SALLIE POLK FALL was more than just the daughter whom Sarah should have adopted; she was also a Childress by blood, granddaughter of Sarah’s older brother, Anderson. If Sarah and James were in fact partners and equals in a companionate marriage, shouldn’t the surviving Childresses have had a stake in Polk Place as well as the surviving Polks?
Not according to Tennessee law, which recognized Sarah’s interest in her husband’s estate, but not the interests of her sister and brothers, or any of their issue. In 1891 the only states that treated property acquired during a marriage as “community property” were states carved from former Spanish territory, most notably California, where the more equitable property conventions of the Visigothic Code still held sway. The rest of America followed the patriarchal conventions of British common law. Had Tennessee law allowed for inheritance by a “worthy” Childress, things might have turned out differently.1
Sallie wasn’t the only Childress descendant with a better claim to “worthiness,” according to the standards of the time, than the Polk progeny who sold off Polk Place. At the time of Sarah’s death, two of John’s children had emerged as particularly notable: John Childress Jr., and Bettie Childress Brown. Both had benefited from Sarah’s intervention during the Civil War and lived in close proximity to their aunt in Nashville at the time of her death. Both were wealthy, political, and shared their aunt’s “appreciation of the relation of current events to history.” Like Frances Willard, they found inspiration in Sarah’s deferential politics and persona, her lifelong insistence that she was a lady first. But the Childresses carried her legacy in a strikingly different direction than did Willard.2
After Sarah twice appealed to President Johnson to secure the pardon of Bettie’s husband, General John Calvin Brown, the couple moved in 1865 to the small market town of Pulaski, where Brown had established a legal practice prior to the Civil War. John Calvin was known in Pulaski; it was a place where it would be easy for him to make a difference. He was thirty-seven. Bettie was twenty-three. Bettie plunged into domestic life: the first of her four children, a daughter, was born in 1865. Like her aunt Sarah, she joined the local ladies’ auxiliary of the Confederate Home and Camp. John Calvin plunged into politics.3
The Browns had once been one of Tennessee’s leading Whig families. John Calvin’s older brother, Neill, helped found the state’s Whig Party in the 1830s, and in 1847 ran for governor on a platform opposing the Polks’ war with Mexico. It was a winning strategy. Neill defeated the incumbent candidate, Sarah and James’s close friend Aaron Brown. The residents of the Polk White House shared their dismay with Tennessee’s Democracy, which returned to its familiar position as the minority party.
When President Zachary Taylor appointed Neill minister to Russia, John Calvin took up the Whig mantle at home. In 1860 he was a vocal Unionist, and an elector for John Bell’s Constitutional Union Party. But when Tennessee joined the Confederacy he enlisted as a private. He moved up the ranks quickly, proved calm in battle, spent six months in a Union prison at Fort Warren, Massachusetts, was repeatedly wounded, and by the time he surrendered his troops in April 1865 had been made a major general. He was also, needless to say, a Democrat.4
The Childresses always had good timing. John Calvin and Bettie Childress Brown arrived in Pulaski at a remarkable moment. In the month before Christmas 1865, or in the summer of 1866 (in later years no one could quite remember which), a small group of young men decided to form a club, they claimed, for the purposes of their own amusement. They gathered in the law office of Judge Jones, near the center of the small town. They were six or seven in number, aimless, bored, frustrated, even angry. Many had, like Bettie Childress’s family, experienced the humiliation of seeing their homes and property occupied by squatters, or family members jailed on suspicion of Confederate sympathies. Some had, like John Calvin, spent time in Union prisons during the war. There were all former Confederate officers, young, well educated, and starting adult life in a manner very different than they had once imagined. Like the Childresses and John Calvin Brown, they all claimed Scottish heritage. They determined to keep their membership a secret, to only appear in public in disguise, and, they claimed, to play tricks on the unsuspecting residents of Pulaski.
