I shall be glad to be on exterior terms of personal intercourse with him….to go thro’ the hypocritical ceremony of shaking hands with him, Polk, with that fine manly Lady his wife, if possible, on all occasions to show that I respect and admire her. I mean to be revenged on [the] Pres[ident].
—CHARLES INGERSOLL TO JAMES BUCHANAN, June 16, 1847
BEFORE THE WAR ENDED, James was already counting “the weeks and days until his term expires.” Given Whig control of the House of Representatives, and sectional tensions produced by northern support of a proviso submitted by Pennsylvania Democrat David Wilmot to ban slavery from any territory taken from Mexico, who could blame the president for fantasizing about his future life in the Grundy mansion in Nashville? Unfortunately, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought little improvement to either James’s health or Sarah’s workload.1
The final year of the Polk presidency was fraught with political dissent. With Mexico secured, Congress needed to determine the status of slavery in the new territories. But each discussion seemed to heighten tensions between the South and the North. And James’s refusal to run for reelection left the Democratic Party in disarray. None of the candidates hoping for the 1848 nomination stood a chance of beating the Whig candidate, General Zachary Taylor. Taylor was not only the savior of the Battle of Buena Vista, the most celebrated victory of the entire war, he was also a political outsider. Moreover, he had issued no statements on any important political issues, so voters could imagine him any way they wished, and his ownership of a Louisiana cotton plantation and eighty-one slaves reassured southerners that he would never interfere with their right to bring their human property into new territories. Taylor was the perfect candidate for a nation fracturing over slavery.2
James always asserted that the question of slavery was peripheral to the war, but the status of slavery in the new territories was a matter of profound significance not only to the slaves themselves, but also to the balance of power between the North and South. The public knew that the Polks were slaveholders, of course, but James pretended to a disinterest in the expansion of slavery that was belied by his actions. Unbeknownst to the public, he began secretly purchasing slave children to labor on the plantation as soon as he got into office.
Or rather, Sarah and her brother purchased them. A president of the United States could not purchase slaves while in office without jeopardizing his reputation in the North. While James was running for office, his good friend Gideon Pillow circulated a letter insisting that James never bought slaves unless doing so would unite a family through the purchase of an enslaved husband’s wife, an enslaved wife’s husband, or the child of an enslaved parent. And indeed Sarah had at times insisted that James make such acquisitions for Childress family slaves.3
But when it came to the plantation, James’s priorities could not have been more different; his goal was to make a profit, and his purchases were of a sort that would particularly horrify the public. James specified that he wanted young people for his plantation, between the ages of twelve and twenty-one, although he had no scruples about buying children as young as ten or eleven. Dafney, purchased at age ten, was married off at age twelve to Giles, who was himself only thirteen when he was bought by James. All of these young people at one point or another before arriving at the Polk Plantation had been ripped away from their families. Family reunification was hardly a priority for James and Sarah Polk when it came to cotton production.4
James employed John Childress to help him acquire human property for the plantation, with Sarah as mediator. When John made a purchase, it sometimes was Sarah who gave him the money. John then conveyed the money and specification to a third man. Sarah’s brother wrote her in July 1846 to inform her that he had “drawn upon” James “for the amount of money he wanted me to invest in property for him.” John’s purchase at the president’s request and with his money was “a boy about 14 yrs old of yellow complexion, for $450. A good sized plow boy and seems to be well disposed.” When Sarah traveled to Tennessee earlier that spring, she repaid her brother for the purchase of several slaves, including “a girl in her fourteenth year, of good size, appearance & of sprighty active habits,” whom John stated would “be much more valuable to you” than the “boy” John traded away. Sarah helped purchase two thirteen-year-old girls that year. One of them, Jane, later remembered that she was just “a girl half grown” when she arrived at the Polk Plantation.5
What John left unsaid was that the reason a “sprighty” thirteen-year-old girl like Jane was more valuable than a healthy boy was because the girl was, or would soon be, old enough to bear children. Not that he needed to tell the Polks this. When Jane arrived at the plantation she noted that eighteen-year-old Dafney, purchased only six years before, already had “a large family of children” with Giles. Jane followed in her footsteps, marrying a Polk Plantation slave and giving birth to at least four children over the next decade. As Thomas Jefferson himself noted less than thirty years earlier, “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm,” because “what she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.”6
The annexation of Texas dramatically increased the value of slave property; it meant new opportunities for planting cotton, a crop that depended on slave labor. As a result, enslaved people sold for 30 percent more in 1846 than they had before James entered office. In 1849 the Polks were no longer in debt; indeed, they were finally on the way to becoming rich. Having finally secured his finances, James could tune out the sectional discord and look forward to leaving office. But his denials of further political ambition failed to convince the Democrats who begged him to run for a second term. A highly secretive man who confided only in his wife, and frequently misled members of his own party, James Polk made many more enemies than friends during his presidency.7
As always, it was up to Sarah to repair these relationships. Some of her efforts were successful. Pennsylvania Democrat Charles Ingersoll was no friend of the president’s: he referred to James as “stupid” and “selfish” in private correspondence with James Buchanan, and vowed to “be revenged” on him. Yet he was willing to “go thro’ the hypocritical ceremony of shaking hands” with James in order to show his admiration and respect for “that fine manly Lady his wife.”8
But the opportunities for anyone to shake hands with James were limited by his declining health. He rarely felt well for more than a day at a time. He suffered from recurrent gastrointestinal disorders, and was completely worn out by the end of the day. He spent most of the summer of 1848 in bed, too sick to attend to anything more than the most important work.9
