“The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our Government.”
Polk’s Inaugural Address, one year before inciting the Mexican-American War
The structure of each biography changes along with the new author. James K Polk by John Seigenthaler was my guide to the 11th president. Seigenthaler, a Tennessean, obviously has an affection for fellow Volunteer State residents Polk and Andrew Jackson. The odd thing was he wrote more about the people that surrounded Polk and preceded him than about Polk himself. The major accomplishments are laid out very matter of fact, as though inevitable. Many major events and Polk’s achievements are told as small vignettes within chapters whereas extensive time is dedicated to how Jackson and Van Buren laid the groundwork for Polk’s “dark horse” candidacy. Over half the book really isn’t about Polk.
That said, I still learned a lot about “Young Hickory.” James Polk declared he’d run for one term so he could focus on getting things done. Love it or hate it, he did what he said he would do, even though it took a war to accomplish it. A one-term president lost in the executive ether between Jackson and Lincoln, Polk was considered by many later presidents as one of the best ever to hold the office.
Polk’s agenda could be summed up in four main goals:
- Lower the Tariff – look out for the poor agrarian, not the east coast industrialist elite!
- Establish an independent Treasury – which had been abolished by the Whigs
- Acquire Oregon from the British – a goal sought by many before him, but never achieved
- Acquire California from Mexico – Manifest Destiny! yada yada yada
For reference, this is what the United States looked like when Polk took office:
How’d that work out for ya, Jimmy?
- Tariff reduction bill (aka the Walker Tariff) signed July 30, 1846 after a tie-breaking vote by his VP
- Independent Treasury Act signed Aug 6, 1846. It passed the House easily and the Senate by 3 votes and lasted until 1913 when it was replaced by the Federal Reserve.
- Treaty signed with Britain over Oregon Territory on June 15, 1846
- It took a war with Mexico, but in 1848 Polk pays for and gets California and New Mexico Territory
The United States when Polk left the White House:
Not only did Polk achieve his four major objectives, he did the first three in under a year and a half. Amazing what you can get done with majorities in both houses. Polk knew a thing or two about party loyalty. He was the partisan’s partisan, living and dying on the hill of the Democratic Party. After losing the governor’s seat in 1841, and subsequently the Tennessee House majority to the Whigs, both Democratic US Senate seats were in jeopardy. (It would be another seventy-two years before the 17th Amendment would mandate direct election of Senators by the people. State legislatures still chose in these days.) The Whigs planned to replace their current Senators with two from their own party. To prevent this, the thirteen Democrat state senators simply didn’t show up for work, leaving the 12 Whigs without a quorum for a vote. This left both US Senate seats vacant, outraging the populace but delighting Democratic President Martin Van Buren that he had two less votes against him. The Tennessee legislators did this shit SEVENTY-TWO TIMES on various votes, taking their cues from party elders like Polk and Jackson.
James Polk’s legacy will always revolve around the last of his four great measures. The Mexican-American War was brought on by American provocation. After the annexation of Texas right as Polk took office, the new president planned for potential conflict over the disputed territory. Sending future president Zachary Taylor with a force to the disputed area, the Americans received fire from the Mexican side and the game was afoot. Many would deride Polk for this tactic including a young congressional upstart named Abe Lincoln. Honest Abe demanded to know the spot to which Taylor was sent, for if it was over the disputed territory line we were at fault, not them. War was declared almost unanimously, but two years later when it was over the House denounced it as “a war unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” In the end, Mexico gave the U.S. California, the New Mexico Territory and all land north of the Rio Grande, more than a half-million square miles. The US, in turn, paid $15 million and took on the additional $3 million of US citizen claims against Mexico. Polk was skewered in the aftermath for letting the war’s bounty justify the means. Maybe this is why he is so forgotten among the presidents.
James Polk died just three months after leaving the White House. Behind him he left a country now stretching from sea to shining sea. He even had a hand in spurring the California Gold Rush, praising the precious metal’s discovery in the newly acquired territory via his last State of the Union address. He did this largely to thumb his nose at those in Congress who complained California was a distant, useless land not worth the price paid for it. Young Hickory had a grand plan, but it omitted many details. Most importantly, he laid no framework of how to incorporate the new territories peacefully, the slavery question deferred yet again. Revered yet forgotten, visionary yet myopic, James K Polk remains a fascinating case study in presidential effectiveness and leadership.
Trivia
- Elected Offices Held Before Presidency:
- Tennessee House
- US House (7-time Representative, including two terms as House Speaker)
- Governor of TN (though he lost the next two election bids)
- One of seven lawyer presidents who argued a case in front of the Supreme Court
- Jan 1827; won his case Williams v Norris
- At 14, has cringe-inducing surgery to remove urinary stones by hanging him upside down and piercing his taint with a syringe (without anesthesia)
- Graduated UNC Chapel Hill first in his class
- Two congressmen hated Polk so much as House Speaker they launched a plot to get him into a fight where he would be duty bound to challenge or accept a duel!
- Slavery
- Was gifted a slave boy by his father as a wedding present that stayed with him the rest of his life, including the White House
- Slave owner his whole life. Left his slaves to be freed upon his wife’s death, but she lived so long that the 13th Amendment freed them first.
- In 1830, he voted against a bill in Congress that would ban the lash as punishment for slaves in the field, “A slave dreads the punishment of stripes more then he does imprisonment” and had “a beneficial effect upon his fellow-slaves.”
- In his first speech on the floor of Congress he called slavery “a common evil”, “peculiar delicacy” and “unfortunate subject” but never did jack his entire career to prevent, alter or deter it.
- Bought into Jefferson’s romanticized idea of diffusion dispelling slavery on its own.
Follow-up Reading
- Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America by Walter Borneman
- A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk by Robert Merry
- So Far From God: The US War with Mexico by John SD Eisenhower