But first their club needed a name. One of them suggested the kuklos, the Greek word for “citizen.” Nothing divided the well educated, like themselves, from the poorly educated in the first decades of the nineteenth century as clearly as did a knowledge of Greek. James K. Polk knew the language, had excelled at it at the University of North Carolina. Henry Clay, to his lifelong embarrassment, did not.5
Kuklos resonated on another register as well. The most prominent college fraternity of the period was Kuklos Adelphon, or “Old Kappa Alpha.” It started at the University of North Carolina in 1812, just a few years before James Polk and Sallie’s grandfather, Anderson Childress, arrived on campus. By midcentury it had spread across the South, to the campuses of more recently established colleges, and in towns where alumni gathered. It’s unlikely that John Calvin Brown’s alma mater, Jackson College of Columbia, Tennessee, had a chapter before the war. Given that the Union army leveled the school, we can say definitely that there was no postwar chapter. But the alma maters of other Pulaski college graduates almost certainly did. The young men settled on an initiation ceremony based on that of Kuklos Adelphon, and anointed their secret club the Ku Klux Klan, adding the final syllable because it sounded right. They thought the alliteration lent the term an extra degree of mystery. Their regalia, with white masks, high coned hats designed to make them appear especially tall, and long flowing white robes, was designed to evoke ghosts.6
The founders always claimed their intentions were benign, and that they appeared in public strictly for the purposes of their own amusement and in order to recruit new members, which they did with surprising ease. But young white southern men had a long tradition of finding amusement in violence toward black people. And given the social dislocations of the end of slavery and the enfranchisement of black men, white men had never felt a greater need to assert their physical authority than immediately after the war.
Within a year of the founding of the Pulaski Klan, men dressed in the Ku Klux uniform, flying the Ku Klux flag, began terrorizing and killing freedmen, revisiting the violence of slavery on men and women who were no longer slaves. When the Tennessee General Assembly conducted an investigation into Klan violence in middle and western Tennessee in 1868, they were inundated with testimony from hundreds of black men and women in Pulaski, in Murfreesboro, in Columbia, in every county, who had been whipped, raped, beaten, shot at, and threatened with death by men in white robes. W. A. Kelly, a former Union soldier and farmer near Columbia in Maury County, was luckier than some of the other freedmen he knew. After he voted in a local election, fourteen masked and armed men came to his house at ten or eleven at night, broke down his door, and fired at him as he escaped out the window. They “presented a pistol” at his “wife’s head” and “swore they would kill” him, and kill his wife as well, if she didn’t give them his money. After looting their house, stealing his money, and tearing up his army discharge papers and “certificate of registration,” they “turned the stock” out into his fields and left just before daybreak.7
By the time the Tennessee legislature collected this testimony, black men and women across the South had fallen victim to Klan raids. The primary goal of this reign of terror was to “redeem” the region from the control of the Republican Party. When W. A. Kelly was asked if he thought “any Union man” who advocated “the cause of the Republican Party” would be “allowed to live” in Maury County “without being molested,” Kelly replied definitively, “I do not. I believe he would be killed.” Dafney, Lewis, Jane, and the other Polk freedpeople in Yalobusha, Mississippi, faced similar terrors as Klan members proudly shot, lynched, and burned those they deemed “bad negroes.”8
Lynch law proved a remarkably effective political tactic. With the Klan playing armed enforcer, the Democratic Party began a revival. Pulaski, birthplace of the Klan, not coincidentally led the way. Between the spring and fall elections of 1868, middle Tennessee’s Republican majority evaporated. John Calvin Brown helped write a new state constitution allowing former rebels to vote and instituting a poll tax to prevent voting by former slaves. By 1870, Tennessee was fully redeemed, its black citizens disenfranchised, and a Democrat, from Pulaski, no less, elected governor of the state.9
That the new governor was reported to be one of “the first members of the Ku Klux Klan,” and later a Grand Dragon of the Realm of Tennessee, should come as no surprise. Nor is it surprising that the new governor was John Calvin Brown. John Childress Jr.’s son later claimed that his father was one of the founders of the KKK. Given that John Jr. was nowhere near Pulaski at the time, it seems impossible that Bettie Childress’s brother witnessed the birth of the Klan. But Bettie’s husband most certainly did.10
