Throughout this state I have seen only two of your old friends who are not for you more warmly than ever, and those two are John Catron and his wife. She has no children and therefore has become a great politician. These women you know who do not breed must always be busy either in making matches or making and unmaking Statesmen.
—ALFRED BALCH TO MARTIN VAN BUREN, Nashville, November 22, 1842
ALFRED BALCH was a Nashville political strategist with a devotion to the Tennessee Democratic Party that dwarfed both his legal practice and his personal ambition. He loved Andrew Jackson, was faithful to Jackson’s political heir, Martin Van Buren, and like so many other men of his type, gained a respect for James Polk that never evolved into friendship.
Appointed by Van Buren to a federal judgeship in the Florida Territory four years into a war between the U.S. Army and Seminole Indians the government was trying to eject from their ancestral homelands, Judge Balch found the climate, including the political climate, “deplorable.” Central Florida was a lawless frontier. “The leading men are divided into bitter parties, and violence is the order of the day,” he complained to Van Buren. Tales of Seminole atrocities against white women had become popular fodder in urban penny newspapers. Those stories helped justify the ongoing war against the Seminoles, but also prevented the kind of family settlement that might have stabilized the territory.1
As for the single white men who hoped to profit from the final act of Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act, they had proven ungovernable. They routinely demanded the protection of U.S. authorities while ignoring U.S. law. Squatting on land that didn’t belong to them, they committed depredations against Seminoles and their runaway slave allies. Army officers questioned both the purpose and possibility of vanquishing the Seminoles from what they saw as worthless Florida swampland. Some officers found the Indians more sympathetic than the poor white settlers occupying their land.
In short, Balch was out of his element. With an important presidential election on the horizon, he decided the Tennessee Democratic Party had more need for him than did the territory of Florida. He quit his judgeship and moved home to Nashville. Balch’s political instincts were usually infallible.2
Despite Van Buren’s embarrassing defeat by William Henry Harrison in 1840, and the fact that his opponents still referred to him as “Martin Van Ruin” for presiding over the Panic of 1837, at the close of 1842 he remained the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee. Balch thought Van Buren’s chances in 1844 excellent. Nashville’s leading Democrats, with only two exceptions, were firmly behind Van Buren. But the holdouts were significant. One of them, Supreme Court justice John Catron, was a close Jackson ally who had run Van Buren’s first presidential campaign in Tennessee. And then there was the “great politician,” Catron’s wife, Matilda. She held no office, nor could she (or any other American woman) vote. Balch was hardly alone in finding her an object of scorn, but he nonetheless understood that Matilda was a force to be reckoned with. It was said that John Catron owed his Supreme Court seat to his wife, that when she read that a vacancy had opened up on the court, she went straight to Washington without consulting John. Arriving early in the morning, she burst in on President Jackson, “his gown and slippers on, and long stem cob pipe in his mouth.” Fortunately, the president, who had known Matilda since she was a child, “was glad as surprised to see her.” Matilda “asked if the vacancy on the Supreme Court had been filled, and when answered in the negative said, ‘I ask the appointment for Judge Catron.’ ” Catron was appointed “before the sun set.”3
Whether true or not, the story of Matilda Catron’s ambition suggested the power that “female politicians” might exercise. Nor was Matilda alone. She was a type, one the long-widowed Van Buren would recognize: a wealthy childless woman with political influence. “Provided they have money enough to buy fine clothes and ride in their own carriages,” Balch complained, “these women you know who do not breed must always be busy either in making matches or making and unmaking Statesmen.”4
Van Buren was not one to underestimate the power of female politicians. While a young widowed congressman in Washington, he realized that his political advancement depended on women. He threw card parties for the wives and daughters of his political allies and gained a particular reputation for female courtesy. Sarah was not alone in admiring his “pleasing address.” But his critics noted that the politician often “used” ladies for political purposes, in particular “for the advancement of his schemes” to gain Andrew Jackson’s trust, and to succeed him as president. No less than Peggy Eaton had lobbied Jackson on Van Buren’s behalf.5
If Van Buren hadn’t learned the power of women in politics in 1836, he certainly did in 1840. Eighty percent of the men eligible to vote in 1840 did so, the highest voter turnout in American history. The 1840 election was also, and not coincidentally, the first in which women played a major role. The Panic of 1837 hit American families hard; in some locations unemployment was as high as 25 percent, and the Whig Party was prepared to capitalize on bad times by emphasizing both their economic and moral superiority to the stagnant Democracy. William Henry Harrison’s “Log Cabin” campaign drew on the techniques of popular religious revivals to energize supporters across the country.
