James K. Polk

President of the United States (1845–1849)

• Born: November 2, 1795
• Birthplace: Mecklenburg County, North Carolina
• Died: June 15, 1849
• Place of death: Nashville, Tennessee

Polk served only one term as president of the United States but used his authority to expand the nation nearly to its continental limits, while adding power and prestige to the presidency.

Early Life

James Knox Polk was the son of Samuel and Jane Knox Polk, members of large Scotch-Irish families whose forebears had begun migrating to North America late in the previous century. When James was eleven, Samuel moved the family westward to the Duck River Valley in middle Tennessee, where he became both a prosperous farmer and a prominent resident. The family was staunchly Jeffersonian in its politics, while Jane Polk was a rigid Presbyterian.

Young James was small in stature—of average height or less according to various accounts—and was never robust. At seventeen, he had a gallstone removed (without anesthesia), and thereafter his health improved somewhat. It became obvious early, however, that he would never be strong enough to farm, and contrary to his father’s wish that he become a merchant, Polk decided on a law career with politics as his goal. For this goal, some education was necessary. He had been a studious youth but until the age of eighteen had had little formal schooling. Thereafter, he applied himself totally and entered the sophomore class at the University of North Carolina at the age of twenty. Two and a half years later, he was graduated with honors. Characteristically, he had worked diligently, but the drain on his physical reserves was so great that he was too ill to travel home for several months.

Upon his return to Columbia, Tennessee, Polk read law in the offices of one of the state’s most prominent public figures, Felix Grundy. Through Grundy’s sponsorship, Polk began his political career as clerk of the state senate in 1819 and was admitted to the bar the following year. Prospering as a lawyer, he was elected to the Tennessee legislature in 1823 and aligned himself with the supporters of the state’s most famous citizen, Andrew Jackson . Soon he became friendly with Jackson, a presidential candidate in 1824, aided Old Hickory’s election to the US Senate, and thereafter was always associated with his fellow Tennessean.

On New Year’s Day, 1824, Polk married Sarah Childress, a member of a prominent middle Tennessee family. Described as not particularly pretty, she was vivacious, friendly, and devoted, and the marriage, although childless, was apparently happy. By this time Polk’s health had improved, but he remained slender, with an upright posture and a grim face below a broad forehead. According to contemporaries, he was always impeccably dressed, as befitted a promising young lawyer and sometime militia colonel on the governor’s staff. Now nearly thirty, he was considered one of the state’s rising Jacksonians.

Life’s Work

Impressed with his legislative record and legal as well as martial success, in 1825 the Jackson faction supported Polk’s bid for a seat in the House of Representatives against four opponents. His victory by a decisive plurality after a spirited campaign solidified his position among the followers of General Jackson. For the next four years, during the administration of President John Quincy Adams, Polk was in the forefront of the Jacksonians, who were determined to overturn the alleged “corrupt bargain” that had denied Jackson the presidency in 1824 and elect their man in 1828.

During the debates on the Adams program, considered too nationalistic by most congressmen, Polk seized numerous opportunities to express his opposition and to stand with the embryonic Democratic Party. He aided in reviving the “corrupt bargain” charge and spoke for economy, majority rule, and limited government. He embraced the party position against the protective tariff, internal improvements, and banks. Only on the question of slavery did he equivocate, as he would always do. Slavery was an evil, he believed, yet doing away with it was fraught with peril. It was best that all concerned recognize its existence and live with it as peacefully as possible.

The issues before Congress during the Adams term commanded less attention than the Jacksonians’ primary goal—the election of Jackson. In this effort, Polk played an increasingly important part as his abilities and devotion to the cause became more evident. In the bitter campaign of 1828, he constantly defended Jackson and carried on an extensive correspondence with him at his home in the Hermitage. Victory for Jackson followed and, despite interparty infighting for the position of successor to the new president, the future of the Jacksonian party looked promising.

In the next decade, Polk’s rise in the party hierarchy was steady. He served as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in Jackson’s first term and played a leading role in the president’s victory in the Bank War. He enjoyed a growing reputation for speeches and reports showing much preparation, logic, and clarity. In 1835, he was elected Speaker of the House, and was reelected two years later. His four years in the chair, where he was the first to function as a party leader and to attempt to guide through a program, proved to be trying. The Whig Party was gaining strength while the slavery issue was intruding in the House, resulting in the passage of the infamous “gag rule.” In the middle of his second term as Speaker, Polk decided to become a candidate for governor of Tennessee rather than risk probable defeat for reelection. By now the recognized leader of the party forces in his home state, he won by a narrow margin in 1839.

