scheme of
Tyler, looking to the annexation of Texas, California, and Oregon, was
now to be put into effect, even at the risk of war with England, whence
serious warnings had been coming since the new national purpose became
clear.

After years of uncertainty and deadlock, the country was now prepared
for a forward movement, and though Polk was not her ideal statesman, the
people rallied with fair unanimity to his standard. The new
Administration would represent the new Democratic party--a resolute
South and an ardent West. And the President-elect, simple and direct in
all his ways, was determined to carry out the purposes of his
supporters, namely, set the country upon a career of expansion hitherto
unparalleled in its history.

In Illinois, Missouri, and throughout the South the demand was
well-nigh unanimous that the disputed region along the Rio Grande should
be held as against Mexico, and that California and Oregon should be
seized and colonized. Cass, the older, and Douglas, the younger leader
of the Northwest, were agreed in these extreme demands; even Benton, the
disappointed friend of Van Buren, found compensation in the proposed
Pacific frontier, while a powerful group of Southerners led by Governor
Gilmer, of Virginia, Robert Barnwell Rhett, of South Carolina, William
L. Yancey, of Alabama, and Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, took up the
program of Calhoun and pressed it almost daily upon Congress and the
country. The South was about to resume control of the national fortunes.

In that region, where cotton was king, and tobacco, sugar, and rice were
powerful allies, a unique civilization had grown up. The plantation was
the model, and the patriarchal master of slaves the ideal character
which the ambitious poor imitated everywhere. The elegant life of the
colonial plantation houses, which adorned the banks of the winding
rivers of the old South in the days of the Revolution, had gradually
moved westward and southwestward until the larger tobacco area of the
Piedmont region extended from Petersburg, Virginia, to Greensboro, North
Carolina, and from the falls of the rivers to the slopes of the Blue
Ridge. Instead of running away from their slaves, as John Randolph had
feared Southern gentlemen would be compelled to do, the tobacco planters
found their business increasingly prosperous as the great cotton area
south of them opened larger markets for their crops and higher prices
for their surplus negroes. Eve