One of the most radical innovations in the campaign was its inclusion of women. They sewed banners for Harrison, lobbied men in their families, and sang Harrison songs. But the Harrison campaign also encouraged women to take their support out in public, to attend campaign rallies, to march at the front of their parades, and to deliver speeches in his honor. The Whigs paid tribute to their female supporters at every opportunity. “The ladies are coming to the rescue,” reported a Connecticut newspaper on the eve of the election. “The Whig ladies…have taken the election of General Harrison in hand” and “are determined to give the cause all the assistance in their power.” After Harrison’s landslide victory, Van Buren was unlikely to question Balch’s implication that Matilda, or any other woman, might influence the outcome in 1844.6
However worrying Matilda Catron might be, Balch confidently predicted Van Buren’s nomination and election in 1844, in large part because he also predicted a Polk victory in 1843. “Polk is already in the field,” with a “commanding position,” he wrote Van Buren. “He is untiring in his efforts….As Ten[nessee] goes in the Governor’s election next August so she will go in the Presidential election of 44.”7
Of course, Balch was wrong about the 1843 gubernatorial election. Polk’s work ethic was not enough to overcome the ascendancy of the Whig Party in Tennessee, leaving him twice defeated by the same popular opponent. But Balch was right about at least one thing: Matilda Catron was worth counting. She was prescient in recognizing that Van Buren’s fortunes were on the wane, and that there was a better man in the field, one with a wife who had proven her aptitude at “making Statesmen” in Washington, D.C., and Tennessee—a woman who also happened to be Matilda’s cousin, and one of her best friends. Before the 1843 gubernatorial race was over, Matilda Childress Catron was hard at work making another statesman.
WHEN ANDREW JACKSON left office in 1837, he promised Sarah Polk that “the scepter shall come back to Tennessee before very long, and your own fair self shall be the queen.”8 It was Texas that made it possible. The Republic of Texas declared independence from Mexico in 1836 after a revolution fought largely by slave-owning American men drawn to Mexico by the opportunity to grow cotton. Mexico never accepted Texas’s independence, and rejected its claims to territory far to the south and west of its former state boundaries in Mexico. Newly independent Texians (as the Anglo residents referred to themselves) clamored for American statehood, but as president, Martin Van Buren refused to consider annexation, agreeing with his predecessor, Andrew Jackson, and successor, Harrison, that Texas annexation was unwise both because it would likely lead to war with Mexico and because the admission of a new slave state would upset the sectional balance of power in the Senate.
But when President John Tyler negotiated a secret treaty to annex Texas in 1844, Van Buren, as the presumptive Democratic nominee, was forced to take a stand. His assertion that annexation was both unwise and unethical was identical to that of his Whig opponent, Henry Clay, and it destroyed his credibility with expansionist Democrats throughout the South. A new man was needed to lead the Democrats: an expansionist who would not only bring Texas into the Union but fight for more American territory to the west and south under the banner of Manifest Destiny. As Andrew Jackson himself informed James, “The candidate for the first office should be an annexation man and from the Southwest.” James K. Polk, a lifelong proponent of expansionism, was clearly “the most available man.”9
When the delegates to the Democratic National Convention gathered in Baltimore in May 1844, the majority intended to cast their votes for Martin Van Buren. But at the start of the convention, a minority group committed to the annexation of Texas seized the floor and changed the convention rules so that a winning nominee required two-thirds of all votes. The annexationists supported Lewis Cass of Michigan, a stolid, serious man with a pronounced sympathy for the South. Van Buren’s supporters derided the Michigan senator’s supporters as “Jack Casses,” but the man’s expansionist credentials were above reproach. Cass had been instrumental in the Indian removal of the 1830s, arguing loudly and repeatedly that the “savage” Cherokee were undeserving of their lands, despite the tribe’s wholesale acceptance of the norms of their white neighbors. His views could not have been further from Van Buren’s: he would annex Texas, just as he hoped to annex Canada, Cuba, and any other territory in the Western Hemisphere that might be available.10
To the astonishment of Van Buren’s many supporters, Cass quickly began to gain on the front-runner. By the seventh ballot he was firmly in the lead. At that point, however, the Jack Casses were faced with the unpleasant reality that their man was no more likely than Van Buren to win the votes of two-thirds of the assembled delegates, particularly given that most of Van Buren’s delegates would sooner vote for Whig candidate Henry Clay than allow “the damned rotten corrupt venal Cass” the victory of the nomination. Tempers flared, and the Van Buren delegates threatened to return home. The convention deadlocked.11
