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If I follow you home, will you keep me?

On the other hand...

Free Aruba, Imperialist pigdogs! :P
And the Antilles! and GTHOOOH! (2nd H = Hemisphere)

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"... Then you'll see me do some MAJOR dancing on your face!" -- Cosby

It is, however, wrong for an historian to take a modern precept or belief and view a past event through such modern eyes. For example the concept of expansionism was all the rage and not viewed with the same sort of contempt as it is today. Further, Polk was fulfilling one of his campaign promises by addressing the concept of Manifest Destiny.

Or, as it were, the idea that it was God's plan for the United States to stretch from sea to shining sea. The other people there, be they native, Mexican, or British (as was the case of the 54 40 boundry dispute in the Oregon territories), were mearly standing in the way of the American frontiersmen from the completion of God's plan. And who were we, simple Americans to stand in the way of God's plan.

Nevertheless, one of the major problems I have with the Mexican American War, beside the outlandish expansionist tone of the whole thing, and the half truths foisted on the Mexicans to get the whole thing going in the first place. For more information on what I mean by this, look at the Spot Resolutions presented to Congress by the Congressmen from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. But beyond that, the Mexican American War is one of the great underlying casues of the American Civil War.

Polk was a southerner by birth, being from North Carolina and living in Tennessee. He was pushed, in a way, by both his rather aristrocratic birth and southern slave holding cohorts into the increase of land. The consequence of expansion turned in a great free-for-all on the floor of Congress and stump speakers both north and south. The accretion of slavery into the territory gained from the wars, as states were created from the vast expance, was viewed as a means for survival for slavery in the south and therefore a good thing. On the other hand, the north saw the things as just the opposite in that the expansion of slavery meant that it would continue to live on in the American system.

Now, by no means did the Mexican American War create these feelings, for they had been an underlying fact of life since the creation of the 3/5ths clause in the Constitution. But what the Mexican American War did was to bring feeling and rhetoric to a boiling point. It made the Missouri compromise of 1820 obsolete and predicated the Compromise of 1850. Which in and of itself didn't last very long before Senator Steven A. Douglas was calling for the ideal of Popular Sovereignty.

Austere, severe, he held few people dear
His oratory filled his foes with fear
The factions soon agreed
He's just the man we need
To bring about victory
Fulfill our manifest destiny
And annex the land the Mexicans command
And when the votes were cast the winner was
Mr. James K. Polk, Napoleon of the stump

*singing saw solo*

In four short years he met his every goal
He seized the whole southwest from Mexico
Made sure the tariffs fell
And made the English sell
The Oregon Territory
He built an independant treasury
Having done all this he sought no second term
But precious few have mourned the passing of
Mr. James K. Polk our eleventh president
Young Hickory, Napoleon of the stump

(Of course, as Jay will no doubt remind us, Van Buren wasn't exactly an abolitionist, and Polk restored the independant treasury.)