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When we arrived at Chickamauga Station, our brigade and General Lucius E. Polk's brigade, of Cleburne's division, were left to set fire to the town and to burn up and destroy all those immense piles of army stores and provisions which had been accumulated there to starve the Yankees out of Chattanooga.
Had the war been less of a military triumph there must have been a far more widely-heard protest from Polk's enemies in the North. Successful beyond the wildest dreams of its promoters, the victorious war carried its own answer to those who questioned the worthiness of the cause.
He had not only secured his re-election and the success of his party in Illinois, but he had served most acceptably as a campaign speaker in Polk's own State. Surely he was entitled to some consideration in the councils of his party. In the appointment of standing committees, he could hardly hope for a chairmanship.
Louis papers, from the marvelous gold fields of California. Since January, when President Polk's annual message to Congress had been read in St. Louis, in the papers, St. Louis people, like the whole population of the United States, had been crazy over the California gold.
And the seconds that I rested silently there Polk spent in shaking both of the Crag's hands and pounding him on the back so that I grew alarmed. "I didn't do it, Jane, I didn't do it," I almost sobbed with fear of what her disappointment was going to be. "He beat me to it!" "Truly. I'm sorry," Cousin James added to my apology as he stood with his arm on Polk's shoulder.
The field return, for example, gives the "present for duty," in the artillery in Polk's corps, as 20 officers and 331 enlisted men 351 in all; while the official report of the chief of artillery of the corps, of casualties in the battle, giving each battery separately, states the number actually engaged in the battle as 21 officers, 56 non-commissioned officers, and 369 privates, making a total of 446.
Texas was annexed by joint resolution a few days before the inauguration of Polk. This act, it was foreseen, would probably provoke a war with Mexico, so Polk's first task was to adjust the Oregon dispute in order to avoid complications with England. The fate of California was also involved. That province was not likely to remain long in the hands of a weak power like Mexico.
War having begun, the line of the Whig opposition was to vote supplies and protest as best they might against the language endorsing Polk's policy which, in the pettiest spirit of political manoeuvre, was sometimes incorporated in the votes. In this Lincoln steadily supported them. One of his only two speeches of any length in Congress was made on the occasion of a vote of this kind in 1848.
Most of our army had already passed through hungry and disheartened, and here were all these stores that had to be destroyed. Before setting fire to the town, every soldier in Maney's and Polk's brigades loaded himself down with rations. It was a laughable looking rear guard of a routed and retreating army.
There are some men that acquire feminine obligations as rough cheviot does lint and Henrietta is one of Polk's when it comes to the fishing days. He takes her so often that she thinks she owns him and all the trout in Little Harpeth, and she landed in the midst of the picnic with her fighting clothes on.
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