CS Charles Sellers Collection
JKP James K. Polk
JC John Childress Sr.
LOC Library of Congress
NCSA Lucy Williams Polk Papers, North Carolina State Archives
NDA Nashville Daily American
NYH New York Herald
SCP Sarah Childress Polk
TSLA Tennessee State Library and Archives
UT University of Tennessee Polk Correspondence
1. The term “First Lady” did not come into use until the 1850s, but I employ it in this project because it so nicely encapsulates the special status of the president’s wife.
2. Elizabeth Thacker-Estrada, “True Women: The Roles and Lives of Antebellum Presidential Wives Sarah Polk, Margaret Taylor, Abigail Fillmore, and Jane Pierce,” in The Presidential Companion: Readings on the First Ladies, ed. Robert Watson and A. Eksterowicz (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 86; Valerie Palmer-Mehta, “Sarah Polk: Ideas of Her Own,” in A Companion to First Ladies, ed. Katherine A. S. Sibley (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 158–75.
3. Elizabeth Benton Frémont, Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Frémont (New York: Frederick H. Hitchcock, 1912), 15.
4. Laura Holloway, The Ladies of the White House (New York: U.S. Pub. Co., 1870), 462; “A Visit to Mrs. Polk,” Alexandria (VA) Gazette, October 29, 1859.
5. “Bolting Among the Ladies,” Oneida Whig, August 1, 1848; Judith Wellman, “The Seneca Falls Convention: Setting the National Stage for Women’s Suffrage,” History Now, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/first-age-reform/essays/seneca-falls-convention-setting-national-stage-for-women%E2%80%99s-su, accessed October 15, 2015; Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
6. John Smolenski, “From Men of Property to Just Men: Deference, Masculinity, and the Evolution of Political Discourse in Early America,” Early American Studies 3, no. 2 (2005): 253–85, quote on 258.
7. William Dusinberre, Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 184–85.
8. “From Sartain’s Union Magazine Mrs. James K. Polk,” Pittsfield (MA) Sun, February 28, 1850. Lori D. Ginzberg has noted that female political activism in the decades before the Civil War was obscured by both an ideology of separate spheres and the efforts of women to conform to the ideal of nonpolitical womanhood. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).
9. Anson Nelson and Fanny Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk: Wife of the Eleventh President of the United States (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1892), 33. Gregory P. Downs makes the argument that a politics of dependence, what he calls “American patronalism,” emerged during the Civil War, and has been missed by scholars. The politics of deference Sarah Polk practiced predates Downs’s patronalism but is otherwise a similar practice of political power from a position of dependence. Gregory P. Downs, Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 1–3.
10. Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., “Polk, Mrs. Sarah Childress,” in American Women—Fifteen Hundred Biographies with Over 1,400 Portraits: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of the Lives and Achievements of American Women During the Nineteenth Century (New York: Mast, Crowell & Kirkpatrick, 1897), vol. 2, 577–78.
11. “Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk,” The Nation 55 (October 27, 1892): 325.
12. National Woman Suffrage Association, Report of the International Council of Women, Assembled by the National Woman Suffrage Association, Washington, D.C., U.S. of America, March 25 to April 1, 1888 (Washington, DC: Rufus H. Darby, 1888), vol. 1, 32; Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 5–6; Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Jada F. Smith, “Get to Know the Historical Figures on the $5, $10 and $20 Bills,” New York Times, April 21, 2016.
13. Barbara Bennett Peterson, Sarah Childress Polk: First Lady of Tennessee and Washington (Huntington, NY: Nova History Publications, 2002), 31; John Reed Bumgarner, Sarah Childress Polk: A Biography of the Remarkable First Lady (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997). Bumgarner makes ample use of Martha McBride Morrell’s “Young Hickory”: The Life and Times of President James K. Polk (New York: G. P. Dutton, 1941) and Jimmie Lou Sparkman Claxton’s Eighty-Eight Years with Sarah Polk (New York: Vantage, 1972). Carl Sferrazza Anthony’s America’s First Families: An Inside View of 200 Years of Private Life in the White House (New York: Touchstone, 2000) draws liberally from Mary Ormsbee Whitton’s romanticized and footnote-free First First Ladies, 1789–1865: A Study of the Wives of the Early Presidents (New York: Hastings House, 1948), while misquotations in Betty Boyd Caroli’s popular First Ladies: From Martha Washington to Michelle Obama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) have led many later authors to problematic conclusions. Caroli cites Charles Sellers’s award-winning James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 1795–1843 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), for her claim that “when Sarah and James married, his relatives supposedly thought that she displayed ‘a great deal of spice and more independence of judgment than was fitting in one woman’ ” (Caroli, 34). But what Sellers wrote was quite different: “Some may have felt that she displayed more independence of judgment than was fitting in a woman; and one of the townsmen proved himself a perceptive judge of character when he noted that ‘her eyes looked as if she had a great deal of spice’ ” (Sellers, 93). Caroli’s statement suggests that James’s family thought Sarah too independent, when there was no suggestion in the original account that anyone in his family was less than enraptured by his new bride. The Caroli interpretation has been quoted repeatedly. See, for instance, Margaret Ripley Wolfe, “The Feminine Dimension in the Volunteer State,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 55, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 120.