Once again, Polk was the first incumbent to use an office for political purposes as a party leader. However, since the governor had little real power and Whig opposition continued strong, Governor Polk was able to accomplish little in his single two-year term. When the victorious Whig presidential candidate, William Henry Harrison, easily carried Tennessee in 1840, Polk’s chances for another gubernatorial term appeared to be slim. He was defeated for reelection in 1841 and failed again two years later. For the only time in his career, he was out of office.

On the national level, Polk’s position in the party remained secure. In 1840, he was a leading candidate for the vice presidential nomination on the ticket with President Martin Van Buren but withdrew when the convention decided against making a nomination. Polk then began to work toward the nomination four years later, when it was expected that the former president would again contend for the top place. In the meantime, he repaired political fences and kept in touch with Van Buren and other party leaders.

Polk’s comeback, which led to his nomination as the Democratic standard-bearer in 1844, is one of the best-known episodes in American political history. Expansionism, justified as “Manifest Destiny,” was in the air as Texas clamored for admission to the Union while American eyes were on California and Oregon. It was expected that the presidential race would be between former president Van Buren and Whig Henry Clay . When both announced their opposition to the annexation of Texas, however, Van Buren’s chances for the nomination faded. In the party convention in May, he withdrew when his cause looked hopeless, and on the ninth ballot delegates turned to Polk, who had declared for annexation weeks earlier. Although his nomination, recalled as the first “dark horse” selection, was a surprise to most voters, it was the result of much hard work and a correct recognition of the mood of the electorate.

In the ensuing campaign, Whig candidate Clay and his supporters obscured the issues by asking, “Who is James K. Polk?” Democrats responded by linking “Young Hickory” to the aged former president, vacillating on controversial matters such as the tariff and stressing annexation as a national, not sectional, question. After an exciting campaign, Polk won a narrow victory brought about in part because a number of potential Clay voters cast ballots for an antislavery candidate. In his inaugural address, President Polk announced a brief but positive program. He called for settling the Oregon question (Congress had voted to annex Texas by joint resolution a few days earlier) by its “reoccupation” and for the acquisition of California. The tariff was to be reduced to a revenue level, and the Independent Treasury, killed by the Whigs, would be reestablished. Unique among American chief executives, Polk carried out his entire program.

The new president assumed his duties, determined to be in control. He appointed able cabinet members, many of whom were friends, and he consulted them and Congress frequently, although he made his own decisions. Seldom away from his desk, he was constantly besieged by office seekers who placed an added drain on his limited strength and energy. Not surprisingly, his appointments were largely “deserving” Democrats.

Foreign affairs immediately commanded Polk’s attention. Oregon, occupied jointly with England since 1818, was rapidly filling up with Americans who anticipated eventual absorption by the United States. It was “clear and unquestionable,” the president declared in his inaugural, that Oregon belonged to the United States. However, he revealed to the British minister his willingness to compromise at the forty-ninth parallel. A negative response evoked from Polk a hint of war and a request in his first annual message for congressional sanction for termination of joint occupation. For the first time, there was a presidential reference to the Monroe Doctrine as justification for action, and war talk, including demands for “Fifty-four Forty or Fight,” was heard. Neither nation wanted war, so the British countered with Polk’s original suggestion, it was accepted, and a treaty was completed, setting the boundary at the forty-ninth parallel, where it has remained.

In the meantime, the Mexicans had not accepted the loss of Texas, and they now maintained that the southern boundary was the Nueces River, not the Rio Grande, as the Texans claimed. Polk agreed with the Texans and also feared that the British might interfere there, as well as in California and New Mexico. As tensions increased, he sent to Mexico City an offer of some thirty million dollars for the entire area. When the offer was refused, he ordered General Zachary Taylor to move his troops into the disputed section. A predictable clash took place, but before word reached Washington, DC, Polk had decided to ask for war. Congress responded with a declaration on May 13, 1846. Although American forces were victorious from the beginning, the Mexican War, called “Mr. Polk’s War,” was among the most unpopular in the nation’s history. Opposition to it was voiced in Congress, in the press, and among the people. Even though the two leading generals professed to be members of the party, Whigs led the protests, which tended to increase Polk’s strongly partisan attitudes.

