Sarah Childress Polk
James K. PolkNovember 2 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of James K. Polk, 11th president of the United States and one of three Tennesseans to become the nation's chief executive. UT Knoxville is home to a treasure trove of historical information about Polk -- the James K. Polk Presidential Papers Project. The documents in the collection tell a far more interesting story than the textbook accounts we've all read about Polk, who lived in Columbia, Tennessee, and served as president from 1845 to 1849. As the papers are collected, annotated, and published, a rich backdrop emerges of the times and the people who knew Polk. Little known details are revealed about him and his family.
Sarah Childress Polk
James K. Polk
Dr. Wayne Cutler, who's in charge of the project, has worked on Polk's papers for 20 years and talks about the former president like an old friend. Cutler can speak at length about "James K.," and does so in the present, not the past tense.
As Cutler has studied letters that Polk received after being elected president, the Polk family history has come into clearer focus.
"When Polk became president, lots of people wrote him about his genealogy, so we're getting some new leads on when his family came over from Ireland and with whom."
The Polks emigrated from Northern Ireland to Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. In the 1750s, Ezekiel Polk, James' paternal grandfather, moved south with a large group of family and friends to North Carolina. The reason was probably cheap land, Cutler says.
"They were farmers, but the best I can judge the whole community, a church group, moved south. That was often the case with immigrant parties. They didn't move as individuals, a little-house-on-the-prairie type thing. They almost always went in communities with large numbers of kinfolk."
The group settled in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, and there in 1795 president-to-be James Polk was born to Ezekiel's son, Samuel, and his wife, Jane Knox Polk. James wouldn't be the first in his family to distinguish himself in the country's history; his maternal grandfather, James Knox, was a hero in the Revolutionary War.
"He got very close to being blasted away in battle," Cutler says. "He charged a battery and spiked a cannon, put a spike right in the gun."
It was an auspicious beginning for the Polks' role in the fledgling nation.
James' baptism, or lack thereof, indirectly led to the Polk clan moving to Tennessee.
"Ezekiel Polk was something of a maverick. He was not among the devout; in fact he was a deist," says Cutler. This caused a hitch in James' baptism ceremony.
Deism's adherents believe that God set the world in motion and then stepped back and had nothing more to do with it. At James' baptism, when the minister asked Sam Polk, a deist like his father, to reaffirm his faith, Sam refused.
"As the story goes, the minister said if Sam couldn't do a reaffirmation of faith, then the minister wouldn't baptize James and he turned them away," says Cutler.
The James K. Polk Postage Stamp,
to be issued November 2, commemorates Polk's 200th birthday. The oval
"frame" around his likeness recalls the 19th century style of early
postage stamps.
The incident started what is known in Mecklenburg County as the deist war (Polk, by the way, wasn't baptized until the last week of his life).
"Ezekiel was infuriated by the slight, and he bought 100 volumes of deist literature and circulated them around the county for some years," Cutler says. "That fuss indirectly led Ezekiel to leave North Carolina for Tennessee in 1803 because he lost the argument over religion, or non-religion. James' father, Sam, followed Ezekiel three years later and settled on a farm outside Columbia."
James was 11 when he came to Tennessee. "One of the things we've learned, just in the eighth volume of the Polk papers, was that his nickname was Black Pony, which I thought was very interesting because later he will be known as the first dark horse candidate for president," Cutler says.
The childhood nickname came from Polk's penchant for racing horses and from a black pony he owned that was a proven winner.
"We didn't know about this before. One of Polk's school mates wrote him during the presidential campaign and told a story about this horse race. So you learn some fun things in editing these letters," says Cutler.
Polk was educated in a field school, also known as a common school. Attendance was mandatory for boys, and although it was a public school, parents paid tuition.
"If you couldn't afford it, then the state paid the tuition. And because almost everybody found some way to afford it, the state legislature spent very little money on education. Many historians have assumed that there were no public schools because the states spent so little money on education. However, we don't know how much income came from the tuitions."
Historians also have assumed that Polk was sickly as a youth, says Cutler, because when he was around 15 years old, he came down with a urinary stone.
"He was quite ill from it and would have recurring bouts of pain. In 1812, his uncle was going to take him to Philadelphia to see a renowned physician and surgeon. But James was so ill that they had to stop in Kentucky. There he was attended by Dr. Ephraim McDowell, who did a surgical procedure and removed the urinary stone.
