported slavery, he opposed the institution’s “extension into regions where it was never known.” After fierce debate, the Senate flatly refused annexation. Whigs overwhelmingly opposed while Democrats split, with Benton and Wright in the minority. Subsequently, Benton proposed his own annexation treaty, dividing Texas into half free and half slave and authorizing the president to negotiate with Mexico over the boundary, but the Senate failed to act.

When Polk won the presidential election, annexation appeared increasingly likely. The emboldened Tyler and Calhoun treated Polk’s victory as a mandate and decided to secure annexation through a joint congressional resolution, spearheaded by Illinois’ Representative Stephen Douglas and Senator Walker. Barnburner Democrat Congressman George Rathbun sarcastically remarked how “surprising” is was that Secretary Calhoun, the supposed “standard-bearer of strict construction,” supported this approach. When the Senate narrowly voted 27-25 for the resolution in February 1845, Benton supported annexation after obtaining assurances that Tyler would not act and Polk would cautiously press for boundary negotiations. Unfortunately, Tyler wanted the credit and quickly sent over Andrew Jackson Donelson, nephew of the former president, to initiate annexation. Polk happily agreed, sending Archibald Yell and Charles Wickliffe to assist, providing them secret executive funds to speed up arrangements. Even worse, the new president, eyeing California, started to position troops in the Southwest to provoke a war between Texas and Mexico. Benton bitterly criticized Tyler and Polk’s treacherous lies.

Although debt speculators did not secure assumption under the second annexation movement, their goal seemed far more achievable now that the Union included Texas. Consequently, in the ensuing years, new speculators gobbled up the debt, including the prominent bankers and financial houses Jay Cooke, W. W. Corcoran, and Drexel & Co. However, annexation benefited the other interests immediately: Texas land values soared, and in July 1845 British officials in the new state noted that slave prices “have risen in value at least 30 per Cent.” The United States moved closer to a cotton monopoly and strengthened slavery protections.

To his credit, Polk still wanted to dismantle the American System, diligently securing the Independent Treasury, the Walker Tariff, and anti-internal improvements victories. But, thanks to Texas annexation, he also aggressively provoked Mexican hostilities. As far as the president was concerned, the imperial executive could secure additional—and far larger—land holdings than Texas.

Western Ports on the Pacific Coast

In the 1840s, Democrats abandoned their peace and noninterventionism, siding with northern merchants to build an international empire. Equipped with the Monroe Doctrine, they intervened in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Hawaii, and China. Furthermore, Jacksonians strategized how to aggressively take Oregon from Great Britain and California from Mexico. While expansionists settled for less than the whole loaf in the Pacific Northwest, Polk used Texas annexation to singlehandedly provoke a war of plunder by moving troops into Mexican territory. In doing so, he transformed the presidency into an emperorship.

In 1845, the newspaper editor John O’Sullivan used the term “manifest destiny” to describe the seemingly inexorable control of North America by the United States. Initially, the Van Burenite envisioned this being accomplished through the peaceful settlement of homesteading pioneers would form autonomous governments that would then petition for annexation. In addition, O’Sullivan supported general incorporation laws for private transportation networks across the country. O’Sullivan’s libertarian program for expansion bore clear similarities with Thomas Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty and should have formed the basis for the Democrats’ expansionism. But, once again, it was just too much land. The power of such a vast territory quickly tempted O’Sullivan, and only a year later he jettisoned peaceful gradualism and swung to rapid aggression. O’Sullivan was merely keeping up with the main currents driving US expansion: top-down aggression by political and business elites to secure lucrative ports on the Pacific coast, or what Norman Graebner calls “ocean frontage” for an “Asiatic mercantile empire.”

Commerce with China, particularly in textile goods, grew tremendously in the 1830s. This caused merchants and manufacturers, especially the Boston Associates, to lobby for three privileges. First, they wanted a stronger navy that could protect American commerce abroad. Second, they advocated “assertive” diplomacy (i.e., negotiations backed by the intimidating US Navy) in Asia to forcibly open markets and establish US dominance. Third, they wanted ports on the West Coast, particularly in the Oregon Country (near modern-day Seattle) and California’s San Francisco and San Diego Bays. These goals would increase the political and economic strength of the American Empire and allow it to exert a domineering imperialism over the world.

Northern businessmen were not the only factions looking to benefit from a strong navy. With the new pro-slavery South, many southerners supported a strong navy in the Caribbean to sooth exaggerated fears of creeping British abolitionism. This stood in sharp contrast to years past, when Macon and Randolph vigorously fought naval appropriations. As a sign of how the times had changed, the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin now believed that the “meddling spirit of Great Britain” over slavery violated the Monroe Doctrine. The South particularly fretted that the potential abolition of Cuban slavery could lead to US abolition. An additional motivation was that many prominent southerners, such as Calhoun and Whig congressional naval advocate Thomas Butler King of Georgia, had close relatives involved in Cuba businesses. As a result of the South’s prodding, the US fortified slavery on the island by informally allying with Spain and dispatching US warships to Havana.

