If I have asked for anything which it would be inconsistent or improper to grant, of course I will not expect to receive it.
—SARAH CHILDRESS POLK
JUNE 15, 1861, marked the twelve-year anniversary of James K. Polk’s death. Sarah woke and dressed in the somber costume of deep mourning, dull black fabric without ornamentation—not because of the anniversary, but because she always dressed this way. Convention suggested two years of mourning for widows, with deep mourning reserved for the first year. By the second anniversary a widow was entitled to color, to jewels, to sartorial rebirth.1
But Sarah offered no concessions to the passage of time since her husband was stolen from her. She was perennially bereaved and her home bore the same weight of tragedy. Sallie was now fourteen. Yet despite her teenage energy, and the presence of a twenty-three-year-old Irish servant and at least five enslaved people, including Elias, who had lived with Sarah for the entirety of her married life, James’s ghost was the governing spirit of Polk Place. The public rooms Sarah kept exactly as he had liked them; private rooms were crammed full of his things. She passed a portion of each day by his tomb in the yard, imagining what he might think or say, how he would advise her. His loss still felt strange, but not the mourning. Had she not foreseen this crypt nestled in a welcoming garden back in her days at Salem Academy? She had the proof right there, in the form of a fine piece of needlework showing “a tomb gleaming white through the foliage of surrounding trees.” She could easily see the tomb through her bedroom window, a “daily reminder of the blissful reunion awaiting her in the near future.”2
Of course, she missed James even more on the important anniversaries: birthdays, their wedding, and above all June 15. But this year something was different. In the midst of her sorrow she felt a distinct sense of relief that her husband had been spared the madness that engulfed the country. Within the week Sarah would see the Confederate flag flying over the recently completed Tennessee capitol building. At least he was spared that.
The coming years would prove Sarah’s greatest challenge, but that challenge was eased by the knowledge that “the wisdom of providence” spared her husband from its “dreadful scenes.” Whichever side he chose, she knew “he would have been misunderstood, and possibly maligned, and would surely have drunk a bitter cup of sorrow.” She missed him, but she also saw “that it was better as it was.” Better that she weather the crisis alone. Of course, she knew she was never truly alone—his spirit was with her just as surely as his body occupied that crypt in the garden. She faced the future convinced she could navigate a path that would have made him proud.3
When Tennessee voters went to the polls in November 1860 to vote for the sixteenth president of the United States, they faced a choice between three candidates, none of whom was Abraham Lincoln. Southern voters could choose between the official Democratic candidate, Stephen A. Douglas; the “Southern Democratic” Party’s candidate, secessionist John C. Breckinridge; and James’s old Whig nemesis, Senator John Bell, who was Tennessee’s most esteemed living politician and was running as the nominee of the newly formed Constitutional Union Party. Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia gave their votes to Bell by a thin margin. The rest of the South cast its lot with Breckinridge and secession. None of their votes prevented Abraham Lincoln’s victory with 59 percent of the Electoral College, and only 40 percent of the popular vote. Lincoln’s outsized Electoral College victory reflected the fact that 71 percent of white Americans lived in the North. Southerners had long warned that unless they captured more territories, northern growth would render them politically powerless. In 1860 those fears were realized.
Lincoln’s election and the subsequent secession of South Carolina in December forced southerners to consider the future in an entirely new light. Sarah, like the majority of her neighbors in Tennessee and the states of the upper South, initially sided with the Union. James’s younger brother William was a staunch Unionist who vocally supported Stephen A. Douglas in 1860, no doubt in part because John Bell and James had been lifelong rivals. Tennessee voters rejected a call for a secession convention in February 1861 after leading Unionists, including Bell, delivered rousing speeches in favor of the Union’s salvation just a block from Polk Place.4
But by the time Lincoln took office and six more southern states had joined South Carolina, Unionism in Tennessee was waning. Lincoln had assured Bell in a private meeting that the United States would not use force against the wayward states, and he repeatedly asserted in public that he would not interfere with their slave property. John Bell and other Unionists initially argued that slavery would be safer within the Union than outside it. But when the Union army refused to surrender the garrison at Fort Sumter, Bell reconsidered his allegiance. In April he called for Tennessee to align with the Confederacy.
William was left holding the flag of Unionism. In May he chaired a Union gubernatorial convention that had to adjourn precipitously when secessionists threatened the Unionists with bodily harm. Although his Democratic allegiances left a great deal to be desired in the eyes of old Whig Unionists in the state, he was suddenly the most prominent man left standing, and thus the default gubernatorial candidate. William’s work ethic never approached that of his oldest brother, and he did not have a Sarah behind the scenes doing political work on his behalf. But he ran the best campaign he could, delivering sixty speeches over the summer’s brief gubernatorial campaign.5
It was an uphill battle. Tennessee voters remained deeply divided. A majority of voters in the mountainous east continued to oppose secession, while Nashville voters were split. As elsewhere in the South, density of slave ownership corresponded closely with support for secession, and while residents of eastern Tennessee owned few slaves, the remarkably fertile lands to the south and west of Nashville were home to a large slave population and enthusiastic secessionists. In a June 8, 1861, referendum, Tennessee voters chose secession by a two-to-one margin, despite nearly 70 percent of East Tennessee voters preferring to stay in the Union. On June 17, the new Confederate flag, the “Stars and Bars,” was raised above the capitol building.
Tennessee was the last state to secede, but its soldiers wasted no time. By the following day the army there was twenty-five regiments strong, with three more on their way to Virginia to fight the Yankees. Only three of Tennessee’s congressional representatives remained in Washington. Senator Andrew Johnson and the other two holdouts all hailed from the Unionist east. Not surprisingly, secessionist incumbent Isham G. Harris handily won the gubernatorial race against William Polk in August 1861. William put his Unionism into action, and signed on as an aide to U.S. general Thomas Crittenden.6
Choosing sides would have been painful for James, but it was distinctly less so for many others in Sarah’s circle. The biggest slaveholders in middle Tennessee were, as a group, the earliest supporters of secession. Many of them were also, unsurprisingly, among Sarah’s family and friends. Leonidas Polk was first cousin to James’s father, from the wealthier branch of the Polk family. He owned a vast plantation just outside Columbia on the “Rattle and Snap” tract, named after the dice game in which his father reportedly won the property. By 1840 he was the largest slaveholder in Maury County, surpassing even his neighbor Gideon Pillow. Leonidas and James were friendly but not friends, particularly after Leonidas threw his support behind Henry Clay in 1844. President Jefferson Davis commissioned Leonidas a major general the very same day that Tennessee joined the Confederacy.7
Gideon Pillow went to work building a Provisional Army of Tennessee even before the state seceded. As soon as Tennessee joined the Confederacy, Pillow was named a brigadier general under Leonidas. But the two commanders proved a toxic combination. Less than three months after Tennessee formally joined the Confederacy, Leonidas ordered Pillow to invade neighboring Kentucky, which had declared neutrality. The invasion forced the Kentucky legislature to call for support from the Union and drove a majority of Kentucky residents to favor the Union cause. It was one of the great blunders of the war. In December, Pillow and Leonidas argued, and Pillow resigned from the army. Regretting his rash decision, he appealed to his old friend President Jefferson Davis to reinstate him. It was a decision Davis would soon regret.8
In February 1862, Pillow badly mismanaged the Battle of Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland River. Under the command of the relatively unknown Ulysses S. Grant, the Union army captured the fort, and Pillow surrendered his army’s twelve thousand men—but not himself. He fled across the Cumberland in a small boat. Grant’s capture of Fort Donelson, along with more prisoners than in all previous American wars combined, made him a national hero. It also opened up the Cumberland River, and thus Nashville, to Union forces.9
Pillow informed an enormous assembled crowd in the Nashville Public Square that Confederate forces would make “no stand” to defend the city. Attempting to calm the crowd, he promised, “The Federals will be with you only for a time, and I pledge you my honor that this war will not end until they are driven across the Ohio River.” Then he left for his estate in Columbia. The mayor of Nashville surrendered to Major General Don Carlos Buell on February 23, 1862, giving Nashville the distinction of not only being the last state capital to join the Confederacy, but also the first to leave.10
The city of thirty-seven thousand people, including fifteen thousand slaves, was of clear strategic value to both sides. It was a regional center for the distribution of goods, and a key transportation hub. Ohio was accessible by river, while five railways connected Nashville to Louisville and Atlanta. It was also one of the South’s few industrial centers, home to seventy-three manufacturing establishments before the war. By the time the Union army arrived, many of them had been converted to the war effort, turning out cannons, muskets, gun carriages, ball and shot, swords, percussion caps, and gray uniform cloth.11
There was, initially at least, little question where Sarah’s sympathies lay. Although she repeatedly asserted, and likely believed, that her husband had given his life for the Union, she was a plantation owner, a southerner by birth and inclination, and a Democrat who had long maintained the need to protect the rights of states from the encroachment of the federal government. That the former First Lady was president of a “Society of Nashville Ladies, organized for the purpose of making clothing for the Confederate Army,” was reported as far away as Boston in May 1861, well before Tennessee joined the Confederacy, and before William ran for governor. The same week as Sarah’s Confederate clothing efforts circulated in the press, the Baltimore Sun reported that she was elected president of a “Soldiers’ Friend Society,” to “take care of families of men in service.”12
Given Sarah’s seclusion since James’s death, and the fact that even as First Lady she preferred to join societies rather than lead them, her embrace of the challenges of two leadership positions is difficult to fathom. But it’s not hard to understand why Nashville’s women turned to their most famous sister in this moment of need, or why Sarah rose to the challenge. Placing the First Lady at the top of the masthead would validate women’s war work as both important and safely within women’s sphere of influence. Since her years in the White House, Sarah had epitomized the glory of female dependence and deference, the First Lady who was a lady first. She was still in the minds of Americans a “sweet exemplification of lowliness.” There was no better way to prove the propriety of activism by southern women than through Mrs. James K. Polk’s involvement.
