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.”

This Day in Presidential History (Grant Shows Daring, Absorbs Lessons at Monterey)

September 24, 1846—If a novel were ever written about the Battle of Monterey, you could do worse than title it A Tale of Three Presidents, for this action in the Mexican War involved the current chief executive of the United States; a general he suspected of harboring ambitions for that office; and a junior officer who drew lessons from their turbulent relationship when he himself commanded the nation’s army and was elected to America’s highest office.

These three men were, respectively, James Knox Polk, Zachary Taylor and Ulysses S. Grant (pictured right). Polk, a workaholic President who did not survive a year out of the White House, was intent not only on bringing Texas into the Union as a slave state, but also on facing down army commanders who a) did anything to short-circuit that aim, or b) might want to run for President themselves. Taylor’s actions in concluding the engagement at Monterey typified Polk’s micromanagement of the war—a pattern of continual interference with his generals virtually without parallel in Presidential history.

Taylor had only come to occupy his current position as the key American commander in the war because of Polk’s hostility to General Winfield Scott, who did little to hide either his Whig Party sympathies or his opposition to the President‘s policies—stances which led the Democratic Polk to give pride of place in maneuvering against Mexico to Taylor.

On the morning of the 24th, Taylor prepared for a fourth day of battle. The prior three had been difficult--especially the last one, featuring door-to-door street fighting in Monterey. But superior American artillery power, and the disorganized Mexican command, gave unpretentious “Ol’ Rough and Ready” the upper hand. More remarkably, Taylor, for the third straight battle, had beaten a force that considerably outnumbered his own and that was well-entrenched in ground with which it was familiar. It was a triumph of his leadership.

But now, Taylor’s victories had led the Whigs to view him, too, as potential Presidential timber. The Polk administration, not thrilled by this prospect, cast about for a pretext upon which to clip the general’s wings--one soon provided, through no fault of his own.

The Mexican general, Pedro de Ampudia, requested a parley with Taylor on the 24th. The two generals worked out an eight-week truce in which Ampudia's troops were permitted to evacuate the city, taking with them their weapons and one six-gun battery. Taylor admitted that the terms were generous to the foe, but he felt that his prior victories would allow Polk’s administration to gain an upper hand in negotiating the end of war and the session on favorable terms to the U.S. Besides, he was not sure how much longer he could continue, as his own ammunition was running low. Lacking access to the still relatively new telegraph, Taylor determined to make the best short-term arrangement he could. Upon hearing the news, the Polk administration made it plain that they felt that Taylor had usurped his authority and that he had not pressed his advantage. Pointedly, their subsequent communications with him refused to thank him for his victory.

The administration then awarded overall command to Scott, who, as ranking general at the start of the conflict, should have had it anyway. Scott proceeded to reel off victories as impressive, and maybe even more so, than Taylor’s.

Again, with Polk’s unwillingness to yield any inch on direction of the war’s denouement to his commander, the relationship between the President and his general unraveled--perhaps even more so this time, as it involved nasty squabbling between Scott and some senior officers, and an eventual Congressional investigation that cleared Taylor of wrongdoing.

Compared with the struggles that the army’s two leading generals waged against Polk, Grant’s participation in the battle and larger campaign was relatively minor. But it would prove decisive for the course of his career.

As World War I turned out to be for the generation of armed-forces commanders in World War II, the Mexican War proved to be a great training ground for important American generals on both sides in the Civil War, including Grant himself, Robert E. Lee, as Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, George McClellan, Joseph Johnson, Jubal Early, A. P. Hill, Meade, P.G.T. Beauregard, Joseph Hooker, James Longstreet, Winfield Scott Hancock, and George H. Thomas. The Mexican War enabled these young soldiers, many recent West Point cadets, to form a bond with one another. Later on, when they split along sectional lines in the Civil War, Grant knew enough about the Southerners--most important, Robert E. Lee--not to be overawed by them.

Monterey provided an opportunity for Grant to shine--in particular, through the willingness to take calculated risks to win a battle. While graduating only 21st out of 36 at West Point, he had made a name for himself with his equestrian skills. In fact, recalled his friend Longstreet, "he was noted as the most proficient rider at the academy." At Monterey, that skill came in handy at the most opportune time.

One of Grant's abiding characteristics was restlessness. As a recently appointed regimental quartermaster he had already been ordered to stay at camp. But curiosity got the better of him, and he ended up close to the line to get a better view of the fighting when the American troops received the order to charge. Rather than slink back, Grant joined them, and was fortunate to survive a charge that ended up with one-third of the Americans killed or wounded in only a few minutes.

On the morning of the 23^rd, the Americans were forced to fire up at Mexican troops, who, shielded by sandbags, were shooting down at them from behind the roofs around the central plaza. Before long, General Garland, alarmed that his men were running short of ammunition, asked for a volunteer to carry a mission to divisional commander General Twiggs, asking for more ammunition and/or reinforcements. Grant stepped forward to accept the task.

Let’s stop at this point to consider the implications of this move. Fifty years ago, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Mackinlay Kantor wrote a speculative history, If The South Had Won The Civil War, which took as its central departing points from what actually occurred a) a Union loss at Gettysburg, and b) an equestrian accident at the beginning of the Vicksburg campaign that ended up killing Grant. The latter was not at all a far-fetched notion: the future commander of Union forces in the war, his son Frederick recalled, liked to ride horses most people considered unmanageable.

Now Grant was facing considerably greater perils: dodging bullets in territory he didn’t know well, from snipers he couldn’t see. But Grant was unafraid. His solution to the problem made the most of his equestrian skills while allowing him to evade enemy fire: He rode on the side of his gray horse Nellie with one foot hooked on the cantle of the saddle and an arm around Nellie’s neck. He made it through without a scratch.

Grant’s courage was of a piece with perhaps his most important decision of the Civil War: how to take Vicksburg, the redoubtable fortress holding the key to controlling the Mississippi River and cutting the Confederacy in half. At this point, Grant recalled a highly unorthodox maneuver made by General Scott after the Monterey campaign—i.e., cut loose from his base. Grant’s subordinate, William Sherman, had been fearful of such a move. But when he saw the result—a victorious campaign—he decided to employ a similar tactic in Georgia and have his troops live off the fat of the land in his famous March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah.

Grant absorbed two other lessons from the Mexican War. First, he saw how Polk undermined Taylor and Scott—two commanders of vastly different styles but each enormously skilled. His judgment of the administration’s resulting maneuvering was blunt: “The Mexican war was a political war, and the administration conducting it desired to make political capital out of it.” As the cancer-ridden odd soldier rushed to finish his Personal Memoirs nearly 40 years later, he pointed out the contrast between Abraham Lincoln, who was “willing to trust his generals in making and executing their plans,” and successor Andrew Johnson, who was fatally handicapped by his warring feelings of bitterness and insecurity in dealing with the South during Reconstruction.

Even more pointed was his characterization of the war as a whole, “an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.” His summary of the results of Polk’s land-grab for Texas (and much of the rest of the current American Southwest) from Mexico echoes Lincoln’s Second Inaugural on the penalty levied by God on America for extending slavery: “The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”