This version of Young George and the Colt is attributed to Horace E. Scudder.

There is a story told of George Washington's boyhood—unfortunately there are not many stories—which is to the point. His father had taken a great deal of pride in his blooded horses, and his mother afterward took pains to keep the stock pure. She had several young horses that had not yet been broken, and one of them in particular, a sorrel, was extremely spirited. No one had been able to do anything with it, and it was pronounced thoroughly vicious as people are apt to pronounce horses which they have not learned to master.

George was determined to ride this colt, and told his companions that if they would help him catch it, he would ride and tame it. Early in the morning they set out for the pasture, where the boys managed to surround the sorrel, and then to put a bit into its mouth. Washington sprang upon its back, the boys dropped the bridle, and away flew the angry animal.

Its rider at once began to command. The horse resisted, backing about the field, rearing and plunging. The boys became thoroughly alarmed, but Washington kept his seat, never once losing his self-control or his mastery of the colt. The struggle was a sharp one; when suddenly, as if determined to rid itself of its rider, the creature leaped into the air with a tremendous bound. It was its last. The violence burst a blood-vessel, and the noble horse fell dead.

Before the boys could sufficiently recover to consider how they should extricate themselves from the scrape, they were called to breakfast; and the mistress of the house, knowing that they had been in the fields, began to ask after her stock. "Pray, young gentlemen,'' said she, "have you seen my blooded colts in your rambles? I hope they are well taken care of. My favorite, I am told, is as large as his sire.''

The boys looked at one another, and no one liked to speak. Of course the mother repeated her question. "The sorrel is dead, madam,'' said her son, "I killed him.'' And then he told the whole story. They say that his mother flushed with anger, as her son often used to, and then, like him, controlled herself, and presently said, quietly: "It is well; but while I regret the loss of my favorite, I rejoice in my son who always speaks the truth.''

Historians have not put much credence in the sorrel colt story. Washington's biographer Marcus Cunliffe identified the story as having appeared in print for the first time in an article written by Washington's step-grandson (the grandson of Martha Washington), George Washington Parke Custis, that was published in the United States Gazette on May 13, 1826, some twenty years after the cherry tree anecdote had first been included in the fifth edition of Rev. Mason L. Weems's The Life of Washington. Custis's article subsequently was reprinted in additional publications of the time, including the January 1827 issue of Casket (available online in the ProQuest subscription database "American Publications Series"), where it was entitled "The Mother of Washington" and identified as taken from the "'Recollections of Washington,' a new work by George W. P. Custis." That work, however, would not be published in book form until 1860, three years after Custis's death.

Custis, Cunliffe surmised, "did more than anyone to propagate the cult of the Mother of Washington. . . . [but] he does not carry conviction as a historian." Although the story was repeated in numerous accounts of Washington's life—a version sans didactic ending was reproduced as fact in a biography published as late as 1997—a few authors even in the 19th century expressed reservations about the story's veracity. Caroline M. Kirkland, in her Memoirs of Washington, published in 1857, cautioned, "The story of his having ridden to death a fiery colt of his mother's . . . sounds a little too much like a modernized version of Alexander's taming Bucephalus; so we shall not repeat it here." In his 1889 two-volume biography, Henry Cabot Lodge discounted the tale, commenting, "How Mr. Custis, usually so accurate, came to be so far infected with the Weems myth as to tell the colt story after the Weems manner, cannot now be determined."

Horace E. Scudder (1838–1902), a biographer, author of children's books, compiler of stories, and also the editor of Atlantic Monthly, was one of the many 19th- and early 20th-century authors who related the story, especially in books intended to educate children. David Ramsay dedicated his 1807 book on Washington to the "Youth of the United States," while John Corry offered his 1809 biography to "the Youth of America." James K. Paulding included the colt story, while omitting that of the cherry tree, in his 1835 biography of Washington dedicated to "the pious, retired, domestic MOTHERS OF THE UNITED STATES. . . . for the use of their children."

Historian Barbara Welter has noted that according to the dominant domestic ideology of the time, "mothers must do the inculcating of virtue [in children] since the fathers, alas, were too busy chasing the dollar." During the Revolutionary era, mothers especially were urged to instill virtue in their sons. In his biography of Washington that was published as part of the "Riverside School Library," Scudder asserted that Washington "owed two strong traits to his mother—a governing spirit and a spirit of order and method." The mother of the father of our country, Scudder related, "taught him many lessons and gave him many rules; but, after all, it was her character shaping his which was most powerful. She taught him to be truthful, but her lessons were not half so forcible as her own truthfulness." While Washington himself honored "my revered Mother; by whose Maternal hand (early deprived of a Father) I was led from Childhood," historians have found no evidence with which to validate the truth of the sorrel colt story.

George Bancroft, Secretary of the Navy under Polk, recalled many years later that Polk had announced in 1845 near the beginning of his presidency that the acquisition of California was one of "four great measures" he hoped to accomplish while in office. Historian Sam W. Haynes has identified Polk as a "fitting representative" of the "expansionist impulse" known as Manifest Destiny. As a condition of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, the government of Mexico ceded to the U.S. a vast amount of territory that included the present state of California.