It was left to the “fine manly Lady his wife” to host their receptions. Sarah canceled the two weekly soirees she had added for the duration of the war, yet because men were now used to talking to her rather than her husband, her cares hardly abated. In June the vice president reported that Sarah was present at a reception by herself, and “the President was invisible, having chills & fever. Mrs. Polk looked well. She has resolved on being one half in eclipse for the rest of this Summer, and will receive only one evening in the week.” A month later he again stopped by the White House, intending to “present” two rising young men “to Mrs. Polk,” but was disappointed to learn she was unavailable, having “discontinued receptions except on Tuesdays.” The three men had to content themselves with a visit to James’s study, which Dallas called a “pis aller,” or last resort, since James was “under the weather in health and spirits.”10
THE SUMMER OF 1848 was not an ideal time for James to fall sick. The Polk presidency left the nation immensely larger, and richer, than it had been when Sarah and James arrived in Washington, but also badly fractured over the issue of slavery. The Wilmot Proviso to ban slavery from any territory taken from Mexico passed the House of Representatives, where northerners outnumbered southerners, but could not get through the Senate, where southerners held the majority. The Democratic Party fractured over the proviso, and was unable to find a candidate that appealed to both northern and southern Democrats. When Lewis Cass of Michigan emerged from the party’s nominating convention in June, James committed to supporting him. But northern Democrats opposed to slavery joined with Liberty Party men to support the nomination of Martin Van Buren and a new Free Soil Party. James needed the party faithful to rally around Cass. Sarah’s close friend Aaron Brown rose to the challenge, but Gideon Pillow declined, blaming an ankle wound received during the war.11
Nor was the election the only political issue requiring finesse. A divided Congress was faced with establishing territorial governments, and the status of slavery, in California, Oregon, and New Mexico. On July 27 they passed a bill organizing all three territories, but outlawing slavery in only one, Oregon, leaving the issue in California and New Mexico to the Supreme Court, which seemed likely to uphold the rights of southerners, who had already moved slaves into those territories. James signed the bill, but made his allegiance with southerners clear by affirming his view that slavery was legal south of the Missouri Compromise line of thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes, including southern California.12
Sarah sent James to bathe in the famous mineral waters of Bedford Springs in an attempt to repair his health, but was herself too busy hostessing to join him. He found that the waters of the springs soothed his chronic intestinal complaints. But the separation from Sarah was excruciating, and almost immediately after leaving he declared himself “impatient” to get back to Washington. He dutifully reported on all the “highly respectable and fashionable people” at Bedford Springs, and attended a ball, as Sarah played hostess at the White House. Her brother John chastised her for not writing more frequently; she had been “so chary of letters recently” that no one in the family had the slightest idea what she was up to. This was a bit much coming from the brother who had failed to invite her to his own wedding.13
Sarah continued to filter the news for James, so it’s very likely she was aware of the July convention in Seneca Falls, New York, “to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” The demand of assembled women for political rights was mentioned in at least one of the Washington, D.C., papers Sarah was in the custom of reading. But the claims by some recent historians that Sarah “encouraged James to address the group” are unfounded. There is no evidence that Sarah or James took an interest in the events in upstate New York.14
The fine manly lady in the White House said very little publicly about women’s rights. Like most Americans, she opposed the idea of women voting. She was a southern Democrat, after all. Women’s rights were hardly more popular with southern Democrats than was abolitionism. But just because Sarah wasn’t at Seneca Falls doesn’t mean her views on women fully conformed to those of her section and party. During her years in public life she had met and corresponded with a variety of powerful women who hoped to uplift women by promoting their authority in the domestic sphere. Catharine Beecher imagined her a partner in expanding women’s power. The editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, Sarah Josepha Hale, sent poetry. Another leading exponent of the doctrine of separate spheres, Lydia Sigourney, sent Sarah a volume of her Illustrated Poems after Sarah invited her to the White House. The editor and dime novel author Ann Stephens sent her the Cabinet of American Literature.15
And as a First Lady who took pride in reading the books sent to her, Sarah was exposed to some of the most radical currents of the day, including the explosion of print culture in the 1840s devoted to sex and reproduction. In 1845, a well-known lecturer on birth control asked her to endorse a revised edition of his best-selling volume Womanhood, a “valuable female work of some repute” that included information about female sexual anatomy, pregnancy, birth, and miscarriage. It also offered advice about birth control (much of it wrong), and for close readers, how to induce abortion with the use of botanicals (tansy, rue, pennyroyal, motherwort) that had long histories as abortifacients.16
Sarah did not endorse the volume, but she clearly supported less radical reforms to women’s economic status. When a justice from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court came to dinner near the close of the Polk presidency, he was thrilled to hear the First Lady express her support for his recent decision in favor of expanded property rights for women. Sarah asked him to send her a copy of the full opinion. The decision in question, McCullough’s Appeal, 12 Pa. 197, was far from radical. It offered legal justification for ignoring previous laws that prevented widows from remarrying and keeping property left to them by their husbands.17
But Justice Ellis Lewis was so pleased by Sarah’s embrace of his position that he sent her, in addition to the decision, a letter he had published in favor of the rights of women. Under the heading “The Liberty of the Press—The Writ of Habeas Corpus—and the Rights of Women: The trinity in the creed of freedom throughout the civilized world,” Ellis bemoaned the situation of America’s women. “By marriage, the civil existence of woman is almost extinguished. Her personal property becomes the absolute property of her husband. Her real estate becomes substantially his for life; her rights of action are also his if he choose to reduce them into possession.” Nor was this all. “The exclusion of females from offices which they might fill with propriety, and from all profitable employments, the reduction of their wages to a pittance insufficient to sustain life, and the neglect of their education” were “evils as alarming in their influence upon the welfare of society” as they were unjust. He asked that Sarah consider the essay a “ ‘Valentine’ to the Ladies in general, and to yourself in particular as standing at the head of them.” Clearly he hoped that she agreed with the editors of a popular women’s magazine that his letter made him “Woman’s Champion.”18