Although Sarah had shown little enthusiasm for sewing since her days at Salem Academy, she, like countless other southern women, turned her attention to provisioning the Confederate army. It’s easy to imagine women gathered at Polk Place sewing uniforms, and Sarah with gray cloth draped over her black gown. But after General Grant’s army captured Fort Donelson, Sarah, like other Nashville residents, faced an immediate and profound decision. Should she stay at home, or flee to the safety of Confederate lines? The Mississippi plantation she now jointly owned with James Avent was open to her. Her brother John was adamant that she move there. Any “unprotected woman” who remained “in a city invaded by a victorious army” would incur “frightful” risks. No need to spell out what those risks were: southerners spread mostly untrue stories of vicious Union soldiers and freed slaves who took vengeance on their owners. In other words, were Sarah to stay in Nashville, she faced the possibility of rape or murder at the hands of Union soldiers and emboldened slaves. As one middle Tennessee newspaper put it, a Union invasion would mean facing “two powerful and blood-thirsty foes, the one without and the other within,” and “a fate to our wives and children equal to the sacking of a city by barbarians.”13
Were Sarah lucky enough to avoid assault, it seemed highly likely that Union officers would confiscate her home, which, valued at $110,000, was one of the finest in Nashville. Leaving Polk Place would ensure its confiscation, but at least she could escape to the plantation with her valuables. Once the Union army arrived, there was no guarantee that any of the things she loved, James’s things, would remain under her protection. Across the South, women of Sarah’s race and class faced the choice between remaining and protecting their property or leaving and protecting their virtue.14
Of course, she couldn’t very well flee with James’s crypt. His final wishes were clear on the matter—his crypt would never leave Polk Place. And so Sarah decided she wouldn’t either. She told her family that “she was at home, and intended to stay at home, and that if her house should be blown up or burned up, she would pitch a tent on the lawn beside Mr. Polk’s tomb, and stay there.” She understood that her position was tenuous, but many elite Confederate women assumed they had the right to male protection, even by the Union army, on account of their sex and class. Nor were they necessarily mistaken: the Union army agreed with them sufficiently to write the protection of female noncombatants into its laws of war. Perhaps no other southern woman had as much claim to protection by the U.S. government as Mrs. James K. Polk. Sarah’s lifetime of political negotiations provided her with the faith that she could leverage her position as First Lady. It was time to draw on some of the benefits of deference she had stockpiled for years. She raised an American flag outside the front door, and waited.15
There was no saying what might happen. “If they come and we can’t defend ourselves we are prepared to welcome them to a pile of ruins,” one elite Nashville woman wrote to a friend. The Confederate army would surely “fire every place that could afford them quarters or in any way benefit from them.” Some retreating troops tried just that. Nashville became “a supreme pandemonium” as Confederates set fire to their vessels, tore up train tracks, and literally burned bridges to keep them out of Union hands.16
As Union forces came into view, Nashville’s residents descended into an “uncontrollable panic. People were rushing madly about with their most valuable possessions in their arms; every valuable vehicle was put into use to carry the fleeing crowd from the city,” wrote a Confederate officer. The “ceaseless clamor of excited voices” was almost “deafening,” and “hysterical women, half laughing, half crying, dragged their children behind them, too much excited to know what they were doing, but impelled by the nervous dread that if they did not move the Yankees would catch them.”17
A great crush fled the city. And then all became quiet as Nashville shut down. “Not a house in the city open. Not one,” wrote one resident five days after the arrival of the army. Miraculously enough, the coming of the Yankees brought none of the threatened terrors. There was no mass uprising of slaves against their masters, and the soldiers were a far cry from the imagined barbarian hordes.18
And General Buell’s overtures were friendly. One of his first proclamations was designed to protect civilian property. Soldiers were “forbidden to enter the residence or grounds of any citizen, on any plea, without authority.” Sarah was a diplomat by trade; surely she could navigate this crisis. Judge John Lea, a longtime friend, was charged with meeting the Union army on the outskirts of town. Before doing so he visited Polk Place and asked Sarah, “What shall I say to General Buell for you?” Putting on her best smile, she replied, “Tell him I am at home.”19
A FEW DAYS LATER, after the commander of the federal army set up his headquarters at the nearby St. Cloud Hotel, he sent a note to Polk Place asking permission to “pay his respects to the widow of an ex-President of the United States.” Sarah wrote back, inviting Buell and his guests at 11 a.m. the following morning. She correctly predicted that this would not be a small reception, and corralled friends and neighbors into helping her with her entertainment. Buell arrived with “nearly every commanding general in and around the city, eighteen or twenty in number.” Over the course of their hourlong meeting, Sarah proved a gracious host, even offering a tour of the house, focused, of course, on James’s great legacy and “curiosities that he received as president.”20
Rather than providing verbal proof of her allegiance to the Union, she allowed her actions to demonstrate that as a First Lady, she stood above the current crisis. Whether she directly said so or not in that first meeting with General Buell, the officers who visited her left with the distinct understanding that she considered Polk Place neutral ground, set apart by the presence of James’s tomb and many objects from his presidency.
The meeting was a success. The officers who left Polk Place were charmed, even delighted. Sarah received Brigadier General William Haines Lytle “with great grace and cordiality….She is still very handsome & elegantly mannered—I am very glad I called,” he wrote his wife. “Mrs. Polk is a very social old lady and a very good looking woman too,” N. G. Markham, a soldier in the 18th Michigan, wrote to his wife about his own visit to Polk Place. “She has got a very nice residence and seemed to enjoy herself very well.” A formal visit to Mrs. Polk became a required event for each succeeding federal commander in the Nashville area, almost all Union officers, and a number of enlisted men as well. That Sarah’s wartime hospitality was widely appreciated is suggested by the testimonial she received years later from Union general Galusha Pennypacker of Philadelphia as “a soldier’s reciprocity to a high-toned Southern woman who had been good to him and his men.”21
Yet this version of the encounter was not remotely the way Sarah’s meeting with Buell was reported in the national press. And it was widely reported; Mrs. James K. Polk’s meeting with the Union officers was understood to be a matter of national interest, and covered accordingly. For a month northern papers reprinted the account of an “eye witness” to the meeting with Buell under the title “Mrs. Polk the Traitor.” The eyewitness claimed that when Sarah and a “niece, daughter of the ex-reverend General Leonidas,” met Buell and the other officers, she “seemed determined that no doubt should be entertained as to her sentiments.” “General,” the First Lady was said to have stated. “I trust this war will speedily terminate by the acknowledgement of Southern independence.” In response to her effrontery she received a lecture about her husband’s great sacrifice to the Union, one that left her silent and, the writer implies, ashamed.22
The absurdity of this story should be evident. There was no one more polite than Sarah Polk, or less likely to bring up an unpleasant issue unnecessarily. Attacking the aims of her powerful guests would not only have been counterproductive to her goal of appeasing her visitors, but also a sin against decorum. Nor was she likely to have expressed such a clear political view; her career had been devoted to obscuring the direct expression of her political beliefs behind the veil of deference.