The navy sympathetically listened to businessmen’s demands. In the 1830s, a new crop of officers—Matthew C. Perry, Matthew F. Maury, Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, and Robert Stockton—wanted the government to mimic Great Britain and play what John Schroeder describes as “an active and integral role in the extension of the nation’s overseas commercial empire.” Indicative statements of the new dispensation come from Mackenzie. In 1837, he trumpeted that the navy should “follow the adventurous trader, in his path of peril, to every sea with cruisers ready to spread over him the protecting flag of the republic!”Translation: strong arm other nations in to trade agreements and offload the mercantile business’ market risk onto the US taxpayer. But unfortunately for Mackenzie, the US only possessed the eighth-ranked navy, and increasing naval expenditures did not interest Van Buren.

Matters changed with Tyler and Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur. “A commerce such as ours,” Upshur opined, “demands the protection of an adequate naval force.” Upshur recruited a crucial ally in one of Tyler’s associates, Massachusetts Whig Congressman Caleb Cushing. He was the son of John N. Cushing, a wealthy merchant in the Pacific Northwest and China trade. Furthermore, Caleb’s cousin was John Perkins Cushing, a China merchant and textile manufacturer whose uncle was Thomas H. Perkins, a major behind-the-scenes Boston Associate in the Era of Corruption’s foreign policy. Clearly, the Cushing family supported a strong navy.

With Cushing’s backing, in 1841, Upshur advocated that Congress increase naval expenditures by 50 percent, establish a naval base in the independent Hawaii, create a naval academy, and reorganize the Department of the Navy. The Whig Congress agreed with most of Upshur’s demands, increasing naval expenditures by 40 percent from 1841 to 1842, along with centralizing control in the secretary. The $8.4 million for the Navy Department in 1842 was its largest peacetime appropriation up to that time, consuming 33 percent of the federal budget. When it came to achieving their goals, the New England merchants were right on schedule. They moved to their second goal: strong-armed Asian diplomacy. In particular, merchants no longer wanted to assume the market risks of the China trade they had conducted since the 1780s. Influential northeastern businessmen, particularly Thomas H. Perkins, Gideon Nye, and Asa Whitney, had already initiated lobbying efforts in the late 1830s.

In December 1842, Tyler urged Congress to appoint a China diplomat to secure trade advantages. He and Cushing also stressed the importance of the rest stop, Hawaii, extending the Monroe Doctrine to the independent country. In early 1843, Adams steered a $40,000 appropriation for a Chinese mission through the House. Adams, an old friend of Thomas H. Perkins, was so bellicose toward China that he supported Britain’s war against the decaying Asian empire because it opened up trade opportunities. In the Senate, Benton fought the measure even though his state benefited from the China trade, recognizing that the appropriation was excessive and the treaty superfluous. “Forty thousand dollars,” Benton grumbled, “to enable one of our citizens to get to Peking, and to bump his head nineteen times on the ground, to get the privilege of standing up in the presence of his majesty of the celestial empire.” But the Senate passed the appropriation. Webster appointed Cushing as the emissary (Cushing had loaned Webster considerable amounts of money over the years) and his oldest son, Fletcher Webster, as his assistant.

Cushing and Congress worried about the influence of Britain over China. Their fears should have been allayed when they found out that the British in 1843 had negotiated a Chinese treaty that granted favored nation status to all foreign merchants. Cushing, however, had travelled a long way (he arrived in February 1844) and wanted his glory. When Chinese officials declined Cushing, he sent the navy to deliver his “courtesy call.” The Chinese understood the subtle but forceful threat and signed the Treaty of Wanghia, ratified by the Senate in early 1845. The treaty formalized trade relations with China but also implicitly established the US as the dominant negotiator, providing the opening wedge to future interventions on behalf of American business. When debating the treaty, Benton considered Cushing a belligerent whose “revolting” conduct “attracted the general reprobation of the country.”

The third and most challenging goal for the mercantile and manufacturing community was securing western ports, either in the Pacific Northwest or more preferably San Francisco. Matters grew complicated when national attention shifted to Texas and Polk secured the presidency. First, the Boston Associates maintained few business connections in Texas and believed the acquisition would make it harder to obtain San Francisco from Mexico. In fact, Webster believed that San Francisco was “twenty times as valuable” as Texas and resigned his position in 1843 over the growing controversy (he was soon succeeded by the pro-Texas Upshur). Second, though expansionist Democrats wanted Pacific commerce, their bellicosity worried Whig businessmen, who wanted to first try peaceful purchase before resorting to “other” options. As John Cushing stated in 1846, the US must obtain San Francisco “by purchase or some other way” (the only alternative to peaceful resolution is violent conflict). Consequently, Whigs played the role of the Federalist opposition party and fought everything Polk did. Despite these difficulties, the northeastern business community still managed to exert considerable influence over the administration’s policies.

