Polk manufactured a Mexican war pretext to satisfy expansionist policy.

Evidence

In May 1846, President James K. Polk ordered troops over the disputed Texas boundary. When Mexican troops defended themselves, Polk painted Mexicans as the aggressors and publicized his war cause. The ploy worked. The fight against Mexico helped rally North and South alike to the cause of national expansion. But the question of whether the expansion of the nation would mean an expansion of slavery divided northerners and southerners. In August 1846, Democratic representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania stapled onto an appropriations bill a clause barring slavery in any territory Polk obtained from the Mexican-American War. Wilmot represented the newest political force in the United States: the antislavery, anti-Black Free-Soil movement. What Polk called “foolish,” what historians call the Wilmot Proviso, what Wilmot called the “white man’s proviso,” never passed. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 495

Categorization

• QUESTION: The Free-Soil movement described as both antislavery and anti-Black is a perfect test case for the reader’s three-way scheme—where does ‘we want no slavery and no Black people’ land? Worth studying in later chapters.