I…cannot other than discern the face of the times, for God writes them in legible characters to be read and known by all men, that is, the extension of our wide spreading Empire.
—JOHN REES TO SARAH CHILDRESS POLK, May 28, 1845
JAMES K. POLK rode to office on a Texas platform, but his inaugural address looked well beyond the Lone Star State. A Polk administration would wrest the Oregon Country from joint control with Britain—“Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!” as their enthusiastic northern supporters cried—and deliver Mexican land to hardworking American settlers who would put the land to use the way God intended: by farming and developing it. “Our title to the country of Oregon is clear and unquestionable” he asserted, and he lyrically extolled the millions of pioneers who “have filled the eastern valley of the Mississippi, adventurously ascended the Missouri to its headsprings, and are already engaged in establishing the blessings of self-government in valleys of which the rivers flow to the Pacific.” God ordained that the magnificent experiment of democratic governance and free enterprise known as the United States would spread its blessings across the continent. This was America’s Manifest Destiny, and James K. Polk was its apostle.1
So what did that make Sarah? After two decades assisting her husband with lobbying, campaigns, and the press, she had become a master of the family business of politics. A Democrat since childhood, she asserted that American principles were driving the “marvelous growth of our country…holding forth the radiant light of a new era.” Her faith that America’s “mighty genius is building home of peace and content for the poor and oppressed of every land” never wavered. She was every bit as much of a true believer in Manifest Destiny as her husband.2
But she was also a woman, in a period when middle-class Americans promoted the idea that there were two spheres of influence. It’s true that from the establishment of Washington, D.C., women were an active presence in public, that their actions had both legitimated national politics and enabled the functioning of party politics. It’s also true that by the 1840s the Whig Party embraced its female partisans, and female Democrats were avid supporters of their own party and its platform of territorial expansion. But most educated men and women nonetheless accepted that the natural terrain of women was the domestic sphere.
The definition of the “domestic” could be, and was, interpreted flexibly. Female reformers in the North used their authority over domestic matters to justify lobbying for social reform—from public education, to helping the poor, to abolishing slavery. James was open about the fact that Sarah defined the boundaries of the domestic sphere as she chose. But if there was any division between the domestic realm and the realm of men, surely the domestic was constrained by the boundaries of the nation. It could not, by definition, include the foreign.
Or maybe it could. The former consul to Trinidad and Cuba, Edmund C. Watmough of Philadelphia, sent Sarah a copy of his Scribblings and Sketches: Diplomatic, Piscatory, and Oceanic not long after the election, because “the President’s Lady should be familiar with Diplomacy, some of the forms and principles of that abstruse science.” Sarah no doubt found Watmough’s volume, dedicated to the emperor of China, a bit odd. In addition to a curious collection of diplomatic correspondence both serious and humorous, the bulk of the volume alternated between engaging descriptions of foreign lands visited by the author and an argument in favor of increasing the size of the navy, grounded in accounts of significant naval battles.3
But she would not have missed the pro-expansion message underlying the whole, which justified female engagement with diplomacy: that territorial expansion was God’s work. “Send your unbeliever out of your crowded cities into God’s holy temples upon the mountain’s side or teeming valley…and he will bow down…humbled in spirit and elevated in sentiment,” Watmough declared. And God’s work was women’s work. Catharine Beecher, one of the era’s leading reformers, declared in her 1841 Treatise on Domestic Economy that God designed that America “shall go forth as the cynosure of nations, to guide them to the light,” a “great moral enterprise” that would be “enacted by American women.”4
Nor was Beecher the only popular writer to suggest that women who chose to go forth and “civilize” foreign lands were especially patriotic. The ability of women to domesticate the wilderness was celebrated on every American frontier, from the Southwest to the Great Lakes. In Florida, the need for the army to protect female settlers became a prime justification for violence against the Seminoles, and helped drag out the Second Seminole War for six long years. Women provided a convenient cover story that Manifest Destiny was in fact a religious mission.5
Now there was a committed expansionist in the White House, and by his side a passionate and powerful Christian woman, one who in her first year in office had gained the love and trust of the public as a pious, down-to-earth Democrat, while reconfiguring the work of the First Lady in a radically new manner. By freeing herself of the tedium of returning calls, she gained the time to share in her husband’s work. It was her labor, paradoxically, that enabled James to claim independence from clique or faction and to become “himself, president.” Her days were spent assisting him with correspondence and job seekers, and limiting access to him in the White House. Most of her evenings consisted of entertainment for political purposes. And her nights included working with her husband in their shared office.
For Catharine Beecher, who was traveling through the Northeast championing “a special role for women” in a series of well-attended speaking tours, Sarah’s elevation appeared a remarkable opportunity to expand the sphere of female influence, both on the frontier and throughout society. “It is a matter of great satisfaction,” she wrote Sarah in September 1845, “that the distinguished lady whom Providence has placed at the head of our nation & sex, is one who can sympathise with us, not only in benevolent aspirations, but in the dear & sacred hopes that unite the children of our common Saviour.”6
Beecher hoped to train fifty thousand women as teachers, many to be sent out to the frontier as agents of civilization. Education in the West was something of an obsession with the Beecher family. From their home in Cincinnati, Catharine’s abolitionist sister Harriet Beecher Stowe and her professor husband, Calvin, advocated for improvement in educational opportunities in the nation’s western states and territories. Their father, one of the nation’s most prominent ministers, Lyman Beecher, had spent over a decade arguing in favor of the Protestant reformation of American lands previously belonging to Catholics and heathens. In 1835, Reverend Beecher declared that it was “plain that the religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided in the West. There is the territory, and there soon will be the population, the wealth, and the political power.” It was “equally clear, that the conflict which is to decide the destiny of the West, will be a conflict of institutions for the education of her sons, for purposes of superstition, or evangelical light; of despotism, or liberty.” For many Protestant Americans, Manifest Destiny was also a religious war between righteous Protestants and Papist Catholics.7
Lyman Beecher had visited with Sarah when she was last in Washington in the 1830s, in order to gain support for his efforts to spread Protestantism in the West. Sarah, in her familiar role as James’s assistant, asked him to “address a communication” to her “on topics on which he wished to consult” James.8
But Catharine presented her plan to the First Lady not on behalf of her father, and not for James to consider. This was a communication between two women, on a subject of “deep interest & anxious reflection” to both of them. And it was a matter that Beecher believed to be above party. Catharine Beecher was every bit the Whig, while Sarah was a Democrat. And yet she reached out to the First Lady not as a partisan, but as a woman with a shared interest in Christianizing and civilizing the frontier. Educating women as teachers would not only bring light to the “darkness” of the frontier, she told Sarah, but fight poverty by providing the thousands of poor women in America’s cities a means of supporting themselves.