Judge Lewis considered Sarah a friend of women’s rights. Given her experiences as First Lady, the many appeals made to her by poor and suffering women, and her correspondence with Catharine Beecher, she was probably sensitive to these issues. James certainly was. He had often seen “mothers dispose of their property among their children, and afterwards become dependent on them,” with “unpleasant” results. When his sister Lydia was widowed he advised her to keep her portion of her estate under her “exclusive control.” A year and a half later, he reiterated that were he in his sister’s place, “I would retain my own property.”19
How Sarah responded to Justice Lewis’s tribute to women’s rights is impossible to know. Like the vast majority of her correspondence, any thank-you note has been lost to posterity. What’s clear is that neither James nor Sarah was willing to advocate in public for the companionate marriage that sustained them and the Polk presidency, let alone to go further and push for expanded rights for women. Sarah had deliberately cultivated a deferential persona in order to connect herself to Andrew Jackson and the traditional values of piety, simplicity, and patriarchy, which Democrats held dear. Furthermore, she had made that patriarchal image work for her, providing cover for outsized political power that was not nearly as deferential as it appeared. She didn’t need to ask anyone for women’s rights.
CHARLES INGERSOLL never was revenged on James, although he was one of many northern Democrats to reject his party’s candidate in 1848 out of disgust over the seeming proslavery course of Manifest Destiny under the Polk administration. Although Lewis Cass never served in the Polk administration, Ingersoll, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, admitted voting against him, because “no one knew better than he what a necessary thing it was to the country that this administration should not be continued.” When Elizabeth Blair Lee, a committed Democrat, met Ingersoll after Zachary Taylor’s 1848 victory was confirmed, she “laughed at him for turning Whig. After a good deal of fun & Merriment, I told him I heard he voted the Whig ticket openly. ‘I swear I didn’t,’ he said laughing all the time. ‘I am the perfectest Democrat in the city & am just buying a pair of new gloves to go see Mrs. Polk & condole.’ ”20
Not long thereafter Sarah took a final short trip without her husband. Her destination was New York City, where she planned to buy furniture for Polk Place. She took her two resident nieces with her, and left hostess duties in the hands of Knox’s wife, Augusta, who met visitors in the parlor along with the president. James was supportive of Sarah’s trip. “As you leave home so seldom I hope you will take full time for your visit.” But he also expected daily letters, and fretted when they didn’t arrive. He wasn’t used to being alone. When a missing letter finally arrived, several days later than James expected, he responded with what he described as a “woman’s letter”—chatty, with a postscript full of gossip. His relief was palpable.21
The final months of the Polk presidency were difficult ones for Sarah. Her mother’s mental state continued to be a concern. Sarah’s faithful correspondent Joanna, who was valiantly struggling to follow her aunt’s habit of daily reading, continued to ask her grandmother if she had a message for Sarah, “but she never has any.” And the house was weighing on her. Looking to the future, Sarah purchased her first cookbook, Mrs. A. L. Webster’s Improved Housewife. It was finally time to learn how to make her own butter.22
But Polk Place was still under construction. This despite the daily visits of Vernon Stevenson, who even checked on the house on a Sunday, “for which sin I claim your prayers,” he wrote Sarah. The blame lay with an epidemic of cholera, a highly contagious waterborne disease that was ravaging cities throughout the Southeast. “The cholera excitement…has taken off one or two workmen,” Stevenson wrote Sarah, and “scared off some others.” Her niece also warned them that “the cholera is very bad in Nashville” and that she and James should plan on staying in Murfreesboro “with us untill it has abated.”23
Not that Murfreesboro was safe from the “alarm & excitement in regard to the cholera.” Sarah’s sister Susan was forcing her family to drink ginger-pepper-brandy tea for its “anti-cholera” properties, and both she and their brother John were worried about their mother, who was unwell from “this influenza that is prevailing.”24
John’s family was also doing poorly; his teenage daughter Mary wrote her aunt a guilt-inducing missive that was unlikely to make Sarah want to leave Washington. “After writing to you several times and receiving no answer, I concluded that you had forgotten me….You know it is discouraging for one that dislikes to write to receive no response….We have had some severe attacks of the cholera….Ma and I have been very sick.” The younger children, including seven-year-old Bettie, and a baby named Martha, were also sick. There was talk of Elizabeth moving in with one of her children, but seeing how “she could not bear the noise of children and there are at each of her children’s houses large families,” they all feared “such a life would not suit her.”25
The very young and very old, as well as individuals who were sick and weak to begin with, were most likely to succumb to cholera. The Childresses were fortunate that they lost only one child, baby Martha, before the epidemic subsided. The rest of the family, including young Bettie, survived. Remarkably enough, Elizabeth Childress survived as well. By March 1849 she was well enough that she was “very busy, having her yard and garden put in order.” Susan’s daughter Sarah Rucker wrote Sarah “that these preparations were for you.” When the Childresses learned that the Polks were considering taking a meandering tour through the cities of the South on the way home, family members again raised concerns about cholera. New Orleans was believed to be particularly susceptible to the disease. Elizabeth Childress, who for months had refused to send any message to Sarah or James, at last felt the need to do so. She was “much distressed at the thought of your going so near the cholera,” she wrote via Joanna, but that “if any body escapes” she looked forward to taking care of them.26
WHILE THE CHILDRESSES STRUGGLED with cholera, and Sarah planned their route to Tennessee from Washington, the nation began the process of saying goodbye to the First Lady. But the success of her public persona as a pious, humble public servant left little room for celebrating, or even acknowledging, that Sarah Childress Polk was also a “fine manly Lady” and political actor.
