In 1848, President James K Polk spearheaded the annexation of Texas, which greatly angered Mexico and triggered the Mexican War in 1846.
Historians today generally concur with the assessment of Abraham Lincoln, a Congressman in 1848, who maintained in a speech on this date that Polk had deceived Americans about the cause of the war. Polk claimed the fighting ensued after incursions by Mexico across the border into America. Lincoln said in his typical style combining fact with humor:
I carefully examined the President’s messages, to ascertain what he himself had said and proved upon the point. The result of this examination was to make the impression, that taking for true all the President states as facts, he falls far short of proving his justification; and that the President would have gone farther with his proof, if it had not been for the small matter, that the truth would not permit him.”
Lincoln then proceeded to examine the evidence presented by Polk, the points of which he enumerated. He tore apart each in turn. Lincoln averred that in fact, it was upon Mexican soil that the U.S. commenced hostilities, rather than the reverse.
In his conclusion, Lincoln observed that Polk had given no indication of when he expected the war to terminate:
…this same President gives us a long message, without showing us, that, as to the end, he himself, has even an imaginary conception. As I have before said, he knows not where he is. He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show, there is not something about his conscious, more painful than all his mental perplexity!”
Lincoln’s careful arguments went unheeded. The country, driven by the idea of “Manifest Destiny” to expand the country’s borders, and avid to get the large piece of territory at stake for its own, chose to ignore the facts.
You can read the entire speech here.
Abraham Lincoln in 1848. Photograph from the Library of Congress
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