notes to pages 13‒16 371
be essential. As noted earlier, however, Madison recognized the value
of bringing multiple voices into deliberations on matters of such
importance, and his own actions on the eve of the War of 1812 refl ect
in part this commitment.
- Th at lawmakers would fl inch before exercising the power of the purse
during a war became evident early on. In mid-1847 the American war
against Mexico was becoming increasingly unpopular back home. Ameri-
can forces had enjoyed brilliant successes on the battlefi eld that left them
in control of Mexico City itself, but the Mexican government refused to
negotiate an end to the war on terms acceptable to the administration of
President James K. Polk. (Th ese terms included cession of the Mexican
provinces of Upper California and New Mexico to the United States
and Mexican recognition of the Rio Grande as the border between Texas
and Mexico.) With few good options at his disposal, the president asked
Congress for additional military appropriations to increase pressure on
the enemy. Just how that could be done short of occupying the entire
country was not clear. Nevertheless, to the dismay of Polk’s critics in the
opposition Whig Party, Congress had little choice but to go along with
his request. As one Whig writer put it in the party’s leading journal,
Congress “would never refuse to grant anything and everything necessary
or proper for the support and succor of our brave troops, placed without
any fault of their own, in the heart of a distant country, and struggling
with every peril, discomfort and diffi culty.” See “Th e Whigs and the
War,” American Review 6 (October 1847): 343 , as quoted in Norman
Graebner, “Lessons of the Mexican War,” Pacifi c Historical Review 47
(August 1978): 325–42.
- John H. Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent,
1846–1848 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), chap. 1.
- Edward Joseph Rhodes, “Sea Change: Interest-Based Vs. Cultural-Cognitive
Accounts of Strategic Choice in the 1890s,” Security Studies 5 (1996): 73–124 ;
Mark R. Shulman, “Institutionalizing a Political Idea: Navalism and the
Emergence of American Sea Power,” in Th e Politics of Strategic Adjustment:
Ideas, Institutions, and Interests , ed. Peter Trubowitz, Emily O. Goldman,
and Edward Joseph Rhodes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999),
79–104. My view of this development has been infl uenced by Douglas
Haugen, Th e Epistemic Origins of American Empire , Ph.D. Dissertation,
City University of New York, 2007.
- On the pressure for rapid demobilization, see Michael S. Sherry,
In the Shadow of War: Th e United States since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995), 118.
- Sherry, In the Shadow of War , 116ff.
- Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s
Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000), chap. 2