Oregon, jointly occupied by the British and Americans since the 1820s, was the first target. Americans had only settled up to the Columbia River, significantly below the lucrative Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Puget Sound. To make matters worse, many reasoned that Oregon would form its own independent government and compete with the United States in the Pacific trade. Consequently, the mercantile community wanted Congress to secure the Strait and solidify their control. Since the late 1830s, John Cushing continually advocated to his son the need for a government settlement on the Columbia River, which Caleb relayed to Congress. In early 1845, Boston Associate William Sturgis emphasized the commercial importance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and only a couple of months later Polk received documents written by Asa Whitney, who warned how an independent Oregon could turn into “our most dangerous and successful rivals in the commerce of the world.”

Although Polk privately recognized Oregon’s “fine harbors,” in his inaugural address the president sided with the grandiose expansionism of western Democrats, who ridiculously demanded Oregon all the way up to Russian Alaska, land the British clearly controlled. Furthermore, in his December 1845 address to Congress, Polk championed the Monroe Doctrine. This earned him the support of the Whig Congressman Adams as well as Democratic Congressman Stephen Douglas and Michigan’s Senator Lewis Cass. However, Polk’s position worried northeastern merchants because they only wanted the Strait, not war with Great Britain. Pro-slavery southerners satisfied with Texas, such as Senator Calhoun, also feared confrontation with abolitionist Great Britain. Senator Benton, one notable Democrat who broke sectional ranks, wrote to Van Buren stressing peace while criticizing the western Democrats’ demands. Debate continued until mid-1846, even after the United States declared war on Mexico. Polk, realizing the dangers of a two-front war, agreed to a British compromise that ceded land up to the Strait. Thus, the United States risked hostile confrontation to build a northwestern port even with no American settlements above the Columbia River. Walter Nugent appropriately comments on the entire affair: “The Americans no doubt did get more than they deserved, if ‘deserved’ is a function not only of discovery but of settlement.”

Oregon controversies aside, the main course for commercial interests was always California, particularly San Francisco. San Diego constituted an important but secondary attraction for merchants. Mexico nominally possessed the huge swath of land encompassed by California and New Mexico (the modern Southwest), where few Mexican or American settlers existed. The proper procedure, then, was O’Sullivan’s process of Americans migrating into the region, homesteading the land, and then forming their own governments that seceded from Mexico and petitioned for annexation. This is what Texas did, save for its egregious land grabbing down to the Rio Grande. But the United States discarded this reasonable option in favor of immediate control through coerced purchase or a covert war.

Democrats originally tried to acquire California when they annexed Texas, planning to provoke a war between Texas and Mexico and then annex after the war. Duff Green, an executive agent of Tyler, formulated this plan. In late 1844, Green proposed to Texas officials that they charter the Del Norte Company to conquer California and New Mexico with an army of sixty thousand Indians, led by Green himself. Green naturally wanted some attractive land grants as compensation. But the Texas government shot down Green’s absurd proposal. Although Green received no official backing for his plan, it clearly fit in with the Polk administration’s desires, which later appointed him during the Mexican War.

The Polk administration renewed efforts after Texas annexation. In April 1845, Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft of Massachusetts dispatched Commodore Robert F. Stockton to southern Texas. Stockton, a wealthy businessman from New Jersey, espoused extremely nationalist views. The Polk administration secretly instructed Stockton to finance an army and incite a war on the border. Clearly, the strong Jacksonian executive had corrupted Polk into implicitly sanctioning an outrageously unconstitutional proposal. However, the president’s plan fell through, and Texas annexation brought no immediate war.

Polk was undeterred: he wanted California for its proximity to China, and he would get it one way or another. He was particularly fearful that the British were scheming to acquire the region (they did not). Consequently, in the fall of 1845, Polk invoked the Monroe Doctrine. He appointed Thomas Larkin, a wealthy New England merchant who traded along the California coast, a secret executive agent to keep an eye on developments, emphasizing “the interests of our commerce and our whale fisheries on the Pacific ocean.” He also sent John Slidell to Mexico City to purchase California for up to $25 million. Implicit force backed Slidell’s efforts, because Polk concurrently ordered General Zachary Taylor to southern Texas. When Mexico rebuffed Slidell, Polk tightened the noose. He ordered Taylor into the “disputed territory” near the Rio Grande, which was really Mexican land. In other words, Polk invaded Mexico and waited for the enemy to fire the first shot. In March 1846, the president informed Congress that he had stationed two-thirds of the army along the southwestern frontier.

Polk’s plan worked: Mexico attacked Taylor in April. The president met with Benton, still a fellow Jacksonian, the next month. The senator told the president he would vote for defense appropriations but not “aggressive war on Mexico” and that Texas had never owned the land Polk sent Taylor’s men into. Unfortunately, the president did not care, requesting Congress declare war (for a conflict he had already started) and provide fifty thousand volunteers and $10 million. The emperor declared that he wanted the legislature to “place at the discretion of the Executive the means of prosecuting the war with vigor.” To bulldoze over the opposition, Polk’s loyal followers limited congressional debate and attached the war declaration to troop appropriations. This ensured that anyone who opposed the war unpatriotically opposed the soldiers on the frontier, hamstringing Benton and other anti-war congressmen. The House limited debate to just two hours and overwhelmingly passed the bill. The Senate quickly followed and only two Whigs dissented. When Polk signed the law, he officially commenced the Mexican War.