Consider the profile of the outgoing First Lady published in Sartain’s Union Magazine. Author Mary Andrews Denison likely had the best of intentions when she set out to write about the outgoing First Lady. Quite likely she planned on conducting research, or at least finding out the basic facts of Polk’s early life. But she was a busy woman, a married twenty-four-year-old journalist who was on her way to wealth and fame as the author of eighty potboiler dime novels that would eventually sell more than a million copies. Her first dime novel, Edna Etherill, the Boston Seamstress, was published when she was only twenty-one.
“Mrs. Polk, though as far removed as possible from what would be called a politician, has yet taken pains to make herself well informed on public affairs,” Denison declared. “One who knows her intimately says, there are not twenty days in a year, that she does not spend a certain time each day, in reading the leading public journals—not those filled with trashy, ‘fashionable’ literature, but the solid productions of sterner intellects….Though perfectly acquainted with politics, yet with a rare judgment, and a comprehension of womanly delicacy, she seldom makes them a subject for conversation.”27
It was inevitable that Denison would get some things wrong. Sarah was far from an open book. Certain elements of her family background, as we’ve seen, were opaque. Denison’s assertion in the first sentence of the profile that Sarah was born in Buckingham, Virginia, may have originated from the pen of an earlier author. Her claim that Sarah “had the misfortune, in early life, to lose her mother” is harder to justify, given that Sarah’s mother was still very much alive, and an ongoing source of anxiety for her three children. Just as perplexing was the statement that “in the tender years of childhood” she “was much of the time away from home….Thrown, to some extent, upon her own resources, with no mother’s guiding hand or approving smile, she early displayed an independence of mind, and a strength of will, joined to remarkable perseverance, which few acquire until the ripeness of middle age.” Nor was it correct that Sarah avoided “fashionable literature.” Sarah was not only an early subscriber to the preeminent fashionable magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, but she valued the magazine highly enough to send it, along with other “Ladys newspapers,” to her nieces back in Tennessee when she was done reading them.28
Most likely Mrs. C. W. Denison embarked on the hard work of biography in the same spirit as the patriotic chroniclers of America’s founding generation. Parson Mason Locke Weems, who wrote the very first biography of George Washington, including the completely fabricated story of young George chopping down the cherry tree, was said to write “without fear and without research.” Sarah Childress Polk, Denison believed, was just as worthy of emulation. “As a wife, a benefactress, a friend, she is a model for every woman to imitate, whether of exalted or lowly estate.” And as a novelist, Denison had a clear sense of what such a woman should be. Denison would become famous for imagining “purer, sweeter, and nobler” women than “are often found in real life.” The Sarah Polk whom she profiled was just as pure and as sweet as any of the heroines in her novels. “There is a perfection in her character” that revealed itself in her “eminent piety, and the purity of her life and conversation,” in the “sweetness of her countenance…the affectionate warmth of her reception,” and the “ease in her deportment” even when “richly and most becomingly dressed.” First Lady Sarah Polk was nothing less than “a sweet exemplification of lowliness.” By this she meant that the First Lady was modest, delicate, and retiring, in short, “the furthest thing from a politician.”29
Except when her husband’s career required her to be political. For what better evidence of a woman’s lowliness, in the best sense of the word, than her commitment to do everything in her power to advance her husband? Sarah was willing to make herself “familiar with much that would have burdened others” because she loved her husband. “Whatever was identified with the public career of her husband…interested her,” Denison asserted, and offered as evidence of her lowliness a story that would be difficult to interpret as anything other than political. “While Mr. Polk resided in Tennessee, a story was put in circulation, calculated to injure his reputation as a public man. He was, at the time of which we speak, several hundred miles away from home.” An editor “repaired to Mrs. Polk, and made known the circumstances to her. She instantly led him into her husband’s private office, and selecting different journals and manuscripts, referred immediately to the page and paragraph containing proofs of her husband’s non-participation in the plot imputed to him. These were soon published to the world.” When James “accidentally met with a paper, containing a complete refutation of the falsehood,” he exclaimed “in extreme, but delighted surprise, ‘Why! This is indeed singular—who could have done it? No one but Sarah knew so intimately my private affairs.’ ” This is a nearly accurate rendering of Sarah’s work on James’s campaigns, with the important caveat that James would hardly have been surprised at Sarah’s actions on his behalf because, more often than not, he was the one directing her.30
But with the exception of politics practiced on behalf of one’s husband, First Lady Sarah Polk “was as retiring, as gentle, as though the public eye had never scanned her conduct, and the public tongue never sounded her praise.” If the aim of Denison’s portrait was not verisimilitude but instruction, then a tragic childhood was a fitting start for our heroine. And “lowliness” rather than political acumen was an appropriate summation of her time in the White House. Yet on both accounts Denison was wrong. One can blame Denison for her mistakes, but it was Sarah’s own efforts that allowed the public to remember her as “a sweet exemplification of lowliness” rather than the “fine manly Lady” she actually was.31
