The negrose seem to be much troubled as bout there master. But since they have learned theh be Long to you the are something beter reconciled.
—JOHN MAIRS TO SARAH CHILDRESS POLK, August 19, 1849
IF IT’S TRUE that James K. Polk’s presidency was only possible with the help of Sarah, so too was it true that Sarah could only do what she did because of the unacknowledged labor of enslaved servants. Because her slaves took care of her household, did her laundry, cooked her meals, cleaned her home, and tended the garden, she was able to focus on politics. Slave labor paid for the carriage, the fine French garments, and all the other material objects that defined Sarah’s identity as a fine lady and social equal to the wealthy women who commanded Washington society. The enslaved people on their plantation grew and harvested the cotton that paid for James’s political campaigns, and allowed him the freedom to neglect his legal practice when he was out of office. And they also enabled Sarah to advance his interests. These men and women were truly dependent on Sarah and James, but they were also the vehicle by which Sarah, who was herself dependent on James, was able to flower into a political actor.1
Sarah Polk had owned slaves her entire life. Her wealth was slave-based, her appeal as a marriage prospect based in part in her dowry’s nine inherited slaves, her work on her husband’s behalf facilitated by her slaves’ labor, her prospects as a widow secured by her plantation slaves. Like most white women who owned slaves, Sarah was invested in a paternalistic understanding of her relationship to her slave property. It was an important part of a southern plantation mistress’s identity that, as a moral Christian, she provided the love and care for “her” enslaved people that transformed them from property to family. The claim that white women were sentimentally attached to their slaves was universally asserted by slave owners to help justify slavery, despite ample evidence that women could be as brutal as their husbands to their human property.2
There is a great deal of evidence that Sarah initially considered herself the very best sort of slavemistress. The responsibility that she felt for the slaves she employed in her home did not extend to freeing them, or to paying them, or to any measures that might improve their lives if they would disrupt hers. But Sarah was no doubt convinced that she was a “good” slavemistress, and that she protected her slaves from the worst excesses of enslaved life, both excessive corporal punishment and the breakup of families through sale.
It had always been James’s contention that Sarah was overly indulgent of “her people,” meaning the Childress family slaves, and more particularly those people left to her in her father’s will. When Sarah was first married and the enslaved people she received from her father were removed for sale, she had sheltered teenaged Mariah over the objections of her mother and brothers. Mariah ran away “to” Sarah, and Sarah rewarded her fidelity by insisting that James buy Mariah from the Childress creditors.
But the limits of Sarah’s solicitude were made obvious when Mariah was shipped off to the first Polk plantation in Tennessee. James was desperate for laborers, and perhaps Mariah had already met the slave from a neighboring plantation whom she would later marry, Henry Carter. But Sarah understood that Mariah would have preferred to remain a lady’s maid in her employment than a cotton picker. Despite this predictable betrayal by the woman who claimed to protect her, Mariah maintained the pretense of affection for Sarah, and in return Sarah convinced James to purchase Henry Carter so the couple could live together. Sarah later insisted that James employ Mariah and Henry Carter’s son, also named Henry, as a house servant in Tennessee and eventually in the White House.3
Mariah was smart. She took advantage of the opportunity to train herself as a weaver, and proudly informed Sarah in 1841 that her new skills had increased her value by thirty dollars. Mariah didn’t hesitate to ask for information from the First Lady, particularly when it pertained to her son, Henry. In 1847 the Polk Plantation overseer added a postscript to a letter to James: “Marier request me to give heir respects to you and her Mistes and if you pleas in the next Leter your rite me to let hir nough hough hir sone Henry is iff well and houg he is doing.”4
Sarah asked James to intercede on behalf of other Childress family slaves, and his experiences with Harbert, whom Sarah inherited when he was just three years old, taught James the value of regarding her wishes. Harbert was perpetually “unruly,” so much so that James made the decision to banish the young man to Gideon Pillow’s Mississippi cotton plantation, but only after Pillow promised Sarah that he would return Harbert to her at some point. That point came sooner than Pillow, or James, wished. After Harbert’s mother protested to Sarah, she demanded that James not only get Harbert back, but also purchase his wife, Mary, and son, Lewis, both of whom were owned by Pillow.5
James set aside his presidential duties to negotiate with Pillow. “As we own his mother Mrs. Polk has…a desire that I should get him back,” he wrote. Pillow was resistant. Harbert was “as valuable a boy as I can get,” Mary was the plantation’s “valuable” cook, and their seven-year-old son, Lewis, was “a very likely & smart & stout boy” and “large for his age…one of the drivers for my gin the past season, though he was small for that business.” James ultimately paid $1,436 for all three of them, $100 more than he believed they were worth.6
Sarah’s self-image as benevolent stood in stark contrast to her efforts on behalf of slavery. As wife of the Speaker of the House, she helped her husband pass the “gag rule” tabling without discussion any petitions against slavery. As First Lady she promoted a war that expanded slave territory. And she believed slavery to be part of God’s plan. James liked to repeat a story from early in their White House tenure, what he described as Sarah’s “acumen” on the topic. Gazing out the window at slaves working the grounds on a hot July afternoon, Sarah interrupted her husband from his writing with the assertion that “the writers of the Declaration of Independence were mistaken when they affirmed that all men are created equal.” When James suggested this was just “one of your foolish fancies,” Sarah elaborated. “There are those men toiling in the heat of the sun, while you are writing, and I am sitting here fanning myself…surrounded with every comfort. Those men did not choose such a lot in life, neither did we ask for ours; we were created for these places.”7