That night Democratic operatives cloistered themselves in a nearby hotel room and hammered out a solution to the deadlock between Van Buren and Cass. By dawn they had settled on a candidate who had the power not only to unify the fractured and angry delegate pool, but perhaps also pull out a victory against Henry Clay in November. He hadn’t received a single vote on the first day of the convention, and his reputation was shaky even in his home state. But he had no enemies, and was a true believer in annexation. The following morning, on the ninth ballot, James K. Polk was unanimously proclaimed the Democratic nominee for president in 1844. With undistinguished Pennsylvania senator George M. Dallas offering sectional balance as his vice president, and a platform calling for “the re-occupation of Oregon and the re-annexation of Texas at the earliest practicable period,” James prepared for the election of his life.12
Polk was the first “dark horse” candidate in American political history, a fact that might not have surprised Matilda Catron, but certainly did a great many other people. His nomination was so unexpected that when Samuel Morse’s new “wonder working telegraph” transmitted the nomination to Washington, “it was heard by all the faithful with speechless amazement.” Listeners assumed the device had erred. Even close friends of the Polk family were surprised. When news made it to Columbia, James’s friend and political ally Alfred O. P. Nicholson exclaimed to his wife, Caroline, “Well guess who’s nominated for President—but you can’t in a month. James K. Polk.”13
The Whig Party was delighted. “Of the nomination of Mr. Polk we hardly know how to speak seriously,” the New York Herald reported. “A more ridiculous, contemptible and forlorn candidate, was never put forth by any party….Mr. Polk is a sort of fourth or rather fortieth-rate lawyer and small politician in Tennessee, who by accident was once speaker of the House of Representatives. He was rejected even by his own state as governor—and now he comes forward as candidate of the great democracy of the United States.” Henry Clay was the founder of the Whig Party and possibly the greatest orator of his era. He had already run for president twice, and he was as charming and charismatic as he was accomplished, with a magnetic personality that endeared him to men and women alike. Who was Polk in comparison? Clay’s supporters were so confident in their candidate’s victory that they commissioned an enormous suite of solid rosewood bedroom furniture for his use in the White House. The thirteen-foot crimson-topped bed cost more than a modest house, and was accompanied by a set of similarly imposing chairs, a dressing table, an armoire, two marble-topped washstands, and a standing mirror.14
But the Whigs badly underestimated both their opponent and the appeal of Manifest Destiny. Young men and women in 1844, particularly in the old Southwest, had seen their parents and in some cases their grandparents profit from western migration, getting rich off lands taken from Indians. Sarah’s family wealth derived in large part from land speculation, as did James’s. Texas, and Mexico’s lands farther to the west, were the next step in a march to the Pacific that most Americans believed had been preordained by a deity who smiled on the young and thriving republic. James was a true believer in Manifest Destiny, and made territorial expansion—including the annexation of Texas and all of the Oregon Country, which was jointly occupied with Britain—key elements in his platform.
For many voters that was plenty. Two Whigs traveling on horseback through Kentucky immediately after Polk was nominated learned this firsthand when they met “a Kentucky citizen horseman” crossing a stream. He naturally “inquired who had been nominated by the Democrats for President.” When the two Whigs informed him, the Kentuckian asked, “Who the h-ll is this here Polk, anyhow? I never heard of him.” The Whigs told the man about James’s platform, and soon thereafter the three of them met up with a second Kentucky “citizen horseman,” who also asked about the nomination. The first Kentuckian responded, “Governor Jeems K Polk, sah.” “Who’s Polk?” asked the newcomer. “Polk! Why you durned old gumphead! Jeems K Polk, the greatest man in America.”15
BUT WAS MANIFEST DESTINY ENOUGH? Those who knew the Polks best recognized Sarah’s value in the coming campaign. Soon after James’s nomination, John and Matilda Catron offered him some unsolicited advice: Sarah should campaign for him. “She ought to be seen also by those from abroad,” John wrote. “The wife of a man aspiring to the White house is no minor circumstance. Few have passed muster there.” There was no precedent for a woman to campaign for her husband, for the presidency. Indeed, it was hardly acceptable for presidential candidates to campaign on their own behalf. Candidates were expected to stay out of the public eye during nominating conventions and general elections.
But the Catrons had a solution: Sarah and James could stay at the Catron home in Nashville, where Sarah could work on James’s behalf from the safe confines of a family home. The presence of James in their home “would afford the excuse to have it open to all suitable visitors,” John noted, “and I very much desire this. I desire that Mrs. Polk should be visited by Whigs and democrats of her own sex—& so she will, as the ladies of the other side uniformly speak well, and generally highly of her.”
John Catron was dead serious. “This may look like a small matter. I think otherwise.” Nor were John and Matilda alone in seeing Sarah as a crucial advantage in the coming campaign. “The matter was mentioned to Mrs. Catron by Doct[o]r Eselman, & she consulted me,” John asserted. “On the subject I have no doubt, nor has Mrs. Catron,” who thought Sarah would be particularly effective with “gentlemen from abroad.”