And it might do more. “I am not without hope,” Catharine wrote, “that this enterprise, if it succeeds, will benefit, not only the poor & oppressed of our sex, but contribute to the usefulness & happiness of many, who amid elegant luxuries & ease, are yearning for some mode of spending their time according to the spirit & example of our lord and savior.” Despite the bias against their “sex,” Beecher was convinced that “if ladies will work as they may work in this effort, it will soon be conceded, that a woman of energy and developed talent, can do as much as a man.” She included with her letter a copy of her most recent book, The Duty of American Women to Their Country. The header of each page posed a dare to readers, impossible to ignore: “AMERICAN WOMEN! WILL YOU SAVE YOUR COUNTRY?” Beecher’s message, to both the First Lady and to readers, was clear: “It is in the power of American women to save their country.” Sarah was never one to back down from a challenge.9
THE PRESIDENT AND FIRST LADY could, quite literally, see the writing on the wall. When Sarah and James entered the White House they found a map of North America hanging in the president’s office, a remnant of either Jackson’s or Van Buren’s years in office. It was a grand map, printed on paper sections that had then been glued together like a puzzle on a linen backing. A ten-year-old map was bound to be out of date. It would likely have featured the Erie Canal, which connected the Great Lakes and surrounding farmland to New York City, but not the railroads that facilitated trade and communication in the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic region, or the new cities of the Midwest, cities created by the new transportation network. Nor would it have revealed the massive growth of the metropolises of the eastern seaboard from European immigration and the internal flow of rural New Englanders from farms to cities. But the eastern half of the map was nonetheless a hive of activity, dotted with the familiar states, cities, towns, and ports of the long-settled United States.
The map’s western half, however, was a relative void, an open expanse of blank paper seemingly waiting to be inscribed. The uncharted territory west of the Mississippi failed to capture the extent of Indian power in the region, or to demarcate the domains of nonsedentary peoples like the Comanches, who exacted tribute over vast expanses and inhibited settlement by Mexicans in land that according to European law belonged to Mexico. Meanwhile, joint control by the British and Americans of the land known as the Oregon Country since 1818 lent the northwestern corner of the map a displeasing ambiguity.10
There was a great deal for James and Sarah to contemplate about this map. Lands to the west of Texas offered great promise to slaveholders like themselves looking to grow rich from cotton production. The Mississippi cotton plantation James purchased in 1834 had thus far failed to turn a profit, but he was determined that it would. Whether or not he realized that the expansion of slave territory would dramatically increase the value of his slaves, he knew the value to planters of fertile land in slave territory.
James’s interest in expansion was not entirely driven by self-interest. The Oregon Country was just as alluring to northerners as Texas had been to southerners. James had implicitly promised his supporters in the North that he would take the entirety of the Oregon Country from Great Britain, including British Columbia, even if it required war, and turn that territory into free states. For a true territorial expansionist, any blank territory on a map of North America presented a call for action.
That spring Sarah received two letters that offered dueling perspectives on the First Lady’s role in the nation’s Manifest Destiny. Alex Jones, a leading Democratic journalist and admirer of Sarah’s, sent her an editorial he published at the end of March 1845 in the New York Journal of Commerce, titled “The Fruits of Peace and of War.” Sarah, as a Christian woman, was expected to agree with Jones’s sentiment. “Blessed are the Peace Makers: There is not a declaration in Holy Writ which is more emphatically true, even in a temporal sense….Let the world keep at peace for thirty or forty years more.” But John Rees, a pious New York shipmaster, assured Sarah two months later that “I know something of my bible,” and the holy book left no doubt about America’s Manifest Destiny. Rees told Sarah that he could clearly “discern the face of the times, for God writes them in legible characters to be read and known by all men, that is, the extension of our wide spreading Empire.”11
As a woman and a Christian, Sarah’s manifest role was as peacemaker. But if God, quite legibly, called for the expansion of the United States, and she knew the value of the West—to the poor, to women, and to the nation’s security—who was she to reject the possibility that war might bring on a greater, lasting peace?
This issue was far from abstract on the Texas border in the spring of 1845. Texians actively courted Sarah even before inauguration day. When John Price of Galveston hoped to start a Democratic “paper of the right stamp” in the Republic of Texas, he wrote to Sarah, promising that his paper “shall be a perfect skinning machine!” It would also contain “a separate Department of vary Exquisite things served up in Oriental Style for their Ladys particularly—in which they will find some & perhaps many things on:
Texas bays and Texas flowers!
And Texas in her own rest hours.
Together with the reasons why
Her star shined yellow amidst the skies.
