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National Post
02-08-2025
- Politics
- National Post
Terry Glavin: Is Trump's lionization of James Polk an ominous sign of things to come?
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. Article content 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. Article content Article content Article content 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. Article content Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content Article content In determining Trump's preference for Polk over Jefferson, for instance, there are a couple of explanations. Article content Article content 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.' Article content 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. Article content How British Columbia comes into this story is in Polk's covetousness of the Pacific Northwest, which was known then as the Columbia Territory. Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content
National Post
12-05-2025
- Politics
- National Post
FIRST READING: The triumph of Canada's 'artificial line'
Article content 'They (the Americans) just assumed it was going to flop into their lap,' said Bown. Article content What happened instead was the sudden amalgamation of North America's various British colonies, many of whom were debt-ridden and plagued by stagnant, oligarchic economies. Article content Still, the country that resulted, Canada, was able to raise its hand as the only viable non-American purchaser of the HBC's former domain — a deal that it struck in 1870. Article content But a mere contract was not enough. If the U.S. couldn't purchase new territory, the other option was for motivated U.S. citizens to simply take it. Article content Multiple times throughout the 19th century, a community of Americans would become established in a foreign country or territory, decide that they wanted to live under the stars and stripes, and then agitate for annexation. Article content That's what happened to Hawaii: U.S. citizens overthrew the kingdom's monarchy and then successfully petitioned for U.S. intervention. Article content It roughly describes the lead-up to the Mexican-American War, which saw California, Utah, Nevada and pieces of five other states added to the U.S. fold. Article content It also describes any number of wars with Native Americans: Settlers would move into territory that had been legally set aside for Indigenous use, triggering armed conflict and a U.S. military response. Article content Early Canadian history is filled with instances of what, in different circumstances, could easily have become a prelude to U.S. takeover. Article content At multiple points, communities of Americans established themselves in Canadian territory, setting up whole economic networks that employed U.S. currency and served U.S. markets. Article content In the immediate aftermath of Confederation, some of the only non-Indigenous people in the Canadian prairies were American traders and hunters operating with impunity. 'The whole area was entirely integrated into the American economic sphere,' said Bown. Article content The 1898 Klondike Gold Rush and the 1858 Fraser Canyon Gold Rush were primarily American endeavours. At its height, the Klondike gold rush centre of Dawson City was predominantly U.S. citizens using U.S. dollars and exporting gold primarily to U.S. buyers. One of those Americans was Friedrich Trump, grandfather to U.S. President Donald Trump. Article content Even the 1870 Red River Rebellion, a conflict over land in modern-day Manitoba, comprised Métis participants who hailed from the U.S. and whose sympathies lay closer to Washington than to Ottawa. In the early stages of the rebellion, leading U.S. figures openly saw it as an opportunity for the U.S. to calve off a piece of Canada filled with American sympathizers. Article content 'Is there no other alternative for the people of northwest British America than to be cajoled or dragooned into this unnatural union with distant Canada?' said then U.S. senator Alexander Ramsey, the leading booster for the effort. Article content And yet, every time, the Canadian government was able to assert just enough influence and authority that the lands remained under Queen Victoria. Article content Canada's first decades are defined by efforts to slap together the semblance of a country north of the 49th parallel before the Americans could do it first. Article content The Canadian Pacific Railroad was the most conspicuous element of the plan, with its builders conscious that if they didn't drive a route to the Pacific as quickly as possible, the Americans would do it for them. Article content In the words of one 2023 review of Dominion, the CPR was 'built to protect British North America from an economically ravenous United States' and was the spine for a 'paper nation.' Article content The Northwest Mounted Police, a precursor to the RCMP, was founded specifically as a means to evict U.S. whiskey traders operating in the Canadian prairies. Article content One of the inciting incidents for the force's creation was the 1873 Cypress Hills massacre, the murder of an entire Nakoda camp by American wolf hunters in what is now Saskatchewan. Article content In the 1880s, the Canadian federal government approved a series of large, corporate-owned cattle ranches across the West. One of them, Bar U Ranch, remains a national historic site. Article content Ranches were effectively the easiest and fastest way to make it look like large swaths of the prairies were under Canadian control. Article content The operations employed predominantly American cowboys to produce cattle for American buyers, but under Canadian ownership and with a British flag flying over the proceedings. Article content The federal leases for these ranches were