Audiobook: Coast to Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands
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President James K. Polk shared these views and fully appreciated New Mexico's strategic importance in the growing American Empire. When delivering the State of the Union address in December 18 48 he specifically mentioned to the newly acquired Southwest as a place that my one day become profitable for agriculture and mining. It's immediate national significance, however, trumped all future possibilities from its position, Poke declared. It is the intermediate and connecting territory between our settlements and our possessions in Texas and those on the Pacific Coast. To assure American Heggem ity over California's gold fields and ocean ports. Poke asked Congress to establish a territorial government for New Mexico, urging lawmakers to set aside sectional differences for the country's greater good in making these remarks of the nation's most powerful expansionist, endorsed New Mexico as a critical possession and added impetus for its Political Inc and infrastructural development. In fact, the president mentioned New Mexico quite frequently over the course of his four year term, cementing the region's position at the forefront of national growth. Referring to the Mexican session generally and to sparsely settled New Mexico, specifically, Polk said that the monetary worth of the land was inconsequential compared to its geographic importance, and he stressed that in line with the Monroe doctrine, no European power should ever again claim jurisdiction over it. These two factors alone constituted in immense value to the United States as a burgeoning hemispheric superpower and justified any troubles and expenses that the government might incur in retaining sovereignty over the area. Although none of the cities on our coast of California may ever rival the city of New York in wealth, population and business, the president prophesied large municipalities would nonetheless rise around Pacific harbors and stimulate the American economy, provided that reliable roots of commerce could be established and maintained. Secretary of State James Buchanan echoed the president's sentiments when he wrote that California formed an integral part of this great and glorious republic, so much so that the government would remain fully dedicated to its development. James D. B. DeBow, editor of a pro slavery magazine in the South, wrote in 18 56 that the growth of California constitutes one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of America. The dollar value of customs receipts at the Port of San Francisco had skyrocketed by a factor of eight since the Gold rush began in 18 49 only New York, Philadelphia and New Orleans exported more goods annually than San Francisco, which had grown from a small seaside town toe a bustling centre of global commerce in just seven years. Farther South, Los Angeles and San Diego offered additional enticements for economic expansion. At one point, DeBow estimated that Western commerce would yield an astronomical $350 million in wealth each year. Fearful that European interests might gain a foothold on the Pacific Coast, financiers and politicians in the South and north alike clamored for exclusive access to and control of this lucrative new market between the Eastern United States and California. However late New Mexico, which thus bore strategic significance for the country's ambitious imperial agenda, Poke and other expansionists want to California but to retain possession of it and realize its full economic and geopolitical potential, they needed New Mexico as a connecting thoroughfare in their nation building project. After 18 45 this perceived need held especially true for Southerners Among home Poke, a native of Tennessee, could be counted because New Mexico linked slaveholding Texas to coastal California for the following two decades, the political implications of the territory's existence and the daily lives of the people living there would be firmly grounded in notions of manifest destiny, American imperialism and the sectional ism surrounding slavery debates. None of this is meant to diminish the significance of places such as California, Oregon or Utah in the broader context of westward expansion. Rather, I argue that New Mexico, primarily because of its geographic location, was much more important to 19th century US expansion and the evolving sectional crisis and historians have previously appreciated.