A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico

by Amy S. Greenberg

  “Who Is James K. Polk?”

  WHEN ANDREW JACKSON called, James Knox Polk answered. He had long been known as “Young Hickory,” and his career was as much an offshoot of Jackson’s as the nickname implied. Polk wasn’t sure why the old man needed him, but the content of the communication made no difference to Polk’s prompt response. It was sixty miles from Polk’s home in Columbia to the Hermitage, outside Nashville. Polk started packing immediately after receiving his summons.

  The Democratic Party had been created by Andrew Jackson in his own image. He was the first common-man president, or rather the first president who represented himself as a common man, since his plantation, slaves, and vast wealth were decidedly uncommon. His public persona was the backwoods general, a man who had risen from nothing, who had led a group of volunteers to an astounding victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans, and whose interests were those of average people. It was the “virtuous yeomanry” who, Jackson maintained, “of their own mere will brought my name before the nation for the office of President of these U. States” and “sustained me against all the torrents of slander that corruption & wickedness could invent, circulated thro subsidized presses and every other way supported by the patronage of the government.”1 Jackson believed that his victory was the victory of the people over entrenched interests and corrupt politicians, including Henry Clay, who ruled Washington.

  Jackson’s election marked the death of a certain deferential politics that ruled during the era of Washington, Jefferson, and John Adams. Voters chose the first generation of American statesmen on the basis of their superior education and experience. But that began to change after 1815, when states eased their requirements for voting, enabling scores of white men to exercise the franchise for the first time. Jackson’s inferior education and shocking inability to spell led the East Coast elite to snicker about his literacy, or lack thereof, but bothered “the people” not a bit. In 1824, 1828, and again in 1832 “the people” turned out for Andrew Jackson. His image would cast a long shadow over the Democratic Party, as countless politicians, including James Polk, attempted to emulate the hero of New Orleans.2

  Jackson’s Democratic Party both expressed and embraced this ideal of popular democracy, and posed the thesis that political outsiders made ideal politicians. Any candidate saddled with inherited wealth and a good education suddenly found them heavy weights to bear. Americans were looking for the common touch. If a man could connect with his constituency, deliver a heartfelt speech about opportunity and equality, and convince the voters that he felt their pain, that he was one of them, then no office in the land was out of reach. If said candidate had proven his martial valor on the battlefield against Native Americans or the British, all the better. A remarkable number of Democratic politicians in the 1830s, particularly in the South and West, rode Indian killing to elected office.

  James K. Polk was just one member of the cadre of Tennessee politicians whose fortunes rose precipitously after Jackson’s election. They were true believers in the principles of Jacksonian democracy, affirming territorial expansion, upholding the rights of the common man, and opposing the urban elite and their sources of power—their banks, factories, and social institutions. The young Tennessee Democrats, including Polk, Sam Houston, and David Crockett, hoped to turn the former liability of a backwoods southwestern upbringing to their advantage, and perhaps emulate Jackson’s remarkable ascent.

  David Crockett was an early adopter of the model. He was a natural showman, a brilliant stump speaker, and a prodigious teller of jokes. His marksmanship was legendary, and he fought ably under Jackson’s command in the U.S. war against the powerful Creek tribe from 1811 to 1813. He made it to Congress, where he chose to fight against Jackson rather than with him. He broke with Old Hickory over the president’s Indian removal policy. Crockett thought it wrong and believed that the Five Civilized Tribes deserved to keep their land. He joined the opposition, wrote a best-selling autobiography, and became one of the first American folk heroes, a character on the stage, and the hero of tall tales. Despite his fame, Tennessee voters still punished him for opposing Jackson. After losing reelection to Congress, he famously told his constituency to “go to hell,” and that he would “go to Texas.”3 He kept his word, and in 1836 gained martyrdom when he died defending the Alamo.

