James K. Polk: Continentalist, 1843-1846 (review)

book reviews361 handsome and tasteful volume. This volume is obviously the product of a staff diat takes pride in editorial excellence. Arthur H. DeRosier, Jr. East Tennessee State University James K. Polk: Continentalist, 1843-1846. By Charles G. Sellers. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Pp. x, 513. $12.50.) This second volume of a projected three volume study of die life and career of our eleventh President carries die story from the summer of 1843, when Polk looked to die Democratic convention of 1844 as a means for salvaging his political career following a second defeat for Tennessee's governorship, to the summer of 1846, when the introduction of the Wilmot Proviso into the House of Representatives heralded a new and treacherous direction for American politics. The intervening years were packed widi significance, for Polk as well as for die nation he sought to lead. The volume's subtide sets the theme, for diese were years of unprecedented national expansion as die continental vision of men like Polk sought and secured implementation. Professor Sellers has skillfully balanced his subject with die times in which he operated, providing a long-overdue account of national political maneuvering in die mid-forties as well as a perceptive assessment of die role played by James K. Polk. The stories of the annexation of Texas, the political and diplomatic steps that resulted in the settlement of the Oregon boundary question and the outbreak of the war with Mexico are told in detail but nowhere does the author lose sight of the forest in his concentration on die trees. If our knowledge of these events is not significandy altered by his efforts, certainly our understanding of them is considerably enriched. Although the focus is on expansion, Professor Sellers does not neglect other matters that challenged Polk's attention and leadership. The distracted and divided state of the Democratic party, in part inherited and in part aggravated by Polk's nomination and the policy of expansion to which he subsequendy dedicated himself, and the problems of patronage with which Polk wrestled in his effort to unite the party (without success ) are given sure and illuminating treatment. Polk's administration is presented clearly as a time of transition, a period of rapid transformation of which the President himself was not fully aware. By the 1840's, the author points out, "the Jacksonian revolution had run its course." An ardent Jacksonian and a devoted follower of Old Hickory, Polk faced the "difficult task of administering the Jacksonian legacy." Tom between his devotion to the past and his inability, or unwillingness, to appreciate the importance of new problems and alignments, Polk, like many of his political contemporaries, was "a man out of his time." The largest of diese new developments—the depth of feeling and emotional response many Americans were giving to the slavery question—was, to a degree, spawned 362CIVIL WAR HISTORY by Polk's own continentalism. It was also a problem, Sellers concludes, which Polk "was not remotely equipped to understand." The story of Polk's struggle with the increasingly disruptive agitation over slavery has been reserved to the diird and final volume of Professor Sellers' study. The author's characterization of President Polk is full and finely drawn, lending support to those who have selected Polk as one of America's ten great Presidents. He was cool and deliberate, a man of much nerve and good judgment, always determined to achieve his ends no matter what the risks. His success in playing the dangerous game of "diplomatic bluff" over the Oregon question and his attitude toward relations with Mexico reveal elements in Polk's own character. He was, Sellers adds, a "master at the art of manipulating men," no small factor in his relations with the nation's lawmakers. Under Polk's prodding and close surveillance, the twenty-ninth Congress compiled "die most impressive record of legislative action in the nineteendi century." The high level of research and scholarship established by Professor Sellers in his first volume of Polk's biography has been fully carried out in the second, a recipient of the Bancroft Prize. He has produced a dispassionate , critical and detailed study of a man...