14. See, for instance, Bumgarner’s narration of Sarah refusing to marry James Buchanan, drawn from Claxton. There is no evidence that Sarah “stated that she had too much respect for her beloved husband ever to change her name,” or that “romance” ever entered her “thoughts.” Bumgarner, Sarah Childress Polk, 127–28. Claxton’s book was published seventeen years before the state supreme court in New York ordered Vantage to pay $3.5 million in damages to twenty-two hundred authors it had defrauded. “Jurors’ Vanity Press Review: Publisher Defrauded Authors,” New York Times, April 7, 1990; Jim Milliot, “Vantage Press Closes,” Publishers Weekly, December 19, 2012.
15. All of this rich source material has been carefully preserved by the Massachusetts Historical Society: www.masshist.org/adams/louisa_catherine_adams.
16. SCP to William H. Polk, April 25, 1875, Polk Papers, PC 75, 4, Correspondence 1875–1877, NCSA.
17. When documenting events, rather than Sarah’s views of events, I have attempted wherever possible to corroborate material in Memorials with other sources. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk.
18. Holloway, The Ladies of the White House, 461.
19. Scholars who promote well-written narrative history, as well as those who practice it, have shaped my approach here. Ivan Jabolonka makes a compelling argument in favor of literary, accessible, jargon-free history: “not lowering the requirements for the social sciences, but on the contrary raising them, by making investigations more transparent, procedures more honest, research more audacious, and words better adjusted….By switching from discourse to text, we can proceed so writing produces a net gain for epistemology.” Ivan Jabolonka, History Is a Contemporary Literature: Manifesto for the Social Sciences (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), xii. Annette Gordon-Reed’s narrative of the Hemingses of Monticello demonstrates how fruitful conjecture can be in writing the history of enslaved people. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: Norton, 2008); Lorena Walsh’s approach to writing the group history of a multigenerational slave community has also been influential. Lorena S. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997).
20. Robert P. Watson, “The First Lady Reconsidered: Presidential Partner and Political Institution,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 27, no. 4, Rules of the Game: How to Play the Presidency (Fall 1997): 805–18, quotes on 810, 811.
21. Rachel Sheldon has recently argued in her book Washington Brotherhood that due to a variety of local circumstances, extra-official spaces became, if anything, even more crucial to the functioning of Washington political life in the antebellum decades then they had earlier. Sheldon reveals that important political alliances and decisions were inevitably made outside the halls of Congress—in social clubs, boardinghouses, and private homes. Sarah Polk’s facility in this realm was of crucial importance to buttressing her husband’s position—she set the conditions for the president to form alliances and influence others. Rachel Sheldon, Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
1. Donald Detwiler, Rutherford County, Tennessee Deaths and Estate Settlements, vol. 1, 1804–1849 (Murfreesboro, TN: Rutherford County Historical Society, 2008), 31; Susan G. Daniel, Rutherford County Tennessee Pioneers (Murfreesboro, TN: Rutherford County Historical Society, 2003), 52; William S. Speer, Sketches of Prominent Tennesseans: Biographies and Records of Many of the Families Who Have Attained Prominence in Tennessee (Nashville: Albert B. Tavel, 1888), 26.
2. Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History (New York: Norton, 2016), 251–80.
3. “Charter of Carolina, 1663,” in The Colonial Records of North Carolina, ed. William L. Saunders (Raleigh, NC: P. M. Hale Printer, 1886), vol. 1, 20–33.
