This mixed hag of essays makes up the annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures for 1985, given at the University of Texas (Arlington). A Texas sponsor financed publication of this attractive, well-illustrated volume, thereby compelling or tempting university libraries to spend precious funds for four pieces that should have been journal articles if, indeed, published at all.
In the first essay, Wayne Cutler gives an account of President James K. Polk’s semipolitical visit to New England in the summer of 1847, one of the few times he left Washington during his four-year term. Cutler also offers a superficial analysis of Polk’s political philosophy, but the main value of the article lies in a detailed narrative of ceremonial occasions and speeches. John S. D. Eisenhower’s “Polk and His Generals” covers largely familiar ground with more emphasis on the first half of the war than on the last. General Winfield Scott is thus somewhat undervalued, with too little on his brilliant invasion from Veracruz to Mexico City and nothing at all on his pioneering occupation policies.
Miguel E. Soto gives us a little fresh material on Spain’s plot during the first half of the war to install a European monarch on a Mexican throne, anticipating Napoleon III by almost 20 years. The foreign aspects of the plot are already fairly well known, as Soto recognizes, but he has consulted correspondence in the papers of General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, showing that the Spanish minister to Mexico was receiving advice from Lucas Alamán, the veteran Mexican conservative. (However, the origin of the letters is open to some question.) The last contribution, by Douglas W. Richmond, is not an essay at all but yet another collection of semi-illiterate letters by an American soldier to his brother at home. These are not of much interest, as Andrew Trussed, their author, had little to say about his surroundings or any perceptive insights about the Mexicans.
