James K. Polk (1795 - 1849) was an American politician and lawyer who served as the eleventh president of the United States from 1845 to 1849. [1] A protege of Andrew Jackson and the only Speaker of the House to become president, he entered office with a short list of objectives and achieved them all, adding more territory to the United States than any president except Thomas Jefferson. The expansion came through the Oregon Treaty with Britain and a war with Mexico that intensified the national conflict over slavery. [2]
Early life and education
Polk was born on 2 November 1795 near Pineville in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, into a family of farmers and surveyors who moved to the Duck River valley of Tennessee when he was a boy. [1]
He entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating with honours in 1818, then read law in Nashville under Felix Grundy and began practising in Columbia, Tennessee. In 1824 he married Sarah Childress, who became an active political partner.
Congress and Tennessee
Polk was elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1823 and to the United States House of Representatives in 1825, where he served for fourteen years. As Jackson's principal lieutenant in the House during the struggle over the Second Bank of the United States, he earned the nickname Young Hickory. [3]
He chaired the Ways and Means Committee and was Speaker of the House from 1835 to 1839, the only person to hold that office before becoming president. He left Congress to win the governorship of Tennessee in 1839, but lost his two subsequent campaigns for re-election.
Election of 1844
Polk's career appeared to be over when the Democratic national convention of 1844 deadlocked between Martin Van Buren and Lewis Cass. Because he unambiguously supported the annexation of Texas, which Van Buren opposed, Polk emerged on the ninth ballot as the first dark horse nominee. [2] He defeated the Whig candidate Henry Clay in a close election, campaigning on territorial expansion and a lower tariff, and pledged to serve only one term.
Presidency
Texas was admitted to the Union at the end of John Tyler's term and organised under Polk. He resolved the long dispute with Britain over the Oregon Country by treaty in 1846, dividing the territory at the forty-ninth parallel and securing the future states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho without war. [3]
Relations with Mexico, which had never recognised Texan independence, collapsed over the boundary of the new state and over American ambitions in California. After Mexico rejected an offer to purchase the territories and fighting broke out along the Rio Grande, Polk obtained a declaration of war in May 1846. American forces under Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott won a series of victories and occupied Mexico City. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ratified in 1848, transferred present-day California, Nevada, Utah and parts of several other states to the United States for a payment of fifteen million dollars. [4]
The war was divisive: opponents argued it had been provoked to acquire slave territory, and the Wilmot Proviso, an unsuccessful attempt to bar slavery from any land gained, opened the sectional argument that led toward civil war. [1] Domestically Polk secured the Walker Tariff of 1846 and restored the Independent Treasury system.
Later life and legacy
True to his pledge, Polk did not seek re-election. Exhausted by four years of intense work, he left office in March 1849 and died of illness, probably cholera, at Nashville on 15 June 1849, the shortest retirement of any American president. [2]
He was a slaveholder and owned a cotton plantation in Mississippi. Historians generally credit him with an effective presidency measured against his stated aims, while noting that the territorial gains sharpened the crisis over the extension of slavery. [3]