And then there is the supposed presence of General Leonidas Polk’s daughter in her house. The young ladies from that branch of the family were among the few nieces who never spent time with the First Lady, because the two branches of the Polk family did not socialize. Clearly Leonidas’s daughter was inaccurately placed on the scene to remind northern readers of the Polk family’s Confederate ties.
The New York Evening Post reported a different meeting, but one little more flattering to Sarah. According to the Post, an unnamed general who had met with Sarah made it clear that “no doubt remained of the lady’s faith in the southern cause. She took occasion to say that although the people of the United States once made her husband president, the abolitionists did not do it.”23
Sarah Polk’s allegiances were of more than ordinary interest for several reasons. As the widow of James K. Polk, she was a living representative of America’s expansionist past, and her betrayal of the Union would signify the truth of Republican claims that the U.S.-Mexican War was fought for the expansion of slavery. For those Republicans who asserted that the government had long been under the sway of a “Slave Power” intent on consolidating slavery at the expense of free labor, Sarah’s embrace of secession appeared not only likely but inevitable.
And at the same time, Sarah represented southern womanhood. Few aspects of secession initially shocked northern sentiments more than the vehemence with which the South’s white women embraced their cause. They insulted Union soldiers with abandon, and aided the Confederacy in countless, seemingly unfeminine ways. They smuggled goods under their skirts; they hid munitions. Could any of them be trusted? With reports circulating of the active dissent of southern women, it was easy to project the same sentiments on Sarah.24
But Sarah’s allegiance was also called into question within the South. Female patriotism was a serious matter for the new Confederate nation, and policed accordingly. Sarah explicitly conformed to many of the obligations expected of patriotic women: she made provisions and she tended to the sick. But by flying an American flag, Sarah made it clear that she rejected the central tenet of Confederate nationalism, which was that the Confederacy was in fact a nation.25
Her willingness to meet with Union officers, in particular, led many southerners to question Sarah’s loyalty to their cause. Criticism of the fact that she treated federal officers “with a courtesy that ought not to be extended to the invaders” was so widespread that a Georgia paper felt driven to justify her “cool politeness” to Union officers. The paper explained that her attitude stemmed from past association, and that many of the officers in question “are old acquaintances and some received their appointments from her husband.” Extracts from “Northern papers” proved, according to this supporter from Georgia, that she “never sought to conceal her sympathy for the Southern cause.” She rightly recognized these visits as “courteous acknowledgements of her dignified position and personal worth, and it would be unwomanly in her to repel them with insult or taunt.” While northerners were quick to attribute treachery to a southern woman, southern supporters justified her behavior by pointing to norms of female decorum. Sarah was a paragon of deferential womanhood; her behavior offered a reproach to more assertive women. The Georgia reporter wasn’t sure whether “the ladies of the South are called upon, by any true instinct of patriotism, to treat mere courtesies from the enemy with scorn or contempt.”26
This is not to say that Buell or any other Union officer knew Sarah to be true to the Union. They did not. “She claims, I am informed, that she is a Union woman,” Brigadier General John White Geary wrote his wife with some skepticism in 1863. Although Geary had been the recipient of a lucrative patronage appointment from President Polk in 1849, he seemed a bit amazed that Sarah “insists upon the retention of the franking privilege which was granted her some years ago by Congress.” When Geary later found himself in Nashville with “more time than I could well dispose of,” he decided to stop by Polk Place. Sarah met him, as she met all officers, “with great warmth and cordiality.” She gave him a picture of Polk Place, featuring James’s tomb, to take home with him, and “made many expressions of extreme unconditional loyalty, of which I took notice as she had been represented as somewhat rebellious in the early part of the war.”27
What neither Geary nor any other officer knew was that Sarah was concealing precious Confederate property. Hidden in Polk Place were boxes of silver, jewelry, and diamonds, as well as fine paintings and portraits owned by neighbors who brought them to her before fleeing the city. When officers of the Tennessee Historical Society in the capitol building discovered their building “open and abandoned to any and all that saw proper to go into it, and especially to straggling soldiers who came with the advance guard of the U.S. Army,” they also turned to Sarah for help. The recording secretary, forty-one-year-old Anson Nelson, knew Sarah through his work as city tax collector. He hastily gathered up valuables and took them to Polk Place, asking her to take care of them for the society. “She very generously consented to put them in a safe place and keep them until they should be called for by proper persons, to be returned to the Capitol.” Not one of the valuables given to Sarah for safekeeping was lost, but countless items left behind at the historical society were destroyed over the course of the war.28
The Union army’s reception elsewhere in Nashville hadn’t been nearly as pleasant as in the drawing room of Polk Place. The population was hostile; the “ladies of Nashville” were “as full of treason as they are in occasional cases of loveliness,” according to the New York Times. Passing two young ladies in the street, a soldier heard one say to the other that she wished she “had the eyeballs of the Yankees to play marbles with.” Indeed, Sarah’s hospitality, whatever her true feelings, was notable in that it existed at all. Another elite Nashville woman wrote a friend on the eve of the Union invasion that she hoped to be able to “entertain” a large number of Yankees, and poison them. “I would with pleasure give each a cup of coffee and I think it would be the last any of them would ever drink.” In Murfreesboro one of James Avent’s female relatives said simply, “I hope I will die before I am found receiving a Yankee.”29
Polk Place was an “island of grace” in a hostile city, in large part because Sarah had the tact to avoid political discussion when entertaining Unionists. She flew the American flag, and was careful to say, when asked, that given his great sacrifice to the nation, her dearest husband would never have supported secession. But when one of the generals leaving Polk Place asked Elias, who was standing at the steps, uncovered head bowed in respect, what he thought of “the situation,” Elias promptly responded, “I’m for the rights of the South in the territories.” This “unexpected answer raised the hearty laughter of the whole party,” and the observation by one officer that “you’d better not ask another darkey his political opinions in his section of the country.”30
Northerners could be forgiven for finding Sarah’s “neutrality” less than amusing. A New York Times correspondent who accompanied General Grant was not charmed by her when he visited Polk Place soon after Buell. He reported that Grant and his staff were received “courteously, but with a polished coldness that indicated sufficiently in which direction her sympathies ran—she was simply polite and ladylike; in no case patriotic.” She expressed neither sympathy for the South nor “anything that might be construed into a wish for the success of the Government.” She hoped, she said, “that the tomb of her husband would protect her household from insult and her property from pillage; further than this she expected nothing from the United States and desired nothing.” The reporter was appalled. “As the widow is of more than ordinary intelligence, and owes the ample fortune which smooths the declivity of her old age to the Government, it is somewhat strange that she should be at once so blindly ignorant of the true character of the present war, and so ungrateful.” Five days later the same story appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, offering just as much reassurance to Confederates as it did concern to northerners.31
This did not quell General William Tecumseh Sherman’s suspicions. When he visited Sarah he made it a point to question her about James’s inaugural address, “which not only contained expression of attachment and loyalty to the Union, but also affirmed that it should be preserved forever indissoluble.” Sarah responded, “Those are good sentiments, sir.” Sherman was unconvinced by her mild expression of loyalty to the Union. But what mattered was that both General Sherman and First Lady Sarah Polk kept up a façade of her neutrality. It’s no critique of Sarah’s ample tact and charm to surmise that the main goal of the repeated visits of Union officers to Polk Place was something other than refreshments. She was a threat that they needed to neutralize. And Union officers were aware that they desired her allegiance, even if only in pretense, in order to maintain Union sentiment in the state.32
Abraham Lincoln entered the war assuming that secessionist sentiment throughout the South was limited, and that the great mass of loyal civilians would embrace a stable Union presence. Were this the case, of course, the quick securing of Tennessee in early 1862 should have resulted in widespread civilian celebration. When Andrew Johnson became military governor of Tennessee in March 1862, he had high hopes that Lincoln was right, and was convinced that a conciliatory approach was the best means of reuniting Nashville citizens with their country. Forgetting Elias’s endorsement of the expansion of slave territory, Union officers asked Sarah if Elias might be included in the delegation welcoming Johnson, as a link to James, and a happier history. Sarah agreed, and so Elias Polk helped escort Johnson into Nashville.33
Whether or not Elias kept his opinions to himself, Johnson quickly learned that secessionism ran deep in Nashville. From the beginning, his governorship was less than auspicious in Tennessee’s biggest city. As the leading political representative of the interests of eastern Tennessee, and an avid Unionist, he was an unpopular figure in Nashville before he became governor, and Union generals worried about “fierce hatred to Governor Johnson, to him personally more than officially.” Nashville’s secessionists considered his rule dictatorial. Although Nashville was home to some vocal and powerful Unionists, the mass of white residents appeared openly hostile to the Union.34
Losing Sarah Polk’s allegiance was not a risk the Union army was prepared to take. They recognized that their hold on Tennessee was far more fragile than it appeared. The fact that the Union held the city throughout the war obscures the strength of Confederate sentiment, sentiment that never fully disappeared because the Confederate Army of Tennessee was so very tenacious. In November 1862, Nathan Bedford Forrest moved against Nashville’s defenses, and Confederates in the city were convinced salvation was at hand. The Union army beat them back definitively, Unionists believed.35