James’s death left Sarah owner of the fifty-six people on her 920-acre plantation, and however much she might believe her life to be over, what had actually changed was the power she now held over other lives. Abolitionists understood that there was no such thing as a “good” slaveholder, and that it was impossible for any man or woman who held the power of life or death over another individual to remain unsullied by the experience. Frederick Douglass described the “fatal poison of irresponsible power” as inevitably turning slave-owning women “of the kindest heart and finest feeling” into “demons.” While James was alive it was possible for Sarah to imagine herself the protector of “her people.” But the events of the 1850s would make clear the impossibility of imagining oneself a benevolent slaveholder when your people were growing cotton for export in Mississippi.8
JAMES WAS DETERMINED to “make more money or loose more” when he purchased the Yalobusha planation in 1834. Because they were absentee owners, the Polks were not privy to either the day-to-day workings of the planation or the sufferings of its workers, but they were highly aware of its balance sheet. Polk’s overseers, like all slave drivers, understood that their job was to extract profit from human bodies and that they would be fired if they failed to do so to the owner’s satisfaction. They were not fired for working slaves too hard or for whipping them unnecessarily.
Not surprisingly, the result was that the Polk Plantation’s most successful overseers were also the most brutal. Plantations on the cotton frontier have been described by historians as “slave labor camps,” where planters expanded their operations by purchasing enslaved people from traders as quickly as they could, and then torturing them into picking cotton “faster and more efficiently than free people.” The Polk Plantation was worse than most. Infant mortality was higher than on comparable plantations, and the mortality rate among young women was much higher than average. At least seven of the twenty-one women on the Polk Plantation died young, six of them within a few years of arriving in Yalobusha County. There was also a remarkably high rate of flight by male slaves. Premature deaths, desperate acts of running away, and the sales of errant slaves together weakened the sense of community on the Polk Plantation that sustained slaves throughout the South. Only nine of the twenty-one slaves that James sent to Mississippi in 1835 were still there twenty-five years later. Only two survived to old age.9
The fact that Polk’s slaves ran away more often than did slaves on other plantations was in large part due to the bleak conditions on the plantation. But Sarah’s reputation for sheltering slaves from abuse also played a role. She did nothing to remove the overseers her slaves complained about, but she pressed for special treatment for the bondspeople she inherited, including Matilda, Harbert, and another inveterate runaway by the name of Jim. James’s sisters in Tennessee also harbored runaway slaves from the Mississippi plantation, and took their sides against overseers. By 1841, Polk’s slaves in Mississippi regarded Tennessee through the lens of nostalgia. It was, they claimed, “a place of parridise.” It seemed within reach, so they fled, some of them regularly.10
One of the Polks’ more brutal overseers, Isaac Dismukes, blamed James for the bad behavior of his slaves. Noting that slaves “runaway from all” the Polk overseers, he suggested that if James were more manly the problem would resolve itself. “You wil have to bea the man that wil have to stop that amongst your negroes.” The solution Dismukes suggested was torture, whippings so intense and prolonged that the slaves would be forced to submit to plantation discipline. James conceded to Dismukes’s disciplinary strategy, despite complaints from his sisters and their husbands about the overseer’s brutality.11
But torture wasn’t enough. The Yalobusha plantation continued operating at a substantial capital loss until the 1844 election. As we’ve seen, Manifest Destiny was a winning issue for the Polks in more than one way. Texas annexation won James the White House, and its impact on the value of slaves made him rich. James made nearly $9,000 (more than a quarter of a million dollars today) in capital gains from the value of his slaves over the course of his presidency.12
Not only did the slaves themselves considerably enrich the Polks during James’s presidency, but so too did the plantation. It averaged a profit of $2,700 a year for the four years he was in office (about $81,000 today). The Polks’ total expenses during four years in the White House were $54,000, a little more than half of his salary during those four years. So although he entered the White House $16,000 in debt, mostly due to election expenses, he was soon solvent, thanks to his planation. He used the entirety of his plantation profits to purchase nineteen additional slaves in order to expand his operation.13
Although Sarah helped James purchase slaves for the plantation, had visited the plantation on several occasions in the early 1840s, and had intervened on behalf of Childress family slaves in Mississippi, there is no evidence that she was involved in the management of the property before James’s sudden death. Sarah, who had worried about the responsibilities of ownership of Polk Place, was unprepared for the reality of plantation management. Just before James died, cotton prices stumbled, and then fell dramatically, the result of political upheaval in Europe. Within weeks of becoming widowed, she had to face the deteriorating situation at the plantation. Rather than do so directly, she enlisted a mutual friend to write to the Polk’s Plantation’s overseer, John Mairs, who had been in place since the early days of James’s presidency. He had run the plantation with little supervision, but now, in the midst of 1849’s growing season, he found himself taking orders from Sarah, whom he had never met.14
We have no record of what Sarah said to Mairs in that first letter, because it, like the vast majority of her letters, has been lost to posterity. Mairs responded in August 1849. He addressed his letter to “Sarah Polk wife of the Late Ex-president James K. Polk.” Noting that James’s death was “very unexpected and most distressing to me,” he added that the slaves “seem to be much troubled as bout there master,” no doubt because they feared the breakup of the plantation and the destruction of their community through sale. “But since they have learned theh be Long to you,” he wrote, “the are something beter reconciled.”15
One can only imagine the relief among the slaves at Polk’s Yalobusha plantation when they learned that the plantation and their families would remain intact. The fact that a woman who believed herself benevolent was now their mistress may have been cause for optimism, spread by the people who knew Sarah best: Mariah and her husband, Henry, and Harbert and his wife, Mary. Mariah and Harbert could testify that Sarah had served as a moderating force in the Polk home and had prevented James from breaking up their families.