THE FINAL WEEKS in the White House were bittersweet for the First Lady. James had a tremendous amount of last-minute legislation to deal with, including how to admit California as a state without alienating either the North or the South, and whether to establish a Department of the Interior. All of which left him completely “worn down” with “excessive fatigue” each night. And they were turning over the White House to a Whig general whom James had openly antagonized. As thousands of Americans left the cities of the eastern seaboard in search of gold in California, Sarah was consumed with the minutiae of their move and the drama of handing over the White House to new occupants. She likely never heard that her fame had taken on hemispheric proportions. Gold Rush travelers reported seeing her likeness hanging on the wall of the alcalde’s office in Gorgona, Panama, in a room decorated with four lithographs, three biblical “Marys,” and the fourth, “wonderful to behold…still another Mary—a black-haired, red cheeked, staring young woman in a flaming red dress and ermine tippets, a pink rose in her hand, and underneath, the inscription: MARY, WIFE OF JAMES K. POLK, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!” The only realistic aspect of the image was the hair: Sarah’s was still jet black at age forty-five. Time had indeed “dealt kindly” with Mrs. Polk.32
Washington etiquette helped with the transition of power. President-Elect Taylor called on James, and a few days later Sarah threw a White House dinner party, her last, for the incoming president. Leading figures in each party, the cabinet, and other luminaries were invited. Diplomatically seating herself between Taylor and his defeated Democratic opponent, Lewis Cass, she managed her forty guests in such a manner that “not the slightest allusion was made to any political subject.” James was pleased and also somewhat surprised that “the whole company seemed to enjoy themselves.”33
Three days later, James and Sarah said goodbye to the congregation at the First Presbyterian Church, shaking hands with their fellow parishioners. At 3 a.m. the morning after the inauguration they left Washington by steamboat. Their party included James’s enslaved servants Elias and Henry, Henry’s enslaved wife, Millie, the Polks’ White House steward, Henry Bowman, assorted Tennessee friends, and Sarah’s two nieces, Sarah Polk Rucker and Virginia Hays, who took advantage of their final evening in Washington to attend Taylor’s inaugural ball without the escort of their uncle or aunt. James was optimistic. He felt “sure I shall be a happier man in my retirement than I have been during the four years.”34
But Sarah kept her thoughts to herself. James’s health was a concern, and she had failed to see the construction of Polk Place completed in time for their arrival. The future was unclear. What would she do in Nashville besides keep up her palatial new mansion? Everything at Polk Place was designed to impress. She purchased the fanciest cooking stove available, complete with a copper boiler of the very latest design. It was a fitting place to try out that new cookbook.35
IN DECEMBER 1848, the House of Representatives voted on the Wilmot Proviso for a third time, and for the third time passed it on a strictly sectional vote. James made it clear he would veto the bill if it passed the Senate. Northerners were outraged at his proslavery bias. But it was southerners who began talking openly about secession as a legitimate recourse against northern “interference” with their property rights.36
Yet the outgoing First Lady and her husband each felt satisfied with their accomplishments. Sarah was showered with praise. The March 1849 issue of Peterson’s Ladies National Magazine, a cheaper competitor to Godey’s Lady’s Book, offered a six-stanza poem in tribute to “To Mrs. James K. Polk.” It honored Sarah as “some bright dame of ancient Rome, Modest, yet all a queen should be,” and suggested that it was easy to forget she was “the highest in the land” because she was “all that was lovely, meek and good.” The author, Ann Stephens, had long admired Sarah. Now she admitted that she “half forgot thy state, in love of thy bright womanhood.”37
Newspapers universally praised Sarah’s “excellent example and devoted character,” asserting that “she has pursued a course and exerted an influence that will make her memory dear to the hearts of Christian people everywhere.” No one seemed to doubt that, as one published letter put it, “in full view of the nation” Sarah illustrated the “power of true piety in a manner worthy of all praise and of imitation….She leaves the capital universally esteemed. Mrs. James K. Polk is a true Christian, and in the highest sense, a lady.”38
A lady, indeed; and in the highest sense. Letter writers from around the country, “in common with thousands of others,” assured her of their “regard & esteem.” They hoped that her retirement would be sweetened by knowing “how highly the Christian public appreciate the example you have been enabled to set, and its happy influence, not only at the Seat of Government, but throughout the land. It is a great thing for a people to see the Lord’s day, and the Lord’s house habitually honored…and the wife of a Chief Magistrate taking occasion to show, both in public and private, that she is not ‘ashamed of Jesus,’ but rather glories in His name.” By “sustaining the dignity & honor of her high position,” an admirer from Boston wrote to James, “yr most excellent lady…has filld the measure of her countrys house, in her appropriate sphere, by filling the full measure of the character of an American Woman.”39
James had always garnered less affection than his wife, and the close of his presidency was no exception. Perhaps this made him vulnerable to the appeal of a final valedictory tour. Sarah had missed the New England tour the summer before. She hadn’t seen the crowds that greeted him, or the affectionate addresses of speakers in a region that had been unrelentingly hostile to his administration. A southern tour could be a companion piece, one that would allow Sarah to witness and participate in his public acclaim. So he willingly acceded to a circuitous route home with stops at over a dozen southern cities, providing him maximum exposure to the public, a trip that, conveniently, would be paid for by his hosts along the way.
