Read an Excerpt
James K. Polk
The American President
By John Seigenthaler, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2003 John Seigenthaler
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6597-6
CHAPTER 1
The Bent Twig
Where did they come from, the conflicted character traits that combined to make James K. Polk less than a natural leader, yet justifiably judged among presidents of great achievement?
Edward Cook, whose Life of Florence Nightingale helped illuminate for the world the heroine of the Crimean War, warned biographers about the "natural temptation" to draw too heavily on youthful experiences in explaining the adult. So often, he admonished, writers "magnify some childish incident as prophetic of what is to come thereafter." The child, after all, is not in all things father to the man.
True enough. Nonetheless, Polk's early life offers fascinating clues that perhaps help explain the development of a president with the missionary zeal of a fundamentalist preacher determined to convert the populace to Jackson's Democracy. Polk's oratory fell somewhat short of evangelistic eloquence, but his religion was partisan politics.
* * *
Polk's boyhood was marked by several distinctive influences. There was an upsetting religious conflict between his parents. There was the upheaval of the family's move from an established community to an unknown frontier destination. There was a continuing, debilitating pattern of poor health. There was a privileged and focused education. But perhaps most influential was his intense political indoctrination at the family hearth. "He grew up imbued with the principles of ... Jefferson," wrote George Bancroft, the historian who served in his cabinet.
His maturation as a Jeffersonian Republican and then as a Jacksonian Democrat is the aspect of his life easiest to track. Eugene McCormac, his biographer, simply concluded that Polk's faith in Republican doctrine was "inherited." It is quite clear that from early childhood both his grandfather and his father engraved on the boy's mind a political creed that never faded. For Ezekiel and Sam Polk, Republican philosophy was their gospel; Jefferson was their Jesus. Born on Little Sugar Creek near Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1795 — just four years after the nation had ratified the Bill of Rights — Polk was three years old when President John Adams signed the Sedition Act, which sought to kill public censure of his Federalist policies. Jim Polk was six by the time Jefferson, having defeated Adams in 1800, pardoned those Republican critics who had been convicted of castigating Federalists under the act.
While the boy was much too young to understand everything he heard around the family table in Mecklenburg County, the demonizing of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Federalist principles seemed to comport with what he knew of the world. Jefferson was the first president he remembered, his first political hero, the leader his elders believed in and admired. In simplest terms, there was an ongoing contest between Jefferson's adherents and his enemies, the power elite.
As Polk grew into adulthood, everything he had grasped about the conflict between Federalist and Republican values seemed to reinforce a basic and logical argument that the country would be better served if national government was the declared servant of all the people (or all those who were not slaves) and was barred from acting chiefly as the agent of rich and powerful constituencies. Jackson was the heir to the Jeffersonian philosophy, as Henry Clay was to the creed of Hamilton. Polk knew where he was in that fight, and it became his own.
GOD AND FAMILY
But if there was agreement in the household as it related to politics, there was discord when it came to Polk's early religious life. As a newborn babe, he was thrust into the eye of a spiritual storm. In his Mecklenburg community, where Presbyterianism was as common as patriotism, he was a marked child: unbaptized.
Following their marriage, his parents, Samuel and Jane Knox Polk, attended the Presbyterian congregation at Providence, a farming community a few miles from where they lived along Sugar Creek. Polk's mother was a great-grandniece of John Knox, the religionist who brought the Reformation to Scotland, and was delighted when Sam agreed that their son, born just ten months and seven days after their Christmas Day marriage in 1794, would be given her family name and baptized in her family's tradition.
The moment came when the Reverend James Wallis, a stern and dogmatic pastor, expected the child's parents to affirm their Christian faith. Sam balked. He would make no such avowal. Whereupon Pastor Wallis also balked; no parental commitment to the Christian faith, no baptism, he decreed. It was not until fifty-three years later, on his deathbed, that James K. Polk was christened by a Methodist minister.
The controversy in which the pastor visited the sin of the father on the son had its roots in a two-year-old argument between Reverend Wallis and Sam's opinionated, confrontational, deist father. Ezekiel fell out with the minister in April 1793 after his second wife bore him a stillborn son, who, according to the pastor's doctrinal belief, would be denied admittance to heaven. Grandfather Polk declared unholy war against Reverend Wallis, seeking, without great success, to convert the preacher's church members to deism. Into that abrasive religious environment, Polk was born.
Jim's childhood and formal education were interlaced with religious orientation and tension. Certainly his mother's piety was a positive force. His father's absorbing values were materialistic, with a near-religious dedication to commerce, farming, and building wealth.