scandalously cheap, 'but like other elements of national policy, these leases were designed to make the northwest profitable and assert Canadian sovereignty against American interests,' wrote historian Claire Elizabeth Campbell in a 2017 book chapter on the Bar U Ranch. Article content And then, starting in earnest in 1901, Ottawa consolidated its hold on the West with one of the most feverish immigration schemes in human history. Article content From just 1901 to 1913, millions of newcomers from Europe and the United States were settled onto prairie homesteads. At a time when all of Canada only had seven million inhabitants (roughly the population of the modern-day Greater Toronto Area), annual immigration briefly peaked at more than 400,000. Article content As Bown notes, many of these newcomers would have had very little allegiance to the new nation of Canada. Large portions of them didn't even speak English. But it ensured that anyone crossing the 49th parallel would immediately encounter settlements filled with Canadian nationals ostensibly loyal to the Crown and flying the Union Jack. Article content Luck underwrote all of this, of course. The aforementioned Mexican-American War and the U.S. Civil War ensured that the United States had to shelve their early 19th century conception of an entire continent under the U.S. flag — a concept often known as 'manifest destiny.' Article content But it's been described as the Canadian ' flank thrust.' While the United States was busy with its other borders, the Canadians were able to tape together just enough of a functioning state that the top half of the continent has remained in their hands ever since. Article content Article content 'It wasn't valuable enough for the Americans to expend any blood or treasure to take it,' Bown said. And by the time it was, 'it was too late.' Article content Article content When King Charles III opens Canada's Parliament at the end of this month, the Bloc Québécois has announced that they will not be showing up to work in protest. This is pretty standard Bloc practice; they usually skip anything with even a slight tinge of royal ceremony, including throne speeches. But the atmosphere will still be far less troublesome than what Charles is used to. In the U.K., speeches from the throne are laden with weird rules, including Buckingham Palace's practice of taking an MP hostage in order to ensure the King's safety. Article content The U.S. Ambassador to Canada, Peter Hoekstra, just declared that we should all stop worrying about U.S. President Donald Trump's repeated threats to annex us. 'From my standpoint, from the president's standpoint, 51st state's not coming back,' he told National Post, adding, 'he may bring it up every once in a while.' This is all somewhat awkward given that voters may have just decided an entire federal election on the basis of Trump ostensibly posing an existential threat to Canada. Watch the full interview here with the National Post's Stephanie Taylor. Article content
Yahoo
11-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Controversial name could come back to Fort Novosel
FORT NOVOSEL, Ala (WDHN) — The Alabama Secretary of State is gunning for Fort Novosel to be renamed back to Fort Rucker after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's Monday night order to restore the original name of a North Carolina Army base. 'It's time to change the name back to Ft. Rucker,' Secretary of State Wes Allen wrote on X. Allen posted this in response to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth signing a memorandum Monday night, reversing the name change of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Fort Novosel, Fort Bragg, and seven other Army bases around the southern U.S. underwent name changes in 2023 under the direction of former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. These bases were previously named to honor Confederate officers. Pentagon changes Fort Liberty's name back to Fort Bragg According to the Military Times, the project to rename the nine Army bases cost the government around $39 million. The costly changes were due in part to the removal and changes to signs, displays, monuments and paraphernalia. Fort Novosel, the home of Army Aviation and the U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence, was originally named for General Colonel Edmund W. Rucker, a confederate officer during the Civil War. After the Civil War, Rucker became a wealthy industrial magnate, dealing with coal, steel, sales, land, and banking. He died in 1924. The Fort's current name honors Enterprise native Chief Warrant Officer 4 Michael Novosel Sr., an aviator with direct ties to Army Aviation who served in World War 2, Korea, and Vietnam. He later earned the Medal of Honor after saving 29 soldiers during a medevac mission in Vietnam. Novosel was also the last World War 2 veteran on active flying status before his retirement in 1985. The name Fort Rucker is officially no more 'CW4 Novosel's life of service in uniform is something out of a Hollywood movie,' said Major General Michael C. McCurry, former commanding general of Fort Novosel. 'His legacy of service and patriotism is a spark to those in uniform striving to be all they can be.' While Fort Bragg was previously named after Braxton Bragg, an Army general who served in the Mexican American War and later as a Confederate general in the Civil War, the Fort will now bear the name of Private First-Class Roland L. Bragg, an Army paratrooper who served during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, according to Secretary Hegseth. There has been no word from the Pentagon on whether or not Fort Novosel or any other Army bases will be renamed. WDHN has reached out to the Pentagon for additional information. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
