It was on Dec. 5, 1848, that James K. Polk provided his official imprimatur to the great Gold Rush that would forever change the face of the American West.
President Polk is the American political figure most closely identified with the concept of "Manifest Destiny" -- the notion that this nation should exist from the Atlantic to the Pacific -- and Polk used his 1848 State of the Union message as a way of encouraging settlement of the West Coast.
"The accounts of abundance of gold are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service," Polk's statement said.
California wasn't yet a state in 1848. Although statehood certainly would have happened eventually, it unfolded quickly thanks to a confluence of events that began earlier that year. Another of those occurrences took place in the White House on this date.
Gold had been found in late January by James Marshall, a New Jersey-born sawmill operator who'd served under John C. Frémont in the Mexican-American War. The momentous discovery came while Marshall was overseeing construction of a sawmill 60 miles upstream from Sacramento on the American River.
In March of 1848, this news nugget, if you will, was published in the state's first newspaper. That pioneering media outlet was The Californian, launched by Sam Brannan in 1846 in Monterey and published half in Spanish, half in English, and which had since moved to San Francisco. A week later, the report was followed by one in Sam Brannan's rival paper, the California Star, which noted in a separate story that the population of San Francisco consisted of 575 men, 177 women, and 60 children.
Those totals, if not the ratios, were about to change dramatically. Not everyone, even in San Francisco, believed the reports from Sutter's Mill. But they believed an American president.
Here, however, I'd like to pause the narrative to mention James Polk's role in promoting Manifest Destiny.
The idea that America was to exist "from sea to shining sea" -- that is to say, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific -- was the self-evident implication of Thomas Jefferson's impetuous (and brilliant) real estate swindle known as the Louisiana Purchase. It was articulated directly by President Monroe, who in an 1823 message to Congress warned that any attempt by European potentates to grab territory in the Americas would be viewed as an act of war. Although historians rewarded the fifth U.S. president for his bravado by historians with a phrase that bears his name to this day, it might also be said that during John F. Kennedy's presidency, the implications of the "Monroe Doctrine" nearly started a nuclear war. At the time, though, Monroe was mainly interested in stopping in its tracks any attempts by Europe to interfere with America's westward expansion.
This, then, is the context of James K. Polk's 1848 State of the Union message. And for more than a century afterward, U.S. schoolchildren were taught that Manifest Destiny was a great idea, and that our nation's vast riches, in both people and natural resources, enabled America to defeat tyranny -- during World War II, for example. Although post-war Germans and Japanese came to the same conclusion (and adopted democratic principles), the 21st century has been a time of re-examining accepted truths and re-evaluating how America became a superpower in the first place.
Amidst riots and protests in the summer of 2020, numerous statues were defaced, destroyed, or removed. Place names were changed, founding myths re-examined. It hasn't been an orderly process and some of the decisions made by the excessively "woke" were imbecilic. But not all. Some were wise. In my view, the demand in some quarters to reconsider James K. Polk's statues and legacy falls somewhere in the middle.
An Independence Day-themed 2020 essay by liberal journalist O. Ricardo Pimentel paints Polk and his quest with familiar tropes about "white nationalism" and all the rest: "Manifest Destiny . . . was outright theft, built on a foundation of racism and imperialism," Pimentel wrote. "I see no need to ascribe greatness to this particular means to an end, no more than white privilege gives anyone license to ignore the racial history upon which our country is built."
Like Victor Hanson, Ricardo Pimentel is from Fresno, California. He is the son of Mexican immigrants. And though this is not the kind of language I would use, Pimentel is pointing out something that should have been obvious all along: namely, that the land between Monticello and San Francisco was not unoccupied at the time America's leaders were encouraging white settlers to go West. Moreover, it's a matter of historic record that President Polk was a slaveowner. It should also be pointed out that East Coast magazine editor John Louis O'Sullivan -- the Democrat who actually coined the phrase "Manifest Destiny" -- was a Confederate sympathizer who couched his appeal by glorifying the "Anglo Saxon foot" on California's borders three years before the Gold Rush.
So we're back where we started. Yes, James K. Polk helped fuel an international stampede of "49ers." But gold fever had already taken root in California before he publicized it.
"The whole country from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from the sea shore to the base of the Sierra Nevadas, resounds with the sordid cry of ‘gold, GOLD, GOLD!' while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes."
So complained the editorialists of The Californian. But the newspaper staff and its owner were as caught up in the fever as everyone else. Sam Brannan had helped start the rush when he held up bottles of gold dust he'd received in payment at his store, and announced that it was gold from the American River. By May, his newspaper announced it was suspending publication -- on the grounds that the newspaper staff itself was decamping to the diggings.
The writers and editors of the California Star followed suit a few weeks later. Are you thinking that American newspaper people were once more intrepid than today? Fair enough, but they were also more poorly paid. And "Eureka!" is still an electrifying state motto.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