To a greater extent than any previous chief executive, Polk took his role as commander in chief seriously. His military experience was meager, yet he planned grand strategy, was personally involved in military appointments and promotions, and took the lead in peacemaking. His emissary (although technically recalled) completed with a defeated Mexico a satisfactory treaty that ceded California and New Mexico to the United States and recognized the annexation of Texas in return for some fifteen million dollars. Polk decided to accept the offer. The Senate narrowly approved the treaty on February 2, 1848, and the continental limits of the nation had almost been reached. Near the end of his term, Polk looked longingly at other areas, such as Cuba, but nothing further was done.

In Congress, the remainder of Polk’s limited program was approved. The Independent Treasury was reestablished and remained in existence into the next century. In addition, the tariff was reduced considerably. Although these successes seemed to indicate party harmony, the Democrats actually were engaged in much interparty wrangling, adding to the president’s many problems.

Of more lasting effect was the revival of antislavery agitation as a result of the possible addition of territory. In the midst of the war, as an appropriations measure was debated in Congress, Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed an amendment banning slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico. This so-called Wilmot Proviso was never approved, yet it rekindled sectional animosities that finally led to secession some fifteen years later. Polk, a slaveholder who seldom thought of slavery in moral terms—he believed that the solution was the extension of the Missouri Compromise Line to the Pacific—was not directly involved in the ensuing agitation during the remainder of his term, yet the legacy of sectional bitterness continued to be linked to his administration.

In his acceptance letter in 1844, Polk declared that he would not be a candidate for a second time, the first nominee ever to do so. As his term drew to a close, he refused to reconsider. His health remained poor, and the split within his party was unsettling. His outlook did not improve with the election of one of the Mexican War generals, Zachary Taylor, as his successor.

Following Taylor’s inauguration, the Polks slowly made their way home, often delayed by the poor health of the former president and well-meaning attempts by supporters to entertain them. Polk never fully recovered (his main complaint was chronic diarrhea) and he died June 15, 1849, slightly more than fourteen weeks after leaving office. His considerable estate, including a Mississippi plantation, was left to his widow, who lived until 1891, witnessing the tragic sectional split and devastating war brought about in part by the events associated with her husband’s presidency.

Significance

The youngest presidential candidate elected up to that time and often called the strongest chief executive between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, James K. Polk raised the presidency in public esteem. Although humorless, partisan, and totally without charisma, he was devoted to the office and impressed all those around him with his dedication and diligence. Nothing was allowed to interfere with the carrying out of his duties—except that no business was conducted on Sundays unless in an emergency. Unlike most occupants of the office—into the twenty-first century—he seldom was away from the capital and was absent a total of only six weeks in four years.

Under his leadership, a relatively brief, successful war was fought with Mexico, the annexation of Texas was completed, the most troublesome dispute with England was resolved, and the nation expanded almost to its continental limits. These accomplishments came about despite Polk’s frail constitution and sharp political differences with the Whig Party and among his fellow Democrats. However, his successes only added to the increasing sectional tensions that would soon tear the nation apart and cause a long, costly conflict.

Bibliography

Bergeron, Paul H. The Presidency of James K. Polk. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1987. Print

Cutler, Wayne, et al., eds. Correspondence of James K. Polk. 10 vols. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1969-2004. Print.

Dusinberre, William. Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.

Greenstein, Fred I. "The Policy-Driven Leadership of James K. Polk: Making the Most of a Weak Presidency." Presidential Studies Quarterly 40.4 (2010): 725­733. Print.

Haynes, Sam W. James K. Polk and the Expansionist Impulse. Ed. Oscar Handlin. 2d ed. New York: Longman, 2002. Print.

Mahin, Dean B. Olive Branch and Sword: The United States and Mexico, 1845–1848. Jefferson: McFarland, 1997. Print.

Merry, Robert W. A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent. New York: Simon, 2009. Print.

Merry, Robert W. "Polk's Peace." Amer. Heritage 59.4 (2010): 48–49. Print.

McCormac, Eugene Irving. James K. Polk: A Political Biography. New York: Russell, 1965. Print.

Polk, James K. Polk: The Diary of a President, 1845–1849. Ed. Allan Nevins. New York: Longmans, 1929. Print.

Schroeder, John H. Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1973. Print.

Seigenthaler, John. James K. Polk. New York: Times, 2003. Print.

Sellers, Charles Grier, Jr. James K. Polk: Jacksonian, 1795–1843. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Print.

Sellers, Charles Grier, Jr. James K. Polk: Continentalist, 1843–1846. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966. Print.

Weems, John Edward. To Conquer a Peace: The War Between the United States and Mexico. Garden City: Doubleday, 1974. Print.