Catron reminded James that while serving on Andrew Jackson’s “Whitewashing Committee,” tasked with refuting slander against Old Hickory during his presidential campaigns, John learned the true value of a wife. Had Rachel survived, she might have worked on Jackson’s behalf, but instead the widowed Jackson had to turn to friends to vouch for his character. They “had more trouble…on the wife head, than with all else,” he admitted. “More public men have received potent help from the wife in this country than in any in the world, not excepting France. The working, anxious, and troubled husband, has no time and tact, to conciliate and please the women, the young men, or the vain old ones. This is the very business of the wife, and one not fit for it, is a dead weight.” Sarah could conciliate in a way her introverted and anxious husband was unable to do. The Catrons knew full well that Sarah Polk had the power to soothe their allies and put their opponents on guard. That Sarah “is fit in high places,” John assured James, “should be well known to friends and opponents.”16
Sarah did not openly campaign for James. Either one or both of them recognized that their political partnership was too radical for the rank and file of the Democratic Party. That she was “fit for high places” was never in doubt, but the Polks chose to conform to their party’s patriarchal vision of the household by celebrating her deference, instead of her political acumen. Both would agree they made the right decision.
Sarah resumed her role as communications director from their home in Columbia, handling correspondence and the press. Because James was intent on maintaining the façade that “he never sought the distinguished office for which the democratic party have nominated him,” he also, unusually for him, refrained from campaigning. The party press bragged that “he probably has not been five miles from home since his nomination. The democrats had a mass meeting in his own town, and begged him to attend, if only for one moment…but this kind request he most modestly declined.”17
Although Sarah would not campaign, her fitness for “high places,” as interpreted by the Democratic Party, was made known through campaign propaganda. “She is a very worthy and a very well-looking lady,” a Washington letter writer to the New York Express assured her readers. “She is not highly accomplished, either in a literary point of view or in those blandishments which now-a-days make up so much of fashionable life. Nevertheless she makes a charming housewife, and knows enough of ‘good society’ to make the balls and visits of her guests both easy and agreeable.”18 A capable housewife with easy social skills and no pretentions to intellectual superiority: this was the ideal of a deferential wife.
And she was, moreover, well loved. “There is no lady in Tennessee more respected and beloved than Mrs. James K. Polk,” the New York Herald reported. Her “intellectual, regular and beautiful features…beam intelligence, kindness and benevolence. She is a professing and consistent Christian.”19 The New York Journal of Commerce added that Colonel Polk’s “lady is both beautiful and accomplished….There is not a human being living that is enemy of her.”20
What more did the country need from a First Lady? The question of character was, in 1844, as in most presidential elections, a concern of voters. The Whigs were the party of religious reform, loud advocates in favor of temperance, and enthusiastic supporters of putting government to work improving society. But the party’s leader and presidential candidate was a good deal less temperate, and less reformed, than many religious Americans wished. Democrats accused Henry Clay of drunkenness, debauchery, foul language, gambling, and dueling. There was a grain of truth to most of these claims, but Clay’s worst indiscretions had taken place decades before, when he was a very young man in very high office.
James Polk’s character, by contrast, was “pure and without reproach.” He was Henry Clay’s opposite. “During his whole life he has been strictly a temperance man in every thing, in liquor, tobacco, in eating, and in all respects,” newspapers reported. “He never gambled. In all his life he never gave or accepted a challenge to fight a duel…and has the moral courage to put in practice the moral principles he professes.” Not even Columbia’s Whig “clique” could say differently. A Democratic reporter quizzed James’s “most violent opposers in Columbia…if there was anything wrong in his whole private life.” They all, “with one voice, to a man, declared that Col. Polk’s whole private life was one of the most unspotted purity.”21
Democrats credited a great deal of her husband’s virtue to Sarah. Happily married to the same woman for twenty years, James in his “private life…has ever been upright and pure.” And Sarah’s Sabbatarianism was suddenly a great advantage. The fact that James kept the Sabbath holy thanks to the “auspicious domestic influence” of his wife helped counter the presence of Theodore Frelinghuysen, the “Christian Statesman,” on the Clay ticket. Clay’s vice presidential pick was a Sabbatarian and president of the American Bible Society.22
But was the influence of a vice president comparable to that of a wife? Most Americans in the 1840s, particularly middle-class Americans who idealized women as moral exemplars, thought not. Moral suasion was the job of a wife. Henry Clay’s wife, Lucretia, was the adoring mother of eleven children, well known for her domestic prowess: her cured hams were said to be some of the best in Fayette County. But her domestic influence was confined to their Kentucky estate. She avoided Washington, leaving her husband to face the demons of temptation alone.23
Sarah’s energies, in contrast, were entirely focused on James. Democrats were quick to promote her as his “guardian angel,” a woman so devout and pure that she could be safely trusted to guide a president “amid the perils and darkness” of political life. And that influence extended beyond her own household. Sarah’s insistence that her husband attend church with her each Sunday was well known. If he was “engaged in the company of men who, either from indifference or carelessness, forgot the Sabbath and its universal obligation,” Sarah would enter the room “shawled and bonneted” and “ask her husband and his friends to go with her to church, saying that she did not wish to go alone.” It made for a good campaign story, and it also happened to be true. Sarah took the sanctity of the Sabbath seriously. The only time she ever denied James a request for political work on his behalf was when he asked her to work on a Sunday.24