The term Manifest Destiny appeared in print for the first time a few months following Polk's inauguration in an editorial published in the Jacksonian United States Magazine and Democratic Review calling for an end to political strife regarding the recent vote in Congress over the annexation of Texas, a hotly contested issue that figured prominently in the election Polk won. The author of the piece, the journal's editor, John L. O'Sullivan, pointed out that England and France had interfered with the process of annexation "for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." In a diary entry recorded later in 1845, Polk, a Jacksonian Democrat, identified this view with that of the general public, writing that "the people of the United States would not willingly permit California to pass into the possession of any new colony planted by Great Britain or any foreign monarchy."

Haynes writes, "In 1845, for both President Polk and the public at large, Manifest Destiny remained inchoate, undefined, an effusive, bumptious spirit rather than a clearly articulated agenda for empire." In addition to reflecting anxieties over European nations controlling parts of the American West, Manifest Destiny, as interpreted in the works of numerous historians, expressed a number of other diverse fears, beliefs, visions, goals, and interests of divergent segments of the population. Surveying the work of a number of scholars, John C. Pinheiro states in a recent book that while one prominent historian of Manifest Destiny, Frederick Merk, identified "a belief in a religious-like republican mission as the primary motivation for American expansion," others have posited that many Americans imbued with the spirit of Manifest Destiny "desired only to ensure freedom for themselves or to encourage the United States's development as a white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant republic." Some historians have argued that desires for specific diplomatic and economic outcomes were the prime motivations for Manifest Destiny, while others have emphasized racism, anti-Catholicism, and Jacksonian doctrines derived from Jeffersonian principles as dominant factors.

Many historians agree that the doctrine spread quickly, especially throughout the North and West, through the institution of the penny press, which had begun to proliferate during the previous decade. Some historians, however, have objected to the use of such a vaguely defined term to adequately characterize U.S. expansionism during this period.

While the public's fear of foreign involvements in continental North America may have concurred with Polk's agenda, the war he fought against Mexico that began in May 1846 and concluded in February 1848 sparked widespread criticism throughout political, journalistic, and literary circles in addition to strong support. Following the annexation of Texas, the Mexican government had severed diplomatic relations with the U.S. Polk subsequently sent an envoy, former Louisiana congressman John Slidell, to Mexico to try to resolve disputes over the Texas boundary and over damages that the Mexican government owed to U.S. citizens but could not pay. Polk instructed Slidell to make an offer that the U.S. would pay off Mexico's debt in order to acquire "Upper California and New Mexico" and would spend as much as $40 million to purchase the land.

Concurrently, the administration-controlled newspaper, the Washington Union, stated that resistance by Mexico would result in an invasion and occupation by U.S. troops. When Mexico refused to sell, Polk began to prepare a declaration of war, but before its completion he learned that Mexican forces had killed or wounded 16 U.S. soldiers in the disputed territory. On May 11, 1846, Polk presented a special message to Congress announcing that "war exists" between the two countries because the Mexican government has "at last invaded our territory and shed the blood of our fellow-citizens on our own soil."

Although the next day Congress passed a war resolution by overwhelming margins in both the House and Senate to the delight of many Americans clamoring for war, adverse reaction to Polk's war message quickly was expressed in Congress and the press. Many Whigs, deeming the conflict "Mr. Polk's War," charged that the president and members of his party in Congress had employed stampede tactics to ensure the resolution's passage and to foment public hysteria. Polk, they contended, had provoked the Mexicans to attack in order to start a war against a weak neighbor so that the U.S. could acquire with relative ease the desired western territory. Radical members of the Whig party stated that Polk's primary goal in instigating war was to expand slavery in order to increase the political power of slaveholding states. The Massachusetts legislation passed resolutions charging that the war "was unconstitutionally commenced by the order of the President . . . with the triple object of extending slavery, of strengthening the slave power, and of obtaining the control of the Free States."

Democratic Senator John C. Calhoun, while abstaining from the vote on the war resolution, vehemently objected to stampede tactics and argued for "dispassionate consideration" to be given to the issue of war. In addition to the attacks on Polk by politicians and members of the press, antiwar sentiments were expressed by the American Peace Society, the American Anti-Slavery Society, and by literary and religious figures such as James Russell Lowell, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, and Wendell Phillips.

As fighting intensified, calls for U.S. forces to capture all of Mexico increased in the penny presses of the urban Northeast and in Illinois, but by the time the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified, Frederick Merk has written, "the nation was utterly weary of the war." Merk argues that had there been less dissent during the course of the war, more Mexican territory would have been acquired. In a recent article, however, Piero Gleijeses criticizes historians for failing to examine the relative lack of dissent during the period leading up to war. He posits that a broad consensus existed for acquiring land from Mexico, but contends that the fierce opposition to Polk following the war resolution derived from the belief that the desired land could have been easily acquired without going to war.