If the election was a disaster for the Republican Party, it was far more so for black Tennesseans. But it was a family victory for the white Childresses. Bettie, who was “noted as one of the most elegant and cultivated ladies in the state,” was now Tennessee’s First Lady, just like the aunt who had secured her husband’s pardon. And her brother, John Jr., had helped them get there: although just twenty-five years old, he managed the campaign that elected his Democratic brother-in-law to the governor’s mansion. His career was launched. John Jr. became chairman of the Democratic Party of the state of Tennessee, a position he held for twenty-five years. Nor was his influence limited to Tennessee. His plans for Confederate commemoration spanned the entire South. John Jr. was reportedly the first person to suggest the construction of a monument to Jefferson Davis in the former capital of the Confederacy, Richmond. He headed up the movement, reaching out to like-minded sons of the Confederacy as far away as Atlanta for the purpose. He then employed an agent to travel throughout the South collecting funds for the monument.11
Visitors to Polk Place noted the remarkable physical resemblance between the state’s new First Lady and pictures of her famous aunt at the same age. Bettie Childress delighted in the comparison, which validated her place in the Childress and Polk family legacy. Bettie’s experience assisting Sarah “in receiving the General Assembly and other distinguished visitors from all parts of the world” at Polk Place over the years paid handsome dividends. Sarah’s niece was arguably a greater success as Tennessee’s First Lady than Sarah had been thirty-five years earlier. Governor Brown was reelected to a second term, something James had failed to accomplish. During her two terms as the state’s First Lady, Bettie “filled her high position with graceful dignity. Her entertainments were frequent and elaborate, and she gave much assistance to her distinguished husband.”12
Bettie and the governor visited Sarah frequently while in office, often in the company of their brother, John Jr., and his new wife. The capitol building, after all, could not have been any closer to Polk Place. Sarah enjoyed the attention, as well as her access to power. In 1871 she asked the governor to appoint a “special friend” of hers as superintendent of the penitentiary, “if consistent” with his “sense of Public duty.” She recognized that “this is a departure from any usual custom,” but she would consider it a “kindness” to her.13
Bettie loved to gaze on the portraits of her aunt in Polk Place, particularly one painted when Sarah was First Lady. “Everyone” agreed that this portrait in particular resembled Bettie more than Sarah. She asked her aunt to leave it to her, and Sarah agreed to do so in front of Bettie’s friends and a reporter. Bettie tried but failed to follow Sarah’s path from Nashville to Washington. In 1874, General Brown ran for the Senate as a Democrat. He was beaten by former president Andrew Johnson, the man who had pardoned Brown at Sarah’s request. Johnson no doubt experienced the victory as a small vindication after watching his beloved Tennessee redeemed by the Democrats four years earlier.14
General Brown left politics; he went to work for the railroads, which was where the real money lay in the late nineteenth century. Although he no longer had an office in the capitol building, he and Bettie bought a mansion on Spruce Street, a few blocks from Polk Place. Family socializing continued to be easy, perhaps more so, now that Sarah and Bettie had so many common experiences to share.15
No doubt Bettie and Sarah discussed Sarah’s vice presidency in the Daughters of the American Revolution, because she joined soon after her aunt. But in the wake of Sarah’s death, Bettie lost her interest in the national association. The DAR, like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, sought reconciliation in the name of national female unity at a moment when reconciliation gained national prominence. The vision of a reunited America, a vision Sarah had promoted in the late 1880s, became a kind of national religion in the last decade of the nineteenth century after the North allowed southern Democrats political home rule and vigilante violence in the name of white supremacy. Reconciliationist pageantry, complete with shared reunions of “Blue” and “Gray” veterans, suggested to many, particularly in the North, that it was time to consign sectional division to the past. If old soldiers could put aside their differences, then perhaps the nation could at last become whole again.16
But Bettie’s allegiance lay not with country but with section. Not to the American Revolution but to the role of the Confederacy, in what she liked to call “the War between the States.” Like her, many white southerners believed their “Lost Cause” was noble, that the North only won because of its superior numbers, and that the racial and social order of an imaginary “Old South,” where slaves were happy and women on a pedestal, was vastly preferable to late-nineteenth-century northern society.17
Elias Polk’s veneration of the Polk family thrilled them, because his sycophancy offered proof that the racial order of the Old South had been just. For these white southerners, most of whom had been too young to fight, the Confederate cause was something to celebrate, to venerate, and to cling to. When John Childress Jr. set to work raising money for Richmond’s proposed Jefferson Davis statue in 1893, he and other members of Nashville’s Young Men’s Democratic Club raised $1,800 in the first year of their work, in the midst of a national economic depression, in a region that had not yet recovered from the financial devastation of the Civil War.18
John’s wife helped out from her position on the “committee of ladies.” The thousands of women across the South who were active in memorial associations in the 1860s and 1870s had taken the lead in commemorating the valor of southern men. Their increasingly political activities included establishing a Confederate Memorial Day, and public homes for destitute widows and orphans of Confederate soldiers. Many of them became enthusiastic advocates of terrorizing freedpeople. According to firsthand accounts, committees of ladies joyfully sewed Ku Klux Klan uniforms. The daughter of one of Alabama’s original Klansmen argued that women were the driving force behind the Klan: “Southern men and women supported the Civil War, southern women and men supported the Klan.”19