He asked Sarah to tell “the Col” “not to forget Galveston!”12
Although Congress had invited Texas to join the Union before James was inaugurated, matters on the southern border degenerated during the spring and summer of 1845. Mexico never accepted Texas’s independence or its territorial claims. Texians claimed a boundary at the Rio Grande, although the historical boundary of Mexican Tejas ran 150 miles to the north, at the Nueces River. When the Lone Star Republic accepted the U.S. offer of annexation, on the Fourth of July 1845, Mexicans called for war. James ordered the navy to assemble in the Gulf of Mexico, and directed the commander of the Pacific flotilla to seize San Francisco should war break out. In June 1845, he directed Major General Zachary Taylor, commander of troops in the Southwest, to march his four thousand soldiers to Corpus Christi, on the northern edge of the disputed territory, and to await further orders. When the two new Texas senators arrived in Washington in April 1846, Sarah had them to the White House for dinner and invited Sam Houston to tell “something of his battles in Texas.”13
In the meantime, James had to deal with Oregon. Thousands of American settlers had made the arduous trek by covered wagon to farm its fertile soils, and they were anxious to see British claims to the region extinguished. But Britain’s navy was the most powerful in the world, and its claims to the region equally formidable. Northwestern Democrats believed that all of Oregon, including British Columbia, rightfully belonged to the United States. Congressmen attacked Britain, and called for war if it did not acknowledge U.S. rights in the region. It was a delicate situation. The United States could hardly fight two wars at once, and yet only months after entering office, James faced the possibility of exactly that.14
At the end of September, John Catron wrote Sarah a long letter about the current political situation. Whig calls to step down from potential wars with both Britain and Mexico were, in his view, politically suicidal. It was a “singular truth,” he noted, that the people “of the East” knew almost nothing about the people “of the West”—that they “suppose us a wild horde” and that “the mass is ignorant altogether of political matters, and follows leaders, merely….How gross this error is, you & I equally well know.” Westerners were thrilled by Polk’s martial attitude, by “the energy and strength displayed…regardless of party trammels, as a decided exhibition of national will & national power.” At this point, nothing less than a “gross blunder on the part of the administration” could revive the Whig Party.
While “the pervading idea of the West” was “not a wish to whip or bully Mexico,” Catron was quite sure that should Mexico’s army “cross the Rio Grande…it would hardly be possible to save…the provinces next [to] that river. The rush then to the border would be like pigeons to the roost. Called or un-called, our young men would go in thousands, armed…well enough to sweep the poor Mexican Indians like a prairie fire through dead grass.” With an utterly insincere nod to the value of peace, Catron added, “Such an unmooring of our war loving and restless population is to be feared, and I am happy that the Prsdt. has taken the very best course to avoid it.” His message was clear: for Polk to win the affections of the West, to gain Mexican territory without directly invading Mexico, and to prostrate the Whig Party once and for all, all he needed to do was order Taylor’s forces to the Rio Grande, and then either wait for or incite an international incident.15
CATRON HAD WRITTEN JAMES in a similar vein over a month earlier. But it wasn’t until Sarah received her letter that James bothered to respond. They must have discussed the letter, most likely late at night in their shared office. “We will not commit an act of aggression unless Mexico should strike the first blow, and in that event we will go on the offensive & make a short war of it,” he wrote. And then matters moved quickly. About two weeks after Sarah received Catron’s letter, William Marcy, the secretary of war, directed Taylor to move “as close as circumstances will permit” to the Rio Grande. Less than a week after the cabinet agreed on “concentrating our naval forces at Vera Cruz” in view of “the probability of a revolution” in Mexico, Sarah hosted a dinner for thirty to forty members of Congress where she was the only woman present.16
It was easy to see where matters were heading, particularly among men who looked for honor in a war with Mexico. John Catron and Lyman Beecher weren’t the only men to turn to Sarah when they wanted to influence the course of Manifest Destiny. An 1846 New Year’s present from the Polks to their neighbors in Columbia, Gideon and Mary Martin Pillow, was acknowledged by a thank-you note written by Gideon rather than Mary. Admitting that wives were usually accorded the job of writing thank-you notes, Pillow explained, “In a contest for the honors,” Mary “yielded to her husband’s pleasure.” He had “long sought an excuse to address” Sarah, and now that he had one, he wasn’t going to let it pass. “I have seen so many handsome things said about you” in the newspapers, he wrote, “that I would expect you had become somewhat vain, did I not know that these were the natural fruits of the head and heart that I always told you were intended to adorn the White House.”
Pillow was full of flattery. “I think the President had better look out, else he may be supplanted in the affections of the American Free-men, and may have opposition from a quarter he little expects it.” Then he got down to business. All “eyes are turned to the Foreign intelligence as indicating the prospect of peace or war. We all prefer peace, but if we cannot have an honorable peace instead the surrender of our rights, let war come, and in such a context, the energies of the nation, almost to a man, may be demanded in defense of the country.” Pillow boasted of no extraordinary intuition, but he was convinced that James was “destined, under Providence, to…march…this nation to future greatness,” he told Sarah.17
Pillow didn’t have to tell Sarah that he was anxious for a military commission. She understood clearly. Nor did he have to wait long to get it. James had just enough time to resolve the Oregon situation before Mexican soldiers crossed the Rio Grande. In a masterstroke of diplomacy and domestic politics, Polk appeased northern expansionists by publicly claiming that Oregon belonged to the United States and asking Congress to terminate the joint occupation, while at the same time secretly inviting compromise from London. In late April 1846, Congress passed a joint resolution to end the joint occupation of Oregon with Britain, and invited the two countries to settle the matter amicably. Polk signed the bill, and with a clear message that he was willing to compromise and hand over the northern portion of the territory to Britain, had it sent across the Atlantic. Fully expecting the British to comply with a settlement that was very much in their interest, he turned his attention to Mexico.