It is clear that presidential power caused the war. Polk sent sitting ducks into Mexican territory to draw enemy fire. The Constitution admittedly gave the president control of the army, but Polk could only justify what he did with an extremely broad interpretation of presidential authority that relied on zero sanction from Congress. The Jacksonian executive, strengthened by vetoes and other actions that dismantled the American System, corrupted its wielders into a war of naked aggression. The president had become an emperor.

With any war comes an increase in government intervention, which opens the door for special-interest wheeling and dealing. Bankers, merchants, promoters of transcontinental internal improvements, and land speculators now plotted their next moves.

The Mexican War

Similarly to the War of 1812, the Mexican War destroyed reform. Admittedly, the Republicans had turned into a party of power long before the conflict, but their war swept away most remaining pockets of dissent. The Mexican War’s effects occurred far more suddenly, but the consequences remained the same: the Democrats completely lost their drive to create a limited confederation. The Jacksonians engaged in military maneuvers for merchants, established corrupt alliances with bankers, increased the public debt, and embraced transcontinental internal improvements and new programs for land speculators. The entire enterprise was truly a gigantic catastrophe, and once again, liberty lost and power won.

Polk undisputedly initiated a war of conquest and ruthlessly achieved his goal. The ramshackle Mexican government stood no chance of preventing the United States from capturing strategic ports and large swaths of territory. Furthermore, the conflict was undeniably what Whig Congressman Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia called an “Executive war,” and what others labelled “Mr. Polk’s War.” Polk dragged the nation into the confrontation and, along with his cabinet, commanded the planning. The strict constructionist Polk, corrupted by the Jacksonian presidency, justified his control by arguing that congressmen were only pliant tools for the executive, who was elected by the overall public. Unlike past presidents, Polk defended absolute executive secrecy in foreign policy and actually tried to set up a clandestine Mexican coup d’état without any congressional authorization. Clearly, he envisioned himself an emperor conducting the war effort.

From the beginning, the Polk administration focused on the ultimate prize: California’s ports. The administration initially wanted only San Francisco and Monterey, but prominent merchants soon persuaded it to secure the rest. In June 1846, Secretary Bancroft wrote to Samuel Hooper, the merchant son-in-law of the Boston Associate William Sturgis, hoping that the navy had seized northern California, “never to be given up.” The acquisition pleased Hooper, but he urged Bancroft to also take the southern ports down to San Diego. Only in this way, Hooper noted, would the United States control the California coast’s lucrative trade. Bancroft dutifully relayed the orders, and by July Commodores John Sloat and Stockton had seized California’s ports. Although the administration kept up the charade of temporary occupation, Sloat told his men that “it is not only our duty to take California, but to preserve it afterwards as a part of the United States.” In his December 1847 message, Polk triumphantly proclaimed that California would “shelter . . . merchant vessels employed in the Pacific ocean, [facilitating] . . . an extensive and profitable commerce with China.”

In fact, by January of that year the army had conquered California and New Mexico, moving into Mexico proper. The administration hoped for a lightning-strike victory, but Mexican guerrillas resisted. This only emboldened Polk and his cabinet to demand more land and drive deeper into enemy territory. By September, the army had moved into Mexico City. Treasurer Walker championed the All Mexico annexation movement, but most Democrat expansionists balked at such a massive acquisition—at least until enough Americans settled in the region—and the president settled for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in early 1848, which “only” ceded California and New Mexico.

But even this was not enough. In spring 1848, Polk flirted with invading the Yucatán Peninsula and even offered Spain an astronomical $100 million for Cuba (recall that Polk previously valued California at $25 million). Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi argued for both acquisitions in the name of “complete control of the Gulf of Mexico, and of all the commerce that floats over its surface . . . [and] the rich monopoly of the East India trade.” Unfortunately for Polk and Foote, the upper chamber provided too much resistance to enter the conflict. Spain also flatly refused the paternalistic and domineering offer to purchase Cuba.

These setbacks aside, the president still acquired a considerable amount of land. Including Texas annexation, Oregon, and land taken from Mexico, Polk’s acquisitions totaled approximately 800 million acres, more than the Louisiana Purchase’s 500 million. The American Empire now had enough territory to dominate surrounding nations and control world trade. No wonder, then, that in 1850 Caleb Cushing, a staunch supporter of the war, declared land “the footstool of our power” and “the throne of our empire.” However, the additions required a new nationalizing American System to bind the extremities, providing opportunities for special privileges and redistribution.