Sarah embraced her moralizing image, but made no effort to conform to the ideal of the good housewife during the presidential campaign. In the fall of 1844, a “lady remarked to a friend of Mrs. Polk’s that she hoped Mr. Clay would be elected to the presidency, because Lucretia Clay was a good housekeeper, and made fine butter.” When Sarah heard this story she proudly replied, “If I should be so fortunate as to reach the White House, I expect to live on twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and I will neither keep house nor make butter.”25
This was a fairly radical claim given the pride that elite white women took in their domestic virtues. Whig women had proudly prepared “Harrison Cakes” in 1840, confections designed to promote his presidency, and they were prepared to go further in 1844. After the success of the Log Cabin campaign, the Whigs knew the power of their female supporters. The party publicly celebrated women’s moral power in the household and in society. Whig men knew women mattered; they were proud to admit it, to declare their wives and sisters their moral superiors, and to support female-led moral reform efforts. As for the party’s candidate, Henry Clay, his charm with women was legendary; they positively “idolize[d] their favorite Harry.” They were ready to work on his behalf.26
Whig men recognized the power of women not only to uplift their husbands and sons, but also to turn out votes. In 1844 the Whigs gave their female supporters unprecedented authority in the elaborate ceremonies that structured presidential campaigns. Women around the country paraded, attended Whig meetings and conventions, and proudly announced their support for “Harry of the West.” The wife of the president of the Democratic National Convention, Hendrick B. Wright, made her Pennsylvania home a meeting place for Clay women, and proudly told her husband’s Democratic friends that “though my husband is a Polk man, I am a Clay man; in fact the ladies are all Clay men.”27
Tennessee’s female Whigs were particularly emboldened. In 1840, 350 Whig women signed a letter inviting Henry Clay to speak in Nashville, after two invitations from the men of the city had been turned down. The women were successful, and Clay spoke to a mixed audience of, reportedly, thirty thousand people. Women in the audience swooned. In 1844, Tennessee Whigs resolved that “the ladies…be specifically invited to attend” their rallies. And female Whigs did so, with passion. In July, Whig women were bold enough to host a “sumptuous barbecue” in Sarah’s hometown, “to which all sexes and all parties were invited.” Nashville’s Whig paper reported five to seven thousand present at the barbecue, including fifteen hundred ladies. “What cause can fail to triumph when women is its advance?” the paper asked.28
Nor were the Whigs afraid to critique James’s masculinity. After the barbecue a veteran of the War of 1812 gave a rousing speech critiquing his military credentials. Polk might be called “a young hickory,” but, asked the speaker, “what great deeds of heroism bestowed upon him this title”? Where was James during the “late war—when our country demanded the help of all her sons….Where was this hero? Was he in the army defending his country? Far from it. He was by his cheerful fireside, in Grundy’s law office.” The attack no doubt stung. Appointed colonel of the state militia by a friendly Democratic Senator, James was one of the few Democratic politicians of his generation who had never fought in a battle. His early ill health kept him from military service.29
Sarah couldn’t have helped but hear about the great Whig meeting a month later in nearby Shelbyville: perhaps twenty thousand Whigs gathered in a town of a thousand for two days of Henry Clay celebration, with single women prominent among the celebrants. A grand parade on the first day of the festivities featured a “Union Company” of twenty-six women, “arrayed in pure white, with sashes of blue, and handsome caps ornamented with white feathers,” each of whom carried a banner suggesting they would have a “Whig” husband or “no husband” at all. John Shofner, a local Whig, was thrilled by the sight. “That was about as nise a site as men ginerley sees, 26 young ladys all drest in uniform marching and each carriing a banner.” And women marched at the head of a procession the following day to the grandstand on the edge of town, where Tennessee Whigs, including the governor who had twice beaten James, spoke in Clay’s support.30
Similar scenes played out around the country, much to the shock and dismay of Democrats. “Though popular opinion is against female politicians,” one female supporter wrote Sarah from Virginia soon after the election, “that was not the principle advocated here, by gentlemen politicians who used the influence of the ladies—every device in the way of flags banners, and all their ingenuity was exercised in the handiwork of our political ladies—and the attendance and cheers of their nocturnal club meetings.” Picking up on a favored slogan of the Whigs, Virginia’s “female politicians…foolishly inquired—Who is James K. Polk?”31
In the meantime, where were the Democratic women? The influence of Whig ladies on the partisan politics of the 1840s was so pronounced that it was easy to assume, as had the wife of the president of the Democratic National Convention, that “the ladies are all Clay men.” But this was not the case. While Democratic women weren’t as prominent as Whig women in the campaign itself, the heated issue of Texas annexation brought them out in public. Three months before the election, Nashville’s female Democrats sewed a tremendous banner, “handsomely wrought and embellished,” which they presented to a battalion of soldiers back from Texas. “The lovely young lady who presented it pronounced her address in a remarkably graceful and spirited manner,” the Whig Republican Banner reported. Noting “a large attendance of Ladies” at the rally and meeting in favor of the annexation of Texas, the writer for the Banner sighed, “it is only doing the fair democrats justice to say that their part in the proceedings was distinguished by so much taste and elegance that we cannot help wishing they were all Whigs.”32
