This Day in Presidential History (Death of James Knox Polk, Effective But Divisive ‘Young Hickory’)

June 15, 1849—James Knox Polk, who dramatically expanded the size of the United States through a war of choice with Mexico that led to the catastrophic Civil War a decade later, died in Nashville, Tenn., only three months after leaving office, utterly exhausted after a single term. At 53, he lived the shortest and died the youngest of any ex-President.

The first “dark horse” Presidential candidate not known to the nation at large, Polk rose in the Tennessee politics as an admirer of Andrew Jackson, earning him the moniker “Young Hickory.” 

As President, he followed the same managerial routine and style he had maintained as a state legislator, Congressman, Speaker of the House and Governor of Tennessee: at his desk overnight into the early morning hours, disregarding ailments he had suffered since childhood, impervious to cajoling and pressure alike, finding little if any good in any Whig opponent, micromanaging his Cabinet secretaries, and taking nobody into his confidence so much as his beloved wife Sarah Childress Polk, his personal secretary, political antenna and even business partner. 

Polk might have been tapping his humorless, self-righteous, even self-aggrandizing vein when he confided to his diary in 1847: “Though I occupy a very high position, I am the hardest working man in this country”—but he wasn’t that far off. Unlike Presidents of this millennium, he not only never took vacations but rarely ventured outside Washington.

Above all, he focused on a narrow range of objectives he outlined at the start of his administration to the historian he appointed Secretary of the Navy, George Bancroft:

*re-establishing an independent treasury;

*lowering the protective tariff;

*settling the Oregon boundary question with Great Britain; and 

*acquiring California.

Polk achieved all of these. In particular, by gaining the last two, he extended the U.S. border to the Rio Grande on the South and to the Pacific in the West, enlarging the nation by one-third. 

But, though avoiding war with Britain over Oregon, he started one with Mexico, under circumstances ambiguous enough to provoke denunciations by one former President (John Quincy Adams) and two future ones (Abraham Lincoln, then a Congressman, and Ulysses S. Grant, then a soldier in the conflict).

For about a century after his death, Polk was seen as one of a number of 19^th-century non-entity Presidents lost in an era of Presidential dominance. But by the 1940s, after Justin Harvey Smith's The War With Mexico (1919) and  short but colorful summaries of his Presidency by historians such as Bernard DeVoto and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., his stock had risen sharply. 

In the early 1960s, historians polled by Schlesinger ranked Polk eighth in importance among presidents—below Theodore Roosevelt and above Harry S. Truman.

Since then, revisionist history that has taken into account the rise of the imperial Presidency and the plight of Native Americans and African-American slaves has dropped that estimate slightly, but he remains among the top-ranked occupants of the Oval Office—if not near-great, then above average. 

Yet it might be more correct to say that Polk was among the most consequential Presidents--one whose ill effects must be reckoned alongside his achievements—certainly foremost among those elected to a single term.

Historians and contemporaries who acclaimed Polk have made much of his insistence that, in keeping to his campaign pledge that he would just seek a single term, he could only make decisions without regard to politics, and that his major appointees must act likewise. 

But his major decisions, it can no longer be denied, revolved around serving the interests of the slaveowner class—a group that Polk not only represented as a government official but to which he belonged.

As a candidate in the 1844 election, Polk was a “warmhearted paternalist” who owned only a few “family” slaves, and bought others just to unite families, according to his neighbor Gideon J. Pillow. But the actual situation was considerably more complex. 

Even as President, while under national instead of regional scrutiny, Polk continued to buy slaves—but did so under an assumed name to avoid being identified. 

In addition, according to William Dusinberre’s Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk:

*Polk became a planter after he already had a successful law practice, because, he was assured, a plantation would augment his wealth; 

*As absentee landlord of a plantation in Mississippi after 1838, he dismissed an overseer who did not achieve the returns he believed he should have achieved, even though the overseer was well-regarded by slaves for his comparative leniency;

*Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, that plantation averaged annual profits of about 8 percent; 

*Only one in two slaves on the Polk estate lived past age 15—a child mortality rate exceeding the national norm;

*More often than not, if a slave ran away in protest over mistreatment, only to be caught, Polk sided with his employee; and,

*By the time he left the White House, Polk owned more than 50 slaves.

