The United States was supposed to be something new, rushing into the future, which for many meant rushing into the West. But, Adams said, constant war had trapped Jacksonians in a state of constant historical grievance, transposing ancient enemies faced by their imagined forebears—including the Normans, who in 1066 invaded Great Britain to conquer Saxon freemen—onto their current opponents. “Is there not yet hatred enough between the races which compose your southern population and the population of Mexico,” Adams asked Polk, that “you must go back eight hundred or a thousand years, and to
...more