But southern sympathizers never lost hope, even after John Bell Hood’s forces lost Atlanta to Sherman’s Union forces in the summer of 1864. Hood, hoping to draw Sherman out of Georgia, marched north to Tennessee and dug in outside the Nashville city limits. Two weeks before Christmas 1864, Hood’s army was within sight of the city limits. The faith of Nashville’s Confederates, they thought, might finally be rewarded. But in two days of fighting, the Union army overran the Confederate trenches and forced Hood’s damaged army to retreat to Mississippi.36
Nor was Sarah’s allegiance of local importance only. Visiting President Polk’s grave was a highlight for thousands of troops who landed in Nashville and encamped outside of town. The 10th Indiana Volunteer Infantry marched directly to Polk Place after landing in Nashville, and were thrilled when “Mrs. Polk came out on the veranda and greeted us kindly, the boys responding with cheers.” The loss of First Lady Polk to the Confederacy would have been a serious public relations failure for the Union, one that would leave the army in the uncomfortable situation of punishing a First Lady who until the war was still widely beloved both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The Union army needed Sarah in its camp just as surely as she needed it in hers.37
IT WASN’T EASY remaining in Nashville through the course of the war. The city almost immediately experienced shortages of coffee, liquor, and staple products. When the Union army arrived, thousands of slaves fled to Union lines. As Nashville became the center of the Union’s western war effort, a permanent garrison of ten thousand U.S. Army troops seized buildings for barracks and hospitals. They also commandeered slaves for military work, many of whom had previously been employed cleaning the streets. Filthy streets produced outbreaks of communicable disease. With roads, bridges, and railroads damaged, the economy stagnated, a situation exacerbated by the fact that the occupation army barred almost all civilian travel, trade, and industry.38
There was a real threat of widespread famine. First Confederate and then Union troops set upon the farmers close to Nashville. The fertile farmland of middle Tennessee was called upon to furnish the Union army with food and draft animals for the remainder of the war, leaving little to spare for urban residents. War refugees sought shelter in the city, which struggled to feed and house them. By the summer of 1863 even wealthy Nashvillians like Sarah had to contend with vastly inflated prices and shortages of basic staple products. In 1862 a workingman might earn two dollars a day, but by September of that month a cord of wood cost fourteen dollars. By January 1864 there wasn’t a cord of wood for sale in Nashville for less than thirty dollars. Crime increased, as did conflicts between civilians and the military. Despite Buell’s order to respect local property, few yards or homes, besides Sarah’s, remained safe from depredations.39
Given the larger goal of reintegrating the citizens of Nashville back into the nation, military commanders struggled with how to best ensure compliance among an openly hostile civilian population. It seemed obvious that one of the best methods was to ask Confederates to sign an oath of allegiance to the Union. Initially they limited this demand to politicians and other leading figures: the more prominent the individual, the more pressure to prove him- or herself loyal. “It is a happy thing these days to be obscure, & a man’s safety now, depends on his insignificance,” wrote one nervous Nashville woman.40
As Johnson grew to understand the depth of Confederate support, he expanded the loyalty oath requirement to any civilian with known pro-southern sentiments. In December 1862, Union military commander General William Rosecrans ordered all Nashville citizens who had facilitated rebellion by speech or action to take an oath to the Union, and insure it with a bond, within a two-week period. The punishment for noncompliance was imprisonment. In March 1863, he expanded the order to all whites not known to be Unionists.
Not everyone complied. Former Tennessee senator Alfred O. P. Nicholson of Columbia, a close friend of both the Polks and the Johnsons, refused to take the oath, boldly claiming that “he had been a sympathizer with the South, and was still a sympathizer with the Rebellion, and that he had made up his mind to take the consequences before he would take the oath.” When a flabbergasted Johnson attempted to corroborate the story with the post commander in Columbia, the commander blamed Alfred’s wife, Caroline. “Nicholson did not speak of you,” the post commander told Johnson, “but seemed under the influence of his wife who is like many other women here intense bitter & unbearable.” Caroline threatened that Alfred would “rot in jail” before she would consent to his taking the oath.41
Regardless of whether Johnson believed Caroline Nicholson to be responsible for his friend refusing to take the oath, he repeatedly responded favorably to the “pleas of rebel ladies.” He allowed Elizabeth Harding, wife of an imprisoned Confederate, and owner of Nashville’s fanciest plantation, Belle Meade, to travel to visit her husband. He also ordered the Union army to protect Belle Meade’s breeding stock and racehorses, which were the finest in Nashville.42
But Governor Johnson didn’t hesitate to exile women whom he believed suspect, sometimes sending them to Canada or to the North, but most often to places south of Union lines. James’s cousin Mary Polk Yeatman, wife of a Confederate officer, was allowed to stay in Nashville after taking the loyalty oath. By the end of May, almost ten thousand men and women had sworn the oath, while others fled south.43
While Johnson hoped to persuade Nashvillians of the Union cause, General Rosecrans supported more drastic measures, particularly the use of military police. He established a secret police force under the command of Colonel William Truesdail, to root out disloyalty. Truesdail’s determination was such that Governor Johnson admitted to President Lincoln that the secret police were “causing much ill feeling and doing us great harm.” One of Truesdail’s chief targets was the Nashville’s Ladies’ Aid Society, which the Union army suspected of smuggling contraband quinine and other necessities to Confederate troops. He clashed so often with this organization that his warning to his operatives, “Don’t trust women,” became an unofficial slogan. One reason that Truesdail was so hated by Nashville dwellers is that he threw women in jail, although not nearly as many as he wished to.44
According to the Boston Post, none other than Sarah Childress Polk headed the Nashville Ladies’ Aid Society. Yet not only was Sarah never under threat of a jail term, but she never swore an oath to the Union. Regulations specified that only individuals who had proven their loyalty via oath would be provided coal for the winter. Provost marshals across occupied Tennessee “coerced patriotism” by requiring loyalty oaths in exchange for desperately needed supplies that the army controlled.45
And yet Sarah asked for and received coal, precisely when “it is most convenient for me to put it away.” Governor Johnson made the stakes with regard to the treatment of Mrs. Polk clear in a letter to commanding officer William Utley in October 1863. “As to whom Mrs Polk is, her high character &c I need not write to you, but trust you will give her letter, and the matters of which it treats such consideration as it deserves, coming from such a respectable source, and relating to a matter of…importance to the Government, and National troops.”46
In February 1864, a reporter from the Cincinnati Times who was visiting Nashville had the good fortune to encounter Sarah in her front yard as he made the requisite tourist’s visit to Polk Place. He was astounded to find that the “elderly female in ‘weeds’ ” seemed happy to grant him an interview. After she insisted that since the time of James’s death she hadn’t attended “a party or gathering of any kind” except funerals, or the occasional dinner while “on business” with James’s other executors, the conversation turned to “Mrs. Polk’s secessionism,” of which “much has been said.” He allowed Sarah to defend herself against accusations of “being a bitter Secessionist,” particularly in relation to the Nashville Ladies’ Aid Society.47
“I never was a Secessionist, and I don’t think I ever will be one,” Sarah stated. “I always said there was no excuse for the course taken by misguided Southern friends. I said that Mr. Lincoln was constitutionally elected, and that that election should be acquiesced in by every true patriot. I go, sir, for my Government, my whole Government.” She admitted that her name was “placed before the public…in a connection that may have engendered in some minds doubts of my loyalty, but was placed against my wishes and remonstrances. But inasmuch as it was done for a humane and charitable purpose I said nothing about it.” Yes, she loved the South, but she invited the nation to understand that this was because she was a woman:
I do not deny…that my womanly sympathies are with the South, and that I often catch myself exulting over the successes of the Confederate arms, but this is only when my reason is taken prisoner and my judgment temporarily suspended at the bidding of my sympathies, prejudices and affections. I was born in the South…my surroundings have all been Southern….Is it, then, reasonable to suppose that…I can throw off, as I would a garment, all the affections, all the prejudices (if you please) of a long life? And yet, dear sir, notwithstanding all this, I long, and pray, and yearn for a restoration of my distracted country to its former peaceful and happy condition.48
The journalist offered little commentary, instead deferring to the preferences of “this retiring and truly modest woman.” His failure to question her narrative was no accident. He, like the Union generals who gave her a free pass to assert her own neutrality, were in effect repaying her for her deference to men. The journalist reported with approval that Mrs. James K. Polk was a woman for whom “it could truly be said that ‘It is a name and an attainment to shun as much as possible the public gaze.’ ” Her allegiance to the South and leadership of the Nashville Ladies’ Aid Society shed doubt on her assertions of patriotism, but her claim to being a private woman kept the “public gaze” from investigating that narrative too closely.49
OF COURSE, the reality was quite a bit more complicated. Sarah was not neutral, and virtually all her efforts during the war supported the South. Her initial energies, in the spring of 1862, were focused on saving the life of her nephew, Confederate artillery captain Marshall Polk. Marshall lost a leg at the Battle of Shiloh in early April and was taken prisoner. Although he was “kindly” treated in northern hospitals, his heart rate remained dangerously elevated after surgery. His situation was dire.50
