By Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. (Anthropology, UCLA)
1845–1848 CE: POLK EXPANDED THE UNITED STATES ACROSS THE CONTINENT
President JAMES K. POLK entered office in 1845, determined to expand the United States to the Pacific. His program embodied what Americans soon called MANIFEST DESTINY—the conviction that the United States was entitled, even destined, to spread across North America.
Polk pursued that expansion in two very different ways. In the Northwest, he used hard bargaining and the possibility of conflict to reach a diplomatic settlement with Britain. In the Southwest, he sent American troops into territory disputed with Mexico, where the resulting clash supplied the immediate justification for a war that enormously enlarged the United States.
DOMINATORS, whom Polk led, said, Mexicans shed American blood upon American soil. We must punish them as well as expand the U.S. to the entire continent, from sea to sea. Make the Pacific Ocean an American frontier.
COOPERATORS, ORDINARY CITIZENS OF MEXICO’S NORTHERN PROVINCES, said, We already live here, but the Americans say it’s their destiny; then they invade and subjugate us.
POLK SENT U.S. TROOPS INTO THE DISPUTED BORDERLAND
The United States annexed Texas in 1845, but Mexico and the United States did not agree on Texas’s southern boundary. Texas and the Polk administration claimed the Rio Grande. Mexico regarded the Nueces River, considerably farther north, as the relevant boundary. The territory between them was therefore disputed.
Polk ordered General ZACHARY TAYLOR and thousands of U.S. troops first to Corpus Christi and then, in March 1846, southward across the disputed territory to the Rio Grande opposite the Mexican city of Matamoros. The U.S. Army constructed a fortified position there. Polk later acknowledged in his own war message that Mexican General Pedro de Ampudia demanded that Taylor withdraw beyond the Nueces. Taylor did not withdraw.
On April 25, 1846, Mexican troops encountered a U.S. patrol commanded by Captain SETH THORNTON in the disputed zone. American soldiers were killed, wounded, and captured. Polk now had the incident he needed to ask Congress for a declaration of war. On May 11, he famously told Congress that Mexico had crossed the boundary of the United States and shed American blood on American soil. But whether that ground was indisputably American soil was precisely the issue in dispute.
Polk deliberately instigated the Mexican-American War. Polk deliberately moved U.S. troops into contested territory claimed by Mexico, placed them opposite a Mexican city, refused Mexico’s demand that they retreat, and then treated the predictable military collision as proof that Mexico had begun a war against the United States. Polk’s opponents therefore accused his administration of manufacturing the circumstances for war.
Congress overwhelmingly authorized war. The House approved the war resolution 174–14, the Senate 40–2, and Polk signed it on May 13, 1846. American armies subsequently invaded northern Mexico, seized California and New Mexico, landed at Veracruz, and fought their way inland until General WINFIELD SCOTT occupied Mexico City in September 1847.
The peace imposed afterward transformed the map of North America. Under the TREATY OF GUADALUPE HIDALGO, signed February 2, 1848, Mexico relinquished its claim to Texas, accepted the Rio Grande as the Texas boundary, and ceded an enormous western territory to the United States. The Mexican Cession included present-day California, Nevada and Utah; New Mexico; most of Arizona and Colorado; and portions of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming.
Under Polk, the United States acquired the land that would later become Idaho—most through the 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain, and a small southeastern portion through the 1848 Mexican Cession. Congress did not create Idaho Territory until 1863.
The National Archives calculates that Mexico lost about 55 percent of its prewar territory.
Under the treaty, the United States paid Mexico $15 million and assumed certain claims by American citizens against Mexico. But the transfer cannot be understood simply as a real-estate purchase: it was the peace settlement following a war in which U.S. armies had invaded Mexico and occupied its capital.
Dominators said, Victory makes expansion legitimate. The Cooperators, the ordinary people in the territories that Polk invaded, said, Military victory can change a border, but it cannot make the people who were already there disappear.”
1846 CE: THOREAU REFUSED TO HELP PAY FOR POLK’S WAR
The war provoked substantial American opposition. Critics included antislavery activists, Whigs, religious reformers, and writers who believed territorial expansion would spread slavery as well as American power.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU became its most enduring philosophical voice. In 1846, he was briefly jailed after refusing to pay a poll tax.
His resistance reflected his opposition to both slavery and the Mexican War. He later developed the argument in his 1849 essay commonly known as “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau argued that an individual should not surrender moral judgment merely because a government has enacted a law or undertaken a policy.
His challenge turned Polk’s logic upside down. The important question was no longer simply, Can the government win the war? It became: What should a citizen do when the government asks him to participate in an injustice?
Young Congressman ABRAHAM LINCOLN attacked Polk from another direction. In his famous “Spot Resolutions,” Lincoln demanded that Polk identify the precise spot where American blood had supposedly been shed and demonstrate that it actually belonged to the United States. The Library of Congress preserves Lincoln’s December 1847 resolutions challenging Polk’s account of the war’s origin.
Polk said Mexico violated America’s boundary.
Thoreau publicly advocated protest, intoning, A citizen remains morally responsible for what his government does, and I’ll go to jail rather than support Mr. Polk’s war.