Sarah may also have relished a final moment in the spotlight. And given that their home was still under construction, they were in no great hurry to return to Nashville. They met crowds of well-wishers in Fredericksburg, Richmond, Petersburg, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, Macon, Montgomery, Mobile, and smaller towns along the way. There were bands playing patriotic music (but never on Sunday), including “Hail to the Chief,” banners and fireworks, speeches about Manifest Destiny, and lovely receptions in hotels and ballrooms. “Universal approbation” for Sarah’s “womanly and sensible course” as First Lady contributed to the “tributes of respect” at every stop. The couple were fêted in every town along the route, just as Andrew Jackson had been twelve years earlier.40
But the schedule was grueling. Sarah was so tired in Macon that she skipped the grand ball held in their honor. The following day they were caught in a rainstorm, attended a banquet with four hundred guests, and were up until two in the morning at yet another grand ball. When they reached Montgomery, James was visibly unwell, with a disturbing cough. The public wanted their president. Assembled throngs at every stop demanded that James speak, and he “felt it was right to do so.” But it was becoming abundantly clear to Sarah that this trip had been a mistake. She tried to cut his addresses short because she couldn’t shake the “feeling” that his “life was at stake.”41
That feeling became more pronounced when a passenger on their steamship down the Alabama River died of cholera. Reports circulated that cholera was rampant in New Orleans as well. When they reached the Crescent City the local arrangements committee assured them that the cholera reports were overblown and that the town was perfectly safe. James agreed to attend a dinner in their honor, but Sarah took him home early. She wanted to leave the city immediately, but James’s physician told her that while it would be fine for her to flee the city, James could not do so “without seeming to undervalue the honors the city has been arranging for him.” Ignoring the recommendations of both doctor and local arrangements committee, she asked for immediate transportation to Nashville. The committee in charge of James’s reception insisted there was none available until the day originally planned for their departure. The people of New Orleans demanded their allotted time with the president.42
But Sarah didn’t care. Ignoring protocol, she thanked the committee and organized alternative transport on a steamer upriver to Memphis. After a passenger on that boat died of cholera near Baton Rouge, she refused to allow James to disembark in Natchez, “much to the disappointment of the people of that city.” By the time they reached Memphis, three more passengers had died, and James was very weak. When Millie was diagnosed with cholera the following day, the entire Polk party was thrown into disarray. Fortunately, her case was a mild one.43
A month after leaving Washington they finally arrived in Nashville. Although a doctor summoned to examine the president reported him free of cholera, he was far from well. After bearing witness to James’s “feebleness,” the Nashville Union reported that “the most intense anxiety for his health has pervaded the city.” An old friend who met with the Polks soon after they returned to Nashville noted that “Mrs. Polk looked as natural as life, with scarce a perceptible change in the four years of absence. But Mr. Polk had changed until I scarcely knew him. From a pure black, his hair had become perfectly white. It did not change to a silver gray, but to a milk white….He looked care-worn and tired.” The change in circumstance struck the friend as poignant. “When he left for Washington, his escorts were thousands,” he noted. “Now that his power and patronage is gone, his faithful wife alone remains by his side, and doubtless he is glad they are gone.”44
AFTER A BRIEF VISIT to their unfinished home, James and Sarah spent ten recuperative days with family in Columbia, followed by a visit of similar length to Sarah’s family in Murfreesboro. They welcomed sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews. They allowed their mothers to fuss over them. And they met with well-wishers, including a memorable visit from the teachers and students of the Columbia Female Institute, who paid a call on the couple at James’s mother’s house not long after they arrived. Aaron Brown’s daughter, a student at the school, offered a “beautiful complementary address to Mrs. Polk,” and afterward Sarah met and shook hands with each of the two hundred visitors.45 Near the end of April they finally returned to Nashville. Polk Place, still under construction, was a scene “of great disorder and confusion.” Their steward, Henry Bowman, had gone directly to Nashville after their arrival in Tennessee, and made the most of the three weeks before James and Sarah joined him, getting carpets put down, furniture unpacked, and two or three rooms made habitable so that the Polks could move in. But “numerous boxes of furniture, books, groceries, and other articles forwarded from New York, New Orleans, and Columbia, Tennessee, were piled up in the halls and rooms.” Elias, Henry, Millie, and some of their other enslaved people settled into wood-framed quarters behind the main building. James and Sarah were overjoyed to be in their new home at last. To the degree possible given the ongoing renovation, “the parlors were thrown open” as they received “old and new friends.”46
Late spring was beautiful, and they passed an exceedingly pleasant month together in their new home, visiting with friends, organizing furniture, hanging paintings, and overseeing enslaved workers installing trees and shrubs in the unfinished landscape of the generous grounds. Sarah and James discussed finally visiting Europe. Neither had ever left the country, but travel writing in Godey’s Lady’s Book, as well as letters from friends George and Elizabeth Bancroft in England, where George was serving as minister to the Court of St. James’s, piqued Sarah’s interest. They started planning a trip for the following year.47
And they discussed James’s historical legacy. With a Whig in the White House, he fretted about the future of his accomplishments. It was easy for him “to foresee, that they will, upon some subjects widely depart from” the policies he had successfully pursued, “and that to that extent, the administration must be unsuccessful, if not disastrous to those who conduct it, and to the party in power.” It seemed clear to James that an accurate recording of the previous four years was essential to the preservation of his legacy, and that such a recording was unlikely to happen without his intervention. He could not let the Whigs write the history of the Polk presidency.