First, and most importantly, the military conquests required money. From 1845 to 1848 increases in the military caused government spending to explode by 98 percent, completely wrecking the Jacksonian drive to control expenditures. Commodore Stockton tossed rational cost-benefit analysis to the winds when he declared that it did not matter “if the war were prolonged for fifty years, and cost money enough to demand from us each year half of all that we possess.” However, Walker knew that financial difficulties could torpedo the war effort and settled on a simple method of finance: Mexico will pay. Walker proposed that the military seize needed supplies and levy “onerous” and “burdensome” tariffs on Mexican ports. The administration instructed Congress about how the war’s yoke must be saddled “upon our enemies, the people of Mexico, and not upon ourselves.” But Mexico imported little during the conflict, and Secretary of War William Marcy estimated that captured property totaled less than $4 million (military expenditures for 1847 alone totaled $46 million). These setbacks forced the Treasurer to borrow: the public debt ballooned from $16 million in 1845 to $47 million in 1848 (a 194 percent increase), a serious setback for the Jacksonian economic program. In doing so, Walker greased the wheels for his banker friend W. W. Corcoran of Corcoran & Riggs.

The banking house of Corcoran & Riggs, a previous holder of government deposits during the pet banking system, fought against reinstituting the Independent Treasury. Corcoran previously accrued valuable political capital by befriending Walker and Polk (as well as Walker’s nephew James Knox Walker), serving as the president’s investment advisor, lending money to his brother William H. Polk, wining and dining leading politicians, and even financing White House refurbishments. Corcoran saw the Mexican War as his opportunity, and earlier predicted that if hostilities broke out his “field for making money will be greatly enlarged.” When Walker needed to borrow, Corcoran helped him sell debt. The banker underwrote $15 million of an $18 million loan in 1847 and then another $14 million of a $16 million loan in 1848. From selling both loans, Corcoran personally collected $755,000 in profit, an enormous increase compared to the meager $15,000 he previously earned. After the war, Corcoran served as the Democratic Party’s preeminent banker and lobbyist, working behind the scenes for speculators (particularly the holders of Texas debt). Samuel Swartwout referred to him as “the American Rothschild.” Corcoran’s cozy relationship sabotaged the party’s previous victories against the crony banking-government partnership.

Wartime finance aside, a crucial issue emerged over the conquests. Previously, the Louisiana Purchase required internal improvements to keep the environs around the Mississippi River linked with the East. Now, with the coveted western ports on the Pacific Coast, expansionists argued for transcontinental internal improvements. Of course, gradual settlement and annexation would have ensured O’Sullivan’s solution of private companies performing the job, but violent and swift conquest prodded the Democratic Party into railroad and steamship subsidies.

These schemes even appeared before the war in late 1845: Stephen Douglas advocated land grants to build a railroad from Chicago to San Francisco while James Gadsden at the Memphis Convention urged subsidizing a southern railroad across Texas. In essence, these men wanted Congress to hand them unappropriated land they could construct a railroad on as well as sell at artificially high prices to settlers. The most vigorous proponent of such cronyism was China merchant Asa Whitney, who lobbied Congress to get western land grants for a railroad from Lake Michigan to Oregon.

In 1846, Democrat Senator Sidney Breese of Illinois, chair of the Committee on Public Lands, presented Whitney’s petition to the upper chamber. Based on the advice of explorer John C. Fremont, Whitney asked for a land grant sixty miles wide and twenty-four hundred miles long (roughly ninety million acres) to finance the $50 million construction cost. During the war, the merchant pled to Walker that the United States could “for[ce] tribute” and “dictate to all the world.” Unfortunately for Whitney, the Mexican War depleted the Treasury’s funds and Walker prioritized a railroad through Central America. His proposal also got short shrift in the Senate. Benton, perpetually torn on internal improvements, sided against his son-in-law Fremont, blasting the land grant proposal as “one of the most absurd and ridiculous that could be presented to Congress.” But the damage was done, and in the ensuing years, Democrats across the country, not just in the West, supported mass subsidization of railroads to facilitate transportation to the Pacific.

To make matters worse, during the war, Congress sympathetically listened to other proposals for transcontinental internal improvements, particularly steamship subsidies, justifiable on grounds of military necessity. Edward K. Collins wanted government appropriations for his steamships to compete with the British steamships in the Atlantic. Corcoran served as his preeminent lobbyist, and in 1847 and 1848 Collins secured a ten-year contract for $385,000 in annual assistance to his New York & Liverpool United States Mail Steamship Company. Prominent stockowners included Corcoran & Riggs and Texas debt speculator William S. Wetmore. Congress also doled out $500,000 in annual assistance to the US Mail Steamship Company and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to connect the coasts via a railroad through Panama. Congress’ actions once again showed that it could not pick winners and losers: the subsidized companies, numb to cost cutting, built expensive and inefficient ships that languished against the private lines of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Democrats also wanted to secure the western domain by handing it to speculators. In particular, Walker advocated for a new Department of the Interior to administer the booty. The recent discovery of gold in California only magnified the rewards from the new conquests. The Treasurer stressed that new “valuable mineral lands” will increase “the business of the Land Office.”In early 1849, Congress responded accordingly and established the new executive department. Furthermore, the legislature equipped a new Commission on Mexican Claims with $3.25 million to handle American claims against Mexico lost during the war. Soon, speculators swooped in and purchased land titles at depreciated rates, hoping to wrangle a bailout. One such speculator and claims agent, Corcoran, proudly admitted that without his lobbying efforts the act “would not have been passed.” Indeed, Corcoran relished his newfound prestige and looked forward to similar dominance in the 1850s.

