Word: devoto
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...Lower California, and became a continental power. At the same time the stage was cleared for a new issue: Who was going to run this continental power-the free-labor North and West, or the slave-labor South? "At some time between August and December, 1846," says Historian DeVoto, "the Civil War had begun...
History as Inexperience. The year of decision really begins in the White House with James K. Polk scheming to get California away from Mexico, Oregon from England. "Who is James K. Polk?" Americans asked when he was nominated. They still ask. Yet Polk, says Historian DeVoto, was "the only 'strong' president between Jackson and Lincoln." He had "guts," "integrity," could not be "brought to heel." But he was also "pompous," "suspicious," "secretive," "humorless," "vindictive." He believed that "wisdom and patriotism were Democratic monopolies." He made an effort to be generous, sometimes confided to his diary: "Although a Whig...
There are glimpses of the amateur statesman Polk conspiring with (and getting double-crossed by) Mexican General Santa Anna, who was supposed to sell out Mexico for $30,000,000. When war came, Polk was all but crushed by his Presidential burdens. Says DeVoto: "Deliberately carrying twin torches through a powder magazine ... he made no preparation for either war. . . . He did not know how to make war or how to lead a people." Result : "Time after time the extemporized organizations broke down. . . . Millions of dollars were wasted, months were lost." But at last "the first modern industrial war somehow . . . succeeded...
...Waters of Sugar Creek. Among the book's most successful sections are those in which Utah-born Bernard DeVoto describes the exodus of the Mormons from the time they were driven from Illinois. The flight from Nauvoo ("The city of the Lord God Jehovah King of Kings. ... In February, 1846, it was fallen-that great city") is memorable. "Acres of ice" floated in the Mississippi. "The ferries were jammed with men, women, children, horses, oxen, cows, swine, chickens, feather beds, Boston rockers, a miscellany of families and goods hastily brought together in the fear of death. The boats dumped...
...Oregon and California. In it he had said: "The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route, about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing southwest to the Salt Lake; and then continuing down to the Bay of San Francisco." Says DeVoto: "When Lansford Hastings wrote that passage . . . neither he nor anyone else had ever taken the trail here blithely imagined by a real-estate...