In early May 1849, James wrote his former secretary of war, William Marcy, about “the great importance, of having presented to the country, a truthful and reliable history of the remarkable events which were crowded into my Presidential term, and especially of the war….Bancroft could do it well,” he admitted. “I had thought of writing to him, and calling his attention to the subject.” But Marcy’s “knowledge of facts, and the considerations, upon which we acted, especially after Mr. B. retired from the Cabinet, and more particularly as relates to the war, would be more extensive and minute than his could be.” Would Marcy himself undertake the work? On Sarah’s behalf, James invited William and Cornelia Marcy to Polk Place for an extended visit. They could discuss it further then.48
Visitors reported seeing James in his garden that May, behind the great iron fence that enclosed the property, with obvious energy and “erect bearing” that “gave promise of long life.” But just a month after they settled into their new home, cholera returned to Nashville. James determined that they would be safer in the country, and insisted that they leave town. Sunday, June 3, the day before their intended departure, Sarah came downstairs to find James lying on a sofa. He told her he would be unable to attend church with her. She responded, “Well, I will go by myself. You cannot always be with me.” But he asked her to stay. “Sarah, I do not want you to go. I am too unwell.” He never got up again. Sarah sat by his bedside, so consumed with his illness that she didn’t notice that their enslaved cook, Matilda, also developed cholera and soon died. A friend sent his own cook to Polk Place and hired a different cook for himself. James’s mother arrived, along with other Polk relatives. Sarah failed to notice anything but that her husband was dying.49
Healthy adults had a good chance of surviving cholera in 1849. But James’s constitution was never strong. Repeated bouts of malaria, as well as chronic diarrhea, had plagued him his entire adult life, and the incessant work and stress of his presidency left him gravely compromised in a struggle with deadly bacteria. His final decline was swift. During a moment of lucidity he attempted to talk to Sarah about their finances. He assured her that “he had so settled the property that it could not be taken from her; that the plantation in Mississippi would support her.” Dolley Madison’s poverty late in life had affected him deeply. He promised her that Dolley’s experience would never be her own, that “his wife should be placed beyond the need of public or private beneficence.” Sarah asked him not to speak about it, but he insisted.50
When the end was near he made an unexpected and upsetting request. He asked Sarah to call a minister of the Methodist Church to his bedside so that he could be baptized. Jane Polk called her own Presbyterian pastor to try to convince her son to reconsider. Surely he would join the Presbyterian Church, the church that had sustained the women in his life, the church where he had worshipped most Sundays his entire life. He refused, and revealed that back when he was governor he had determined that “when he did embrace Christianity” it would be as a Methodist. Neither Mother Jane nor Sarah had known.
That James had kept such a secret from Sarah must have cut her deeply. He was an intensely secretive man, but Sarah believed she was privy to his secrets. In the presence of Mother Jane, and Sarah, and at least one Presbyterian minister, he was baptized a Methodist. And in the presence of Mother Jane, and Sarah, and at least one friend, he died, less than two weeks after falling ill. The funeral sermon was preached in the Methodist church, as he requested.51
James K. Polk, the youngest man to become president, now had the distinction of being the youngest to die. The news stunned Washington. Elizabeth Blair Lee met with friends who were “not very tender of Mr. Polk.” She, for one, felt “sorry” for Sarah, whom she knew to be devoted to James. But as for James, she expected “few will mourn deeply.”52
The depth of Sarah’s bereavement defies easy description. Partners in both work and love, she and James had shared a harmonious life together for twenty-five years, more than half her life. Because they spent so much time together, because James had no close male friends, because they had so long lived at a distance from relatives, and because they were childless, they were more dependent upon each other for emotional solace than most couples at their stage of life. James admitted that Sarah knew his “private affairs” better than anyone else. Sarah felt the same way about James. He was just fifty-three years old. They should have had at least another decade together. She was a widow at age forty-five, and saw no path forward, no purpose for continuing. All she could see was that her “life was then a blank.”53
ALTHOUGH THE EX-PRESIDENT’S official cause of death was listed as “complicated,” rather than “cholera,” city authorities insisted on his rapid burial in the Nashville City Cemetery outside of town, along with the rest of Nashville’s cholera victims. Matilda, the Polk’s cook, had been interred in the cemetery’s “negro ground” four days earlier. Sarah arranged for a funeral at the Methodist church that Polk had joined on his deathbed, listened as the minister praised his accomplishments and great “moral” character, and then laid him to rest not, as he wished, at home, but in a fine walnut coffin in Felix Grundy’s family plot, thanks to Grundy’s son-in-law, who hastily found space for the ex-president.
