54-40 or Fight? Oregon Got Neither

"54-40 or fight," the story goes: President James K. Polk wanted all of Oregon, up to 54°40′, and was ready to go to war with Britain for it. In Oregon, he got neither. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 stopped at the 49th parallel and never said which channel the line ran through. How did the US get Oregon? The papers of 1844 to 1872 show a slogan that took shape after the election, a boundary left unfinished in the water, a pig shot on San Juan Island in 1859 and the standoff that followed, later nicknamed the Pig War, and a German emperor who settled the dispute in Berlin. Series: How America Got Its Shape, episode 3. Episode 1, Alaska:    • Seward's Folly Is (Mostly) a Myth — Why Ru...   Episode 2, Louisiana:    • The Louisiana Purchase Nobody Could Draw   Chapters 0:00 The Slogan Polk Never Used 1:44 An Agreement Not to Decide 2:11 Why Fifty-Four Forty? 3:43 Polk's Own Offer 4:37 "The Whole of Oregon, or None" 5:51 Britain's Draft, Word for Word 6:52 Forty-Nine or Flunk 7:56 The Treaty Never Named the Channel 9:19 An Island in the Gap 10:13 A Pig, Thirteen Years Later 11:14 Two Flags, One Island 12:28 Haro or Rosario? 14:58 Not the Only Pig 16:16 Fifty-Four Forty, After All 17:38 Bancroft's Three Words Sources Avalon Project, Yale Law School: Convention of 1818; Polk's inaugural address, 1845; Oregon Treaty, 1846; Alaska Treaty, 1867 — https://avalon.law.yale.edu U.S. Statutes at Large: conventions with Russia, 1824, and Britain, 1827 — https://www.govinfo.gov Papers relating to the Treaty of Washington, vol. V (1872): the treaty of 1871, the British case, Bancroft's memorial and dispatches, the award; FRUS 1890 (the 1825 convention) — Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov American Presidency Project: Democratic platform, 1844; Polk to the Senate, June 10, 1846; Grant, Dec. 2, 1872 — https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu Georgia Historic Newspapers: Georgia Constitutionalist, July 9, 1844, and Nov. 13, 1845 (reprinting the Washington Union); Daily Chronicle & Sentinel, Mar. 16, 1846; Georgia Telegraph, June 30, 1846; Savannah Daily Republican, Apr. 30, 1847, and Sept. 26, 1848; Daily Sun (Columbus), Oct. 10, 1859 (from the New York Evening Post); Daily Constitutionalist, Oct. 26, 1872 (the Times, as cabled to American papers) — https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.... Punch, vol. XI (1846); Daily British Colonist (Victoria), July 27, 1859 — https://www.britishcolonist.ca Charles Griffin, Belle Vue Farm journal, 1859 — https://npshistory.com/publications/s... Crosbie report, H. Ex. Doc. 77, 36th Congress (1860); Hansard, House of Commons, May 2, 1873 National Park Service: San Juan Island National Historical Park; Oregon National Historic Trail — https://www.nps.gov/sajh/ Hans Sperber, "'Fifty-Four Forty or Fight': Facts and Fictions," American Speech 32:1 (1957); Oregon Encyclopedia, "Oregon Question"; Thomas C. McClintock, "British Newspapers and the Oregon Treaty of 1846," Oregon Historical Quarterly 104:1 (2003); Melissa Baker and Cyrus Forman, "True Casualties of the Pig War," COLUMBIA 36:2 (2022) Images (public domain / CC0): Library of Congress, U.S. National Archives, National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian), New York Public Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Rijksmuseum, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Seattle Public Library, Internet Archive and other collections. Maps drawn for this video from Natural Earth, OpenHistoricalMap (CC0; Oregon Country from the Newberry Library's Atlas of Historical County Boundaries), NOAA and USGS data (public domain) and Natural Resources Canada CanVec; the Rosario and middle-channel lines are our sketch of the claims, not a survey. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada: https://open.canada.ca/en/open-govern... Footage: "The Covered Wagon" (1923), a film with actors, Prelinger Archives; U.S. infantry, Tampa, 1898 (Edison), Library of Congress; San Juan Island today, Bureau of Land Management; all public domain. Ink and rigging: Pexels stock (illustration, not archive). Music: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... "At Launch" by Kevin MacLeod "The Path of the Goblin King" by Kevin MacLeod "Americana" by Kevin MacLeod "To the Ends" by Kevin MacLeod "Crusade" by Kevin MacLeod "Investigations" by Kevin MacLeod "Peaceful Desolation" by Kevin MacLeod "March of the Spoons" by Kevin MacLeod "The Other Side of the Door" by Kevin MacLeod "Windswept" by Kevin MacLeod "Impending Boom" by Kevin MacLeod "Hidden Agenda" by Kevin MacLeod "The Chamber" by Kevin MacLeod "Court of the Queen" by Kevin MacLeod "Mary Celeste" by Kevin MacLeod "Plaint" by Kevin MacLeod "End of the Era" by Kevin MacLeod Narration: synthetic voice.