The Mexican War delivered a fatal blow to the Jacksonians. Conquests in the name of imperial commerce blew up the debt and corrupted the Polk administration and the Democratic Party toward banking privileges and transcontinental public works. Before, libertarian Democrats fought statist Whigs, steadily weakening the American System. No more. To add insult to injury, the spoils of war—those massive acquisitions of western territory—dramatically amplified the slavery controversy that had emerged during Texas annexation. Missouri was one thing, and Texas another, but potentially spreading slavery to the Pacific increased sectional tensions like never before.

The Deathknell of Reform

Polk and his cabinet were not motivated to invade Mexico to spread slavery; the Pacific ports always reigned supreme. Even Senator Calhoun remained hesitantly sympathetic to the conflict and absented himself from the initial war declaration, worrying that conquering Mexico would hurt slavery. But this did not stop antislavery activists from insisting on the conflict’s pro-slavery cause, such as Congressman Adams, who voted against the war. Critics of slavery formed the significant opposition, albeit a minority: for the most part, Democrats and Whigs supported the war effort and partisan Whigs concentrated their ire upon the Democrats’ management.

Opponents of slavery decided to make an early stand. In August 1846, Democratic Congressmen Preston King of New York, a Barnburner, and David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, a Van Burenite sympathizer, attempted to add to a war appropriations bill a proviso forbidding slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso set out to accomplish what the Tallmadge Amendment tried to do for the Louisiana Purchase: stop the spread of slavery. But the ever-present desire for a strong and vast empire, and the immense privileges it could grant, led to the defeat of the proviso.

Despite this setback, a revolution in the Democratic Party was in the making. After the moderate Hunker Democrats seized control of the New York party and the nationwide organization rallied behind the expansionist and slavery advocate Lewis Cass of Michigan for the presidency, Barnburners allied with other opponents of slavery and formed the Free Soil Party to oppose the spread of slavery in the West. The party chose none other than Van Buren as its presidential candidate. The Free Soilers remained optimistic, but in 1848, Van Buren failed to carry a single state, amassing only 10 percent of the popular vote against Cass and the victorious Whig candidate, General Zachary Taylor of Virginia.

Van Buren described his decision as “an exceedingly unpleasant but unavoidable sacrifice.” Surely the New Yorker did not exaggerate: by leading the Free Soil ticket, he broke with the Democratic Party, the network of anti-crony activists he worked so hard to forge. Put more forcefully, “this tragic split in the Democratic Party,” explains Murray Rothbard, cost the organization “its libertarian conscience and drive.”

The party fell under the sway of aggressive southern expansionists who wanted to continue extending the American Empire into the West and the Caribbean, fortified by a vast system of internal improvements. This certainly could not muster any real anti-crony resistance to the equally pro-slavery Whigs, who also wanted to strengthen the American Empire through protective tariffs and their own transportation projects. No significant laissez-faire party remained, only two groups in favor of special privileges.

The Mexican War, the emergence of the slavery controversy, and Van Buren’s Free Soil candidacy led to the ideological disintegration of the Democratic Party and the collapse of reform. Jackson’s party remained, but it lost all motivation to weaken the central government, destroy the American System, and stop the American Empire dead in its tracks. The reason for the failed Jacksonian Revolution, as with the ratification of the US Constitution and failed Jeffersonian Revolution, was simple: “[P]ower tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

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Daniel Howe, What Hath God Wrought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 423.

Robert Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), pp. 277–81; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005), pp. 324–26.

Robert Whaples, “Were Andrew Jackson’s Policies ‘Good for the Economy’?” The Independent Review (Spring 2014): 547.

Richard Ellis, The Union at Risk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 27.

Remini, Jackson and His Indian Wars, p. 238. See also Ellis, Union at Risk, pp. 27–28; Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire (New York: Vintage Books 2009), pp. 225, 339; Remini, Jackson and His Indian Wars, pp. 222–38, 262; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, pp. 326, 867.

Remini, Jackson and His Indian Wars, pp. 237. See also Ellis, Union at Risk, p. 28; Nugent, Habits of Empire, pp. 225, 339; Remini, Jackson and His Indian Wars, pp. 222–38; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, p. 326.

