88. Silverman, Lightning Man , 259–64; 429; Albert Moyer, Joseph Henry (New York, 1997), 239–47; Donald Cole, A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall (Baton Rouge, 2004), 246–50, 301.
89. See Richard John, “The Politics of Innovation,” Daedalus 127 (1998): 187–214.
90. See Charles Geist, Wall Street , rev. ed. (New York, 2004), 39; James Carey, Communication as Culture (Boston, 1989), 218. Quotation from the North American , Jan. 15, 1846, p. 2.
91. Richard DuBoff, “Business Demand and the Development of the Telegraph in the United States,” Business History Review 54 (1980): 459–79, quotation from 468. Technical but revealing is Kenneth Garbade and William Silber, “Technology, Communication, and the Performance of Financial Markets, 1840–1975,” Journal of Finance 33 (1978): 819–32.
92. For more examples of the value of information to the economy, see John McCusker, “The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” AHR 110 (2005): 295–321.
93. Richard John, “Recasting the Information Infrastructure for the Industrial Age,” in A Nation Transformed by Information , ed. Alfred Chandler and James Cortada (New York, 2000), 75, 84.
94. Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 11–29.
95. “Morse’s Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,” De Bow’s Review 1 (1846): 133.
96. David Hochfelder, “Taming the Lightning: American Telegraphy in a Revolutionary Technology” (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1999); Paul Israel, From Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory (Baltimore, 1992).
97. Cole, Amos Kendall , 245.
98. Democratic Review , quoted in William Weeks, Building the Continental Empire (Chicago, 1996), 85; U.S. House of Representatives, Ways and Means Committee Report, 1845, quoted in Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind (Chapel Hill, 1982), 12.
99. Quoted in Silverman, Lightning Man , 243.
100. Andrew Jackson to William Lewis, May 3, 1844, Correspondence of AJ , VI, 282.
101. John Quincy Adams, Memoirs , ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia, 1874–79), XII, 171.
102. Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist (Princeton, 1966), 215–20; Crapol, John Tyler , 220.
103. See Cooper, Politics of Slavery , 194, 205; Freehling, Secessionists at Bay , 409–10.
104. Quoted in Peterson, Presidencies of Harrison and Tyler , 259.
105. Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929; Boston, 1963), graph on 177.
1. Quoted in Sam Haynes, James K. Polk (New York, 1997), 18.
2. William Dusinberre, Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk (New York, 2003).
3. Presidential Messages , IV, 381; Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates , 3rd ser., 79 (April 1845): 199; David Pletcher, Diplomacy of Annexation (Columbia, Mo., 1973), 236–41.
5. Linda Hudson, Mistress of Manifest Destiny (Austin, Tex., 2001), 60–62. This attribution is questioned by Robert Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan and His Times (Kent, Ohio, 2003), 244–45.
6. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, April 27, 1809, Writings of Thomas Jefferson , ed. Andrew Lipscomb (Washington, 1905), XII, 274–77; Andrew Jackson to Aaron V. Brown, Feb. 9, 1843, in Correspondence of AJ , VI, 201.
7. Presidential Messages , IV, 380; Joel Silbey, Storm over Texas (Oxford, 2005), 102.
8. William Gilmore Simms, “Progress in America,” quoted in Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny (New York, 1995), 48.
9. Robert J. Walker, “Report as Secretary of the Treasury for Fiscal Year 1846–47,” Niles’ Register 73 (Dec. 18, 1847): 255.
10. Bancroft misquoted a poem by the Irish philosopher and bishop George Berkeley, “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” I have taken this chapter title from Bancroft rather than Berkeley.
11. John Pinheiro, “Anti-Catholicism, All Mexico, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” JER 23 (2003): 69–96; Walker is quoted on 78.
12. New York Morning News , May 24, 1845, quoted in Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York, 1963), 22–23.
13. Henry Clay to John J. Crittenden, Dec. 5, 1843, Papers of Henry Clay , ed. Robert Seager II (Lexington, Ky., 1988), IX, 898; Christopher Clark, Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War (Chicago, 2006), 205–6.
14. “Letter to the Hon. Henry Clay on the Annexation of Texas,” Aug. 1, 1837, in William Ellery Channing, Works (Boston, 1847), II, 181–261.
15. Presidential Messages , IV, 211–14; Pletcher, Diplomacy of Annexation , 208. See further Edward Crapol, John Tyler (Chapel Hill, 2006), 135–55.
16. Norma Peterson, The Presidencies of William Henry Harrison and John Tyler (Lawrence, Kans., 1989), 140–43.
17. Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, Eng., 2005).
18. See Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985).
19. Quoted in Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist (Princeton, 1966), 213.
20. Gerald Geary, The Secularization of the California Missions (Washington, 1934); Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization (Albuquerque, N.M., 1995), 87–106.
21. See Doyce Nunis, “Alta California’s Trojan Horse,” California History 76 (1997): 299–330.
22. Quoted in Neal Harlow, California Conquered (Berkeley, 1982), 35.
23. John Parrott to Thomas Jones, June 22, 1842, in John Parrott, Selected Papers , ed. Barbara Jostes (San Francisco, 1972), 22.
24. Ray Billington, The Far Western Frontier, 1830–1860 (New York, 1956), 91–115.
25. See Will Bagley, “Lansford Warren Hastings,” Overland Trail 12 (1994): 12–26; George Stewart, Ordeal by Hunger (Boston, 1960); Kristin Johnson, ed., Unfortunate Emigrants (Logan, Utah, 1996).
26. Julie Jeffrey, Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa Whitman (Norman, Okla., 1991), 76–82.
27. See John S. Galbraith, The Hudson’s Bay Company as an Imperial Factor (Berkeley, 1957).
28. The New Orleans Weekly Picayune , July 17, 1843, gave a detailed accounting of the 990 migrants and their wagons and animals.
29. Thomas Leonard, James K. Polk (Wilmington, Del., 2001), 95; Meinig, Continental America , 105. In general see David Dary, The Oregon Trail (New York, 2004).
30. Frederick Merk, The Oregon Question (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 234–54.
31. Peter Burnett, “Recollections of an Old Pioneer,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 5 (1904): 93.
32. Merk, Oregon Question , 96.
33. Quoted in Sellers, Polk, Continentalist , 219.
34. Howard Jones and Donald Rakestraw, Prologue to Manifest Destiny: Anglo-American Relations in the 1840s (Wilmington, Del., 1997), 184, 187, 193; Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York, 1956), 486–87; Crapol, John Tyler , 119–21.
35. Pletcher, Diplomacy of Annexation , 242–43.
36. “First Annual Message to Congress” (Dec. 2, 1845), Presidential Messages , IV, 392–99. More recent presidents have given notice of treaty terminations on their own authority, without seeking prior congressional authorization.
37. Sellers, Polk, Continentalist , 357.
38. Jones and Rakestraw, Prologue to Manifest Destiny , 207–8, 235–37, 243.