Before the likes of Dusinberre researched his background more extensively, Polk was credited by historians with a degree of moderation on slavery, at least when compared with “fire-eaters” such as John C. Calhoun. (The judgment of Schlesinger, in The Age of Jackson, was typical: while the President failed to “perceive the moral irrepressibility of the slavery question,” his attitude “did not arise from any particular solicitude for slavery.”)

But, given Polk’s vested—and growing—interest in the success of the “peculiar institution,” his policies and conduct of the Presidency need to be regarded more skeptically:

*While willing to settle the Oregon boundary dispute along the 49^th parallel rather than his more belligerent followers who wanted “54-40 or Fight,” Polk wanted to negotiate with Britain in order to avoid a war with an imperial power that, only 30 years before, had burned Washington, while he could concentrate instead on Mexico, a country that could not match up logistically with the U.S. (or, as Grant wrote in his Personal Memoirs, "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation");

*Polk ordered U.S. troops under General Zachary Taylor down to the disputed Rio Grande border with Mexico in the spring of 1846, then used that country’s retaliatory attack as a pretext for launching the Mexican-American War;

*Polk disregarded the warning of Secretary of State James Buchanan—himself not in the slightest sympathetic to the anti-slavery cause—that Northern abolitionists would regard the conflict as a trumped-up means of securing more potential slave territory;

*Though saying publicly that the Missouri Compromise border between slave and free states could simply be extended to the Pacific, Polk knew that land north of that line would not lent itself to cotton cultivation and the slaves required for that in any case—and privately assured Calhoun that he’d only nominate judges who would keep the interest of slave owners in mind;

*Polk did attempt to acquire—unsuccessfully—Cuba, whose warm climate was far more congenial to the kind of crops grown on Southern plantations than, for instance, the Pacific Northwest;

*Throughout the subsequent Mexican-American War, Polk, distrustful of their political ambitions, sought to undercut the two generals who won the most significant battles in the conflict, Taylor and General Winfield Scott—and, ludicrously, sought to create a new military position—lieutenant general—and fill it with a Democrat with no significant military experience: Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a fellow Democrat;

*“Rarely has a war been so successful militarily while breeding such divisions,” wrote David Reynolds in Waking Giant: America in the Age of Lincoln—an opposition seen most dramatically in Adams’ denunciation of the war as wicked, Lincoln’s furious outcry in the House against what he saw as an unconstitutional Presidential infringement of the congressional war power, and author Henry David Thoreau’s development of the doctrine of civil disobedience against a war he saw as unjust;

*Although Polk’s reduction of the tariffs has sometimes been seen as a stimulant to American prosperity in the late 1840s and early 1850s, it sprang inevitably from the direct interest of the Southern planter class, who abominated tariffs as a hindrance to their profits.

However chagrined he might have felt over the Whig Taylor succeeding him office, Polk looked forward to retirement, moving into “Polk Place,” a new Nashville home that he and Sarah had renovated. 

But overwork had degraded his already frail physique, leaving him vulnerable during a cholera outbreak that broke out during his 28-day, his post-Presidential celebratory tour of the South. “He knew what he wanted, and got it, but it killed him,” summarized Schlesinger.

In his last will and testament, Polk requested that Sarah manumit their slaves upon her own death (though the next day, he authorized the purchase of six more slaves—again, characteristically, a task performed secretly). She discharged the slaves, but not in the manner her husband had envisioned. In 1860, sensing at least disruption of their plantation and perhaps even uncompensated emancipation, she sold the property and all the slaves with it.

Polk added more territory to the United States than any other President except Jefferson. Seen simply as a President who helped establish the U.S. as a power on the North American continent, he may have belonged on Mount Rushmore as much as Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

But in the truest sense, he weakened that same power by thrusting the issue of new slave territory irrepressibly onto the American political scene, where it could not be settled short of the Civil War—which cost far more lives (620,000) than the 13,000 in “Mr. Polk’s War.”