General Taylor, who had no great respect for James Polk or the war he appeared to be instigating against Mexico, took his time reaching the Rio Grande. It was clear to him and to many of his officers that the residents of the disputed territory south of the Nueces considered themselves Mexican. They fled when the U.S. Army approached. But Polk had heard Catron. He began drafting a war message to present to Congress even before receiving news that Mexican soldiers had crossed the Rio Grande and attacked U.S. forces on April 25, 1846.18
The day after learning of the attack, James sent a war message to Congress. In the strongest possible language he excoriated Mexico, elided the truth, and demanded—not that Congress declare war, but that it recognize a war already in existence. He informed them that “now, after reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil.” It wasn’t true, of course. Objective observers saw clearly that it was the United States that had invaded Mexico. Nor was it true that “notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it,” war “exists by the act of Mexico herself.” But no one could argue with the fact that Taylor’s army was under attack and needed immediate reinforcements. “We are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interest of our country,” James insisted.19
As Catron predicted, westerners rejoiced. Volunteers poured into recruiting offices, particularly in western states: Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee. There were more men than the army could handle. Sarah was shocked to read in “the Nashville papers” that her own brother John had left for Mexico in command of a Tennessee volunteer company. Once again, it appeared, John had failed to communicate a matter of crucial importance. She wrote immediately to her sister-in-law, Sarah Williams Childress, to confirm the story.20
Fortunately, her fears were unfounded. John and the majority of his company changed their minds about serving in the army when they learned that Polk insisted that volunteers serve a twelve-month enlistment. John sheepishly admitted that “most of the company as well as myself being unwilling to be absent from home for so long a time, without the emergency was greater, declined the service, and another company was taken in our stead.” One imagines the embarrassment he felt explaining to his brother-in-law why he had decided to stay home, particularly after the publicity surrounding his promised sacrifice.21
Enthusiasm for the war in the eastern states was somewhat more muted, particularly in the Northeast, where both Whig and Democratic congressmen voted for the war despite privately acknowledging that the president had lied about Mexicans shedding American blood on American soil. There were plenty of men in the Northeast who were enthusiastic volunteers, but also voices protesting the war as designed to increase slave territory. Slaveholders, including Tennessee slaveholders, felt no misgivings about this point. In July 1846, James made Gideon Pillow a brigadier general. Less than a year later he was promoted to major general.22
And suddenly America was at war. Two weeks after the congressional vote, Joanna Rucker wrote her cousin that Washington was filled with “wars and rumors of wars!” On Friday, May 29, “a regiment of several hundred soldiers marched up to the president’s house.” Joanna admitted that “some of the soldiers were very ordinary looking men, but when my heart enlarged at the thought of beholding those that were willing to defend and die for their country, I forgot but that they were the finest looking in the world.” It all happened so quickly, Joanna could “scarcely realize that we are actually in war.” She was “certain I have no patriotism until I see the soldiers and hear the drums, and then I wish to be a man.”23
Unlike her niece, Sarah never expressed a desire to be a man. She understood how to put the White House to work in the service of the nation. She increased the number of weekly receptions at the White House, and transformed them to reflect the war now under way. One of her greatest innovations was musical. She had enjoyed the Scottish march “Hail to the Chief” as a girl, so much so that she painstakingly recorded both the words and score in her Salem Academy copybook. At the outset of the war she directed the Marine Band to perform the march at large events in order to announce James’s arrival. This not only imbued gatherings with a martial flavor, but also ensured that her unassuming-appearing husband would be noticed and acknowledged as commander in chief even in the largest crowds.24
Regardless of the newly martial music, Sarah’s receptions during the course of the war continued to be celebrated for their “republican simplicity.” An admirer noted, “There is no extra formality exhibited when a Secretary or some other high officer of government presents himself” in the White House. “The quiet, unheralded citizen receives a polite and cordial salutation, as well as the rich man or the Minister of State.” A visitor to the White House in the first months of the war was particularly struck by “Mrs. Polk’s patriotic sentiments. A gallant lieutenant, just back from the bloody but glorious conflict at Monter[r]ey was there also; and as she carried back his thoughts to the distant field of his fame, he caught the inspiration, and dwelt briefly upon some of the thrilling incidents of those scenes.” It was an “animated conversation.”25
Sarah understood the need to honor the military in a time of war. Visitors to wartime receptions at the Polk White House noted the frequent presence of uniformed army and naval officers. None of the “Mexican lions,” as they were called, at the 1848 New Year’s levee “attracted more attention than the handsome and dashing General Shields,” an Illinois Democrat who won praise as a brigadier general of the volunteers, and delivered a speech during the dinner praising the war. “He can talk as well as fight,” offered one admirer afterward. Shields put his patriotism and sacrifice on display at the levee. “He still carries his left arm in a sling and the ladies have provided him with ribbons enough to keep it tied up for half a century.” Guests during the course of the war included not only officers and soldiers, but also William Prescott, a historian whose best-selling 1843 History of the Conquest of Mexico was popular reading among American troops.26
While the war started with a burst of enthusiasm, a series of thrilling victories by Zachary Taylor’s army on the Rio Grande, as well as the easy conquest of California and New Mexico, were not enough to sustain the support of the people. Americans, including James, assumed the war would be a quick affair. But although the United States secured Texas, California, and New Mexico by the end of the summer of 1846, Mexico refused to surrender. James pulled the army from Taylor, whom he disliked and resented, and gave it to another Whig officer, Winfield Scott, who bombed the walled port city of Vera Cruz at a great loss of civilian life and property, and then, following the same route taken by Hernán Cortés, marched to Mexico City, capturing the capital in a series of bloody engagements in September 1847.27