From that time on Mairs wrote Sarah regularly, usually once a month. He addressed her as “Mrs. Sarah Polk,” the only person among dozens of correspondents over seven decades who did so. Mairs was not an educated man, and had he realized that she referred to herself as “Mrs. James K. Polk,” no doubt he would have done likewise. But she never corrected him.
If Mairs thought it strange to work for a woman, he showed no sign of it. Daniel Graham and Sarah’s brother John acted as her advisors in business matters, with John in charge of most deliveries to the plantation, but from the outset Mairs made his monthly reports to Sarah, and at least pretended to take direction from her. He appealed to her, rather than her brother or Graham, to make the important decisions at the plantation. In his second letter he asked for instructions about the marketing and sale of her cotton. “You have not givin me enny dy Recttions About your coten….Please give me some Dy Recttions about the coten or eny thing els you want don. We have packed 22 Bals of coten I will sen you the wats and numbers.”16
She turned to one of Jane Walker’s sons-in-law, William Pickett, to market her cotton from his firm’s base in New Orleans, and less than a year after James’s death, in the early spring of 1850, made a visit to the plantation. Mairs reported that “the Negros was muched pleased to hear that you was coming doune to sey them.” When he asked for a raise, Sarah gave it to him. His $550 salary was generous, but during the first years of Sarah’s ownership of the plantation Mairs appeared to deserve it. In 1852, Pickett attributed the “unusually high price” her cotton fetched to the “beautiful manner” in which the overseer “prepared” her cotton “for the market.” In reality, it was the slaves under Mairs’s control who prepared Sarah’s cotton so beautifully, but white men and women who owned slaves generally spoke about the work of their slaves as if it were their own. As an absentee owner, Sarah was insulated from thinking about the hard labor of cotton production.17
This does not mean Sarah had no responsibilities. She still had to decide when to sell her cotton, an all-important decision upon which hundreds if not thousands of dollars could be made or lost. Pickett made suggestions: “The market may keep up for some time, and even get better—but I am decidedly in favor of selling at present,” he advised on November 9, 1849. But whether to do so was ultimately Sarah’s call. Pickett was solicitous of Sarah. He invited her to “call on” him in New Orleans. But she was a wary owner, on the lookout for fraud. Pickett reported on the condition of all her cotton, and sent regular copies of the “stock” report for the New Orleans markets, including cotton.18 But when Sarah believed the price on the cotton exchange unfair, she complained. When she noticed an unidentified expense in her “account sales,” she asked for clarification.19
She was also responsible for provisioning the plantation. Every spring, her agent bought supplies in New Orleans, on Sarah’s orders, and had them sent upriver when the Yazoo was high. She purchased three dozen pairs of brogans, heavy and stout low-cut work shoes, hard and clumsy, for men and women. Children went barefoot. And adult slaves received “Campeachy hats,” like the ones worn by Mexican peasants in the fields of Campeche, in order to protect them from the brutal southern sun. Practicality at a cheap price, rather than the comfort of the slaves, was Sarah’s goal in both cases. Most plantations had to purchase cheap slave cloth from the North, but Sarah was fortunate at the outset of her plantation management that Mariah, whom she had once harbored, could weave an impressive seven yards of cloth a day, enough to make summer clothes for the plantation’s slaves, and fabric for winter garments as well. “Negro Cloth” was notoriously poor in quality and rough in texture. Mariah almost certainly made better. Sarah purchased blankets (said to be of decent quality), as well as other supplies for the plantation—rope, twine, bagging, iron, and steel. Mairs occasionally complained that she had not bought enough steel or iron, but in general her provisioning seems to have met with his satisfaction.20
When William Pickett left his firm in 1857, he continued to court her business, as did a number of other middlemen anxious to “solicit the consignment of your crop of cotton.” Pickett, who had moved to Memphis, encouraged Sarah to begin shipping cotton from that city instead of New Orleans. In July 1857, he predicted that the Mississippi and Tennessee Railroad would within a year “perhaps penitrate as far as Granada [its destined point] and maybe within a very short distance from your plantation.” Two months later he was more adamant, assuring her that “a majority of the planters in that county [Yalobusha] will now ship their crops to Memphis.” He promised her she would “receive more for” her crop in Memphis than New Orleans. But Sarah chose stability over risk, even at the cost of family ties, and stuck with her firm in New Orleans.21
One scholar who analyzed the Polk Plantation in detail suggested that Sarah’s “close oversight of the plantation is worthy of commendation.” And the remarkable financial success of the plantation in her hands suggests that she was a canny businesswoman, perhaps more so than she could have imagined. During the ten years that she was sole owner, the plantation itself increased in value by $4,000. But her success may well have been due more to luck and forces outside her control than to skill. The end of revolution in Europe in 1849 led to a worldwide cotton boom, while both northerners and southerners felt cautiously optimistic about the decline in sectional tensions following the Compromise of 1850. Sarah’s cotton was selling for 12.5 cents a pound in 1856, and as of 1857 slave prices had doubled from the day James entered office.22