"This led to some later confusion among historians because somehow it got out that James had had a gallstone removed rather than a urinary stone. It went in the books incorrectly as the first successful abdominal surgery in the history of surgery."
A physician from Vanderbilt, Bob Ikard, wrote an article in the 1980s outlining the circumstantial evidence for Polk having had a urinary stone, not a gallstone, removed, Cutler says. Ikard's diagnosis was confirmed by the Polk Project staff upon recovering a short biography of Polk written as a campaign pamphlet.
"The author of the essay sat down with Polk for three days, took notes, and went back to Nashville and wrote up the article. So we have almost a first hand account of the operation, and in that sketch it was a urinary stone."
The operation was a success and Polk rebounded from it, but Cutler says, it may have caused him to become sterile.
James was the eldest of his father's ten children, and Sam wanted him to be educated. Sam sent James to an academy in Murfreesboro to study Latin and other classical subjects, then to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for three years. He graduated first in his class, taking first honors in Latin and mathematics.
Polk then went to Nashville to study law with Felix Grundy, who would later become a senator and attorney general. Studying with a practicing attorney was the usual educational route of lawyers then, says Cutler.
Polk's first job came in 1819 when he clerked for the Tennessee legislature, which was meeting in Murfreesboro. He had only been out of college five years when he was elected to a seat in the legislature in 1823.
"That's when he met his future wife, Sarah Childress," says Cutler. "Her father was the political boss of Rutherford County. Sarah had attended a Moravian academy in Salem, North Carolina. She was exceptionally well educated for a woman in that time and took a very active part in Polk's political career all through his life. She was quite the vibrant personality and knew everything he was doing. When he campaigned she took care of his mail and correspondence for him."
Although the Polks never had any children of their own, Sarah reared her grandniece, Sarah Polk Jetton, and Polk took in his nephew, Marshall Tate Polk Jr., when he was 13.
"When Sam Polk died in 1827, James became head of the family. So in 1831, when three of his younger brothers died in the same year, James adopted his nephew," Cutler says.
Meanwhile, Polk graduated from state to national politics. In 1825, he won the first of seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was speaker of the House from 1835 to 1839 and is the only speaker to serve as president of the U.S.
"Polk was a protege of Andrew Jackson's and supported him very strongly. In 1835-36 he followed Jackson's wishes and backed Martin Van Buren for president. That was when the parties split in Tennessee. Those who didn't want to vote for the New Yorker, Van Buren, supported Hugh Lawson White of Knoxville, and that was the genesis of the Whig party in Tennessee," Cutler explains.
Jackson prevailed, Van Buren was elected, and two years later Polk returned to Tennessee, at that time the Union's fifth most populous state, to run for governor and try to shore up flagging Democratic party support. He won in 1839 but failed in the gubernatorial races of 1841 and 1843, largely due to his support of Van Buren, Cutler says.
The party was still splintered in 1844 when Polk won the nomination for president as a compromise candidate.
His opponents called him a "dark horse" because he was less well known than other politicians. Cutler thinks the term has obscured Polk's many accomplishments as president.
A campaign banner touts the
candidacy of James K. Polk and George Dallas, his vice presidential
running mate.
"The Dark Horse of 1844 won his race, kept all of his campaign promises, and returned to Tennessee after a single term. It is ironic that although professional historians generally rank Polk in the 'top 10' of America's presidents, his Whig opponents' taunt lingers within our collective memory, 'Polk Who?'"
The correspondence of James K. Polk, as well as the letters, speeches, and memoranda of Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson are being collected, transcribed, annotated, and published.
Presidential papers projects are not the same as actual repositories of presidential papers. A presidential papers editor first must find the papers, wherever they might be. Take the Andrew Jackson papers, for example.
"The largest single collection of Jackson papers is in the Library of Congress," says Dr. Harold D. Moser, director of the Jackson project. "But the majority are in more than 4,600 repositories scattered throughout the world."
Once the papers have been located, copied, and transcribed, they must be read and references to different people and events annotated, or explained in footnotes. Because of the enormous volume of material, editors also make judgments about which documents and correspondence to include in the published volumes.
The Johnson project has published 11 volumes with the 12th due any day under Dr. Paul Bergeron, director. The Jackson project has published four volumes and the Polk project eight. Both expect to publish new volumes by the end of the year.
When the three projects are finished, UT will have the most complete collection of research materials on Presidents Jackson, Polk, and Johnson anywhere.