Henry Cohen, Business and Politics in America from the Age of Jackson to the Civil War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1971), pp. 26–27, 31, 119; H. Jordan, “A Politician of Expansion,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review (December 1932): 363–65; Glenn Price, Origins of the War with Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), p. 84; Remini, Jackson and His Indian Wars, p. 249; James Shenton, Robert John Walker (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 13–16, 25, 33, 63, 67, 71.

Remini, Jackson and His Indian Wars, p. 266.

Historical Statistics of the United States, vol. 5, ed. Richard Sutch and Susan Carter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 91; Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, “Martin Van Buren,” in Reassessing the Presidency, ed. John V. Denson (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2001), p. 194; Remini, Jackson and His Indian Wars, pp. 238, 250–77; Whaples, “Andrew Jackson’s Policies,” p. 547; David Wishart, “Evidence of Surplus Production in the Cherokee Nation Prior to Removal,” Journal of Economic History (March 1995): 137.

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2002), pp. 20–22; Marc-William Palen, “Free-Trade Ideology and Transatlantic Abolitionism,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought (June 2015): 294–97.

Ellis, Union at Risk, p. 191.

Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, pp. 22–23. See also Ellis, Union at Risk, pp. 191–93; Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design (New York: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 30; Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, pp. 22, 26; Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics (New York: University Press of America, 1979), pp. 160–81; Phil Magness, “The American System and the Political Economy of Black Colonization,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought (June 2015): 187–94; Murray N. Roth-bard, “Report on George B. DeHuszar and Thomas Hulbert Stevenson, A History of the American Republic, 2 vols,” in Rothbard, Strictly Confidential, ed. David Gordon (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2010), p. 122; Nicholas Wood, “John Randolph of Roanoke and the Politics of Slavery in the Early Republic,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (Summer 2012): 133–34.

Kinley Brauer, Cotton versus Conscience (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1967), pp. 23–24; Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, pp. 81–82; Thomas O’Connor, Lords of The Loom (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), pp. 46–47, 51–52, 56–59; Robert Remini, The Legacy of Andrew Jackson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), pp. 83–111.

Donald Cole, Martin Van Buren and the American Political System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 272.

William Chambers, Old Bullion Benton (New York: Russell & Russell, 1956), pp. 213–14; Cole, Martin Van Buren, pp. 269–72, 281; Anthony Comegna, “‘The Dupes of Hope Forever’,” Doctoral dissertation in history, University of Pittsburgh, (2016), pp. 39–41; Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, p. 26.

John Belohlavek, “Let the Eagle Soar!” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), pp. 113–17, 124–26, 218–23, 230–31, 233–37; Cole, Martin Van Buren, pp. 197–98, 201–03, 317–19; Nugent, Habits of Empire, pp. 137–54.

John Belohlavek, Broken Glass (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2005), pp. 84–86, 192; Philip Burch, Elites in American History, vol. 1 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1981), pp. 183–84, 219–20, 299, 303; Hietala, Manifest Design, p. 59; Hummel, “Martin Van Buren,” pp. 174–76; Nugent, Habits of Empire, p. 154.

Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 2 (New York: Viking Press, 1946), p. 915.

Cohen, Business and Politics, pp. 128–29; Thomas Govan, Nicholas Biddle (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 353–54, 396, 409–11; Holman Hamilton, “Texas Bonds and Northern Profits,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review (March 1957): 582–83, 586–87; Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 171–72; Elgin Williams, The Animating Pursuits of Speculation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), pp. 33, 100–01, 119, 139, 141, 171, 208.

Williams, Pursuits of Speculation, p. 159.

Hietala, Manifest Design, p. 66. See also Burch, Elites in American History, 1, pp. 190, 193, 220, 222–24; Govan, Nicholas Biddle, pp. 353, 409–10; Shenton, Robert John Walker, pp. 12–13, 22, 32–34; Williams, Pursuits of Speculation, p. 108.

Hietala, Manifest Design, p. 24.

Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 94–95.

Hietala, Manifest Design, pp. 18, 22–24; Karp, Vast Southern Empire, pp. 83–95.

Hummel, “Martin Van Buren,” pp. 173–74.

Chambers, Old Bullion Benton, p. 271.

Ibid., p. 275.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 276.

Karp, Vast Southern Empire, p. 98.

Karp, Vast Southern Empire, p. 109.

Chambers, Old Bullion Benton, pp. 271–91; Cohen, Business and Politics, pp. 129–31; Cole, Martin Van Buren, pp. 393–94; Hietala, Manifest Design, pp. 47–49, 224; Karp, Vast Southern Empire, pp. 106–09; Robert Remini, Andrew Jackson, vol. 2 (New York: History Book Club, 1998), pp. 5–6; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, p. 595; Williams, Pursuits of Speculation, pp. 139, 165–83.

Hietala, Manifest Design, p. 255.

Norman Graebner, Empire on the Pacific (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1955), pp. 26–27. See also Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 73–75, 129–30; Hietala, Manifest Design, p. 255; Kelley, Cultural Pattern in American Politics, pp. 181–82.