  Sam Houston was another natural at the game, and like Jackson made political hay out of his military service in the War of 1812. His ability to charm a room was equaled only by his astounding capacity for alcohol, and after two terms in Congress in the 1820s he became Tennessee’s most charismatic governor. Houston also moved west to Texas. Some said the move came at the encouragement of President Jackson, who hoped Houston might turn his talent at causing trouble toward fomenting an uprising. Houston did just that but fared better than Crockett. He led Texas forces to victory at San Jacinto, and in 1836 he was elected the first president of the republic.

  And then there was James Knox Polk. Of the three young Tennessee politicians, Jackson loved Polk best. Polk always came when Jackson called, and Polk never betrayed him. He was truly Young Hickory, though Jackson wouldn’t live to see the full extent of Polk’s devotion.

  James K. Polk was born in western North Carolina in 1795 to wealthy, slave-owning parents, the eldest of ten children. His mother was a strict Presbyterian, his father’s faith in the democratic ideals of Thomas Jefferson was equally absolute. James was never baptized; his father’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of God derailed the ceremony. No doubt the event caused his mother pain and worry, but on the southern frontier a husband’s authority over his family was close to absolute; and if a man wanted to keep his son from God’s grace, there wasn’t much a mother could do about it.

  When James was ten, the family moved to Tennessee, where his father became a judge and one of the richest men in the county. James’s faith in territorial expansion was grounded in his history. His parents and grandparents had prospered at the expense of Native Americans, following the frontier west as the federal government negotiated treaties displacing tribes from their land. Westward expansion was the source of the family’s riches.

  James was a small, sickly child. He was never able to compete with his brothers and friends at the physical contests so important to establishing dominance in the southern backcountry. But he showed a natural aptitude for both mathematics and Latin, a language that Henry Clay, to his lifelong chagrin, never mastered. As a teenager he was crippled with pain from urinary bladder stones. His father found a doctor in Kentucky willing to try a highly experimental treatment, and at age seventeen James underwent a harrowing surgery without benefit of anesthesia. The stones were removed, but at a cost: James never fathered a child, as the surgery likely left him sterile.4

  His recovery seemed miraculous. James threw himself into his scholarship, and his parents encouraged his talents. They sent him back to North Carolina for the best education in the region. He excelled at the University of North Carolina, graduating first in his class. He took up law, but his passion was politics. By the early 1820s he had hitched his star to Jackson’s.

  Polk was no natural at the game of politics. To start, he had little military experience. Although he was promoted to colonel in the local militia, he never aimed a rifle at an Indian or anyone else. Many of his college chums volunteered to fight the British in the War of 1812. Polk would have loved to be part of that epic struggle against America’s nemesis. The young War Hawks of the day believed it was a second American Revolution. But his health hardly allowed it. Five foot eight and painfully skinny, Polk had excellent posture, but he was almost always sick or recovering from illness. He lacked charisma, couldn’t tell a joke to save his life, and was an uninspired public speaker. Where Houston and Crocket were warm, Polk was cool. He had chilly gray eyes and a stern mouth, and he wore his dark, unruly hair brushed straight back. Closemouthed, even sullen, formal in his words and calculating in his thought, he lacked a politician’s deft touch.
Polk was not a man that people liked.

  But he overcame these liabilities, as he had so many others in life, through sheer will. He campaigned twice as hard as his opponents, worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, and, perhaps out of insecurity that he hadn’t fought in a war himself, adopted a belligerent attitude toward other nations that played well with the folks back home. He would never be a great speaker; his supporters claimed that “his ambition was to distinguish himself by substantial merit, rather than by rhetorical display.” John Quincy Adams noted that he had “no wit … no gracefulness of delivery, no elegance of language,” but he taught himself how to deliver a speech laced with entertaining anecdotes.5 He forced himself to meet and greet, to mingle with the people, although it never came naturally to him. He perfected a public persona of direct honesty that stood in stark contrast to his private reticence. While not as good as Crockett’s bonhomie, for the most part it did the trick.

  James K. Polk, 1845. Lithograph by Charles Fenderich. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (photo credit 2.1)

  Polk also married well. Rumor has it that it was Jackson who encouraged Polk, then a young state legislator, to court the teenage Sarah Childress. Polk had gone to school with her brother and had met and admired the young woman. He followed Jackson’s advice in this as in everything else. The couple married at her parents’ plantation near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 1824, when Sarah was twenty and James twenty-eight.