The Polks never adopted Marshall, but Sarah’s devotion to him was intense. It was widely acknowledged that he was her “darling.” She made it her mission to bring him home. “I have never seen her so much concerned about anything since her Husband’s death,” wrote a close family friend. Sarah turned to commanding general Henry Halleck to secure his release, and her appeal was granted. For weeks Sarah tended to Marshall, whose situation remained critical. Ten days after his arrival, Polk family friend Malvina Grundy Bass visited Polk Place, and “very much fear[ed] that Capt Polk will die.” But Marshall recovered, and his aunt returned him to the Confederate army on crutches.51
Sarah then turned her attention to the care of other wounded soldiers. She became “assiduous in her attentions to the sick in the hospitals, devoting a large portion of her time in visiting the sick, and furnishing them with everything that would in the least contribute to their comfort.” Although Sarah was far from alone among elite southern women in her hospital work, it won her praise in the North and the South. A New York correspondent condemned the “shesessionists” of Nashville for their “ultra Southern sentiments” and “energetic animosity,” but made an exception for “the venerable Mrs. James K. Polk,” who was renowned for her “charity and attention” to the sick in local hospitals.52
Sarah tended to both Union and Confederate wounded, but expended her political capital in support of the Confederacy. Her most public intervention took place in September 1864, when she petitioned President Lincoln on behalf of four Confederate soldiers, or, as she put it, “4 fatherless, destitute, simple hearted, uneducated Southern youths,” requesting that they “be reprieved in order that they may prove themselves innocent of the charges for which they were under death sentence.” In addition to the petition, which was signed by other prominent Tennessee women, Sarah included a personal letter appealing to the president. Lincoln reprieved the men.53
This was not the only time she drew on her political capital to secure the comfort or release of Confederate soldiers. Sarah had built personal relationships with dozens of politicians over the years. Many of them had received patronage from James during his political career, and some of those relationships deepened after James’s death. In 1863 she sent ten dollars and a note to the commander of the prison at Rock Island to be handed to an unknown soldier, with the order that the money be turned over to “this boy immediately and you will much oblige me.”54
She also secured the release of her nephew John Childress Jr. from prison. John was only sixteen years old when the war started, with an enthusiasm for battle that was matched only by his bad luck. He was captured almost immediately after joining the Confederacy, and jailed at Camp Chase in Ohio. Sarah wrote immediately to Ohio governor David Tod to plead for his release “on a parole of honor or by a bond that he will not take up arms again,” basing her claim on the grounds of John Jr.’s youth, “not 17 years of age,” and the fact that he was in service at Fort Donelson “only a few days before the battle,” as well as on Tod’s own “position and high character.” An indirect reference to “many recollections of the past” only hinted at the debt Tod owed the Polk family. David Tod, like James, had the misfortune in the 1840s to run as a Democrat in a Whig state. When he lost the governor’s race in 1846, James took pity on him and appointed him minister to Brazil. “You have the power to confer on me a favor, that will be ever remembered with gratitude,” she wrote Tod. Tod granted that favor.55
NONE OF SARAH’S political relationships would prove to be as valuable as the one she had formed with Andrew Johnson. When Johnson served his first term as governor of Tennessee in the mid-1850s, he and his family were frequent guests at Polk Place. Their relationship was cordial enough that Sarah lent him books to read. She appealed to Johnson repeatedly for the release of friends from prison, for special dispensation from federal law, and for a variety of other favors.56
Many of those favors were on behalf of her brother John’s family. In 1860, fifty-four-year-old John Childress, his wife, and their seven children, including eighteen-year-old Bettie (who as a child survived cholera), were living on their very valuable farm outside Murfreesboro. He was a regular visitor to his mother’s home nearby, and with the neighboring Avents, co-owners of the Polk Plantation with Sarah. But Murfreesboro was far from peaceful. After the Union army captured the town in 1862, both John Childress and James Avent were arrested and jailed, along with ten of the town’s other leading men. “There is no knowing who will be next,” wrote Avent’s relative Kate Carney. “For it seems though [sic] most polite are the first arrested & I verily believe, if a person did not open his mouth, they would have them taken up on suspicion of his having looked contrary to his established rules.”57
The men were released in late May, after swearing an oath to the Union, but less than two weeks later James Avent was arrested a second time. Mary Childress Avent and her two young sons fled to Polk Place and the protection of her aunt. Sarah picked up her pen and wrote to Governor Johnson. Appealing to his sense of chivalry, she requested Avent’s parole so that “he may go home to his distressed family.” The appeal was successful, and Johnson released him soon after. This was the first of many requests that Sarah made to Johnson over the course of the war, requests that grew ever larger, and almost all of which he granted. She made another request on behalf of the Avents, in order to prevent one of their slaves from being impressed by the Union army, but the majority were on behalf of John Childress, and ultimately her own fortunes.58
The Avents remained in Murfreesboro as Confederate troops began to mass nearby in hopes of regaining the town. But John and his family packed up their belongings and escaped to northern Georgia later that summer. Whether they were escaping from the Union or the Confederate army was unclear, a fact that would cause a great deal of trouble for both John and Sarah in the future. But in one respect, at least, it was a highly fortuitous move. In Georgia, twenty-year-old Bettie Childress met a “gallant” Confederate major general by the name of John C. Brown, and married him not long thereafter.59
On January 2, 1863, the Union army secured permanent control of Murfreesboro at the Battle of Stones River, one of the deadliest engagements of the entire war. This was no gift to Sarah, who suddenly found herself responsible for John’s property, at the same time that she lost his help in looking after their mother. Compounding matters was eighty-one-year-old Elizabeth’s rapidly degenerating health. Sarah successfully appealed to Union soldiers to protect her mother’s property, and as Elizabeth declined, repeatedly received Union escort to visit Murfreesboro both before and after her death, on May 25, 1863.60
Sarah was devastated by her mother’s death, and felt the want of companionship deeply. She had female friends in Nashville, several of whom, including Malvina Grundy Bass, reached out to her during her mother’s last illness. Sarah was grateful, but Malvina herself died almost immediately after Sarah’s mother, and her Nashville companions were no substitute for family. Sarah was possessed by the desire to see Sister Jane. Jane would be a comfort; she knew what it was like to lose a mother. Sarah sent news to Jane through their niece Naomi Hays that “her mother is dead,” and “that she is very anxious to see her.” If Jane didn’t “come up there soon,” Sarah vowed she would “try to come” to Columbia.61
But Columbia was also under siege, and without mail service. A recent “Yankee raid” had subjected the inhabitants to “various” unspecified “bad things,” including, though not limited to, the theft of horses, mules, and the entire contents of smokehouses. Leonidas Polk lost seventy-one horses, leaving his daughters “grieving over the loss of their riding-horses.” Jane Walker was more fortunate. Union soldiers forced their way into her house, looking, they claimed, for hidden Confederate soldiers, “but the Colonel apologized upon hearing she was a sister of James K. Polk” and took nothing.62
In the end Sarah did not get to see Jane: the situation in Murfreesboro didn’t allow it. The Union army “appropriated” John’s furniture after he fled, and squatters moved into his home. Sarah set aside her grief over the loss of her mother and focused her energies on securing John’s property. Her efforts were heroic. According to family history, after John Jr. was released from prison he rode up to the family home “to look things over” disguised in a Union uniform, and then turned the squatter occupying his family home over to military authorities. In fact it wasn’t John Jr. who returned the property to family hands, but Sarah.63
Although Governor Johnson recognized that any complaint on the part of Mrs. James K. Polk had political implications and was a matter of “equal importance” to the “Government, and National troops,” as to “the parties concerned,” Sarah had a much harder time convincing the lower-level supervisors who had the power to release John’s property. She sent letter after letter adamantly insisting that her brother was loyal to the Union. “I must be allowed to repeat that my brother did not ‘abandon’ his home,” she wrote. “He left when the Confederate Army was concentrating at Murfreesboro. Two months before” the Union took control of the town. John was no Confederate. “He has nothing to do with the army in any form whatever and expects to return as soon as he can remove his family.” Her multiple letters to supervising agents and the provost marshal requesting that John’s property be returned to him, or at the very least “the Piano & the mirror,” were all declined. Not dissuaded by repeated rejection, she sought permission in March 1864 to ship a trunk of “ladies wearing apparal” to her brother through Union lines in Chattanooga. When her request was rebuffed on the grounds that it was illegal, she apologized to Colonel Parkhurst, the provost marshal general, that “the usages of war prohibited a complyance” at the time of her request. With her head held high, she offered a wish that “when communications are open I can have the privilege of sending it.”64
In early April, Sarah turned to the governor for help. A week before the intended sale of the Childress property the governor requested that the sale be postponed long enough to give Sarah time to present a memorial to the secretary of the treasury. That appeal was successful. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase had the “great pleasure to be able to relieve” Sarah’s concern by ordering the authorities to surrender John’s furniture to him. Chase was apologetic. “It is not my wish that the agents of this Department shall take or retain possession of any furniture or like property unless it has been really abandoned, and even then, only for the purpose not of depriving the loyal owner of it, but to preserve it for the rightful proprietor,” he assured her. Unsurprisingly, given this outcome, she breezily asked Parkhurst for a pass for her brother to visit her in Nashville.65
SARAH’S SUCCESSFUL APPEALS on behalf of her brother and Confederate soldiers, the consideration she received from the army regarding her mother’s property and death, and the implicit understanding occasioned by the continuing visits of Union officers to Polk Place, emboldened her to pursue her own affairs.