The grieving widow spent the following eleven months trying to bring his body back home, where it belonged. She put William Strickland, the prominent Philadelphia architect who designed the Tennessee capitol building, in charge of constructing a sufficiently monumental edifice to serve as James’s final resting place. Strickland created an imposing marble monument shaped like a temple, surrounding James’s four-foot-tall tomb. An epithet in his honor covered three sides of the tomb. The fourth side was left blank, reserved for Sarah. By the time James’s remains were finally transferred to Polk Place, on May 22, 1850, the monument was complete.54
IT APPEARED to Elizabeth Childress that her daughter was all too ready to take her place by James’s side. Sarah had nursed her mother after Joel Childress’s sudden death in 1819, willingly leaving Salem Academy and her education behind. Now it was her mother’s turn. Hoping to bring Sarah back from her grief, she made a radical suggestion. What if Sarah raised her little grandniece, Sarah Polk Jetton, whom everyone called Sallie? Sarah had been close to Sallie’s mother, Mary Childress Jetton, who had been left an orphan when Sarah’s elder brother Anderson and his wife both died. Mary looked to her aunt Sarah for advice on both large and small matters, and Sarah sent her gifts.55
But Mary died in childbirth, leaving Elizabeth with the care of a motherless newborn great-granddaughter. Sarah had been in Washington at the time of Sallie’s birth and Mary’s death, but heard about her regularly from family members. In the summer of 1848, Sarah Rucker wrote her aunt, “I saw little Sally Jetton a short time since, you have no idea how much she has grown, she is very pretty and the greatest fidget I ever saw.” It was Mary’s dying wish that the First Lady might have a hand in the upbringing of her little namesake. Elizabeth hoped that “the sunny presence of childhood might enliven the then desolate home.”56
Sarah agreed to allow Sallie into her home. Sallie was three when she was delivered to Polk Place, just a few months after James’s death, and one imagines quite terrified by the scene that greeted her. The great marble pillars in front of the house were draped with black, and her aunt Sarah was still “inconsolable in her grief.” Newspapers, unanimous in their sympathy because “even her late husband’s political enemies speak of her as being a most worthy and estimable woman,” reported that Sarah had “almost entirely secluded herself from society.”57
Not that America had forgotten about her. Evidence that her star still shone brightly is suggested by the offerings at Mathew Brady’s Daguerreian Gallery in New York City. Only 10 of the 107 portraits of “distinguished persons” on exhibit at Brady’s in the summer of 1851 were women. Sarah shared the honor with Dolley Madison, Abigail Adams, and the famous Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. But Sarah seemed to forget about everything outside her grief.58
Not even the double wedding of two of her nieces, Joanna and Sarah Polk Rucker, pulled her out of her depression. Joanna was twenty-seven and Sarah twenty-one when they married in a joint ceremony, officiated by the esteemed Methodist minister John B. McFerrin in Murfreesboro on November 6, 1850. Both women had shared the First Lady’s life in the White House. Sarah Rucker was with the Polks at the end of their White House sojourn, and had accompanied them back to Tennessee. Joanna had devoted two years to lifting the First Lady’s burdens at the start of James’s term, primarily by returning social calls. She had kept in close contact with her aunt since, and had not only become Sarah’s most faithful correspondent, but also the niece who worked the hardest to impress and please her aunt.59
Nevertheless, Sarah did not attend the wedding. And she proved utterly unprepared for the care of a small child. It was John Catron’s contention that because Sarah had “always been absorbed in political and social affairs,” she was “not the one…to have the charge of a little child.” Sarah was lucid enough to know she needed help, and turned, as usual, to Childress nieces for help. Sixteen-year-old Mary Childress and fifteen-year-old Susan Rucker, neither of whom had been old enough to visit the White House, settled instead for a long visit with their widowed aunt and three-year-old Sallie. Sarah hired a nurse to take care of Sallie, and purchased a subscription to Mrs. Whittelsey’s Magazine for Mothers, published by Henry M. Whittelsey, New York. As Elizabeth Childress had hoped, Sallie brought “new light and life into the echoing halls and stately parlors” of Polk Place. Sarah may have wanted to disappear from view, but Sallie Jetton would not allow it.60
Nor would her finances. In his will James acknowledged his dependence on Sarah, not only her devotion during “all the vicissitudes” of his political life, but also her “prudence, care and economy” in financial matters. He made her executor of his will—a somewhat unusual role for a woman of Sarah’s class and station, and evidence of James’s respect for her abilities—and gave her full discretion to dispose of his assets, excepting Polk Place, in which she was granted a life interest.61
The bulk of those assets were tied up in the 920-acre Mississippi plantation that he had assured Sarah would support her in her later life. Yet James added a curious note about people they owned, most of whom struggled to pick cotton under some of the most brutal conditions known to enslaved people in North America. Were he to outlive Sarah, he wrote in his will, “it is my intension to emancipate all my slaves, and I have full confidence, that if at her death she shall deem it proper, she shall emancipate them.”62
It’s easy to see in these words an admonishment to Sarah to consider their slaves as people rather than property, and as entitled at some point in the future to their freedom. But there is good reason to believe James added this sentiment to his will for purposes of public consumption rather than a sincere intention to free his human property. He was becoming increasingly concerned with his historical legacy in the final months of his life. As sectional tensions worsened, it was easy to see that public sentiment was turning against slavery, and that the very survival of the “peculiar institution” was in danger. That George Washington had freed his own slaves upon his death had always been understood to be to the first president’s credit.
But given that James had assured Sarah on his deathbed that she would be saved from poverty by the profits of the plantation, it’s hard to imagine that he had any intent to do away with that income source. If he intended to free his enslaved people, he certainly would have discussed it with Sarah. And had he ever suggested to Sarah that their slaves deserved to be free, she almost certainly would have ensured that this became the case. It’s difficult to imagine that a wife as devoted as Sarah would ignore her husband’s dying wish.
But the clearest evidence that James had no late-in-life change of heart regarding the humanity of his enslaved people was that the day after he wrote this will, he surreptitiously purchased an additional half dozen “very young slaves” for their plantation, in the same manner in which he had, with Sarah’s help, been secretly buying slaves throughout his presidency. James offered a vision of Sarah as emancipator while ensuring that she would become something very different upon his death: a cotton planter.63