Democrats could easily have capitalized on this nationalist enthusiasm. One of Polk’s supporters suggested that “the influence and ingenuity of our ladies can now be of service if they are properly Called…to action.” Some Tennessee Democrats took a step in that direction when they invited men to bring their wives to parades.33
But a deep antipathy to the specter of “female politicians” was, like much of the Democratic Party’s appeal, grounded in nostalgia and a yearning for values that seemed to have been lost in the dramatic changes of the nineteenth century. The Democratic Nashville Union expressed its ambivalence about the prominence of women in the Whig campaign with an appeal for female support that remained firmly in the private sphere. “To THE RESCUE, then, in your own lovely sphere; embroider the LONE STAR on every national flag you can find; offer prize banners to promote vigilance; and by winning votes for James K. Polk, you may consummate immediate annexation.” Embroidering stars, donating handmade banners to men, even “consummating” annexation, depending on your definition of annexation: these were all indoor activities, none of which threatened male control over public space. Democrats recognized the value of women in electoral politics, but fully capitalizing on that potential would have meant embracing change. This the party was unwilling to do.34
But just because Democratic women were less visible than Whig women doesn’t mean they were less plentiful. The father of the party, Andrew Jackson, had female partisans. James’s college roommate voted against Jackson in 1828, after “mature deliberation,” he admitted to James, because he “did not think” Old Hickory “would make a safe President of these United States.” But his wife, Susan, was “a real Jacksonian,” and “as an evidence of it” had one of Jackson’s speeches “printed on satin, suspended in a large gilt frame.”35
Polk had his female supporters as well. Elizabeth Bosworth, of Carroll County, Louisiana, considered herself very much a part of “The Democracy,” and proudly sent Sarah the “flag of the Democratic Association of Carroll” County when James won the nomination. “I consider his nomination as victory already achieved,” she wrote. “This is the feeling that animates the whole Democracy and will lead us to a glorious victory.” Another Louisiana Democrat, Mrs. McGimsey, challenged a female Whig to bet her house slave on the outcome of the election. Cincinnati resident Jane Frindlay’s apology for her lack of partisan effort suggests how normal she viewed female partisanship. “You are aware that I am too far advanced in life to pay much attention to most party politics,” she wrote Sarah Polk, although she admitted that “one can never be too old to take an interest in their country.”36
Most of the Democratic ladies believed that their Whig sisters had crossed a line of decorum with their political activism. But a conservative understanding of the proper spheres for men and women did not lessen the political passion of Democratic women. “A patriotic zeal for the cause of Democratic principles” has been “coeval with my existence,” one wrote to Sarah, and she was not afraid to let those views be known, even when surrounded by “adverse female partisans…who respect me, though not my principles of politics.” Matilda Catron, Caroline Nicholson, and Sarah Polk were exceptional not because they espoused the principles of the Democratic Party, but because their wealth and power provided them with a large sphere of influence. Democratic women were quieter about their politics than their Whig sisters, but no less committed.37
And their efforts were no less crucial to the functioning of high politics, on the state and national level, than were the efforts of Whig women. As Sarah’s experiences made clear, political success in Washington might have been possible without female help, but it wasn’t easy. The etiquette of Washington’s “official society” required skill to navigate, skill cultivated by women, and success was dependent on relationships forged outside official work hours. From the earliest establishment of the nation’s capital in Washington, D.C., politics was a family business, one in which wives, sons, and daughters played a role.
It’s no wonder that so many sons of politicians followed their fathers into politics and that so many of their daughters married politicians, or helped husbands forge political careers. Jessie Benton, the daughter of the powerful Missouri Democratic senator Thomas Hart Benton, married explorer John C. Frémont in 1841. His increasing involvement in politics over the following decades occurred in close tandem with his wife, who lobbied on his behalf and helped manage his campaigns. Although Jessie was likely the only wife of a presidential candidate in the antebellum era to write her husband’s campaign literature, few found anything strange about the son-in-law of a powerful senator entering politics, or the daughter of a senator drawing on political skills learned and political connections forged in her own childhood family home. It took the efforts of an entire family to cultivate the relationships necessary to succeed politically.38
Nor was the role of women in politics limited to Washington. Etiquette in Nashville was nowhere near as exacting as in the nation’s capital, but Sarah learned the hard way that the social exertions of the wife of the governor were just as crucial to political success as they had been for the wife of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Men might complain about female politicians, but they ignored them at their own risk. The nation was about to learn that the true value of a political wife had little to do with making butter.39
THE 1844 PRESIDENTIAL CONTEST was remarkably close, a difference of just 38,000 votes out of more than 2.7 million votes cast. Polk carried the Deep South, but proved Alfred Balch correct on a second point: Tennessee swung the same direction in 1843 as it did in 1844. Polk not only lost Tennessee, but even his hometown of Columbia.40
Nevertheless, just like that, Sarah Childress Polk was elevated to First Lady. When the Polks first heard the news, hours before it was reported in the press, they kept it private, remaining quietly at home. If Sarah hadn’t thought through the implications of her new status before the election, she did so during those final hours before the news broke in Columbia.