In 1893, many of the women working for Confederate commemoration under the umbrella of the “Ladies Auxiliary of the Confederate Home and Camp” purchased Sarah’s posthumous memoir. The “charmingly written” and “elegant book” was available from bookstores across the South for just $1.75, and was advertised in the Confederate Veteran, a new magazine started under the auspices of John Childress Jr. to promote the work of commemoration. As narrated by Anson and Fanny Nelson, Sarah Childress Polk’s life story revealed the power of Christian womanhood to shape American politics and inspire others. Her life was nothing less than a testimony to the power a strong Christian woman could wield in society.20
But her story was also one of fidelity and devotion: to James, to his tomb, to his memory, to home, and to nation. With “the waters of oblivion…silently engulfing” the “glory” and “grief” of “the epic of the Confederacy,” it became clear, at least to one group of elite Tennessee women, that the time had arrived to lead rather than to follow. Emboldened by their pro-Confederate activities, white southern women embraced unreconstructed Confederate nostalgia as a means of expanding their sphere of influence. They, not their husbands and brothers, would vindicate the South.21
On September 10, 1893, Bettie Childress Brown joined with her friends and neighbors to organize a new hereditary society, devoted to honoring “the memory of those who served and those who fell in the service of the Confederate States; to protect, preserve, and mark places made historic by Confederate valor; to collect and preserve the material for a truthful history of the War between the States.” They committed to placing Confederate monuments across the South, to remind the coming generations of the heroism of Confederate soldiers, and the justness of the cause for which they fought. They also pledged “to record the part taken by Southern women in patient endurance of hardship and patriotic devotion during the struggle.” Like other women’s organizations of the period, they expanded upon the traditional understanding of women’s role as moral guardian to claim political authority equal to that of men. It was a radically broad agenda for an intensely reactionary group of women. None of them seemed to notice that in the gender order of the Old South, the one they yearned for, their female activism would have been unthinkable.22
Their first convention, the following year, was held in Nashville. Bettie, “a pioneer in the work,” labored tirelessly to promote the new group. When the National Association of the Daughters of the Confederacy changed its name to the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1895, Bettie Childress Brown was elected the association’s first president. President Brown immediately published a letter in the leading southern newspapers “setting forth the need for this association, calling on the Southern people to rally to it, and pleading for the organization of chapters.” Although membership was limited to relatives of Confederate veterans and women who served the Confederacy, the UDC grew rapidly. During its first year of existence, 20 chapters were organized. Within three years there were 138 chapters. By 1912, forty-five thousand Daughters belonged to 800 chapters. This was but a fraction of the membership of the WCTU or the Daughters of the American Revolution. But the United Daughters of the Confederacy were motivated, they were organized, and they were determined to redeem their Old South.23
Women like Bettie Childress would ultimately prove more resistant to appeals for reconciliation then would the South’s white men. For the United Daughters of the Confederacy, activism in the name of conservative tradition was driven by resentment, because they believed that the glory of the Old South, where white women were venerated and protected, and had not needed to prove their equality, had been stolen from them. But it was also driven by love, and a conviction that the best way to prove your love for those who died was to continue fighting for the thing they died for. The UDC took as their motto “Love makes memory eternal.” It was a sentiment that Sarah surely would have agreed with, one that captured all that she stood for in the second half of her life, even as it erased from memory her accomplishments in Washington. Although Sarah Childress Polk rose to political power by crossing boundaries, skillfully manipulating both men and women, and analyzing politics with a focus nearly as intense as that of the husband who worked himself to death, in public memory Mrs. James K. Polk was celebrated as something quite different, a First Lady who was a lady first, whose politics had been driven by love and by a widow’s responsibility to protect and cherish the memory of her lost husband. It wasn’t untrue, but nor was it the whole story.24
Sarah never did leave Bettie the portrait she coveted. Although Bettie was convinced it resembled her “as much as it once did” Sarah, perhaps Sarah saw things differently. In the end the portrait did not go to the niece who chose section over country, but to Sallie Fall, the niece who should have been a daughter, and whose devotion matched her own.25