Yet Mexico still refused to surrender. The army settled in for a long, wary occupation of Mexico’s capital. With fighting at a standstill, the public began to turn against the war, and against the president. There had been too many casualties, soldiers were being shot by guerrillas on a regular basis, and disturbing reports of atrocities against civilians committed by men in American uniform circulated in U.S. newspapers.28
Bad news poured into the White House. Sarah heard from families of servicemen about the “many sorowful days—and sleepless nights” caused by the “Mexican mania.” When an officer returned home to Cincinnati “a walking specter” and reported “seven-hundred sick in the hospital” in Perote, in the state of Vera Cruz, a frantic grandfather wrote to Sarah in hopes of intervention.29 Sarah made a courtesy call on a Washington, D.C., mother of a young lieutenant killed in action, “to condole with the heart broken mother, on the untimely and savage death of her gallant and darling son.” But according to a reporter, the First Lady was met not with thanks, but incredulity. “Tell me not of resignation,” the woman addressed Sarah. “Tell me Madam, if you can, for no one seems able to answer me—for what was this wicked war brought upon our country? Why was my noble son sent to be murdered in that barbarous country?” The First Lady’s response went unrecorded.30
Family members provided war news from Tennessee. When two hundred volunteers spent the night in Murfreesboro on the way to Mexico, “they drank and caroused all night, and the next morning, Sunday as it was, the drum & fife called them to start…the streets were filled with Negroes & children, some of the school-boys ran off with the companies to Nashville wishing to go to Mexico.” Half a dozen young men wished to join, but their parents were opposed. News had also made it to Murfreesboro that the American army had lost two thousand men attempting to take Mexico’s capital. Sarah’s niece hoped it was a false report.31
Sarah also heard from her sister-in-law about the war. James’s brother William married wealthy thirty-one-year-old Mary Louise Corse on June 29, 1847, and immediately afterward joined the 3rd Regiment of United States Dragoons as a major. Inspired by Sarah’s “systematic course of reading,” Mary Louise dedicated herself to following her “example,” but with a husband in Mexico, she was unable to marshal Sarah’s focus. She found it “very difficult to concentrate my ideas, they will fly off to Mexico in spite of all my effort.”32
In November 1847, Mary complained to Sarah about her “low spirits.” She admitted to “gloomy forebodings by day, & ill dreams at night….I awaken in agony & tears. Oh! this war, this horrid war, when will it cease, what does the President think about it? It must cause him a vast deal of anxiety.” But not as much anxiety as it caused Mary once she realized she was pregnant. “My dear friend will you be kind as to enquire of the President for me…is there any chance of the Major’s making a visit home early in the Spring?” Mary didn’t attempt to hide her disdain for the war: “That ‘bold Huzzah’ will have a great deal to answer for one of these days.”33
Other women turned to Sarah for help as well. The widow of a New York volunteer killed in the march to Mexico City wrote Sarah for help getting her husband’s pension. She and her four-year-old had been patiently waiting for “the pension due my child.” They had no money for food. “The vexations and delays of the officers of the government are killing me by inches,” she pleaded. She hoped Sarah could intervene, and believed she would, because she knew from her reading that Sarah was a kind woman. “I somewhere saw in the journal of a foreign lady an account of her interview” with Sarah, she wrote. “She said you made so many kindly inquiries after her and her family at home that it brought the tears from her eyes and this may perhaps have in my misery suggested the idea of taking the liberty of addressing you.”34
A YEAR INTO THE CONFLICT, with no end in sight, it was becoming clear that war with Mexico would neither unify the nation behind the Polks nor annihilate the Whig Party. Instead it was becoming a political liability. Whigs won control of the House of Representatives during the midterm elections, and called for an immediate end to the war. An anonymous Ohio letter writer signing themselves “the Devil” threatened James that “the spirits of those you have murdered will eternally ho[v]er round you in this world, and when I get you to my regions, they shall each punch you for 24 hours with the Mexican bayonets!”35
Each evening the couple met in their shared office and worked together, analyzing policies late into the night. Because Sarah was in charge of reading and editing the press that James read, she was able to limit his exposure to the many vindictive partisan attacks on his presidency. But when a Massachusetts newspaper condemned her as a hypocrite who, despite “her piety…lov[ed] most cordially all plunder, robbery, murder, and every other sport for the sake of slavery,” no censor protected her feelings.36
Sarah dismissed the protests just as her husband had done. “Of course there were some opposed,” she told a Nashville reporter, “there is always somebody opposed to everything.” But until the end of her life she maintained that the acquisition of Texas, California, and New Mexico were “among the most important events in the history of this country.” As the nation divided over war, Sarah’s role as conciliator became ever greater. “Mrs. President” invited political opponents to dinner, deploying her political skills in the dining room and parlor. James noted in his diary that at the end of one such dinner Henry Clay promised Sarah he would “visit her drawing room soon” and that “he had heard a general approbation expressed of her administration, but that he believed there was some difference of opinion about her husband’s administration.” Playing along, Sarah “replied pleasantly that she was happy to hear from him that her administration was approved, and added, if a political opponent of my husband is to succeed him, I have always said I would prefer you, Mr. Clay, and in that event I shall be most happy to surrender the White House to you.”37
Vice President Dallas believed that Sarah held too much power, but marveled at her social skills. He wrote home to his wife in Philadelphia after overhearing a conversation at a wedding between Sarah and a woman disgruntled with the administration, in order to explain exactly how the First Lady was able to win over opponents of her husband.
After a little conversation, Mrs. P. said suddenly though kindly, “why have you never been to see me? I have often wanted to invite you, but feared I should intrude, as you had never called.” “Pray, Mrs. P., don’t let us talk upon the subject.” “Oh! but I am sincerely anxious to know.” “Since you press me—remember I would cheerfully abstain—but the cause is simply the inexplicable and inexcusable treatment of my son-in-law Mr. Irwin.”
“But that ought surely to be set down to politics, and not be permitted to interfere with personal intercourse.” “Ah! Mrs. Polk, you have never been a mother, or you would know that a mother feels much more keenly than her children every wrong they suffer.”
