| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Manifest Ambition: James K. Polk and Civil-Military Relations during the Mexican War. By John C. Pinheiro. (Westport: Praeger, 2007. xii, 228 pp. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-275-98409-0.)

Rather than offering a narrative history of the Mexican War, this book analyzes key issues relating to its conduct at the federal level. The author argues that President James K. Polk managed to achieve victory and his relatively limited territorial objectives in the war, despite the shortcomings of his personality; the highly charged partisan politics rampant in Congress and in his administration; the political ambitions, disobedience, and sometimes incompetence of his generals; Americans' traditional aversion to large professional armies; the Jacksonian hostility to elites of any kind; and unprecedented problems of occupying and governing conquered territory. Popular hostility toward Mexico and the Catholic Church, wartime atrocities committed by American troops, and a late, brief, but intense "All Mexico" movement in the United States further threatened to turn the war into a long and costly occupation of hostile territory. Polk achieved his original war aims through his forceful personality, pragmatism, managerial style, and the steady expansion of executive powers.

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