Hey everyone, welcome to episode five of our Civil War podcast. I am Rich and right

there is Tracy. Hello, y'all. Welcome to the podcast. We want to take a second here at the

top of the show and say thank you to everyone who liked us on Facebook this past week. There

were quite a few of you who took the time to do that, so thank you. Yes, please know it's

appreciated. We hope you're enjoying what we're doing with the various historical Civil War

related quotes there on the show's Facebook page. All right, so previously on the podcast,

we talked about the tariff of abominations and the nullification crisis of 1832 and 33 which

brought South Carolina and the administration of President Andrew Jackson to the brink of war.

And then we closed the show by flying low and fast through the idea of manifest destiny,

and we quickly covered the run up to war with Mexico in 1846.

Right, now remember that according to the notion of manifest destiny, people believed it was the

United States destiny or its fate or even its duty to settle the land from the Atlantic ocean to

Pacific, from sea to shining sea. But a major roadblock to seeing that dream become a reality

was the fact that much of that territory belonged to Mexico. We said in the last show that after

Texas won its independence from Mexico in 1836, the Texans set up a new independent republic.

What they really desired was to become a part of the United States. But Mexico renounced its

peace treaty with Texas, pointing out that the treaty was signed under duress while Mexican President

Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana was a prisoner of the Texans. And even as Mexico stubbornly refused

to back down over its claim to its rebellious province, in Washington, D.C., there was strong

political opposition to the annexation of Texas, mostly stemming from the fact that Texas would

enter the Union as a slave state. This opposition was not overcome until the election of 1844

when James K. Polk of Tennessee ran for president on an expansionist platform calling for

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