Sarah’s finances, like those of other white southerners, were devastated during the war. Her investments consisted of slaves, cotton, and state bonds. Her 50 percent stake in the Yalobusha plantation was her sole source of income during the war. The Union army placed an embargo on cotton sales, and backed it up with naval reinforcements to prevent illegal smuggling of cotton out of New Orleans. The president himself was the only one who could issue a permit for a southerner to bring cotton north for sale.66
Sarah’s firm in New Orleans was left holding an entire season’s worth of cotton that was impossible to sell. But unlike most southerners, she was in the position to work around the ban on cotton. In November 1864 she turned to her old friend Andrew Johnson, now vice president–elect, for a “special permit, to bring into the Federal Lines a small lot of cotton.” Having successfully appealed to Lincoln only three months earlier for a reprieve of the death sentence handed down on four young Confederates, she turned now to Johnson “to solicit most earnestly, your interest in my behalf, with the President of the U.S.” She entertained “a confident belief, that if the request is placed before him showing my necessity, he will be kind enough to grant me this privilege. I most respectfully ask it as the Widow of an Ex-President of the U. States.”67
Were her status not enough to persuade President Lincoln, whom she rightly predicted would see the letter, she drew on her status as a dependent on the basis of both age and sex. “I am now 60 years of age, retired from the active scenes of life, and can not provide for myself.” It was a powerful appeal, and for the second time that fall Lincoln granted Sarah Polk her wish. She was allowed to import sixteen bales of cotton into Union lines.68
Less than two weeks later she wrote to the general who oversaw the first delivery for “another favor; to give me permit to bring into Memphis a few bales more of Cotton.” Again, she was explicit in her appeal on the grounds of dependence. Expenses, she claimed, would consume “almost the whole amount that I can get for the 16 bales” she had already received permission to ship. She would like to ship an additional hundred bales from Mississippi to Memphis, and then north. “I ask this favor solely for the purpose to get means to live on. And to prevent the saddest of all evils in old age: dependent poverty. I am now 60 years of age, and cannot provide for myself.” She felt sure that he would “sympathise with me in the desire to save something to live on in the decline of life.” Sarah was canny enough to recognize that a second appeal to Lincoln was unnecessary, and that the earlier permit might be interpreted in a flexible manner. And again she judged correctly, for a second time receiving permission to ship what was now a substantial quantity of cotton through Union lines. When requesting permission to ship more of her cotton, she testified that it “was produced by my laborers, who was and are supported by me, & receives a portion of their product.”69
This was not an entirely accurate representation of the situation on the Yalobusha plantation. While the Emancipation Proclamation abolished slavery in Mississippi on January 1, 1863, the enslaved people on the Polk Plantation didn’t learn of their freedom until 1865. Although the Polks’ enslaved people were entitled to farm small plots of land on their days off, there is no evidence that Sarah or anyone else was paying the laborers on the Polk-Avent plantation in 1864. Nor, of course, were they paid before emancipation.70
But by this point, Sarah had become an expert at learning how to craft an appeal that would win her special treatment. She was indefatigable in pursuit of her own interest, repeatedly requesting (but never demanding) that her voice be heard and her privilege acknowledged. Her excuse for never taking no for an answer was one she had cultivated over decades in politics: her deference to men. “If I have asked for anything which it would be inconsistent or improper to grant, of course I will not expect to receive it,” she wrote to Union officers. Her decorum enabled her to push past the customs and laws that were designed to hold her back. Sarah made it clear that it was up to the men in charge to determine what she was entitled to, but she did so in the knowledge that her approach made it difficult for them to deny her the means for her support. It’s fair to say that her deferential pose never paid better dividends than during the Civil War.71
But Sarah wasn’t done with cotton in 1864. In March 1865 she wrote Vice President Johnson asking forgiveness for “my perseverance, and I do fear annoyance,” as well as “your interest + influence in my behalf in relation to the favor I have been soliciting from the President. You have some knowledge of my pecuniary circumstances. The necessity to provide means to live on, is my object. The sale of some cotton is my resource, and all I have to meet my daily expenses + deferred demands against them.” Asking for “a permit + safe conduct, into federal lines” to sell a hundred bales of cotton, she hoped, “will not conflict with the public good…and will be a favor, gratefully acknowledged by me, the proceeds of which will relieve me of much embarrassment.”72
A month later President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Nashville theater attendees had recently enjoyed watching Booth and his more talented brother perform Othello at the Nashville Theatre. Sarah was not among them; she never went to the theater. Newly sworn-in president Andrew Johnson sent her, by military telegraph, a blanket pass lifting “all restrictions on cotton, including the twenty five percent tax.” She need not ask again. She could ship as much cotton as she pleased.73
In July 1865 the new president granted her one last favor. Reminding Johnson of his acquaintance with her niece Bettie (most likely from meetings at Polk Place), Sarah requested a pardon for Bettie’s husband, Confederate general John C. Brown. Johnson issued the pardon. It was a decision he would come to regret.74
AND WHAT ABOUT THOSE LABORERS? How did the human beings owned by Sarah Polk fare during the Civil War? When the Union army arrived at Polk Plantation on August 19, 1863, the season’s cotton crop had been “laid by,” and field hands were occupied with the sort of mundane tasks that could wait for the end of the harvest. That Wednesday, many of them were cleaning out a turnip patch. Overseer George W. Peel had just enough advance warning of the army’s arrival to order twenty-seven-year-old Charlie, who was owned by James Avent, to “take the mules and horses off and hide them in a certain canebreak.” When he returned to the turnip patch, Charlie discovered that “the Yankees had done come through” and commandeered ten valuable mules as well as two saddles and bridles. Nor was that all they left with: “All the boys was gone off the place” as well.75
The Polk Place overseer claimed the army “took” ten Polk slaves. Jane, the onetime “sprighty” thirteen-year-old Sarah had helped purchase for the plantation in 1846, claimed her husband, Manuel, was “carried off” by the Union army. But the men may have seen it differently. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, not only declared “all persons held as slaves” in the rebel states “henceforth free,” but it also provided for receiving those former slaves into the armed service of the United States. The opportunity to take up arms against the Confederacy was a matter of great celebration among black Americans. By the time the Union army reached the Polk Plantation, thousands of former slaves had joined the United States Colored Troops. Close to 10 percent of Mississippi’s black male population, almost eighteen thousand men, served in the Union army.76
Some enslaved men resisted enlistment because they worried about the safety of loved ones left at home. Women and children were subject to retribution by angry owners, and the very real possibility of mistreatment, including rape, from raiding soldiers. But many, if not all, of the black men on the Polk Plantation had a taste of armed rebellion when they took part in the insurrection against overseer John Mairs in November 1858, including Giles and Manuel, who were still awaiting trial. It’s far more likely that they willingly embraced the Union offer of freedom and a uniform than that they were taken by force, even when it meant, in Manuel’s case, leaving his wife, Jane, and three living children behind. Or in the case of Giles, leaving his wife, Dafney, with five living children, including an infant less than a month old.77
One of the ten Polk men returned to the plantation within days. The rest marched a hundred miles north to La Grange, Tennessee, where on August 24, 1863, they enlisted together for a three-year term in the U.S. Colored Infantry. In one week they had gone from slaves to soldiers. “We were all together,” remembered Harbert’s son, Lewis, who at age twenty-four was a generation younger than some of his companions. Seventeen years earlier, Gideon Pillow had described Lewis as “a very likely & smart & stout boy” when haggling with James over his value. He was still likely and smart, but no longer a boy.78
After another young man from the Polk Plantation deserted four days after enlisting, Lewis and the remaining seven Polk men chose to cast their lot with the Union army. Not only had they all, in the words of Lewis Polk, “formally belonged to Mrs. J. K. Polk and lived on the Polk Plantation,” but they had at this point known one another most or all of their lives. Thirty-nine-year-old Alfonso was Manuel’s brother. Five of the men were within five years of age of one another. Alfonso’s son John was ten years old and a frequent playmate of the elder living children of Giles and Dafney. Manuel and Giles were the same age. Giles and Lewis left behind wives with “suckling” babies born just weeks apart, and the two men promised each other that if one of them should die, the other would care for the family they left behind.79