  Sarah Polk, 1829. This portrait of Sarah Childress Polk was painted by Ralph E. W. Earl when she was twenty-six, had been married for five years, and was living in Washington, D.C., while James served in Congress. James was pleased with the portrait. “Mr. Earle has caught exactly the look of mischief that few people outside myself ever see,” he reportedly remarked (Bumgarner, Sarah Childress Polk, 34). Courtesy James K. Polk Memorial Association, Columbia, Tennessee. (photo credit 2.2)

  Polk’s bride hailed from a background like his own: the Childresses were also slave-owning Presbyterians at the very pinnacle of Tennessee society. Sarah’s father was a wealthy land speculator who recognized and encouraged his eldest daughter’s unusual intelligence. Like the Polk family, he looked east to North Carolina for schools worthy of his bright progeny. Sarah attended the exclusive Moravian Female Academy, the very best school open to women in the region, and like her future husband she excelled academically. But her father’s untimely death, when she was only fifteen, cut her formal schooling short. Returning home to comfort her mother, in deep mourning for her beloved father, Sarah found solace and direction in the strictures and ritual of the Presbyterian Church. Throughout her life she had a weakness for beautiful clothes that stood somewhat at odds with her general solemnity and disdain for affectation. With her strong features and dark, deep-set eyes, Sarah was considered striking rather than beautiful by all but her closest admirers, but her reputation for intelligence, exemplary piety, and very fine wardrobe were beyond dispute.

  Sarah was the perfect partner to James Polk, and as the years passed they forged a union of remarkable strength. She fulfilled all the normal expectations for political wives: she was social where he was not, and ever solicitous of his fragile health. She fought a valiant battle to get him to eat and sleep on a regular basis. But theirs was far from a typical nineteenth-century marriage. Childless in an era when the birth and upbringing of children defined a woman’s married life, Sarah threw herself into her husband’s work. And far from being threatened by her strong opinions and political acumen, James embraced his wife’s capabilities. Early in their marriage, when she would lobby James to put out the lamp and come to bed, Polk instead put her to work. “Taking up a newspaper, he would quietly reply, ‘Sarah, here is something I wish you to read.’ And so he set me to work too,” she remembered.6

  Soon she was analyzing political debates for him. She became a regular companion on James’s political excursions, one of the only wives who traveled with their politician husbands. “He always wished me to go,” she recalled, “and he would say, ‘Why should you stay at home? To take care of the house? Why, if the house burns down, we can live without it.’ ” Whether James’s primary goal was preventing his wife from becoming lonely in their childless house or he needed her advice, Sarah Polk became James Polk’s closest political advisor. This suited her fine. “Knowing much of political affairs she found pleasure in the society of gentlemen,” one friend of hers remarked. Rather than socializing with other wives, Sarah could be found with the men. “She was always in the parlor with Mr. Polk.”7

  Sarah Childress Polk was every bit as much a Democratic stalwart as her husband, and of the two she was the more ambitious. James liked to joke that “had he remained the clerk of the legislature she would never have consented to marry him,” but probably he wasn’t far off the mark.8 Before their wedding Sarah extracted a promise that he would run for Congress. Although she perpetually worried about her husband’s fragile health, as well as his unbaptized soul, her trust in his political destiny was total.

  For many years that trust seemed well placed: Polk was elected to seven straight terms in the House of Representatives and with President Jackson’s support became Speaker of the House for two of them. Sarah was no small part of his success, fulfilling her responsibilities “with ease and dignity.” She took extra rooms specifically for entertaining at the Washington boardinghouse where they lived, and successfully served as intermediary between her prickly husband and the rest of Washington.9