When it did, she was prepared. A boisterous crowd gathered at their home. “A gentleman” reportedly entered the Polk parlor. “Mrs. Polk,” he said, “some of your husband’s friends wish to come in to the house, but we will not let the crowd in, because the street is muddy and your carpets and furniture will be spoiled.” Sarah responded, “The house is thrown open to everybody. Let them all come in; they will not hurt the carpets.” Although she reported that “this decision was exactly in accord with Mr. Polk’s wishes and preferences,” it was wholly her innovation to bring mass democracy into her own parlor, stamping her domain with the party’s vaunted egalitarianism as surely as dirt was stamped on her carpets.41 Of course, she wasn’t the one who would be cleaning them.
This grand gesture was excellent preparation for the White House. After almost two decades of political experience in Washington and Tennessee, Sarah was in an ideal position to transform the office of the First Lady. Given the public association of “political” women with the Whig Party, there’s an irony to the fact that the first serious female politician elevated to the office of First Lady was a Democrat. Her Democratic supporters surely celebrated when Congress passed a joint resolution to admit Texas as a state at the close of John Tyler’s presidency.
Perhaps because the Whigs were the party of “female politicians,” Sarah’s elevation provided very little critiquing of her political partnership with James among the politicians who knew them best. Although deferential Democratic wives like Sarah did an excellent job pretending to be apolitical, well-connected and wealthy political wives had been making use of their access to politicians since the earliest days of the republic. A wealthy woman had the ability to make a generous donation to a political campaign, or to influence powerful men in her orbit. At the state and local level, women of high social status had easy access to politicians. They entered state legislatures “as if they assumed their welcome” and successfully lobbied politicians for friendly laws and corporate status. Or, in Matilda Catron’s case, with a Supreme Court judgeship for her husband. Sarah was not alone in making use of her political access while disavowing the reformist sensibilities of Whig women. Her privilege justified her actions at the same time that her politics obscured those actions.42
A month before the president’s inauguration, Vice President–Elect George M. Dallas, who had neither the president’s trust nor his friendship, expressed his disapproval to his wife, Sophia, of the power “political” women held over their husbands. Mrs. Polk, he told her, “is certainly mistress of herself, and I suspect of somebody else too.” But Sophia Dallas made her priorities clear when she chose to remain in Philadelphia during her husband’s term as vice president. Their marriage was very different from Sarah and James’s partnership. Fellow Philadelphian Henry Gilpin did not share Dallas’s concern. “If I am not mistaken,” he wrote Martin Van Buren about Sarah soon after the election, “she has both sagacity and decision that will make her a good counsellor in some emergencies.” Sarah Preston Hale of Massachusetts, a forty-eight-year-old supporter of Henry Clay, found hope in Sarah’s elevation. She wondered if “perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Polk together will make a very good President.”43
Sarah never forgot her trip to Washington with the president-elect. The travails of 1826 were long forgotten; although the Cumberland River was too shallow to navigate, once they reached Kentucky, technology smoothed their way. In Louisville they were able to board a steamboat heading up the Ohio River, and railroad tracks extended as far west as Cumberland, Maryland. They spent two leisurely weeks, traveling only during the day, fending off the “manifestation of the people” in support of the new president, and meeting with committees of “prominent gentlemen.”44
They arrived in Cincinnati on a Sunday, and were met by Democrats serenading them with a band. Sarah offered a preview of her administration when she broke up the impromptu concert. There was to be no music on the Sabbath. James accepted her decision, and apologized to his supporters, quipping, “Sarah directs all domestic affairs, and she thinks that is domestic.” Had he a sense of humor, it might have been meant as a joke. Instead it was an accurate statement about both their relationship and Sarah’s approach to politics. He conceded command of “domestic affairs” to his wife, and allowed for a remarkably elastic definition of the term. But he also demanded her participation in his political and economic affairs. The Polks gave lip service to the ideology of gendered spheres of influence, but Sarah’s own sphere was copious, and never separate from that of men.45
The letters she received just after the election suggest that her supporters recognized that having “no children to occupy her time,” she could serve as a “valuable assistant” to her husband. Sending his best wishes for “her” administration, Leonard Jones of Shelby County, Kentucky, offered, “May all your actions be original….Hope the characteristics of your administration may be to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit sick & in Prison, & Take the Stranger in.” Another recognized that she would be a “helpmeet, in the best sense, to your Husband.”46
But mostly they wrote about religion. Sarah’s strict morality was a great comfort to a great many. One aged professor of religion, who wrote not long after the Polks arrived in Washington, prayed that Sarah would “let all the nation see—that in the house & family of the President of the United States, the Lord’s day is sacred.” He hoped she realized the extent of her power to influence others. “Do not forget how much is, humanly speaking, in your power to promote the good of all around you, how great an influence a bright Christian example in the family of the President, may exert…on the whole country.” Her influence and example could be “the means of drawing down blessings on his administration.” Sarah loved getting letters like these. “A good letter from a Christian friend,” she marked on the envelope.47