They remained together as much as possible during five months of post and garrison duty at La Grange and Moscow, Tennessee. In January 1864 their regiment marched to Memphis, where they gained the designation of Company E of the 61st United States Colored Troops, and forty-five-year-old Addison Polk died of smallpox. The 61st remained on garrison duty in Memphis until July, when they first saw action in Tupelo, Mississippi. Under the command of Union general Andrew Smith, the 61st USCT helped defeat Confederate forces under cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest. This was no ordinary victory for the USCT. Forrest was among the most reviled of all Confederates for commanding the troops that massacred more than a hundred black Union soldiers after their surrender at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, just three months earlier. Victory at Tupelo was fittingly sweet.80
Over the course of an eventful summer, the Polk men battled the Confederacy on at least four separate occasions, and were again victorious over Forrest’s Confederate troops in Memphis in late August. They remained in Memphis for the remainder of the year, and spent the spring of 1865 marching first to Louisiana, then to Florida, and finally to Alabama.
It was on the march in Alabama that Giles Polk died of congestive heart failure on May 15, leaving widowed Dafney and his five children behind on the Polk Plantation. Alfonso outlived him by less than a month, dying of fever in Mobile. The loss of three of their number was not unusual: black soldiers were far less likely to return home alive than white soldiers, and in comparison to white soldiers, who were twice as likely to die of disease than war wounds, black soldiers were ten times more likely to die of disease than in battle.81
The five surviving Polk men remained in Alabama until mustered out on December 30, 1865. They all returned to the Polk Plantation. Manuel was reunited with his wife, Jane, and their three children. Lewis, keeping his promise to Giles, determined to care for Dafney and her children. Following a pattern typical among freedpeople in the Mississippi Delta, most of the former Polk Plantation residents left the plantation immediately after the war, but didn’t venture far. In 1866, a core group of the Polk freedpeople “put in a crop” at “the place next to ours.” But the following year they returned to Polk Plantation as sharecroppers.82
It might be difficult to understand why the men and women formerly owned by the Polks would voluntarily return to the unhealthy ground where so many of their friends and family died. But freedom was a complex matter for newly emancipated people, and more likely evaluated in terms of family, safety, and paid labor than physical distance. To maintain your family free from violent interference by white people while being paid for your labor meant that you were free. In the coercive landscape of the postwar South, many freedpeople discovered their best chances for freedom were in the neighborhood they knew best. And despite everything that happened at the Polk Plantation—despite sickness, violence, and death—for Dafney, Manuel, Jane, Lewis, and others, their shared history, family ties, and community meant that Yalobusha was home.83
Manuel and Jane had two more children after the end of the war, while still living and working at the Polk Plantation. When Manuel began drawing his veteran’s pension, he did so from the Polk Plantation. More than twenty years after the war’s end, a core group remained in the immediate neighborhood, able to confirm shared memories about their experiences in slavery and the coming of freedom. One of the benefits of freedom was the opportunity to choose a new surname, and a few of them did, one from Polk to Avent. But most remained Polks, on land they continued to refer to as the “Polk Place.”84
MATTERS AT THE NASHVILLE POLK PLACE were somewhat different. As a loyal state, Tennessee was exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation. Governor Johnson called for the immediate emancipation of Tennessee slaves in August 1863, but slavery didn’t end legally in the state until February 1865. Slaves in Tennessee were forced to free themselves, and the majority did so by physically removing themselves from their former owners.85
It’s possible to interpret the murder-suicide of enslaved twenty-seven-year-old Susan Polk in November 1861 in this manner. According to the coroner, Susan killed her three young children before taking her own life while “in a fit of insanity,” but we have no way of knowing what was going through the young woman’s head. Sarah left behind no commentary about the event, nor about the death of another Polk Place slave, twenty-six-year-old Nancy, from a burn two years later, beyond excusing her inability to return social calls on account of being “a little scarce of servants.” But, of course, Sarah Polk had never enjoyed returning social calls.86
Nancy, Susan, and Susan’s three young children may well have been the only enslaved Polks to leave Polk Place during the war. There is no evidence that anyone at Polk Place fled to Union lines or volunteered to fight in a black regiment, as did the men of the Yalobusha plantation. Seven men with the last name Polk show up in registers of black men employed by the Union army in Nashville, so it’s possible that one or two of the unnamed enslaved men who were listed in the 1860 census as living at Polk Place were impressed by the Union, but none of the “contraband” Polks have familiar first names. And when the Union army attempted to impress Jerry, one of her enslaved people, Sarah secured his exemption by appealing, once again, to her good friend Andrew Johnson. If it was the case that none of her other enslaved people were requisitioned by the army, it was likely because Sarah was once again receiving special treatment.87
The black residents of Polk Place may well have asserted their assumed freedom by working less, or not at all, as did the slaves of her neighbors. Her friend Malvina Bass noted in June 1862 that the “darkie men are more obedient and are better than usual” because “intelligent Contrabands don’t want to lose good homes,” but that “the women are becoming insolent and lazy.” Sarah’s niece Naomi Hays reported that as soon as federal soldiers arrived in Columbia, “many darkies ran off,” although her own family’s enslaved people remained at their posts, albeit with a decided lack of enthusiasm. “I have concluded to be a dining room servant after the war,” Naomi thoughtlessly joked, “being the surest way of getting fed, and not any hard work.”88
Six African American freedmen were still living with Sarah four years after the end of the war, at least one because he claimed loyalty to the First Lady. That was sixty-year-old Elias Polk, the slave given to James and Sarah as a wedding present, and the man who greeted Governor Johnson. The 1870 census listed Elias as owning $5,000 worth of personal property, a remarkable amount for a freedman, and working as a porter in the state senate. In the decades following the Civil War he became one of Nashville’s leading black politicians, while continuing to live, as he had since age eighteen, in a home with Sarah Polk. Elias never stopped deferring to the Polks, and it’s largely because of that allegiance that his name isn’t better known today.89
Elias ended up on the wrong side of history. Despite his enslavement, he appears to have fully internalized the Jacksonian democratic perspective, claiming to have been “ ‘a democrat from conviction’ since 1834, having imbibed his partisanship from listening to the private conversations of Calhoun and Polk.”90 That perspective extended to what many considered the subjugation of his own race. Not that he considered himself subjugated. According to newspaper reports, he claimed that President Polk once offered him his freedom. They were traveling through Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, when “several white men approached him and asked him if he didn’t know he was free. They told him that he was in a State where a man could not hold slaves, and all he had to do was leave and his master couldn’t do a thing.”91
Elias supposedly rejected the offer. “Do you think I would go back on the President dat way? No, sir. You don’t know me I’d sooner die than run off.” President Polk rewarded his loyal slave for his fidelity. “The President happened to be near and heard this. He was greatly pleased, and the next day surprised his faithful valet by speaking of it and told him whenever he wanted his freedom he could have it. When his master died Elias remained with the family.” Whether or not James offered Elias Polk his freedom, Elias’s response to General Buell and the other Union officers when they first visited Sarah in 1862 was likely no feint—he did support the rights of southerners to bring slaves into the territories. And he wasn’t afraid to say so. During the Civil War he welcomed one visiting general to Polk Place by remarking that the general “looked like a good conservative gentleman,…like his good old Master who was dead and gone.”92