Unlike most cotton planters, Sarah was conservative in her investments, and unwilling to maximize her profits when there was a potential for loss. James determined to grow cotton in Mississippi because he hoped to become rich. But Sarah stuck with shipping from New Orleans when her agent promised her higher profits in untested Memphis. She never expanded her holdings in order to grow more cotton. And in contrast to James’s policy of purchasing healthy young people from dealers in order to expand the portion of his plantation under cultivation, Sarah bought exactly one additional person, Alfonso. And she purchased him because he was husband to her enslaved laborer Maria Davis. She convinced her nephew Marshall to sell Alfonso in order to keep the marriage together.23
She was also unwilling to go into debt. Most planters made regular use of credit, often going into debt to their cotton agents. Sarah’s agent in New Orleans noted that she was “anxious to avoid” the “credit system,” and he managed her affairs with respect for her seemingly unusual desires in this matter, reminding her, however, that he was “always ready to supply your wants” if she did decide to proceed on credit.24
There were setbacks, including some serious ones. In 1853, boll weevils and rain decimated the crop, and the following year a fire at the Yalobusha River warehouse destroyed two-thirds of the crop. Although Sarah held insurance on the cotton, it did not cover accidents taking place in the warehouse, so she lost a great deal of money. But this loss was offset by the considerable increase in the value of the men and women she owned.
On April 25, 1855, Perkins had “further disasters to your cotton” to report, a remarkable series of unfortunate events that led him to conclude, “A fatality seems to attend your Crop of Cotton this year.”
The 55 bales not burned at Troy were shipped on a Keel boat as soon as there was sufficient water in the river, which Keel boat was sunk in the Yallobusha before reaching a reshipping point. Your cotton was recovered in a damaged condition and again shipped on board the steamer “Texana”—and this boat took fire in the Yazoo river & was consumed with most of her cargo.
The cotton that survived one fire, and then survived a watery grave, only to be burned in a second fire, remarkably resulted in less loss than had the Troy cotton, due to insurance. “This cotton was insured at $50 a bale, a high valuation and more than it would probably bring in the market.” Perkins promised to look into it and in the meantime asked her to “instruct” him “what you will have done with the proceeds of the cotton.” He provided a final settlement in a letter dated January 18, 1856.25
But even in those two terrible years, Sarah’s profits were still 10 percent a year. Overall the plantation provided her with an 11 percent average profit.26
OF COURSE, that 11 percent profit came at a sharp cost. When Sarah inherited the plantation, it was home to fifty-five enslaved people, and more than half the children died before reaching the age of fifteen. During Sarah’s first ten years of ownership, thirty-six babies were born into slavery on the plantation. Thirty slaves, including seventeen babies, died, and plantation births outnumbered plantation deaths by 12 percent. This was an improvement from the period before Sarah took over management, but it was substantially less than the 23.5 percent average population increase among slaves elsewhere in the South in the 1850s. Dafney and Giles, the slave couple who were married, in Dafney’s words, when “we were neither of us hardly grown,” lost six of their ten children before they reached adulthood. There was so much death in their family that in later years Dafney was unable to recall exactly when she lost each of her children.27
Not only was infant mortality higher on Sarah’s plantation than on most, but the mortality rate among young adults was dramatically higher than the norm. Most of the Polk Plantation was flat and wet, clearly “unhealthy ground.” For purposes of surveillance, overseers crowded the slaves into cramped quarters, facilitating the spread of infectious disease. In 1852 six Polk slaves died of pneumonia, bacterial infection, and whooping cough. That fall and winter so many enslaved people were ill that they left one-sixth of the cotton crop to rot in the fields. In 1853 five enslaved people suffered from dysentery, and in 1854 the plantation was hit with typhoid fever, both of which resulted in excruciating suffering. Most of the men and women who labored on the Polk Plantation had been purchased from the upper and middle South, so to their peril they lacked resistance to malaria, a debilitating and frequently deadly disease endemic to the Deep South. And clearly John Mairs pushed some of the laborers until they died, despite his assertion to Sarah when many of the men and women were “unwell with bad colds” that “I am not pushing, think it better to lose a little tim than a negro.” Young black men and women, children, and newborn babies on the Polk Plantation suffered and died painful, unnecessary deaths all the time.28
But these tragedies were, by definition, abstract to an absentee owner. Overseers were paid to terrorize slaves for profit, but they were equally responsible for providing plausible deniability to their employer, to protect the owner from the reality of the indignities and tortures and death endemic to plantations. So although it is fair to say that compared to many other slave owners Sarah was a “good mistress” to the slaves with whom she developed personal relationships, those acts count for little when weighed against her liability as a slave owner. She treated Mariah, and some of the other Childress slaves, as individuals, and occasionally did benevolent acts in their favor. Quite likely, she felt sorrow when she heard about Mariah’s death, at age thirty-seven, of unexplained spasms stemming from a chronic gynecological condition. She and Sarah had a long history, after all, one that stretched back to Sarah’s life in Murfreesboro, before her marriage. But the ability of slave owners to maintain distance from the suffering of the people they owned, suffering that was ultimately their responsibility regardless of the mediation of an overseer, reveals the basic and inescapable corruption of slavery. The only truly benevolent slave owner was the woman or man who freed all their slaves.29