Soon after his marriage Polk dutifully paid for a pew in the Presbyterian Church, and throughout his life he often found time to attend Sunday services with his wife, Sarah. As a young, ambitious politician, he became a Mason and signed on with the state militia, but never joined a religious congregation.
During Polk's years of public service, as throughout most of the nation's life, religion mattered in society. Alexis de Tocqueville, who arrived from France in 1831 (when Congressman Polk was thirty-six), wrote, "The religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention." He was "astonished" by the "peaceful dominion" of religious tolerance throughout the United States. He was told by clergymen and laity alike that it was due "mainly to the separation of church and state." Tocqueville never met Pastor Wallis but did discover "men full of a fanatical and almost wild spiritualism" across the country. He concluded that "religious insanity is very common in the United States." Separation of church and state, in those days, as now, did not keep preachers out of politics. (Jefferson was attacked during the 1800 presidential campaign by a Connecticut minister for being a "howling atheist.") Nor did the "wall of separation" deter politicians from openly seeking denominational support. (In his first race for Congress Madison pledged to support a Bill of Rights in order to win Baptist backing.)
In his presidential diary, Polk occasionally mentions the quality of a sermon he heard at church with Sarah, but more as if he were a theater critic than a worshipper. The churchgoing was at Sarah's initiative. Most often he notes in his diary that he "accompanied his wife" to church. She had no hesitation in interrupting a Sunday-morning presidential conference by walking into his office and inviting (it may have been a demand) the assembled conferees to attend with her.
Rarely in his life did he speak on his religious commitment. When expressing a slight partiality for the Methodist Church, he comes across more as if he were considering which fork in a road to take for a comfortable horseback ride, rather than selecting a path to salvation.
As president, he rarely referred to God in his diary or suggested that he prayed for guidance or heavenly intervention in his life — not even during the war with Mexico. On one occasion, after an angry argument with a preacher, he did "thank God" for the constitutional wall between government and religion. Once, when frustrated by individuals seeking official appointments, he promised that if "a kind Providence [permitted him] length of days and health," he would write "the secret and hitherto unknown history" of the evil workings of government. Again, the deity turned up in the diary when he discussed with his cabinet how to handle the growing difficulties with Great Britain and Mexico. The country should stand firm against both countries, said Polk, "and leave the rest to God and the country." But religion was second to politics in Polk's life.
In his inaugural address, he followed the example of every one of his predecessors with a paragraph invoking "the aid of that Almighty Ruler of the Universe ... to guard this Heaven-favored land." On his fiftieth birthday, in office not yet a year, after a church service, he wrote that the scriptural text that day had set him thinking: "Before fifty years more would expire I would be sleeping with the generations which have gone before me. I thought of the vanity of this world's honors and ... that it was time for me to be 'putting my house in order.'" He didn't mention it again for three years. On his fifty-third birthday he returned to the theme, repeating almost as a premonition: "I will soon go the way of all earth. I pray God to prepare me to meet the great event." Seven months later he was dead.
However he treated religion in his own life, he had a clear understanding of where it belonged in the life of the nation. In 1846, in the midst of the expansionist movement and the northwestward sweep toward the Oregon Territory, he encouraged the measured movement of persecuted Mormons (whose members had voted for him) as part of the migration. There was strong political opposition to it. When Senator James Semple came to see him to criticize "absurd" Mormon religious practices and to urge that Polk halt their move, he flatly refused. "If I could interfere with the Mormons, I could with the Baptists or any other religious sect," he said.
Brigham Young had written an impassioned letter to Polk in May 1845, asking the government's protection from the brutal persecution Mormons had suffered in Missouri and in Semple's Illinois. A year later, when Jesse C. Little, a Mormon from New Hampshire, came to investigate the administration's attitude toward the Mormons' planned move to Oregon, the president assured him that he believed the Mormons were entitled to the same constitutional protection as every other denomination. He then asked Little's help in recruiting as many as five hundred Mormon men to join the army to fight against Mexico. Again, it was politics first!
Earlier the president had expressed grave concerns that the Roman Catholic population of Mexico feared that if their country were conquered by the United States, Polk's army would close and rob their churches. He asked Bishop John Hughes of the Catholic Diocese of New York to send to Mexico a number of Spanish-speaking American priests to convince the Mexican clergy and laity that the United States would never interfere with their religion.
Polk found Hughes "highly intelligent and agreeable" when he pledged to help — and even volunteered to travel personally to Mexico — to communicate Polk's assurances to the Mexican archbishop. Five months later there was a backlash from a Protestant preacher. Polk's hot castigations of his political enemies singe the pages of his diary, but he saved his most searing outburst for the Reverend William L. McCalla, a Presbyterian who brought a petition that Polk called "a violent and most intolerant attack on the Roman Catholics and a censure on the administration." "Aside from its abuse of Catholics and its fanaticism," said Polk, the memo's main point "was that unless I appointed the Rev. McCalla a chaplain, the petitioners intended to go before the public and attack the administration upon religious grounds because of the employment of these Catholic priests. I felt great contempt for Mr. McCalla and his religion and gave him my mind freely."