After the war Elias’s politics remained Democratic, and, in the view of the vast majority of freedmen, radically offensive. The Democratic Party openly embraced white supremacy. But Elias was a founding member of a “Colored Democratic Club” and spoke out against northern Republican “carpetbaggers” sent by the Johnson administration to help rebuild the state’s political infrastructure. In 1869, he spoke at a meeting of black leaders in Nashville on the subject of migration. He insisted that freedmen could live peacefully in Tennessee if they would “just leave the white man’s politics alone.” While being considered as a Democratic candidate for the legislature, he put that philosophy into action, working with southern white Democrats to wrest control of the legislature from Republicans, actions that led to violent attacks by political opponents, and “wounds which were almost fatal in their results, received because of his firm adherence to his party.”93
But Elias never wavered, “in spite of the great odium in which it brought him with the people of his own race.” He remained an outspoken Democrat. He was listed as one of the “prominent colored men” who supported Horace Greeley in 1872. In 1875 he was quoted in newspapers from Massachusetts to San Francisco for his support for Andrew Johnson’s Senate race. When Johnson was nominated, “Elias Polk, an aged colored man, the trusted body-servant of President Polk, came in, saying that he had not felt so happy since 1844, ‘when master beat Clay.’ ” In 1880 he “delivered a brief speech warmly indorsing” the platform at the Tennessee Democratic Convention.94
Although Elias remained Sarah’s fierce advocate and supporter until the end of his life, he eventually chose to leave Polk Place for the excitement of Washington and “being back again among the great men of the nation and in the midst of scenes where he had spent so many happy days.” By the time he left, his $5,000 was gone. But like Sarah, Elias understood patronage and knew how to get by in a system that marginalized him. In 1881 he was working as a laborer for the Forty-Seventh congressional House of Representatives, at a salary of $720 a year. The rise of Grover Cleveland, “a typical Democrat of the old-school,” pleased him greatly in part because Cleveland reminded him of James. Elias, who claimed to have “shaken hands with every other President since 1826,” had the opportunity to shake Cleveland’s hand in 1886, and died soon thereafter.95
Southern Democratic papers enthusiastically eulogized Elias, “the colored carriage driver of President Polk,” and enjoyed quoting him about the “many a narrow escape from the fury of the ignorant niggahs have I had for voting and speaking my sentiments so freely.” As “one of those old-time colored people who feel that they are members of their employers’ family,” Elias, in continuing to live with Sarah long after the end of slavery, reassured southern whites that black Republicanism was a carpetbagger plot. Elias Polk offered support to their dearest wishes—that their servants only hated them because they were manipulated by abolitionists. His death, and Sarah’s sorrow over losing “the body servant of her husband,” were reported nationwide. “I sincerely regret his sudden demise,” Sarah was quoted as saying. “He was always a trusted and faithful servant.” As for Elias, Sarah was never far from his thoughts. In his final interview, he discussed her contributions to Washington life, and bragged that she still “did all her own correspondence, without aid of glasses.”96
One obituary that Elias would have particularly appreciated ran in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. When “Mr. Polk and his bride had removed to their home Mr. Polk’s father sent Elias to him. Elias had grown up with his young master, and was never a slave.” It wasn’t true, of course. Elias was property, given as a wedding present from Sam Polk to his oldest son. But by publicly insisting that James K. Polk’s political views were also his own, Elias was not only able to shape the conditions of his freedom after emancipation, but to retrospectively erase slavery from his past. It was a particularly skillful use of deference.97
WHEN ELIAS’S POLITICAL STAR began to rise at the close of the war, the members of the Tennessee legislature resumed their annual visit to Polk Place. The representatives offered a resolution in their hostess’s honor. “You were in the line of the advancing and receding hosts, in the very gulf-stream of the war, but the mad passions engendered by the conflict were ever calmed in the presence of your abode.” Sarah was delighted by this tribute, since it was exactly what she herself believed.98
She was happy to embrace the fiction of her neutrality even as she joined other elite white women across the South in the hard work of reconstructing order out of chaos and helping southern men find honor in defeat. Ladies’ Memorial Associations, formed in the immediate aftermath of war across the South, took charge of memorializing the Confederate dead with proper burials and monuments in their honor. When Nashville women hoped to sanitize “unwomanly” political activism in the name of the Confederacy at the start of the war, they put Sarah at the head of the Ladies’ Aid Society. At the close of the war they embraced yet another activist agenda that required the imprimatur of America’s leading model of pious and deferential womanhood, Mrs. James K. Polk. Sarah was at the head of a committee to purchase land for a Confederate cemetery near Nashville.99
Like the First Lady, the southern women directing these memorial associations were adamant that they were ladies first. It was no coincidence that these women referred to themselves as “ladies.” In the wake of Confederate defeat, white southern women adopted an explicitly deferential position in relation to their husbands and brothers. The Civil War overturned both racial and gender hierarchies: black people were no longer enslaved, and white women, left at home without the aid or protection of white men, had proven self-sufficient and capable of jobs previously considered outside their sphere. The humiliation of Confederate defeat left southern white men badly in need of reassurance that they still held authority, as men, over women, if no longer over slaves. White women were happy to provide this reassurance. To say that they were ladies implied that there were gentlemen protecting them.100
“Southern ladies naturally shrink from contact with the outside world,” one memorial association announced, explaining, “Southern women frankly acknowledge their dependence on southern men.” They embraced Sarah in part because her deferential womanhood was their explicit ideal. But the hard work of Confederate memorialization would undermine their professed dependence in ways the “ladies” of the South failed to foresee.101
SARAH PURCHASED a volume of Milton in 1865, and, one imagines, plunged into Paradise Lost.102 It was an appropriate choice for a white southerner at the close of America’s deadliest war. She could easily have imagined herself as Eve, thrust out of Eden. In coming years a host of historians would point to the war with Mexico that she and James oversaw as the origin for the Civil War. Her onetime visitor Ulysses S. Grant would call that war the nation’s “sin” for which the Civil War was “punishment.” Among the many things lost during the Civil War was the legacy of that earlier war.103
James was clearly concerned about his legacy after he left office, but his overtures to William Marcy came to nothing, and he hadn’t lived long enough to find a biographer. At the close of the Civil War, Sarah thought she might have found the right person: Henry Randall, author of the popular Life of Jefferson. Sarah wrote President Johnson with yet another request: Would he give “his approbation” to Randall composing a “ ‘Life + Times’ of my husband ex President Polk”? With the support of the sitting president, including an interview or two, writing a biography of the controversial and short-lived expansionist would be a far more attractive prospect for a biographer of ambition. Sarah assured Randall that Johnson would “be disposed to extend” this “favor” to her. “My personal relations with President Johnson have been of an agreeable character. During his term as Govr. Of the State, Senator in Congress & Military Governor, I received from him marked attention,” she wrote, with considerable understatement.104
But Randall wasn’t at all sure he wanted to get involved with the Polks. He made his reservations clear in a private letter to President Johnson. He would embark on a biography of James K. Polk only if he first received reassurance from the president on two points. First, he needed to know “whether Mrs. Polk, or her friends, entertained feelings which would lead her, or them, to expect the work in question to be tinged by any prejudices against those who have been instrumental in putting down the Rebellion.” Second, Randall asked Johnson to intervene with Sarah, if necessary, so that Randall could “fill my canvas properly” and “take the true standpoint in respect to some of those important & mooted questions in President Polk’s career.” In other words, could Johnson vouch that Sarah was not, in fact, a Confederate? And could Johnson ensure the publication of a critical biography, one that revealed the ugly side of the U.S.-Mexican War? Johnson failed to reply, and Randall declined Sarah’s offer. No one appeared anxious to write the biography of James K. Polk.105
Sarah had every right to set aside her concern about the unwritten biography and focus instead on her success during the Civil War. She had kept Polk Place safe. Soldiers never ransacked its grounds, and James’s tomb was untouched. In the immediate aftermath of the war she still had faithful Elias by her side, proudly carrying on James’s Democratic legacy. It was much easier for her to focus on the praise offered her by the Tennessee legislature for her neutrality than to take Republican condemnations of the Polk presidency seriously. For the moment she could ignore what Republicans wrote. Sarah didn’t read those sorts of books anyway. But she would soon find it impossible to ignore them.