Terry Glavin: Is Trump's lionization of James Polk an ominous sign of things to come?

National Post

5 days ago

Shortly after his January inauguration, U.S. President Donald Trump made the peculiar decision to remove a portrait of the great Thomas Jefferson from the Oval Office and replace it with a portrait of James Polk.
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Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and the third American president. Polk, the eleventh president, launched the Mexican-American War and expanded the reach of American sovereignty from what is now Texas to Washington State, and from Wyoming to California.
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This history is directly relevant to the origins of British Columbia's August holiday weekend, which uniquely intertwines the August 1 celebration of Emancipation Day, commemorating the end of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, and the establishment of the Crown Colony of British Columbia, on August 2, 1858.
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The story is about how Canada very nearly lost the opportunity to extend its dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. It was a very close call, and it's an instructive lesson in the radical differences between Canada and the United States — differences that tend to get completely papered over by the current fashion for historical revisionism and the stupidity of the 'settler colonialism' paradigm.
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The thing about Trump is that, in his persistent expressions of territorial covetousness — most exuberantly in his public meditations on taking Greenland by military force and annexing Canada as the 51st state by economic coercion — you never really know if he's being serious or if he's just being a jackass.
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In determining Trump's preference for Polk over Jefferson, for instance, there are a couple of explanations.
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The first is his admiration for Polk as 'sort of a real estate guy,' and his esteem for Polk because ' he got a lot of land.' It could also be because he found the frame around Polk's portrait more pleasing than the frame around Jefferson's. 'I'm a frame person,' Trump told a cabinet meeting in early July. 'Sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures.'
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It has become commonplace to frame British Columbia's colonial origin as an unwelcome intrusion of a foreign power to force the displacement of Indigenous peoples in a process of ongoing, systemic genocide. This is an interpretive paradigm that has the disadvantage of being untrue, masochistic, and fatally corrosive to the persistence of distinctly Canadian comprehensions of sovereignty and nationhood. It also deliberately elides the profound differences between Canada's westward expansion and the way Americans behaved themselves south of the 49th parallel.
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How British Columbia comes into this story is in Polk's covetousness of the Pacific Northwest, which was known then as the Columbia Territory.
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An ardent disciple of the American notion of 'manifest destiny,' Polk had campaigned on the slogan ' 54-40 or Fight,' which declared an intention to displace British sovereignty West of the Rockies as far North as the Russian possessions in Alaska, at 54 degrees, forty minutes of latitude.
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Polk very nearly succeeded. Coupled with American encroachment into the British fur trade realms of what is now Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, Polk's belligerence induced the British colonial office to capitulate with the Oregon Treaty of 1846. The treaty sliced the old Columbia Territory in half by extending the 49th parallel from the Rockies to the Pacific.
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The treaty forced the Northward migration of thousands of settlers, traders and adventurers under British dominion. They were Orkney Islanders, Scotsmen and Englishmen, Iroquois freemen, Quebecois voltigeurs, 'King George Indians' from a variety of western tribes, and Kanakas, as the Hudson's Bay Company's Hawaiian workers were then known. They would go on to become the first British Columbians.
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Led by the HBC's James Douglas, who would end up the governor of both the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, a new and thriving multicultural society sprung up around Fort Camosun, now Victoria, where they'd been welcomed by the local Saanich ad Songhees tribes.
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Below the 49th parallel, the British and Canadian exodus opened the gates to genocide and anarchy: The Cayuse War, the Klamath War, the Salmon River War, the Yakima War and the Nisqually War.
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Absolutely nothing remotely like this occurred in the settlement of the Canadian West. For all the injustices and travesties of marginalization, and taking into account the Red River Rebellion and the Northwest Rebellion, it was mostly a collaborative affair between Euro-Canadians, Métis and Indigenous people.
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The Vancouver Island colony bore absolutely no resemblance to the settlements in the American West. Douglas was a West Indian, as the HBC called him, or an 'octoroon' owing to his mixed Scots and Creole ancestry. His wife, Amelia, was the daughter of a Cree woman and the Irish HBC official William Connolly. South of the 49th parallel, Black people were denied American citizenship. Douglas invited hundreds of Black people North.
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Meanwhile, wholeheartedly supported by the American slave states, Polk decided to take by force all the Mexican territories North of the Rio Grande in a war that unfolded in unspeakable cruelty. The abolitionist Abraham Lincoln was against the war, and General Ulysses S. Grant, who would go on to succeed the assassinated Lincoln, said he was ashamed of his role as a young soldier on the Mexican frontier. 'I had not moral courage enough to resign,' he once confessed.
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Two years after the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe, which ended the Mexican war, ushered in the same ghastly progression of mass murders and shooting sprees: The Yavapai slaughter, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Mendocino War, the Yuki genocide, the Snake River War, the Colorado War, and on and on. It was a tidal wave of hideous crimes against humanity that lasted decades.
That's how the American West was 'won.' It's also how the territory that came to be called British Columbia was very nearly lost.
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By the late 1850s, American miners were streaming North across the 49th parallel, headed to the Fraser Canyon in a mania for gold. Upon arriving by ship at Victoria, they were greeted by the First African Rifles — a regiment of armed Black men. In Victoria, Emancipation Day was already a civic holiday, although it was more than a century before either B.C. or Canada formally celebrated it.
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In the Fraser Canyon, the Americans had formed themselves into militias, and scores of dead began to pile up in their encounters with local Indigenous miners. So, Douglas took matters into his own hands, and at Fort Langley, on August 2, 1858, Douglas unilaterally declared the establishment of the Crown Colony of British Columbia.
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The following year, 1859, an American insurrection very nearly broke out in Yale, in the Canyon, when a Black man filed assault charges against an American. Governor Douglas put down the revolt, but was immediately seized of another crisis, on San Juan Island.
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In a petty dispute over the shooting of a pig, American troops commanded by the notorious General William Harney invaded the island and settled in for a siege, awaiting orders. Harney was one of the worst war criminals in the US military at the time. His instructions to his troops as they were exterminating the Lipan and Caddo tribes were to 'exterminate all the men and make the women and children prisoners.' Their villages were to be looted and burned.
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Fortunately, however, by 1859, the presidency had gone to James Buchanan, who was preoccupied by tensions that would soon erupt in the war to free the slaves. The dispute on San Juan Island, ostensibly about the trajectory of the border between the islands, was given over to arbitration.
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