"Thank God," Polk told McCalla, that "under our Constitution there was no connection between church and state and ... as President of the United States I recognized no distinction of creeds in my appointments to office." He explained to the minister that he had asked the Catholic clergy to help change the mindset of what he called the "ignorant people" of Mexico. McCalla was "a knave without vital religion or a fanatic without reason ... destitute of both religion and principle." It is interesting to ponder how the unbaptized president might have fared as a candidate a century and a half later in a political environment infused with fundamentalist theology akin to the righteousness of Pastor Wallis.
Polk may have been ultimately touched by his mother's fervor, or he may have been true to the anticlerical, deist leanings of Ezekiel and Sam. He died a nonpracticing Methodist who ardently believed in Jefferson's wall of separation between church and state.
THE POLKS OF NORTH CAROLINA
They were liberty-loving folk, the Polks of Mecklenburg. No doubt young Jim heard the story of how his great-uncle Thomas Polk reacted after word reached North Carolina that British troops had fired on American citizens at Lexington and Concord. Tom Polk was a firebrand, who stepped forward to speak for the crowd of angry North Carolinians that met at Mecklenburg on May 31, 1775, to strip themselves of all ties with King George. "All commissions, civil or military, granted by the Crown ... are hereby null and void," declared Tom as he read the Mecklenburg Resolves. It was part of the family lore, and probably true, that grandfather Ezekiel was at his older brother Tom's side that day.
As the Polks loved liberty, they also coveted land. Tom Polk was politically wired to North Carolina's foremost power broker of the day: William Blount, architect of the infamous 1783 Land Grab Act, which triggered the surge of exploration, speculation, and exploitation of the western lands. Most Americans looked at that acreage between the Smoky Mountains and the Mississippi River — the Tennessee Territory — as a dangerous no-man's-land of savage Indians, raging streams, and wild animals. Blount, Tom Polk, and their syndicate envisioned an elongated corridor of fertile terrain that would become a strip of towns and cities, plantations and farms settled, developed, and cultivated by a wave of new frontiersmen. Using their political muscle and contacts, the Blount syndicate purchased cheap land warrants from North Carolina's Revolutionary War veterans and ultimately came to control perhaps three million acres of the Tennessee Territory.
Young Jim Polk was also steeped in family stories about Grandfather Ezekiel's frequent explorations to "the West." As Ezekiel traveled, surveyed, claimed, and staked out land developments, his sponsors in the Blount syndicate became more affluent — and he shared a piece of their wealth. Jim was eight years old when his grandfather left North Carolina the last time, bound for Tennessee. Sam kept his family in Mecklenburg for a time. He and Jane were worried about the episodic illnesses that plagued Jim, and Jane's religious life was more tranquil with her father-in-law gone.
Three years later, family reports of the garden spot Ezekiel had found near Columbia in middle Tennessee finally convinced Sam that the fields were much greener and the harvest more rewarding on the other side of the Smokies. With Jim now eleven, he convinced Jane that they should make the move. It was an arduous odyssey that must have been difficult for the ailing boy, who was old enough for some responsibility but not strong enough to assume it. In little more than six weeks the family traversed five hundred miles over paths and roads that were rutted and difficult. It was beyond Polk's comprehension, of course, that one day he would lead the nation west to the Pacific Ocean.
THE YOUTH BECOMES THE MAN
Without a smile at the oxymoron, Polk wrote in his presidential diary that in his youth he had "enjoyed bad health." In childhood he was slightly built, emaciated, and without much strength or energy. Recurring bouts of stomach disorders sapped his vigor and made strenuous work or even play difficult. As George Bancroft said, his "boyhood was ... very serious and sober." Later, during one of his gubernatorial campaigns, he recalled that as a boy he had cut cane along Tennessee's Duck River, and his early biographers recorded that he had accompanied his father on surveying trips, tending the horses and preparing meals. He no doubt did what he could, but the near-chronic sickness often left him physically unable to carry his load of chores. His ailments naturally frightened and puzzled his parents.
Polk men lived by a strong work ethic. Sam, at one point, decided that perhaps a mercantile career might be less strenuous than farming and arranged for Jim to work for a friend in a Columbia general store. It didn't take. What Jim craved was formal schooling.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from James K. Polk by John Seigenthaler, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.. Copyright © 2003 John Seigenthaler. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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