Last year, I finished my latest book, Tracking the Storm. The following post is the eighth installment (find the earlier sections here). You can download a pdf if you enjoy reading on your computer or also purchase a printed copy of the book.
From the start of the country, it is clear that there was no unified agreement as to what the Revolution in 1776 had wrought. Though most “Patriots” had ultimately been happy to remove control of the mother country, England, there was no clear direction for “what’s next.” For the next 60 years, from 1790 to 1850, the country would move ahead, often through key compromises, but with the question of control never fully resolved. Jefferson had taken over in his own “Revolution of 1800,” but then as he governed, his own actions affirmed some of the need for increased power in the central government. The Supreme Court’s decisions, and new dynamic powerful leaders like Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, only solidified more centralized power and control. Yet even Clay and Jackson had not fully agreed, spending 20 years fighting about the levels of power in Washington DC, accusing one another of being evil, ruining the Republic. By 1850, in Clay’s last years of life, the spirit of compromise was fully dying due to twin pressures: manifest destiny and abolition.
In the 1820s, a Second Great Awakening spread across the country, about 80 years after the First Great Awakening had played a key role in the last cycle of history. A major outcome of the spiritual movement was to bring to the surface a new series of social leaders who refused to be silenced about slavery. Yet, while men like William Lloyd Garrison, William Still, Frederick Douglass, and James Birney were starting to publish and speak openly against abolition, a different outcome from the Great Awakening grabbed headline attention.
The Great Awakenings have, in their roots, been a call to return to the “City on a Hill” belief of the special uniqueness of the United States, and connected to that, the need for brave new “pioneers” to take belief to untamed lands. The first Pilgrims and Puritans had crossed the oceans with this spirit. The responders of the First Great Awakening had crossed the Appalachian Mountains to spread our ideals through the middle part of the country. It was that notion that made Prime Minister Grenville’s 1763 Proclamation Line such a fiasco. Now, in the early 1840s, it was a new generation’s turn to cross the remainder of the continent. This new spirit took on the name of “Manifest Destiny.” Directly in the way of moving west, was the new country of Mexico, which had first achieved national independence in 1821, one year after the explosive Missouri Compromise.
Hispanic settlements of the new country had been successful, but in disparate areas such as Sacramento, San Diego, Santé Fe, and Mexico City, thus communication and coordination was very difficult. Eventually, the distance began to lead to political upheaval that resulted in various revolutions in Mexico. Those revolutions would be first felt in Mexico’s most northern state, Tejas.
The resultant conflict between Mexico and Tejas, more recognizable by its anglicized name of Texas, would lead to an open war of independence by the Texans, both Anglo and Hispanic working together against Santa Anna. The success of this war came in 1836 with Santa Anna signing the Treaty of Velasco to end the conflict. Texas, for its part, quickly appealed to the USA to be annexed, something that should have been an easy task for a Congress drunk on the manifest destiny wine.
However, the abolitionists finally saw their chance and worked tirelessly to oppose the acquisition of new land that clearly would be slave land. A new political party emerged, the Liberty Party, and it was successful in gaining some support for Congressional members and the choice of annexation was held in limbo. For Southerners, and many other citizens eager for more land, the position of the abolitionists was horrible, but year after year, annexing Texas was denied. This, to Southerners, was just more proof that the national government was moving away from the Jeffersonian view of a limited government.
The election of 1844 became a critical moment in our story and perhaps the starting point of the clear unraveling period. The leading candidates, former President Martin Van Buren and Whig leader Henry Clay did not want the slavery question to become the focus of the election. However, the issue of national power connected to slavery was not going to subside. During months of the summer of 1844, both Van Buren and Clay had been unclear on their position about slavery and annexation. For Van Buren, his answers meant that the Southern Democrats would not support him and during the Convention, the Democrats nominated Tennessean James Polk whose most redeeming feature was his rabid position on manifest destiny. For Clay, his refusal to be totally clear would open the door for James Birney’s Liberty Party to strike its strongest blow to date. Shockingly then to some pundits, Polk took the Presidency easily, in the election of 1844.
A year later, Polk would provoke the Mexican nation into an unwise attack on American forces that had moved into the disputed land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. Mexico, for her part, could look to the history of New Spain and find proof that Tejas had only been north of the Nueces. Texans, however, could also find support during the history of New Spain for the land extending to the Rio Grande. Not surprisingly, Polk and other manifest destiny adherents wanted every inch of the land formerly held by Spain.
Polk carefully positioned his troops, including the US Navy off the California coast and Army troops north of Santé Fe and also in the Oregon Territory. Once the shooting started, the war would prove to be something of a “pre-season” game for the men of the eventual Civil War. Mexico really never stood a chance, and the independence minded residents of all of northern Mexico never really opposed any American force, seemingly happy to join the United States. For our part though uncovering the pattern of the Great Crises, the Mexican War plays the same role as the French and Indian war in the previous story (or the Restoration from the first pattern we reviewed)—a glorious moment that seemed to portend good ahead, but really was only setting the table for the events that would unfold over the next decade.
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You can read the rest of chapter 8 in Tracking the Storm; the book provides powerful clues about what is coming, rapidly, to the United States. There is little doubt that a storm is approaching the country, the outer edges of the winds already swirling around us. What does that portend for the nation? Through the clues of history, we can find direction and steps to undertake to prepare. Many believe there won’t be a storm, or maybe that the worst is over. With history as a guide, I demonstrate that we haven’t yet even reached the Great Crisis.
Gripping and “a scary yet necessary read,” Tracking the Storm moves through the past 400 years of Anglo-American history to illustrate the various clues provided that show the steps to the coming crisis. I will tell the story of political instability, economic distress, rapid technological changes and a growing philosophical divide that challenged previous generations. At the end of each Great Crisis, the nation had been radically changed. Pick up your copy of Tracking the Storm today!