President James K. Polk

The James K. Polk House

This museum charges $10 for seniors and, unfortunately, wasn't geared for my kind of tourism.  They have a video about the president's life but there are virtually no exhibits.  The tour is entirely about the home and its furnishings. 

The home was built by Polk's parents and inherited by his brother.  The furnishings, however, almost all belonged to Pres. and Mrs. Polk.  The furniture mostly came from their home in Nashville when he was governor, I think.  They have some things of the couple's from their time in the White House.  Sadly for the tour guide, I was so completely uninterested in these things I flat refused to go on the usual tour.  Since I was the only member of this tour group, I got his undivided time for a while. 

He knew a lot about the Polks, but he was used to delivering the information in relation to the furnishings.  It almost seemed like he couldn't help himself and kept trying to tell me about portraits and china and sofas, and I kept telling him it was all interesting and I was glad they had these things preserved but I really didn't want to hear about them.

This is what I was able to glean from the video and the guide.

Polk personally
His mentor was Andrew Jackson and, like Jackson, Polk came to TN from North Carolina as a child.  Unlike Jackson, Polk was from a wealthy family, and they flourished here.

Polk was ambitious and hardworking and focused and humorless.  Your basic dry stick of a person.  Remarkably, he managed to attract smart, vivacious, attractive Sarah, also from a wealthy family.  She was the best thing that ever happened to him and was probably the primary reason he had a political career.  She was much like Dolley Madison, who similarly helped her unlikable husband.

Polk apparently knew slavery was morally wrong, but he was the absentee owner of two plantations - one near Memphis and one in Mississippi.  He pushed his overseers to make him more money, with the result that his plantations had among the highest death rates of slaves.

He went on to spend much of his life trying to suppress any public debate about slavery.

Polk compounded his pretense at humanity by being a tax dodger.  Slaves, considered property, were taxed as property.  Polk moved slaves from one plantation to the other depending on when the tax assessments were being done.

Furthermore, having high political ambitions and knowing his slave ownership wouldn't play well up north, he hid his ownership from the public by using surrogates.  He couldn't hide the 6 or 7 domestic workers he had at his own house, but he did hide the 60 or 70 that worked on his plantations.

A real sweetheart of a guy.  I'm almost grateful to know that our country could survive the leadership of such a ghastly excuse for a human being.

Polk's career
Polk was a lawyer who was first elected to the state legislature.  Then he went to the US House, where he was eventually the Speaker of the House.  Then he was elected governor but served only 1 term.  He tried for reelection twice but lost both times.  His political career seemed dead.

William Henry Harrison succeeded Jackson in the White House but died within a month, and John Tyler became president.

For the 1844 presidential race, Democrats (the dominant party in the South) couldn't agree on a nominee.  The convention went to 8 ballots without a winner emerging.  Polk's allies pushed him as a compromise candidate and, miraculously, he was in the race.  Henry Clay was once again running for the Whig Party. 

Outgoing president Tyler wasn't happy about either candidate and talked about making a third-party run.  Polk made a deal with him - if Tyler didn't run, then Polk would support Tyler's pet project - annexing Texas.

Clay underestimated Polk, who was elected president in a stunning political comeback (after being a two-time gubernatorial loser).

Polk's presidency
According to the museum, he made the office even more powerful than it had been.

His most controversial act was the Mexican-American War, which grew out of Polk's deal with Tyler.  (The museum called it the Mexican War.)  Mexico saw the southern US border as ending at the Nueces River in Texas; Texas (and the US) saw it as the Rio Grande, much farther south.

Polk sent Gen. Zachary Taylor down to station troops at the Rio Grande, hoping to provoke a reaction.  He got it.  Mexico ordered the US troops back to the Nueces; they refused; Mexico fired on them.

Polk demanded a declaration of war from Congress, claiming Mexico had shed American blood on American soil.  The American public was initially supportive of the war.  But as it dragged on for 2 years, opinion turned and Polk became very unpopular.  Even the result of gaining all Mexico's southern territory to the Pacific didn't redeem him.

Polk had already negotiated ownership of the Oregon Country from England so, under Polk's leadership, the US had acquired the territory that now forms the borders of the contiguous US.  Three new states were created during his term: Texas, Wisconsin and Iowa.

In a way, though, Polk's expansionism backfired on him, because the north saw it as an effort to expand the bounds of slavery.  It increased the debate about slavery that he had spent his lifetime trying to suppress.

Polk's off time
Essentially, he had none.  During his presidency he took 27 days of vacation.  He actually worked the entire four years.

His wife Sarah tried to introduce some lightness to the White House - even bringing in a circus one evening.  But after a while Polk left to go work some more.  He considered everything else a waste of time.

The only thing he did besides work was horseback riding, and even then he often had representatives from Congress or his cabinet ride out with him so they could talk business.  I think he worked himself to death.

He was too tired even to ask for a second term.  Three months after he left office, he was dead of cholera.  There was a widespread epidemic at the time, but his resistance was certainly worn down by the way he'd spent his previous 4 years.

Of course, there's lots more to him, but this is most of what I got from the museum.  If you want more information, here's the Wikipedia link.   https://en.wikipedia.org/James-K.-Polk

My opinion
I can't say I think much of Tennessee's contributions to the White House.  Both Jackson and Polk worked hard for what they saw as the good of their country, and I'm grateful for that.  I can't see that either one tried to enrich himself at the expense of the office they held.  But both seem really quite unpleasant people - almost remarkably so - and I have a hard time working up much more than an unenthusiastic rah for the two of them.

And yet, we survived. 

I'd also note that Henry Clay got defeated by both of them.  In fact, he ran unsuccessfully for president 5 times, which makes him a champion loser I guess.