Sarah had other tragedies to contend with in the early 1850s. Both of her recently married nieces, Joanna and Sarah, died in childbirth within three years of being married, just three months apart. Joanna had lived with her aunt for two years and adored her. She directly modeled her behavior on her aunt Sarah’s, turning to her for direction about what to read and how to spend her time, years after the two were separated. The same minister who officiated at the joint wedding of the two Rucker daughters returned to Murfreesboro in December 1853 to preach their joint funeral sermon. Although Sarah did not attend the wedding, she most likely made the trip to Murfreesboro for their funerals.30
And despite Sarah’s lifelong aversion to breaking up slave families, she was ultimately responsible for the separation of three. The first two came after Mother Jane’s death in 1852, and Sarah’s culpability might not have been clear to her. Jane Polk held a life interest in three of the people on Sarah’s plantation. After her death, all three became Jane’s grandson Marshall’s property. Sarah proposed to exchange slaves with Marshall in order to preserve the marriages of two of the slaves, but for reasons that remain unclear, all three were moved to Marshall’s plantation in Bolivar against their will, and with much distress to the Polk Plantation community.31
But her decision in 1856 to sell Harbert after years of “protecting” him was entirely her own. She could blame no one else. Mairs couldn’t handle him any better than had previous overseers. Mairs was adamant that thirty-six-year-old Harbert was a “bad boy,” and after his fifth attempt at escape, Sarah sold him away from his wife, Mary, and their teenage son, Lewis.32
If Sarah ever had any taste for plantation management, she lost it with Harbert’s sale. She stopped writing monthly letters to John Mairs, and he responded in kind. His own lack of enthusiasm was no doubt colored by the fact that Sarah owed him $339.06 in back wages in 1857. The crop the following year was disappointing, just 129 bales, or 20 bales below average. Mairs had difficulty mustering his usual enthusiasm for the enterprise. “I am in hops we will be more fortunate this year,” he wrote Sarah in January 1858.33
But Mairs wasn’t trusting his salary to fortune. Using every weapon at his disposal, he pushed the slaves so hard that something snapped. On November 1, 1858, Mairs threatened to whip one of the enslaved men, and the rest fought back. Led by Giles and Manuel, the slaves armed themselves with “axes, hatchets, clubs, scythes, stones, &c….and swore they would die to a man before one of their party should be whipped.” It took seventy-five white men, one of whom was seriously injured, to subdue an uprising that the newspapers proclaimed a great “negro rebellion.” Giles and Manuel were indicted for “conspiracy to make rebellion,” an offense punishable by execution, and taken to jail.34
But thanks to Sarah’s intervention, Giles and Manuel were not put to death. The attorney she hired on their behalf requested and received a change of venue to Tallahatchie County, and then successfully challenged the indictment on the grounds of habeas corpus. After an initial mistrial, Giles and Manuel returned to prison. Sarah petitioned the presiding judge for bail, again on the grounds of habeas corpus, and after paying $3,000, brought both men back home on the last day of January 1860.35
Three thousand dollars was a tremendous amount of money, but it’s worth asking why a Mississippi judge allowed the ringleaders of a widely publicized slave rebellion to post bail at any price. After all, they were returning to the same plantation, and the same slave community, where they had reportedly armed their fellow laborers with weapons and faced down their overseer. One has to conclude that Sarah received special treatment from the court. The drawn-out nature of the legal proceedings also suggests that the state of Mississippi felt some misgivings about putting to death two slaves once owned by President Polk. Sectional tensions had never been higher, and the publicity surrounding such an execution would not have reflected well on either the South or its labor system.36
Nor is it clear why Sarah agreed to pay such an outrageous sum in bail, particularly given that Mississippi law reimbursed slave owners for half the value of their executed human property. The average price of an enslaved person in 1860 was $800. If Sarah thought of the two men strictly as property, if she wished to punish them, or if her abiding interest was in the submission of her plantation’s slave community, she would never have brought them back home. Giles and Manuel’s fate remained uncertain as the case made its way through the appeals process in the beginning of the 1860s. But Sarah’s bond was never discharged.37
Cotton plantations had very little to recommend themselves to their owners beyond profitability. But that was generally enough. Despite the high death rate at the Polk Plantation, a slave uprising, and repeated unforeseen disasters with the crop, Sarah’s plantation did exactly what James intended: it provided his widow with a steady income. It was still doing so two weeks after Giles and Manuel returned to Polk Plantation, when Sarah sold away “the undivided one-half” of her plantation and fifty-six slaves. The purchaser was James M. Avent, who had several years earlier married twenty-three-year-old Mary Childress, the niece who lived with Sarah at Polk Place shortly after James’s death. Avent, almost twenty years older than Mary, had capital to spare and dreams of getting rich on cotton after a career as an attorney in Murfreesboro.38