Dallas closed his dialogue by noting that “the ladies found they liked each other, and separated most graciously.” As the vice president related it, the story was not necessarily flattering to Sarah, since it implied that she lacked empathy because she was childless. But the fact that she won the friendship of a former opponent of the administration proved her worth as a political actor, and her abilities as a conciliator were far more valuable to the Polk presidency than maternal empathy.38
As in previously stressful moments in James’s career, such as the Tennessee gubernatorial elections, he demanded that Sarah do more. He twice asked her to return a call to Benjamin Butler, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Butler was one of the powerful men who opposed the war, and he appeared willing to desert the Democratic Party for a new Free Soil Party, composed of northerners who opposed the extension of slavery into territories gained from Mexico. “Under the circumstances I think you should make it a point to return the call,” James told Sarah. This one could not be delegated to the nieces.39
Nor was James above using Sarah’s domestic skills to appease other politicians. His close friend Robert Armstrong wanted a brigadier generalship. James closed his letter denying the request by telling Armstrong that his daughter “Little Rachel visits us very often and calls Mrs. Polk, aunt, as affectionately and familiarity, as if she had been raised in our family. She spent from last Saturday evening until Monday morning with us….Mrs. Polk takes as much interest in her, as if she were her own daughter.”40
The conquest of Mexico City in September 1847 should have resulted in a peace treaty, yet somehow the occupation drew on, month after month, without word of a settlement. As dissent against the war grew in intensity, Sarah started carrying a heavy ornamental mother-of-pearl fan, brought back from Mexico for her by General Pillow. She admitted that it was too unwieldy for use, but she carried it to state dinners anyhow. It was a symbol of U.S. victory, and she had long been accustomed to carrying heavy weights on James’s behalf.41
James, unfortunately, was in a poor position to appreciate her efforts on behalf of the war. Never robust, the overworked president began declining during the second half of his term. By his own admission, his “constant confinement to my office and great labour for many days past” left him increasingly “enfeebled and prostrated.” Sarah begged him to take a vacation, but his deep sense of duty made it impossible. Although in “the habit of taking exercise on horseback all my life,” James stopped exercising in October 1846, not long after coming into conflict with General Taylor over his actions south of the Rio Grande. As James complained in his diary, he was “so incessantly engaged into the onerous and responsible duties of my office” that he didn’t mount a horse for the next six months.42
The chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs called on Sarah to warn her that James “was wearing himself out with constant and excessive application, that if he did not take some recreation, he would die soon after the close of his term.” He suggested that she “insist upon his driving out morning and evening; that she must order her carriage and make him go with her.” Sarah, who understood her husband’s destructive work habits better than anyone, attempted to follow the advice. Day after day she ordered their carriage, “and the carriage waited and waited, until it was too late. It would have been obliged to wait all day, for somebody was always in the office, and Mr. Polk would not, or could not, come,” she later recalled. It was hopeless. “I seldom succeeded in getting him to drive with me.”43
Instead she focused on limiting his exposure to both bad news and people who might upset him. No longer did she simply intervene when men like Lyman Beecher wished to speak to her husband, or stop strangers at the foot of the grand staircase before they disturbed James with job requests. By the start of 1847, if a politician hoped to speak to James, he did well to be on good terms with Sarah.
John Van Buren was one recipient of the First Lady’s wrath. Son of the former president, Van Buren was an antislavery Democrat who spent much of 1847, in James’s words, “making violent political speeches against my administration” and drumming up support for a new Free Soil political party. As a Democratic leader, he made repeated calls on the president, who, “of course, treated him courteously in my own parlor.”
But Sarah banned the younger Van Buren from White House social events. “On two or three occasions I had decided that he should be invited to dinner,” James wrote in his diary, “and in each case Mrs. Polk had countermanded the order….On one of these occasions I was amused when she told me she had burned John Van Buren’s dinner ticket, which I had requested my Private Secretary to send to him.”
Van Buren was a traitor to the Democratic Party, but his political views don’t fully explain the vehemence of Sarah’s reaction. Whigs made regular appearances at White House dinners. Equally unforgivable was Van Buren’s lack of respect for the First Lady herself. He “so far neglected the courtesies of life as not to call and pay his respects to her,” and thus, Sarah proclaimed, “he should not be honoured with an invitation to dinner.” Eventually Van Buren caught on and made a formal call on Sarah. But he still wasn’t invited to dinner.44
That virtually no one critiqued Mrs. James K. Polk’s aggressive politicking is due to several factors. Opponents of the administration believed that Sarah, as a pious Christian, might be a moderating force in the seemingly bloodthirsty administration. When James was preparing his annual message in December 1847, the New York Herald offered a “hope that, with the aid of the chivalric spirit of Mrs. Polk, he will throw out a message that will reflect credit on himself and the country, and astonish the whole world.”45
James’s supporters, on the other hand, recognized that Sarah’s “affable manners” went a long way toward “allaying the opposition that is ever apparent in times of national trouble.” Sarah appeared to be so much more reasonable than James. This was why it was left to her to appease John C. Calhoun after James removed him as secretary of state. Franklin Pierce, one of Sarah’s “most cordial and constant friends,” said he would rather discuss politics with Sarah than with her husband. George Bancroft expected to hear from his “great and good friend” Sarah directly while he was abroad serving as minister to Great Britain, and repeatedly told James as much.46
And she had power. Politicians had long understood the need to cultivate Sarah to get to James. Before the Polks entered office, Thomas Hart Benton wrote directly to her on behalf of the minister of the Presbyterian church where Andrew Jackson worshipped, to determine which church she and James would worship in. Catron wrote to Sarah to promote his ideas about the war. Gideon Pillow wrote to her in order to gain a commission. And from faraway Havana, U.S. consul Robert B. Campbell sent her “a small box of sweetmeats” after his “lamented wife” died of yellow fever. Campbell hoped to return home to South Carolina, and the possibility that Sarah’s intervention might result in a more desirable position clearly influenced his gift.47
Other men cultivated Sarah not because they wanted something from James, but because they understood the extent of her control over aspects of White House political life. When Thomas Ritchie, editor of the administration newspaper, the Washington Union, wanted to read the communication between the president and Captain Hiram Paulding, commander of the sloop of war Vincennes, he turned to Sarah, requesting that the First Lady let him read it, “if convenient,” and promising to “make not a line of Extract from it, without your full consent.” And her power was recognized beyond political circles. A police officer, fired without explanation, wrote Sarah asking if it was because he had asked the driver of her carriage to move from a spot where it blocked traffic. “It was suggested by a friend that I might have been so unfortunate to have incurred, on a certain occasion, at the Capitol grounds, the displeasure of the lady of our Chief Magistrate.” A great deal had changed since James had first run for governor of Tennessee, including the willingness of men to recognize and acknowledge Sarah Childress Polk’s political power.48
IN THE SUMMER OF 1847, Sarah and James temporarily parted ways—he for a two-week tour of New England, and she for a longer trip to Tennessee to visit family and oversee the construction of their new home.