1846 CE: POLK’S THREATS FORCED BRITAIN TO CEDE LAND THAT BECAME OREGON, WASHINGTON STATE, AND IDAHO TO THE U.S.
In the Pacific Northwest, Polk demanded the region up to 54°40′ north latitude. He and Britain compromised and divided the land. The OREGON TREATY, signed June 15, 1846, extended the international boundary westward along the 49th parallel and through the waters separating Vancouver Island from the mainland. The settlement placed the territory that would become Washington, Oregon, and most of Idaho on the American side. Britain kept Vancouver Island and the lands to the north. Polk had combined threatening rhetoric, migration, territorial pressure, and diplomacy in Oregon while avoiding war with the world’s leading naval power. The contrast is striking: compromise with powerful Britain; war with weaker Mexico.
POLK AND MANIFEST DESTINY
In 1845, James K. Polk became President of the United States. Polk sought territorial expansion, promoted war with Mexico, defended slavery, and demanded obedience to government authority. Similarly, in 2026, the U.S., under Donald Trump, the current President of America, has also sought territorial expansion—in Venezuela and threatened to expand the U.S. to include Greenland, Canada, Colombia, and Cuba.
Many Americans in Polk’s day admired Polk’s aggressive nationalism, as do the MAGA deplorables nowadays. Others, like Henry Thoreau in Polk’s time, viewed his policies as unjust, as AOC, Kamala Harris, and Robert Reich rate Trump’s policies now.
Henry David Thoreau, the Massachusetts writer (later famous for Walden), said the Mexican-American War, which Polk provoked so he could seize California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. Modern progressives—AOC, Sanders, Reich, Goodman, Hartmann, Packman, Maddox, Wallace, Velshi, and Meiselas –regard Trump’s foreign interventions with the same horror Thoreau expressed at Polk’s war promotions.
THOREAU ADVOCATED PARTNERSHIP CONSCIOUSNESS, THE ANTI-DOMINATION COUNTER-ETHOS OF THE ANUNNAKI DOMINATION DEMENTIA OF YAHWEH/ENLIL & MARDUK/ZEUS
In 1846 CE, Thoreau rejected the dominator premise. He argued that an election determines who holds office, but not what is right. A citizen’s highest duty, said Thoreau, is not obedience but conscience. People should never surrender their moral judgment to politicians, legislators, or governments. Every citizen must continually evaluate whether government actions are just. To Thoreau, patriotism did not mean silence. Patriotism meant independent thought.
NINMAH, the person from Nibiru, whom its slaves regarded as the Great “Goddess of the Anunnaki led the genetics team that created our Hybrid Homo sapiens/Homo erectus ancestors as their slave race. She advocated that we embrace the ethos of compassion and cooperation, which Riane Eisler and I call Partnership Consciousness. Ninmah said we need to meet the basic needs of all people on Earth. We must do so, Ninmah insists, to balance the domination-obsession of Marduk and his agent Gabriel, the covert masters of Earth to this very day, if we are to survive the drastic climate challenges we now face.
Partnership Consciousness asks: Is this policy compassionate? Does it promote human well-being? Does it respect freedom and dignity? Does it serve life rather than domination?
LET YOUR LIFE STOP VIOLENT MACHINE
Thoreau understood that governments and institutions possess momentum. He knew that people excuse injustice by claiming they are merely following orders, obeying laws, or respecting the will of the majority. But Thoreau disagreed, writing that when injustice becomes severe, a citizen should become “a counter-friction to stop the machine.”
The domination machine was not merely government and domination institutions; the overall machine was–and still is– CONFORMITY, PASSIVE OBEDIENCE, AND MORAL SURRENDER
Partnership Consciousness asks each person to become the counter-friction that can grind the state, the church, and the business to a stop and allow We The People the loving oneness and sharing inherent in our consciences.
THE DANGER OF POLITICAL PASSIVITY
Thoreau reserved special criticism for people who privately opposed injustice but took no action. He observed that many Americans claimed to oppose slavery and war, like that of Polk’s war against Mexico, while doing nothing to stop it. People who opposed the war just waited, perhaps complained, but basically just waited for it to end while they remained comfortable as American and Mexican soldiers and innocent civilians suffered theft, rape, home destruction, wounding and death.
For Thoreau, silence assists domination, and inaction strengthens the machine. Partnership Consciousness requires participation, and freedom survives only when citizens actively defend it.
LET CONSCIENCE TRUMP AUTHORITY
The enduring lesson of Civil Disobedience that Thoreau gave us is simple: Though government, majorities, and traditions possess power, conscience possesses legitimacy.
Thoreau refused to serve what he considered an unjust government. Instead, he served his own reason, moral judgment, and conscience. He chose cooperation, responsibility, and moral awareness over the path of domination and obedience. His message remains relevant today:
Never surrender your conscience to authority.
When the machine serves injustice, become the counter-friction that stops it.
#HASHTAGS
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Reference: The School of Life. 2017. “Thoreau and Civil Disobedience.” YouTube video, January 27, 2017.
Ojalá que Israelis and Palestinians friend and forgive each other and their ancestors, make amends, and together prosper in peace.