It’s unclear what motivated Sarah to take the highly unusual step of selling an “undivided” half interest in her plantation and its people to a step-nephew. There’s no evidence that she was in need of money. The 1860 census listed the value of her personal property at $105,000, and Polk Place itself at $110,000. She was clearly tired of plantation management, and according to testimony from the Polk Plantation slaves, their home came “under” Avent’s “management” starting in 1860. It’s possible that the rise of the antislavery Republican Party raised Sarah’s concern about the future of the peculiar institution, although it would be several months before the party would name Abraham Lincoln their 1860 presidential candidate. She may well have been motivated to assist a niece who had provided her with comfort after James’s death. What is clear is that although James suggested in his will that Sarah might at some point free their slaves, she did no such thing. Saving Giles and Manuel’s lives was a benevolent act, but her benevolence had clear limits. Instead of liberating “her people,” she turned them, and the capital gains they represented, into cash. She sold out her benevolent pretentions for $30,000.39
But half ownership was still ownership. In the view of both the residents of the plantation and the federal government, it remained very much Sarah Polk’s property. The 1860 census listed her as owner of sixty slaves in Mississippi. She continued to profit from her plantation’s cotton throughout the Civil War. And of the twelve former slaves living on or near the Polk Plantation who provided testimony years later, not one identified Avent as the owner of either themselves or the plantation where they labored. Lewis, whose father, Harbert, was sold away from him when he was seventeen, gave clear testimony in 1887 that “I formally belonged to Mrs. J. K. Polk and lived on the Polk Plantation.” Caroline, the daughter of the plantation midwife, agreed. “We were all owned by President James K. Polk and his widow after his death.”40
Despite the nearly universal assertion by scholars that Sarah sold the plantation in 1860, it wasn’t until 1870 that she and the Avents sold “the tract of land known as the ‘Polk Plantation’ ” to a third party for $10,000, a fraction of its prewar value. The loss hurt Avent far more than Sarah, given that he had paid her $30,000 for half ownership of the land and its occupants ten years earlier. From a business perspective, Sarah had done quite well for herself.41
DESPITE SARAH’S BUSINESS SUCCESS, the decade after James’s death was a struggle. Apart from weekly appearances in pew 137 at the Nashville First Presbyterian Church she rarely left Polk Place. Beyond that initial trip to visit John Mairs and her plantation in 1850, she appears to have left town only to visit family in Columbia and Murfreesboro. She cut back on shopping; her decreased expenditures reflecting her circumscribed public life rather than diminished finances. She still had to care for Sallie, of course, and continued to buy shoes from the likes of Nashville’s Daniel and Ben Winter ladies’ fashionable shoemakers, and hats from New Orleans’ Olympe millinery and fancy dry goods store. But the sum total of these purchases was just a fraction of those in the past. Rather than buy new dresses for herself, she chose instead to remake her Washington frocks.42
By 1853 she had begun entertaining again, although her limited purchases of claret ($1.50 a bottle) and champagne ($1 a bottle) from the liquor and wine retailer George Grieg were also a fraction of her past expenditures. In 1854 the Tennessee legislature began what would be a yearly tradition of making a “New Year’s call” on Sarah at Polk Place. The First Lady, dressed in mourning, was said to have received them “with that courtesy, grace, and hospitality for which this excellent lady is so distinguished.” Nieces were visiting again, none more frequently than John Childress’s teenage daughter Bettie, who enjoyed helping her aunt with the receptions.43
When Congress granted Sarah franking privileges, allowing her to mail letters without paying for postage, it was an honor never before shown to a First Lady. But Sarah wrote few letters in the 1850s. Instead she read. She had always been a reader, but after James’s death she plunged into British history. In 1850 she ordered eleven volumes on the Lives of the Queens of England, carefully inscribing “Mrs. James K. Polk” in each of them. She plowed through Thomas Macaulay’s History of England and William Shakespeare’s complete works. Turning her head toward the continent, she read French scholar Arsène Houssaye’s Men and Women of the Eighteenth Century, and a collection of biblical lectures by a divinity professor at King’s College London. She received Martin Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy from her “sincerely attached friend” Ann Wright in 1849. In taste and content these volumes marked a return to her reading habits at Salem Academy: books about powerful women, books about serious philosophical matters. Sarah was reading for her own pleasure now, and the topics that pleased her were telling. She was thinking about her own legacy, about female power, and about religion. There is no need to explain the Shakespeare: in the mid-nineteenth century everyone loved him.44