  Sarah’s behavior would not have been out of place in the first decades of the nineteenth century, when Dolley Madison and other canny political wives used social events to build political alliances. But a separation of public and private spheres in the early 1830s left Washington politics almost exclusively in the hands of men. Sarah’s political maneuvering definitely stood out. Not long after he became Speaker, one of Polk’s allies wrote that he was glad Sarah was “engaged in the amusement of politics, though from my heart I could wish that she had some more amusing amusement to amuse herself with—something more domestic for instance.” But Sarah didn’t need domestic concerns to amuse herself; James’s career was fully consuming for both of them. They devoted all their energy to ensuring that Young Hickory was viewed as the legitimate political offspring of the also childless Jackson.10

  Old Hickory had high hopes for his acolyte. He thought Polk might make a good vice presidential candidate when he got a bit older, eventually even president in his own right. When Jackson left the White House in early 1837, after two glorious terms in office, James and Sarah Polk were part of the party that accompanied him back to Tennessee. During one of those long carriage rides, Jackson turned to Sarah. Looking into the young woman’s dark eyes, he told her that “the scepter shall come back to Tennessee before very long, and your own fair self shall be the queen.”11

  But that seemed like ancient history in 1843. The Panic of 1837 had hit Tennessee and the Democratic Party hard. Whigs argued that Democratic legislation had destroyed the economy and that it was time for new ideas. After eight years of Jackson in the White House, Democrats were in no position to persuasively argue otherwise. Polk made the selfless choice to return home and attempt to save the fortunes of the state party. Sarah successfully coordinated his campaign for governor of Tennessee in 1839, but he couldn’t stop the party’s slide. Tennessee voters seemed bewitched by the Whigs’ program for economic development, which encompassed building good roads, stabilizing the banking system, and implementing protective tariffs to support fledgling industry. There may not have been many voters who replaced their framed portraits of local hero Andrew Jackson with those of his archrival, Henry Clay, but the state went for the Whigs in the 1840 presidential election. Tennessee appeared nearly beyond redemption for the Democrats.

  Polk’s fortunes fell just as hard. Twice in a row he lost bids for the Tennessee governorship to a charismatic Whig who was a far better speaker and had all the personal charm Polk lacked. In 1843, fresh off
his second loss, both he and Sarah worried about his future. Polk wasn’t wanted as governor; the people of Tennessee had made that clear. He might return to the House of Representatives, or perhaps Andrew Jackson might lobby his Washington supporters for a cabinet position for Polk once the Democrats returned to power. Old Hickory wouldn’t want Young Hickory to fall into total disrepute.

  But perhaps Polk was also beyond redemption. After the second gubernatorial defeat, Jackson stopped writing to Polk about his vice presidential prospects. He stopped writing about Polk’s political future altogether. Even Sarah Polk had to admit that Jackson’s prophecy was taking on the air of a fairy tale.

  All this was before the issue of Texas turned the presidential race upside down. Polk was an attorney by trade, but like his parents and grandparents he made his real money off westward expansion and slavery. He first began speculating in land in western Tennessee while a member of Congress, using slaves to clear and improve property that he then sold for a handsome profit. Polk appears to have paid more attention to his investments in land than to his investments in human flesh. Despite warnings from family members that one of his overseers treated Polk’s slaves with disturbing brutality, Polk continued to employ the man.12

  Polk also used slaves to grow cotton on a plantation in Mississippi. He spent most of April 1844 there, insulated from the chatter about Texas, but made it back to Tennessee before news broke of Van Buren’s startling stand on annexation. Tennessee Democrats were outraged. Few were surprised by this kind of response from Henry Clay, but Martin Van Buren? They had expected better from the Democratic front-runner.

  As for Polk, he had always supported annexation. Texas, he believed, was just a first step toward the realization of a far greater, God-given goal: that of a United States stretching from shore to shore, taking its place in the world as Europe’s equal. He felt no hesitation in saying so. Well before Van Buren’s betrayal became public, Polk announced that he favored the “immediate reannexation” of Texas, picking up on the fanciful idea, introduced by Mississippi senator Robert J. Walker, that Texas, as part of the Louisiana Purchase, had once belonged to the United States and was wrongly traded away by then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in the 1819 Transcontinental Treaty. In fact, the United States had no legitimate prior claim on Texas.