Of course, moral suasion didn’t stop at the White House front door. It was “common cant,” one male admirer wrote, “that the world is governed by men, and that men are governed by women,” but “age and experience have taught me…that women govern both, and it is a fortunate interposition of Providence that it is so….At home they have all the turmoil, anxiety and care. Abroad they are the ministers of comfort, of peace, and consolation.”48
The many women active in reform movements during the period made it clear that domestic ideology sanctioned a broad array of public activities in the name of benevolence, from charity work, to moral reform, to temperance, and even abolition. Men wrote letters to Sarah waxing enthusiastic about women’s “generous hearts, and hands…kindly contributing to the wants, and necessities of the orphan, and the widow.” Although most reform societies attempted to conform to standards of female propriety by asking men to chair meetings and address public gatherings, it was not a great secret that behind the scenes women wielded most of the authority. Leonard Jones’s letter jokingly referred to the “favorite doctrine of female supremacy” to justify writing to the new First Lady, but cautioned her that he felt certain that “women’s intuitive powers will be called forth in this trying season” in order to “fix the principles of the succeeding administration, & practically carry out” the responsibilities of high office.49
Jones recognized that Sarah would play a role in carrying out the responsibilities of high office. But in what way? Although partisan politics was largely considered off-limits to women, and both women and men held differing opinions about the propriety of women petitioning Congress, thousands of women nonetheless did so in opposition to slavery. They pressed their congressional representatives for legislation to improve the lives of women, children, the weak, and the vulnerable. In the name of benevolence they lobbied men in power. No one was more successful in this regard than Dorothea Dix, who the year before Polk’s election gained national attention by successfully advocating for state-funded insane asylums. In order to secure an insane asylum in New Jersey she stayed up late into the night cajoling votes from elected officials. “You cannot imagine the labor of converting and convincing,” she wrote.50
Only a few of the letters Sarah received from strangers were explicitly political. A Virginia Episcopalian wrote her to warn that some Presbyterian ladies lobbying her for funds for a new church were in fact firm Clay supporters. Those women were “foremost in having public meetings” on Clay’s behalf during the election, including one “in the church they solicit your aid in decorating.” She wrote not to “influence you against these Presbyterians,” but “if you aid them let them know you are doing good for evil, that you know they used all their influence against your honored and distinguished husband.” This news may not have surprised Sarah, since Whig women were far more likely to belong to benevolent associations pushing for social reform than were Democratic women. She declined their request.51
GIVEN SARAH’S well-known church membership, her Sabbatarianism, and the widespread view of middle-class women as the keepers of moral virtue in society, it’s hardly surprising that her constituents assumed that Sarah would guide her husband’s behavior by setting a moral example. But in fact James and Sarah’s relationship bore little resemblance to what the public imagined. It was James, not Sarah, who was the moral influence in the household. Sarah attributed her own moral standards to the “strict” moral “school” run by her husband. She made sure James attended church, and did her best to keep the Sabbath holy. But his “ideas of propriety” were far stricter than hers, and in private he was not above admonishing her for failing to conform to what she described as his “delicate conception of the fitness of things.”52
There’s little doubt that Sarah was a gossip. Indeed, her intimate friendships with Aaron Brown and John Catron were in large part fueled by a shared love of political gossip. Her willingness to engage in what James would certainly have considered unfair conjecture opened up a space for communication with men clearly distinct from the manner in which those men communicated with her husband. Aaron Brown warned Sarah against sharing with James their cruel jibes about James Buchanan’s “marriage” to William King. But Brown wasn’t the only recipient of Sarah’s indelicate gossip. When Sarah’s niece learned “something amusing about Mr. Buchanan,” she immediately told her aunt, despite the gentleman who spread the news promising “to tell me more if I should not say anything about it.” Sarah didn’t need to be warned, because if James heard her joke unkindly about another person, he rebuked her. “Sarah, I wish you would not say that. I understand you, but others might not, and a wrong impression might be made.”53
But disagreements about morality were a minor blot in a remarkably harmonious relationship between the First Lady and her husband. Sarah and James had a truly companionate marriage, one characterized by mutual respect, deep affection, and a recognition of their dependence upon each other. Wife and husband, they were above all else a team of two, in politics as in life. As they moved into the White House it was with a shared mission that would transform not only the office of the First Lady, but the entire North American continent.