About the only American volume she acquired in the first years after James’s death was Sheppard M. Ashe’s Monterey Conquered: A Fragment from La Gran Quivera; or, Rome Unmasked. Ashe’s tribute to the heroism of Tennessee volunteers in Mexico was a thoroughgoing celebration of Manifest Destiny in classical garb. Following “the star of Empire Westward,” Ashe attempted to “sing his country—her political and religious destiny—her arms and institutions—her unaffected manners, and moral worth.” Admitting that his seven-canto epic poem was a “freak of Fancy,” Ashe was likely aware that Monterey Conquered was no Iliad or Odyssey. But Sarah’s attraction to the piece is easy to understand. Ashe, a minor functionary in Tennessee politics and a committed Democrat, had been an acquaintance of James’s, and his poem closely reflected Sarah’s convictions about the justness of the war and James’s heroic place in it.45
Thou son of Washington! my harp in vain
Would sing thy praise; for the wild surging main
Doth chant, and winds, where’er our banners play,
Acknowledge thee. Thy glory shall remain
Eternal as the hills of Monterey;
And a whole nation, bursting party’s chain,
Invite their only living Washington to reign.46
James was “Augustus, worthy of some noble song,” leading his
countrymen, thus armed with right
To scourge yon vain, intolerable foe
And make them feel and own Columbia’s might,
By sparing when their capital lies low;
Then offer peace, that all the world may know
Americans take no delight in blood,
And unprovoked had never struck the blow.
Opponents of the war, by contrast, were “the base of a degenerate age.”47
Sarah thought about her own place in history, happily submitting to an interview with Mrs. E. F. Ellet, author of the volume Women of the Revolution, when she visited Nashville “to collect reminiscences of the Pioneer Women of Nashville.” Sarah took the “liberty” of recommending a female friend to Ellet, “as one that might be interested in her object.” Expressing her own finely developed views of the etiquette of social calls, she offered the following advice to her friend: “If you are not disposed to receive this literary Tourist, you need not be at home.”48
As the bushes and trees about Polk Place burst into flower in the spring of 1852, Sarah discovered her interest in the outside world also revived. “Although my spirits have undergone such a trial in the death of my lamented husband, time has calmed me” she wrote to her brother-in-law William, who had recently been elected to Congress. Given the sectional divisions in the Democratic Party, there was a real possibility that another dark horse presidential candidate would win the party’s nomination in June. “I find that I cannot now withdraw my mind from the political affairs of my country,” she admitted to William. While she did not “claim to have patriotism,” she told him, a life spent “with one so pure” as James was “calculated to make lasting impressions. His devotion to the interest of the country, was self-sacrificing.” She made a request of the congressman: “I…would like for you occasionally to give me some of the items of news, & speculations as to the probabilities of coming events, believing I have some character for discretion. I hope that you will not be afraid to put on paper your views that are not intended for the public. Will our friend Donelson get the Census printing? Who is your candidate for the Presidency?”49
And in fact, the Democratic Party still needed her. When Democrats gathered in Nashville prior to the election of 1856, the assembled military companies paid a call on Sarah. The Nashville Union reported that “having been so much identified with public life, and partaken so fully of the sentiments of her illustrious husband, for long years the pride and support of the Democratic party, it is but natural that she should continue to feel a lively interest in the success of the Democracy and the consequent ascendancy of its principles.”
But while Sarah found the convention tribute “gratifying” and admitted to being a “cordial well-wisher for the triumph of our party on this and all other occasions,” she refused to publicly comment on the election because to do so would be unladylike. The Nashville Union approved entirely. “She maintains inviolate that ladylike reserve and abstinence from all overt political action, so becoming to one of her age and position in the esteem of the American people irrespective of party.”50
Of course, Sarah’s “ladylike reserve” from “overt political action” was, as always, a façade. Late in life she claimed that she had never recommended friends for office, on the grounds that it was “undignified to make such solicitations,” and were she successful, “it would be heralded over the country that she was now meddling with politics.” She was clearly worried that public acknowledgment that she was politically active would “render her liable to the loss of whatever influence she might possess.” Yet she continued to exercise her influence by calling in political favors. Earlier that year she had drawn on the political capital she still held in Washington, writing to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to request a brevet for an officer friend. Davis promised to present the officer’s name to President Franklin Pierce for the honor.51
James Buchanan’s election in 1856 fully captured Sarah’s attention. Although she had at one time mocked his sexuality, he had been her close friend and frequent companion in the 1840s. And, of course, he had been James’s secretary of state. His elevation to president brought back a host of pleasant memories.52
It also returned her to power as a source of political information. When James had asserted that no one knew his affairs as closely as did his wife, he received no contradiction. Her work as communications director of his political campaigns provide her with an intimate knowledge of his papers. Her secretarial assistance during his presidency only deepened that archival knowledge. Buchanan, like other political insiders in the 1840s, was well aware that Sarah had full command of presidential paperwork.
