James K. Polk

He was a sickly child on a Tennessee frontier with no use for one. In 1812 the urinary stones got bad enough that his father hauled him hundreds of miles north to Danville, Kentucky, where Ephraim McDowell cut him for the stone with brandy for anesthetic and speed as the only defense against bleeding. Polk was 16 or 17 — the sources do not fix the month. He recovered into an obsessive student, entered the University of North Carolina as a sophomore, graduated with honors in 1818, and read law under Felix Grundy in Nashville. He married Sarah Childress on January 1, 1824. They never had children, and the surgery is the likeliest reason.

Four years, and he had told people in advance what all four would contain. He got the tariff he wanted, rebuilt the independent treasury, split Oregon with Britain at the 49th parallel, and took the Southwest from Mexico in a war he engineered. He signed the act that created the Smithsonian along the way, and the one that created the Department of the Interior on his last full day in office. Then he went home and was dead inside four months. That presidency and what it opened up are BriefHistory's territory. This page is about the man it consumed.

While he was president, Polk bought at least 19 people for his cotton plantation in Mississippi, and 13 of them were children between 10 and 17. He paid out of the plantation's own profits and instructed his agents to keep the purchases quiet, writing that the reasons why should not be known. He was buying children in the same years he was assuring the country that the territorial question could be handled with a line on a map. He also would not delegate anything. The diary he kept from 1845 shows a president who read his own mail, distrusted his own secretary of state, and left Washington almost never. He took the office at 49 and gave it up at 53.

Cholera killed him in Nashville on June 15, 1849, and an ordinance putting victims of infectious disease into the ground within 24 hours left him in a corner of the City Cemetery. Within a year he was moved to a tomb at Polk Place, and in 1893, after his widow died and the house was sold and pulled down, moved again to the Tennessee State Capitol grounds. In 2018 the Tennessee House voted 51 to 37 to move him a fourth time, to Columbia, and the resolution stalled in the commissions and the courts. Sarah kept Polk Place for 42 years, the longest widowhood of any first lady.

James K. Polk's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Walker Tariff law
  Cut rates sharply and held for 11 years 1846
• Independent Treasury Act law
  Took federal deposits out of private banks — it lasted until 1913 1846
• Act establishing the Smithsonian Institution law
  Signed August 10, ten years after the bequest arrived 1846
• Oregon Treaty other
  Split the country with Britain at the 49th parallel rather than fight for it 1846
• Department of the Interior law
  Signed on his last full day in office 1849
• The Diary of James K. Polk book
  Four years of daily entries, published 61 years after he died 1910

• November 2, 1795 aged 0 Born in a log cabin in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina
• 1812 aged ~17 Cut for the stone by Ephraim McDowell in Danville, Kentucky Brandy was the only anesthetic available. He was 16 or 17 and probably left sterile.
• 1818 aged ~23 Graduates from the University of North Carolina with honors
• January 1, 1824 aged 28 Marries Sarah Childress at Murfreesboro She was 20 and he was 28. She became his private secretary in everything but name.
• 1835 aged ~40 Elected Speaker of the House He is still the only Speaker who went on to become president.
• May 29, 1844 aged 48 Nominated for president on the ninth ballot He had gone to the convention hoping to be put on the ticket as vice president.
• March 4, 1845 aged 49 Takes the oath as the 11th president
• June 15, 1849 aged 53 Dies of cholera in Nashville, aged 53 The shortest retirement of any president. He was buried within a day under a city health ordinance.
• 1893 aged ~98 Moved to the Tennessee State Capitol grounds, his third grave

• Henry Clay 1777–1852
  Senator and statesman known as the Great Compromiser for his role in preserving the Union. defeated
• Winfield Scott 1786–1866
  Commanding general whose long career, Mexico City campaign, and Anaconda Plan shaped nineteenth-century U.S. military strategy. appointed and distrusted
• John C. Frémont 1813–1890
  Explorer and military officer whose five expeditions mapped much of the American West. court-martialed under his administration
• Ulysses S. Grant 1822–1885
  18th President and Union Army general whose leadership was decisive in winning the Civil War. fought in his war and condemned it
• Sam Houston 1793–1863
  Commander at San Jacinto who became president of the Republic of Texas and later its governor and senator. annexed his republic