Karp, Vast Southern Empire, p. 67.

Ibid., pp. 40, 59–68; Lindsay Regele, Manufacturing Advantage (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), p. 140; John Schroeder, Shaping a Maritime Empire (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 8, 59.

Schroeder, Shaping a Maritime Empire, p. 42.

Ibid., p. 43.

Hietala, Manifest Design, p. 57.

Belohlavek, Broken Glass, p. 154; Burch, Elites in American History, 1, pp. 184, 203, 219–20; Regele, Manufacturing Advantage, pp. 141–42; Schroeder, Shaping a Maritime Empire, pp. 42–43.

Belohlavek, Broken Glass, p. 151; Hietala, Manifest Design, pp. 57–58; Historical Statistics, 5, pp. 91, 200; Karp, Vast Southern Empire, pp. 32–49; Schroeder, Shaping a Maritime Empire, pp. 59–66; William Williams, The Contours of American History (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1961), p. 272.

Belohlavek, Broken Glass, p. 153.

Ibid., 165.

Belohlavek, Broken Glass, p. 183. See also pp. 151–67, 183; Samuel Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (Norwalk, CT: The Easton Press, 1987), pp. 484–85; Burch, Elites in American History, 1, p. 228; Hietala, Manifest Design, pp. 59–61.

Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, p. 99.

Belohlavek, Broken Glass, p. 417.

Burch, Elites in American History, 1, p. 183; Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, pp. 39, 71; Hietala, Manifest Design, pp. 73–74, 80–81; Michael Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 232–33.

David Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), p. 224.

Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, p. 105.

Nugent, Habits of Empire, p. 182. See also Belohlavek, Broken Glass, pp. 93–95; Bemis, Adams and the Union, pp. 488–92; Chambers, Old Bullion Benton, pp. 294–300; Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, pp. 25, 126–28; Karp, Vast Southern Empire, pp. 105–06; Nugent, Habits of Empire, pp. 161, 178–86, 193; Pletcher, Diplomacy of Annexation, p. 224.

R. Brockmann, Commodore Robert F. Stockton (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2009), pp. 149–54; Burch, Elites in American History, 1, pp. 191–92; Hietala, Manifest Design, pp. 44–46, 146, 154; Karp, Vast Southern Empire, pp. 107–08; Nugent, Habits of Empire, pp. 189–91; Price, War with Mexico, pp. 43–48, 51, 65, 122–23.

Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, p. 119.

Chambers, Old Bullion Benton, p. 306.

Karp, Vast Southern Empire, p. 110.

Chambers, Old Bullion Benton, pp. 306–08; Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, pp. 8, 118–20; Hietala, Manifest Design, pp. 84–86; Karp, Vast Southern Empire, pp. 107–12; Nugent, Habits of Empire, pp. 194–200.

Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, p. 151 and Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, p. 582.

Hietala, Manifest Design, pp. 208, 223; Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 160; Karp, Vast Southern Empire, pp. 112–16;

Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, p. 157.

Ibid., p. 158.

Ibid., p. 225. See also pp. 155–58, 224–26; Nugent, Habits of Empire, p. 203; Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist, pp. 422–24.

Hietala, Manifest Design, p. 248.

Belohlavek, Broken Glass, p. 81.

Ibid., pp. 192–93; Hietala, Manifest Design, pp. 2, 117–18, 157–59, 211–12, 247–48; Nugent, Habits of Empire, pp. 202–04, 210–17.

Brockmann, Robert F. Stockton, p. 255.

Price, War with Mexico, p. 11.

Ibid., p. 11.

Cohen, Business and Politics, p. 40.

Williams, Pursuits of Speculation, p. 25.

Stuart Brandes, Warhogs (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997), pp. 65–66; Burch, Elites in American History, 1, p. 223; Cohen, Business and Politics, pp. 32, 39–62, 96; Janet Coryell, “W.W. Corcoran,” in Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography, ed. Larry Schweikart (New York: Facts on File, 1990), p. 148; Historical, 5, pp. 80, 91; Shenton, Robert John Walker, pp. 94–98.

Hietala, Manifest Design, p. 200.

Ibid., p. 202.

Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, pp. 95–96; Hietala, Manifest Design, pp. 91–92, 196–202.

Cohen, Business and Politics, pp. 109–13; Burton Folsom and Anita Folsom, Uncle Sam Can’t Count (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014), pp. 39–50.

Shenton, Robert John Walker, p. 120.

Cohen, Business and Politics, p. 123.

Ibid., pp. 123–27; Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1964), p. 1; Shenton, Robert John Walker, pp. 120–22.

Burch, Elites in American History, 1, p. 194; Cole, Martin Van Buren, pp. 409–18; Jonathan Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 68–75; Karp, Vast Southern Empire, pp. 111–21; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, p. 582.

Cole, Martin Van Buren, p. 418.

Rothbard, “Report on George B. DeHuszar,” p. 126.

John Acton, Essays on Freedom and Power (New York: A Meridian Book, 1955), p. 335.