Polk was the idiot who set the civil war into motion.

I thought that was Buchanan?

You both must be confusing these two with the
Abolitionist Lincoln.

I always blamed Clay, myself.

By the way lower in these post OJ likened himself to Franklin Pierce. He was a Brigadier General under Winfield Scott during the Mexican War. He only noteworthing thing I remember about Franklin Pierce is that he is an ancestor of our present President via Barbara Bush. The other thing about Pierce is that he spent the entire Mexican War in his tent suffering from Montezuma's revenge.

My dad used to tell me that my grandad always said there had not been a good president since Polk.

Dave Barry said it best in his history of the United States that the most notable achievement of the Franklin Pierce administration was that the Earth did not fall into the sun.

What set the Civil War in motion was that the South didn't want to respect the results of a Presidential election.

US history as I see it:

Polk started off the Mexican war which is the closest thing to a land-grab America's ever pulled off. Since the new territories acquired had a climate similar to that of the southern states, the South assumed they could start bringing in slaves there. Northern states disagreed since they didn't want free labour competing wih slave labour. So the ensuing decades led to the South going from accepting slavery as a necessary evil to vaunting it as a God-given, scripture-authorised good and sought to introduce it in states like Kansas while growing politically ever-distant from the industrial North and ultimately seceding.

If Lincoln was an abolitionist, that would have come as a mighty surprise to the Anti-Slavery League and William Garrison among others who felt he was far too lax about manumission.

As for Buchanan he was an irrelevant lame duck who didn't prevent the ACW but didn't do much to cause it either.

It was our Manifest Destiny--better to have done it quickly and cleanly, as Polk did.

Polk is one of our most under-rated presidents. He acquired more land for the country than any president except Jefferson. He certainly indulged in a bit of Machiavellianism -- prodding Mexico to declare war on the U.S., which thus gave him the opportunity to send in the military and annex California as well as consolidating his hold on Texas. But Mexico, then as now, was an extremely troublesome neighbor -- borrowing huge sums and then reneging on its debts (does this sound familiar?), making several incursions into American territory to grab booty, and engaged in an endless series of internal conflicts that threatened to destabilize the region. We should be grateful that Polk forced the Mexicans to recognize the Rio Grande as the national border. (Of course, quite a number of Mexicans still ignore the border anyway, but that's another story.)

M Ali,
I was joking about Lincoln being an abolitionist.
(although many in the South certainly thought he was). Now I am slightly confused because I thought slavery was legal in Mexico at that time and therefore any expectations the South had would have been rational on that subject. I am sure someone can correct my facts.