The dislike was reciprocated, interlaced with no little contempt. In 1865 a progressive English gentleman offered to endow a lectureship at Cambridge University for American studies, to be filled every other year by a visitor from Harvard. Cambridge dons protested against what one called, with admirable literary flair, "a biennial flash of Transatlantic darkness." Some found the concerns exaggerated, recognizing that the lecturers would come from the class that felt itself "increasingly in danger of being swamped by the lower elements of a vast democracy." But most feared that the lectures would spread "discontent and dangerous ideas" among defenseless students. The threat was beaten back in a show of the kind of political correctness that continues to predominate in the academic world, as wary as ever of the lower elements and their strange ideas.³⁴

Recognizing that England's military force was too powerful to confront, Jacksonian Democrats called for annexation of Texas to gain a world monopoly of cotton. The US would then be able to paralyze England and intimidate Europe. "By securing the virtual monopoly of the cotton plant" the US had acquired "a greater influence over the affairs of the world than would be found in armies however strong, or navies however numerous," President Tyler observed after the annexation and the conquest of a third of Mexico. "That monopoly, now secured, places all other nations at our feet," he wrote: "An embargo of a single year would produce in Europe a greater amount of suffering than a fifty years' war. I doubt whether Great Britain could avoid convulsions." The same monopoly power neutralized British opposition to the conquest of the Oregon territory.

The editor of the New York Herald, the country's largest-selling newspaper, exulted that Britain was "completely bound and manacled with the cotton cords" of the United States, "a lever with which we can successfully control" this dangerous rival. Thanks to the conquests that provided a monopoly of the most important commodity in world trade, the Polk Administration boasted, the US could now "control the commerce of the world and secure thereby to the American Union inappreciable political and commercial advantages." "Fifty years will not elapse ere the destinies of the human race will be in our hands," a Louisiana congressman proclaimed, as he and others looked to "mastery of the Pacific" and control over the resources on which Europe was dependent. Polk's Secretary of Treasury reported to Congress that the conquests of the Democrats would guarantee "the command of the trade of the world."

The national poet, Walt Whitman, wrote that our conquests "take off the shackles that prevent men the even chance of being happy and good." Mexico's lands were taken over for the good of mankind: "What has miserable, inefficient Mexico...to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?" Others recognized the difficulty of taking Mexico's resources without burdening themselves with its "imbecile" population, "degraded" by "the amalgamation of races," though the New York press was hopeful that their fate would be "similar to that of the Indians of this country -- the race, before a century rolls over us, will become extinct." Articulating the common themes of manifest destiny, Ralph Waldo Emerson had written that the annexation of Texas was simply a matter of course: "It is very certain that the strong British race which has now overrun much of this continent, must also overrun that trace, and Mexico and Oregon also, and it will in the course of ages be of small import by what particular occasions and methods it was done." In 1829, Minister to Mexico Joel Poinsett, later Secretary of War responsible for driving the Cherokees to death and destruction on their Trail of Tears, had informed Mexico that "the United States are in a state of progressive aggrandizement, which has no example in the history of the world"; and rightly so, the slave-owner from South Carolina explained, because "the mass of its population is better educated, and more elevated in its moral and intellectual character, than that of any other. If such is its political condition, is it possible that its progress can be retarded, or its aggrandizement curtailed, by the rising prosperity of Mexico?"

The concerns of the expansionists went beyond their fear that an independent Texas would break the US resource monopoly and become a rival; it might also abolish slavery, igniting dangerous sparks of egalitarianism. Andrew Jackson thought that an independent Texas, with a mixture of Indians and fleeing slaves, might be manipulated by Britain to "throw the whole west into flames." Once again, the British might launch "mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes" in a "savage war" against the "peaceful inhabitants" of the United States. In 1827, Poinsett had reported to Washington that the "half-breed" Cherokee chief Richard Fields and the "notorious" John Hunter had "hoisted a red and white banner," seeking to establish a "union of whites and Indians" in Texas; Hunter was a white man raised by the Indians who returned to the West to try to prevent genocide. The British also noted with interest their "Republic of Fredonia." Stephen Austin, head of a nearby white colony, warned Hunter that his plans were folly; if the Republic were established, Mexico and the US would join in "annihilating so dangerous and troublesome a neighbor," and would be satisfied with "nothing short of extermination or expulsion." "The U.S. would soon sweep the country of Indians and drive them as they always have driven them to ruin and extermination." Washington would, in short, continue in its policies of genocide (in contemporary terminology), putting an end to "this madness" of a free Red-White society. Austin had successfully cleared out the "natives of the forest" from his own colony before moving on to put down the uprising, with Hunter and Fields assassinated.³⁵

The logic of the annexation of Texas was essentially that attributed to Saddam Hussein by US propaganda after his conquest of Kuwait. But the comparisons should not be pressed too far. Unlike his 19th century American precursors, Saddam Hussein is not known to have feared that slavery in Iraq would be threatened by independent states nearby, or to have publicly called for their "imbecile" inhabitants to "become extinct" so that the "great mission of peopling the Middle East with a noble race" of Iraqis might be carried forward, placing "the destinies of the human race in the hands" of the conquerors. And even the wildest fantasies did not accord Saddam potential control over oil of the kind the American expansionists of the 1840s sought over the major resource of the day. There are many interesting lessons to learn from the history so extolled by enraptured intellectuals.

³⁴ Appleby, Capitalism, 1f.

³⁵ Hietala, Manifest Design; Horsman, Race. Fredonia, Drinnon, White Savage, 192, 201-21; emphasis in original. Emerson, cited by Clarence Karier, "The Educational Legacy of War," ms., U. of Illinois, July 1992.