During the third year of his presidency, Buchanan found himself at odds with Britain over the northwestern boundary of the United States, which was supposedly settled in 1846, to the Polk presidency’s great credit. He turned to Sarah Polk for assistance. Apologizing that his public duty required him to bother her (“& I know, in your opinion, will justify it”), he turned immediately to business. “You will doubtless recollect the Oregon negotiation,” he wrote. Although Minister to Britain Louis McLane was clear about the boundary between British-controlled Vancouver Island and the U.S.-controlled San Juan Islands, the British government now claimed additional territory. McLane, who died in 1857, wrote a number of letters to the president that might now buttress the American position. Would Sarah be willing to locate an account of the conversation between McLane and British foreign secretary Lord Aberdeen about the matter dated “on or about the 18 May, 1846”? Buchanan would be gratified to hear from her “as soon as it may be quite convenient.”53
What Buchanan most likely did not know was that after James’s death, Sarah kept his office exactly as he left it, and spent “day after day among the papers and relics, recalling to memory the times of which they speak. Nothing is more delightful to her than this indulgence,” a visitor wrote. She was so comfortable in his office that “she now has a clear idea and perfect familiarity with the position occupied by any paper she desires to lay her hand upon.”54
Sarah knew exactly where to find the McLane correspondence. Although she responded almost immediately, she apologized that “absence from my house prevented an earlier reply.” The combination of erudition and political acumen beneath a veneer of deference was vintage Sarah, an indication that despite her self-imposed exile from Washington, she was still mentally engaged in the world of politics. “At your request I have examined the correspondence of my Husband + Mr. McLane, on the subject of the Oregon Negotiation,” she wrote Buchanan, “and find the letter you suggest, dated May 18, 1846, which I have enclosed.” While “there are many letters marked private + confidential from Mr. McLane, I have not read the correspondence carefully,” she demurred. “Perhaps I have not selected such as may contain the information you desire.” She included a second letter, one he had not requested, “dated April 30, 1846, giving the interview with Lord Aberdeen on the subject.” She added, “I will take pleasure to communicate any information that may be in my possession.”55
James Buchanan knew Sarah well, had known her for decades, and their correspondence on the Oregon boundary reminded him of how much he missed her. He pleaded with her to visit with him and his niece Harriet Lane, who was serving as First Lady for the first bachelor president. “I recollect with particular pleasure our agreeable and friendly social intercourse ‘in the auld lang syne,’ ” he wrote.
I have ever cherished for you the most respectful and friendly regard. Why can we not meet again? Why will you not visit Washington during the present autumn or the next Session of Congress? Miss Lane & myself would give you a most cordial welcome to the White House, where you could pass a few months. In common with your numerous friends, we should be delighted with such a visit. I am now in my 69th year & am heartily tired of my position as President. I shall leave it in the beginning of March, 1861, should a kind Providence prolong my days until that period, with much greater satisfaction than when entering on the duties of the office. Pray do come. I should not ask this great favor, were I not thoroughly convinced that there would not be the least shadow of impropriety in your compliance with this my earnest request.56
Any awkwardness in Buchanan’s tone, and the reference to “impropriety,” no doubt stemmed from entirely baseless rumors in the penny press that he was “about to marry the widow of the late President Polk.” Sarah, of course, knew this was ridiculous. But Buchanan would nonetheless have been embarrassed. His solicitation to Sarah was sincere, and it would, as he told her, have been “a great favor” for her to join him for a few months of what had devolved into a spectacularly controversial presidency. Her presence might remind Sarah’s “numerous friends” of better days, before abolitionists and proslavery settlers had turned “popular sovereignty” in the Kansas Territory into a bloodbath, and Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina had beaten Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner into unconsciousness on the floor of the Senate. Sarah belonged in Washington, but Buchanan was no longer sure he did.57
Sarah thanked the president for the invitation to visit Washington, “+ the offer of the hospitalities of the ‘White House.’ ” She enjoyed the “reminiscences of my life in Washington….And the appearance that I am remembered by friends, will brighten some of the quiet hours of my retirement.” But she remained unmoved. Polk Place was her place now. She sent her regards to Miss Lane, and asked the president “to return me the letters” at his “pleasure.” She signed her letter, as always, “Mrs. James K. Polk.”58