James had campaigned on the promise of only serving one term in office, a decision he wrongly believed would unify his party. He began thinking about retirement almost as soon as he reached the White House. Only a year into his presidency, Joanna Rucker reported that the president “talks a great deal of anticipated enjoyment after his term expires.” When James learned, in the fall of 1846, that Felix Grundy’s Nashville mansion was up for sale, he imagined himself occupying it, and was willing to buy it, sight unseen, without knowing “what extent of back ground, or yard, there may be. Nor do I know anything of the back buildings.” What he did know was that Grundy’s Palladian-style brick home had been the finest in Nashville when it was built in 1820, and it had no doubt dazzled the young student when he visited. Provided Nashville resident Vernon Stevenson could vouch that the exceptionally high price ($10,000, not including a vacant lot behind the property that James also wanted) was reasonable, he wanted it. “I prefer it to any other,” he repeated, “and desire to buy it.”49
Sarah was less convinced. The house needed work. Among other issues, the roof leaked, and Felix Grundy’s son-in-law, John Bass, intended to continue living in the home and pay the Polks rent. Sarah made clear to James that “the house would require thorough repairs and modernizing, before she would be willing to occupy it,” and that “this will cost a considerable sum.” James admitted that this was a matter in which Sarah was “so much interested,” but when had she ever denied him anything? Her husband had earned the right to live in Judge Grundy’s home and to rename it Polk Place as a way of reminding himself as well as Nashville that he had thoroughly surpassed even Grundy for honors and laurels.50
James closed the deal as quickly as possible, paying $13,000 for the house and vacant lot. He optimistically told friends that he was purchasing the property “long in advance” of when it was needed so that “I will have full time to cause the necessary repairs and improvements to be made.” By “I” he meant Sarah. It was a tall order, as was responsibility for a home that was set to rival the new capitol building under construction just a block away. Sarah admitted to her sister-in-law that she dreaded “the vast responsibility” of keeping up the property.51
Bass, who was living in the house, recommended repairing the roof at once. James had no intention of doing any such thing. Indeed, he refused to make any repairs until Sarah could get down to Nashville and take charge of the proceedings. James had strong views about the necessary remodeling. The building’s current Palladian style felt stuffy, and Greek Revival was in fashion. Polk engaged a builder to transform the façade by changing the shape of the windows, flattening the roof, and adding a great portico with fluted columns and Corinthian capitals.52
But it was Sarah who was in charge of refurbishing the house and bringing it up to, if not presidential standards, then at least the standards a former U.S. president deserved. Despite her clear reservations about the condition of the Grundy mansion, she accepted this duty with the same equanimity with which she had met all of James’s requests. “Mrs Polk will visit her friends in Tennessee in June,” James wrote Bass, “and will at that time—in consultation with yourself, Mr Stevenson, and Judge Catron, determine upon the improvements to be ordered.” Responding to news about Sarah’s coming “reconnaissance,” Bass assured the president that he was happy “to act as her aide de camp on so important an occasion,” but his use of military terminology suggests some discomfort at the perceived power arrangement. Felix Grundy’s son-in-law, renting his wife’s family home from the great legislator’s former student, knew Sarah’s visit could only result in discomfort for himself, and quite possibly in orders he might not want to receive from a woman.53
As Sarah headed south, James went north. It was their first separation since moving to Washington. Although James’s tour of New England was “of the most gratifying character….Nothing of a party or of an unpleasant character has occurred anywhere,” as he told his wife, he missed her terribly. He wasn’t the only one. At every stop on the tour “the friends of the President were earnest and sincere in regretting the absence of his honored lady,” according to the journalist who accompanied James. In New York, a little girl residing in an asylum for the deaf told the president that she “regretted (and the regret was everywhere general) that he had not brought Mrs Polk with him.” James Buchanan wrote Sarah from Portland, Maine, that “there was nothing wanting to make our party everything it ought to have been but your presence.” When Buchanan added that “we have got along as well as could have been expected in your absence,” he was likely speaking for himself as well as for James. Back in Washington the secretary of state socialized with Sarah a great deal. When Sarah and her nieces wanted a male escort for charity events, dinners, or, on one notable occasion, a convent graduation ceremony, Buchanan was their preferred companion.54
James clearly enjoyed reporting his victories to Sarah, not only well-delivered speeches, but also good press, and a warm public embrace seemingly at odds with the outcry over his war. “I have seen many hundreds of thousands of people of all ages and sexes,” he marveled. “The newspapers, though they give a general account of the tour, furnish, but an imperfect idea of it. The manner of my reception and the consideration paid me far exceeded any thing which I had anticipated.”55
But once he was back in Washington his spirits sank. He fretted that Sarah might have met with an accident when he didn’t hear from her, being unable to account for the failure of her letter to reach him. He ordered her to write to him, and was quick to respond to letters from others reporting her whereabouts, never directly thanking his correspondents but rather making clear that he was glad to hear that Mrs. Polk had arrived safely. He closely tracked her whereabouts, crowing at one point that news that she had reached Nashville on July 8 “verifies my predictions made some days ago.” He could only admit “the truth,” which “is I miss you very much, and am already becoming impatient for your return.” Her description of events in Murfreesboro led him to respond, “I wish I could have spent the day with you.”56
The following evening he wrote simply out of affection, to “let you know how much I miss you in the White House.” He had given a dinner party in Sarah’s absence, and Mariah’s son, Henry, noted that “things was a heap straighter when Miss Sarah was here.” James, reporting the anecdote to Sarah, plainly agreed.57
