James Knox Polk

president james knox polk
eleventh president of the united states  

interesting facts  
James K. Polk is arguably the most expansionist president. He expanded the United States to the Pacific Ocean.

quotations
"54-40 or fight!" - Democratic campaign slogan in response to the 54°40' parallel they coveted.

biography
Arguably the "most successful" president, James Polk, born in 1795 in a log cabin in Mecklen County, was the eldest of ten children born to Samuel and Jane Knox Polk. His mother, a religious mother was a descendant of John Knox, the founder of the Presbyterian Church. Polk began his formal education at the age of 18, at a church near his home. Amazingly, Polk mastered not only English in a year but Latin and Greek as well. Soon, his father, now a rich man was able to send James Polk to a much better school, where he continued his studies at an more astonishing rate.  

He next applied for admission to the University of North Carolina and was found qualified for the sophomore class. He graduated in 1818 with first honors in mathematics and the classics. Of importance equal to his formal education was his introduction to politics at home. Both Ezekiel and Samuel Polk had been ardent followers of former President Thomas Jefferson. They were also friends and admirers of General Andrew Jackson, who was then Tennessee's leading citizen. These two men, Jefferson and Jackson, became Polk's political heroes and the greatest influences on his political career.  

As many other Presidents, Polk moved to Nashville, where he studied law. During this year, 1819, a depression occured in which Polk experienced, first hand the political unrest a panic caused. This experience reinforced his faith in Jeffersonian democracy and made him distrustful of banks, speculators, and paper credit, which would influence his ideals when he became president. Throughout the years, Polk continued to practice law, but he began turning his attention towards politics.  

In 1822, James Polk met and became engaged to Sarah Childress. Sarah Polk was as vivacious and sociable as Polk was quiet and solitary. Their marriage was childless, and she devoted herself to her husband's career. When Polk was elected to national office, she became one of the most popular hostesses in Washington, D.C. Polk soon decided to run for a seat in the Assembly. Called the "Napoleon of the stump" by his supporters because of his small stature, he proved to be an effective campaigner and a skillful orator. Consequently, he was elected and it was Assemblyman James Polk who married Sarah Childress on January 1, 1824. Polk, as assemblyman quickly established himself as a champion of the debtor class. He supported free public education, hard money (gold or silver) and other Jeffersonian democratic ideals. In 1825, Polk was elected to the House of Representatives, the lower house of the Congress of the United States.  

Polk, a firm believer of democratic rule was outraged at John Q. Adams and his "Corrupt Bargain". In his first speech before Congress he called for an end to the existing electoral system and for a constitutional amendment giving the people the right to elect the president by direct popular vote. As congressman, Polk supported all Jacksonian ideals. He opposed a high tariff, a national bank, paper money, and the financing of internal improvements such as roads, bridges, and canals with federal funds. Like Jefferson, whose philosophy the Jacksonians believed they followed, Polk supported in an agrarian country and opposed all forces that strengthened the commercial and financial interests.  

In 1835, Polk was elected to be the Speaker of the House of Representatives. However, the newly-born Whig Party soon grew stronger and more vocal in Congress and Polk became the primary Jacksonian bloc in the House. Throughout his term in the House, Polk was bitterly criticized, especially by the Whigs. When Jackson retired from his Presidency, so too Polk did as well. He soon became Governor of Tennessee. During this time, Polk's party, the Democratic Party began to decline, especially in Congress. Polk, as governor spent much of his time revitalizing the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, his victory in 1839 had greatly impressed Democratic leaders throughout the nation, and even though he lost the elections for governor in 1841 and 1843, he had become a national figure and a potential candidate for the vice presidency in 1844.  

In the election of 1844, Martin Van Buren was the premier Democratic candidate. However, Van Buren detested the annexation of Texas and he was quite unpopular in the South and the West. It was clear, on the seventh ballot that Van Buren would not win the two-third majority. On the eight ballot, Polk was presented as a compromise candidate. He was unanimously nominated on the ninth ballot and became the first so-called dark horse, or little-known candidate, to win a presidential nomination. The Whigs nominated Henry Clay.  

The election of 1844 was quite noisy. The primary issue was western expansion. Clay kept quiet on the issue of Texas, while Polk, an ardent expansionist expressed his desire for Texas and Oregon (from the British). The Democratic campaign slogan became "54-40 or fight!" It meant that Polk was willing to fight Britain for the possession of Oregon north to the 54°40' parallel. This would have given the United States possession of what is now British Columbia northward to the southern tip of Alaska. At the time, Manifest Destiny became very popular in the United States. Manifest Destiny stipulated that Americans were destined, by God, to spread the United States ideal of democracy to all parts of the world. Annexation supported this theory and many Americans thus supported annexation.  

The belief in manifest destiny was almost a religion in the West, and Polk's bold talk of expansion enabled him to win all the Western states except Ohio and Tennessee. However, Polk won the election only because a third candidate, James G. Birney of the antislavery Liberty Party, took enough votes away from Clay in New York to give Polk the state. In all, Polk had 170 electoral votes, Clay 105. In the popular voting, Polk received 1,337,243 votes and Clay 1,299,062 votes. George Mifflin Dallas of Pennsylvania was elected vice president.  

Soon after his inauguration, Polk was torn with the issue of the Walker Tariff. Traditionally, the Democratic Party had been opposed to tariffs. The Whigs favored a policy of protection and tried to keep the tariff high. Now Polk, with his able secretary of the treasury, Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, drew up a new tariff schedule for revenue only, with "protection incident but not the object." Minimum duties were placed on essential items, with higher rates on luxuries. To win support from the West, the administration argued that a low tariff would enable Western farmers to sell their surplus grain abroad. This was a new argument, but it carried the day, and the Walker tariff was passed. Besides lowering tariff rates in the United States, it encouraged the movement for free trade (the exchange of goods between countries with no tariffs) in Britain. The tariff was also influential in causing Britain to repeal its corn laws, which restricted grain imports. Thus, Western farmers were able to export grain to Britain for the first time.  

The political slogan of '54'40 or fight' was soon shattered when the British envoy Lord Aberdeen proposed the 49th parallel as a compromise. Despite previous demands for 54-40, Polk, on the Senate's advice, accepted the offer, thus extending the northwest boundary of the contiguous United States to its present position. With the winning of the Mexican American War, Polk expanded the United States further to California, Arizona, New Mexico, and other future western states. The war also expanded Texan territory.  

All during Polk's administration, European nations had threatened to intervene in American affairs. There were British warships in California harbors during the Oregon dispute, and both Britain and France were interested in maintaining an independent Texas. Therefore, in December 1845, Polk revived the forgotten words of President James Monroe, who had declared that the American continent was closed to further European interference or colonization. In 1848, when Yucatán temporarily won its independence from Mexico and seemed in danger of becoming a French protectorate, Polk invoked the Monroe Doctrine again, with greater emphasis, making it a cornerstone of American policy in the western hemisphere.  

James Polk died in 1849 at the age of 53. He was buried in the garden of his Nashville home, Polk Place, but in 1893 his remains and those of his wife were removed to the grounds of the Tennessee state capitol in Nashville.