James Knox Polk, the Andrew Jackson protege who achieved all his goals during his time as seventh US president

By Gordon Lucy

Published 10th Jun 2024, 06:00 BST

Updated 10th Jun 2024, 07:49 BST

Both Jackson and Polk were born in the Carolinas. Polk was born in North Carolina but both North and South Carolina compete for the honour of being Jackson’s place of birth, although Jackson thought he was born in South Carolina. Both practised law and both made their way politically in Tennessee.

Polk, who died 175 years ago this month, bore a strong physical resemblance to Jackson. Both had gaunt faces, high foreheads and swept-back hair. Whereas Jackson was ‘Old Hickory’, Polk became ‘Young Hickory’.

However, Polk differed from Jackson in several respects. Polk was not as gregarious as Jackson and had little time for the social whirl which Jackson clearly enjoyed. Polk was a loner and a workaholic. Nor was Polk a man to go out of his way to court popularity. He was a much more committed Christian than Jackson and spent much of his leisure time reading the Bible.

Polk became the original ‘dark horse candidate’ of US politics by winning the 1844 Democratic Party’s presidential nomination (on the ninth ballot) over a host of better-known candidates. The support of the elderly Andrew Jackson was of crucial importance.

The Whig campaign majored on what they considered to be the mediocrity of ‘Polk the Plodder’. Henry Clay, the Whig nominee, jeered: ‘Who is James K Polk?’ During the election campaign Democrats replied that Polk was the candidate who stood for expansion. After the election they were able to provide the best riposte of all: ‘The president of the United States.’

The Democrats accused Henry Clay, the Whig presidential nominee, of having systematically violated, sin by sin, every one of the Ten Commandments. The Democrats claimed that ‘the history of Mr Clay’s debaucheries and midnight revelries’ was ‘too shocking to appear in public print’. However, this did not prevent the Democrats going into some detail about these matters. In other words, it was a typical mid-19th-century presidential election.

Despite being described as a ‘dark horse’, Polk was by no stretch of the imagination a complete unknown, a point Henry Clay privately appreciated. On the contrary, Polk had been member of Congress for seven consecutive terms, governor of Tennessee for one, and a conscientious speaker of the House of Representatives.

Unusually for a successful presidential candidate, Polk failed to carry the state in which he was born (North Carolina) and the state in which he resided (Tennessee), the latter albeit by only 123 votes.

Overall it was an extremely close contest. Polk won only 38,181 votes more than Henry Clay (1,337,243 votes to 1,299,062) but by carrying several states by very narrow margins he secured 170 votes in the Electoral College to Clay’s 105.

When he assumed office on March 4 1845, Polk, aged 49, became the youngest man to hold the office up to that date.

At his inaugural, Polk did not allow his spirit to be dampened by a steady downpour. With total confidence in his expansionist programme, he told his audience: ‘Our system may be safely extended to the utmost bounds of our territorial limits and that, as it shall be extended, the bonds of our Union, so far from being weakened, will become stronger.’

As president, he set himself five major goals: the annexation of Texas, the settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute with the UK, tariff reduction, the establishment of an independent treasury and the acquisition of California.

Having a strong sense of mission, Polk possessed the determination, the skill, and the energy to achieve it. He is probably the only man who was able to vacate the presidency happy in the knowledge that he had achieved exactly what he had set out to achieve.

During his presidency he achieved the largest expansion of the United States’ territory by the annexation of Texas, acquiring the Oregon Territory (the modern states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho) and by purchasing 525,000 square miles of territory in the South-West and California in 1848. Polk gave reality to the term ‘Manifest Destiny’, the belief that the United States was destined, even divinely ordained, to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean.

As president, he kept a diary which reveals a man of great integrity weighed down by the cares of the office. He found dealing with office seekers especially time consuming and very wearing. By the end of his first and only term – he had pledged himself to not seeking a second term – he was already in poor health and succumbed to cholera within three months of leaving office in Nashville in June 1849.

He was the first US president to be photographed frequently while in office.

Of Polk, John C Pinheiro, a presidential historian, has observed perfectly fairly: ‘Polk came into the presidency with a focused political agenda and a clear set of convictions. He left office the most successful president since George Washington in the accomplishment of his goals.’

Ten of the first 12 presidents were slave owners, Polk being one of them. (John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams were the exceptions.) Pinheiro has described Polk’s failure to address and resolve the issue of slavery as ‘a missed opportunity’.

Can this really be viewed as fair criticism? Probably not because he had secured no mandate on the issue which was one which even the ‘Founding Fathers’ had sought to evade because there was no easy solution, and it was only resolved by an extremely bloody civil war which cost more American lives than all America’s other wars combined before the Vietnam War.

Polk was a descendant of a Robert Polk from Londonderry who had arrived in the American colonies around 1680. It is generally assumed that the family name was originally Pollock and Polk is a contraction of that name.