James K. Polk was our most underrated president. A protégé of Andrew Jackson, Polk, a Democrat, won an improbable victory when he beat the Whig candidate Henry Clay in the 1844 presidential election. During his single, tumultuous term, he expanded U.S. territory across vast expanses of the West and Southwest, from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Coast up to the 49th parallel. He lowered the heavy tariffs supported by the industrial north, stripped public tax funds from unaccountable private banks and created an independent Treasury that survived for more than 60 years. By the time he left office in March 1849, he was played out physically and politically. He would be dead within four months, at the age of 53.

Robert W. Merry wrote a masterful biography of James Polk titled A Country of Vast Designs, wherein he lays out the nuanced and complex history of this era. For example:

Mexico established its independence from Spain in 1821 and set about to address a problem that had plagued the Spanish overlords for generations -- the dearth of settlement in Texas and California and a consequent inability to establish dominion over those lands. Unlike the robust Anglo-Saxon migrations to the New World, the Spanish influx had not encompassed large numbers of families seeking land for cultivation and settlement. The Spanish migrants had been more bent on establishing themselves as a societal elite superimposed over the established Indian societies. This worked in the New Spain heartland, where the populous Indians had established a high degree of civilization. But in areas such as Texas, where the landscape was forbidding and Apache and Comanche Indians posed a brutal threat, it faltered. To address this problem, Spain had granted large tracts of Texas land to an American group headed by Moses Austin.

In 1821 Austin’s son Stephen began selling land to American settlers........

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