Bernard DeVoto. The Year of Decision, 1846. 1942; Digital History Books, 2018. E-book.

Bernard DeVoto was a highly esteemed historian one or two generations ago. My father owned this book, but I never read it while I lived with my parents. DeVoto’s works still have a lot to say. The Year of Decision, 1846 reads like a novel. In it we get the scope of events that made 1846 so significant in American history.

DeVoto tells us there are some great historical ironies. President Polk achieved most of his goals for the country and could be considered successful, yet he only served a single term. DeVoto considers him the one strong president between Jackson and Lincoln.

Ironically also, probably the least competent military leader in the Mexican War would be seen as a hero and become the next president, Zachary Taylor. He also suggests that the death of Joseph Smith was not a bad thing for Mormonism. Not only was there a new martyr, but the church would be led by a politically savvy organizer who could bring the group to stability—unlike most of the other social and religious experiments of the nineteenth century.

The Year of Decision, 1846 is mostly about the American West. The Mormons succeeded where others like Brook Farm, the Shakers, Oneida, etc. either failed or at best continue to exist on the margins. 1846 saw the fulfillment of Polk’s vision for America “from sea to shining sea.” Texas became a state. California fell into American hands. New Mexico (today’s Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada) was conquered. Oregon, Washington State, and Idaho would become undisputedly American.

Besides heroes of the Mexican War (notably Winfield Scott and Stephen Watts Kearney), the other heroes are the so-called Mountain Men—scouts like like Kit Carson, Jedediah Smith, Moses “Black” Harris, and Jim Clyman—who knew the West and could lead their countrymen westward.

Clyman was an especially interesting character, almost a symbol. He was born in Virginia in 1792 on a farm owned by George Washington (whom he met); he died in Napa, California, in 1881, among the westward vanguard. He was living in Illinois during the Black Hawk War and served in the militia with Abraham Lincoln. He worked as a surveyor with Alexander Hamilton’s son. He seemed to be everywhere and knew his stuff.

There are some villains in the story as well. John C. Fremont does not come off well at all. Neither does a promoter by the name of Lansford Hastings. Hastings had written a book promoting the settlement of California which claimed an easier route there than the Oregon Trail.

Clyman exhorted people in 1846 not to take that route—some, like a former governor of Missouri, listened to Clyman and made the trip with time to spare. One rather large group of around 95 settlers followed Hastings’ route and are collectively known today as the Donner Party. Thirty-five did manage to survive. At least one of those survivors comes across as downright evil.

DeVoto has an interesting and probably accurate analysis of Mormonism. It adopted a number of movements or ideas trending at the time—revival meetings, Adventist prophecies, religious communes, fraternal organizations like the Masons, Transcendentalism, and health fads (think of Sylvester Graham, whose eponymous crackers are still popular today).

The Year of Decision, 1846 also notes the complicated lead-in to the Mexican War. The only time (and it was brief) that I ever studied this 1846 war was in graduate school. The professor called it a theft and an example of naked imperialism. According to DeVoto it was a little more complicated than that.

For obvious if unrealistic reasons, Mexico never recognized the independence of the Texas Republic. Mexico threatened retaliation if Texas were ever admitted as a state of the United States. This took place in 1846.

It appears that Polk and Mexican strongman Santa Anna were approaching an agreement which included payment to Mexico for diplomatic maneuvering as well as money for much of the territory which ultimately would be ceded to the United States after the war. America might have obtained much of that territory without fighting.

However, before an agreement could be reached on the various issues, Santa Anna was overthrown by a nationalist government that called for no compromise and, if possible, a reconquest of Texas.

Since the United States and England were also bickering over the Oregon Territory (54°40′ or fight!), the beginning of 1846 looked like it might introduce the United States to wars with two countries.

Much of DeVoto’s book is the saga of how the Oregon dispute was settled and especially how the Mexican War was won. All of these issues had to do with America’s West. 1846 is really the year that the United States became a continental North American country and power.

We read some about Thoreau and Lincoln—both opposed the Mexican War—and we see how the Democratic Party would be split along sectional lines and how the Whigs would fade away. In spite of all the political compromising that took place in 1846, America would come to compromise less in the next fifteen years.

DeVoto shows how that began in 1846. Since Texas already had slavery, Texas would be admitted as a slave state. But what about all the other new territory? An amendment to a law was passed noting that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery, so the new territory beyond Texas would also prohibit slavery. While a compromise on the issue would be worked out in 1846, that was the last time it happened.

DeVoto shows there would be no further lasting compromise on this issue, a new party would be formed out of the ashes of the Whigs, and many young officers who cut their teeth in battle in Mexico would fight each other fifteen years later.

DeVoto observes or believes that Grant more than anyone would remember the usefulness of artillery and rifles. “Lieutenant Grant learned about firepower” in six hours. (192) He notes that Winfield Scott had an overall understanding of what it would take to win a war more than anyone else. So with Scott’s Anaconda Plan and Grant’s relentless sieges, the Confederacy was surrounded and doomed.

He suggested that both Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis (Davis was a West Point grad and a colonel in Mexico) were too “old school” to be as effective as they could be. DeVoto notes sarcastically that Davis was “the one military strategist whom Robert E. Lee was never able to defeat.” (207)

There is a lot of truth in DeVoto’s interpretations as we can see with over a century’s hindsight (not quite a century in the original when DeVoto was writing in 1942). American History classes in the school where I teach used to conduct paper war games for their Civil War units. Because of its larger population and greater industrialization, the students playing for the North usually won the “war.” One year that the South won, the students playing for the South used the Anaconda Plan on the North and chose different military leaders, Longstreet and Forrest instead of Lee and Beauregard, for example. Sure, it is alternate history at the high school level, but it may illustrate some of DeVoto’s points.

Thoreau was living at Walden Pond in 1846, and that was the year he was jailed one night for opposing the Mexican War and slavery by not paying his poll tax. Another well-known non-fiction writer, Francis Parkman, was exploring the Oregon Trail. This would become his book entitled The Oregon Trail.

One of the most poignant parts of The Year of Decision, 1846 is Parkman’s observations of the Western Indian tribes, especially the Sioux with whom he lived for about three weeks. Back then the few white trappers, scouts, and settlers made peace with the Indians. The Indian wars in the West would not begin for another decade.

Parkman believed that the Plains Indians he observed could not withstand encounters with civilization because of inherent cultural weaknesses. “…[They] had a culture but no character, they were helpless against the world and even in selfhood—they must go down.” (304) By this he did not mean that whites must fight them, but that they could not possibly even comprehend the culture that was coming. Even most of their leaders had no idea of what it meant to plan for the future.

There are hundreds of such fascinating characters and details. I could go on and on. I wonder, for example, if Uncle Billy in a couple of Bret Harte’s stories including “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” got his name from the nickname of one of the members of the Donner Party.

The Year of Decision, 1846 reads like a novel with many direct quotations and multiple plot lines. The various lines, though, do come together—pointing to what America and especially the American West would become.