Sarah was fully occupied with the responsibilities of family and home. She enjoyed John Catron’s escort to middle Tennessee, entertaining him along the way with political news, including a detailed report of a “Splendid Speech” Polk cabinet member John Y. Mason delivered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. When they reached Columbia on Sunday evening, July 10, the “truth of affection” displayed by James’s mother posed a dramatic contrast, in Catron’s eyes, with “the Smiles of office seekers and fawning for place” Sarah lived with back in Washington. Sarah also visited her mother, whose welfare was an ongoing concern. After Joanna Rucker left the White House and returned to Murfreesboro, she wrote Sarah on a regular basis. She was concerned to see that her grandmother “lives alone and leads a lonely life. I often ask her if she has a message for you. But she sends none.”58
Elizabeth Childress clearly needed attention, but Sarah’s main business was their new home. John Catron had overseen construction in her absence, and sent her positive reports that may have helped distract from the increasingly “red hot shot” being “poured onto Mr. Polk” because of the divisive war. “Congress seems to be slashing away at the President,” Catron wrote her. Fortunately, this war, unlike the Second Seminole War, was not going to break down the administration “as a few naked Indians in Florida” did to the “regime of Mr. Van Buren.”59
Three months after Sarah returned to Washington, William’s wife, Mary Louise, visited Nashville and reported “your house not as much advanced, as I had imagined.”60 Whatever frustration Sarah must have felt about the slow progress was placed in perspective by the news a week later that Nashville was “shattered by the explosion of a powder magazine.” Matilda Catron sent the bad news. “There is not a house in Nashville or within three miles distant that is not injured by the explosion.” Matilda rushed to Sarah’s new house immediately after the explosion, and confirmed that the walls were solid. Unfortunately, “there is not a window nor door but have received too much injury to repair for present use.” She left “two carefull negroes” in charge of the house, and promised to call there frequently on her evening walks.61
Neither the unsettled state of affairs in Mexico nor the explosion in Nashville prevented Sarah and James from celebrating their twenty-fourth wedding anniversary on New Year’s Day 1848. James gave Sarah an enameled gold pendant watch, made in Europe, displaying a bucolic river scene on the dial. It’s possible he intended the image to remind them of the promise of their lives after the White House. He engraved it “to Mrs. Jas. K. Polk from Jas. K. Polk Jan. 1, 1848.”62
In February 1848, the long-hoped-for peace treaty between the United States and Mexico finally arrived in Washington. It was a peculiar and not entirely welcome one, as it had been signed by a disgraced American diplomat acting contrary to James’s orders, and brought less territory to the United States than anyone in the cabinet desired. But with opposition to the war growing, and Whigs in control of the House of Representatives, the treaty left James in a quandary. Were he to reject it, Congress would likely refuse to vote him money to continue the war, and he might lose California. We have no way of knowing if James discussed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Sarah, but given that he stayed up late the night it arrived, they almost certainly discussed it at length. And given Sarah’s record of advising James, it seems likely that she concurred with her husband that he had no choice but to accept it. On February 21, 1848, President Polk presented the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to Congress.63
The United States had conquered Mexico. The defeated republic handed over nearly half of its original territory in return for $15 million. The Polk presidency added more than eight hundred thousand square miles of territory to the United States as a result of negotiations over the Oregon Country and the U.S.-Mexican War.
When Catharine Beecher wrote Sarah in order to enlist her assistance in civilizing the frontier, this was certainly not the outcome she hoped for. America’s greatest female reformer and most powerful female politician agreed in principle that America’s women had the power to enact its Manifest Destiny, and that “if ladies will work as they may work in this effort, it will soon be conceded, that a woman of energy and developed talent, can do as much as a man.” But they had very different visions of what that destiny would entail. Beecher’s Whiggish vision of an American West domesticated and Christianized by female teachers was a great distance from Sarah’s Democratic dream of Mexico conquered by young men with guns.64
As much as Sarah agreed with Beecher that it was “in the power of American women to save their country,” she never did advocate in favor of Beecher’s plan to settle women in the West. On the contrary, the First Lady lent her support to a very different outcome when she led a fund-raising drive in support of destitute Mormons driven from Illinois because of their doctrine of polygamy, and then later signed on to an appeal to women in other cities to help the Mormon refugees. In an era when religious persecution of Catholics and other religious minorities was widespread (Lyman Beecher himself warned of the threat posed by Catholic settlement in the West), Sarah’s position was not the easiest to adopt. Mormons were even more reviled than Catholics. But these acts of charity aligned with James’s personal and public support of religious tolerance. James personally donated ten dollars toward the relief of the Mormon refugees, and agreed to arm a regiment of Mormon soldiers to fight in the U.S.-Mexican War, and to ultimately settle the Great Salt Lake region. Thanks to the Polks, the women in the West would not be Protestant schoolteachers, they would be Mormon wives.65
Upon his return home, General William Worth, one of the heroes of the war, presented Sarah with a life-size, three-quarter-length portrait of Hernán Cortés. Worth claimed he had a colonial painting copied for the First Lady, but scholarship on the Cortés portrait makes clear that it was no 1840s copy. In other words, Worth presented Sarah Polk with a valuable and most likely looted colonial portrait. The First Lady was happy to offer a place in her home to the painting, “trusting it may prove an agreeable incident in the brilliant retrospect of the last four years.” Journalists later noted how appropriate it was for General Worth, “one of the conquerors of a party of Mexico,” to present a picture of Cortés, “the original conqueror of that great and beautiful country, to Mrs. Polk; for it was during Mr. Polk’s administration that this vast and valuable territory was gained for the United States.”66
Sarah proudly hung the portrait in a state parlor in the White House, where guests might easily contemplate the comparison between her husband and the man who conquered the Aztec Empire. For the rest of her life the painting occupied a place of honor in her home. It remains on display in the James K. Polk Ancestral Home, in Columbia, Tennessee, looted testimony to the role of the Polks in the course of America’s Manifest Destiny.67