4. Speer, Sketches of Prominent Tennesseans, 26; Richard Carlton Fulcher, 1770–1790 Census of the Cumberland Settlements (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1987), 181; William Heth Whitsitt, “Annals of a Scotch-Irish Family: The Whitsitts of Nashville,” American Historical Magazine and Tennessee Historical Society Quarterly 9 (1904): 239, 241.
5. Quoted in Tom Kanon, “The Kidnapping of Martha Crawley and Settler-Indian Relations Prior to the War of 1812,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 64, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 14; James Seagrove to William Knox, May 24, 1792, American State Papers: Indian Affairs, ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), vol. 1, 296; Kristopher Ray, Middle Tennessee, 1775–1825: Progress and Popular Democracy on the Southwestern Frontier (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 26–27; Mark Renfred Cheathem, Andrew Jackson, Southerner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 26.
6. Ray, Middle Tennessee, 28–33, quote on 28.
7. Donald B. Dodd and Wynelle S. Dodd, Historical Statistics of the South, 1790–1970 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1973), 50.
8. “Treaty with the Cherokee a.k.a Treaty of Hopewell, 1785,” Nov. 28, 1785. | 7 Stat., 18. American State Papers: Indian Affairs, vol. 2, 8–11; Daniel, Rutherford County Tennessee Pioneers, 52.
9. Important facts about the early history of the Whitsitts and Childresses are frustratingly obscure. One of James K. Polk’s biographers claimed Sarah’s parents were married in Campbell County, Virginia, and when questioned about this late in life, Sarah herself thought he might have been correct, although she admitted that she didn’t know where her parents were married, or when. But this appears highly unlikely. Legal documentation suggests that Elizabeth Whitsitt’s father, John Whitsitt, was originally from North Carolina, not Virginia, and also offers evidence that Elizabeth was born in North Carolina, and was living in Tennessee by age nine at the latest. Judge Andrew Jackson oversaw John Whitsitt’s sale of a “Negro boy named Jack about seven or eight years old” in Sumner County in 1795. An early narrative states that Elizabeth and Joel were married in Sumner County, and multiple land deeds place Joel Childress in Sumner County at the turn of the century. Whitsitt, “Annals of a Scotch-Irish Family,” 239–41; Speer, Sketches of Prominent Tennesseans, 26. See also Daniel, Rutherford County Tennessee Pioneers, 52; Sumner County, Register of Deeds, Roll #108, TSLA, vol. 1, August 1793–December 1797, p. 107; Thomas Waller to Joel Childress, Deed, Sumner County, Register of Deeds, Roll #108, TSLA, vol. 3, April 1800–October 1805, p. 210.
10. Anson Nelson and Fanny Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk: Wife of the Eleventh President of the United States (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1892), 1–2; Thomas Waller to Joel Childress, Deed, Sumner County, Register of Deeds, Roll #108, TSLA, vol. 3, April 1800–October 1805, p. 210; Joel Childress to John Jetton Deed, Rutherford County, Register of Deeds, Roll #109, Tennessee State Library and Archives, vols. A–G, 1804–1808, vol. A, p. 36; Joel Childress to John Lawrence Deed, Rutherford County, Register of Deeds, Roll #109, Tennessee State Library and Archives, vols. A–G, 1804–1808, vol. A, pp. 35–36. On debates over Sarah’s place of birth, see John Williams Childress, “The Childress Family of Tennessee” (typescript, 1960), Rutherford County Historical Society publication no. 16 (Winter 1981); Land Office, and Museum, Early Tennessee/North Carolina Land Records, 1783–1927, Record Group 50, August 10, 1811, TSLA, p. 942; Daniel, Rutherford County Tennessee Pioneers, 52.
11. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), vol. 1, 341–45, 387–88, 523–40; Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 6–9, 267–68; Elizabeth Whitsitt Childress portrait courtesy of the Rutherford County Archives.
12. Heyrman, Southern Cross, 6–9.
13. Susan Childress Rucker portrait courtesy of the Rutherford County Archives.
14. Elizabeth Whitsitt Childress portrait courtesy of the Rutherford County Archives.
15. Genesis 1:28. Rebecca Edwards has argued that by the 1820s, female fertility was helping to drive territorial expansion, and that “Americans believed, in fact, that moving to ‘fair and fertile territories’ caused women to have more children.” Rebecca Edwards, “Childbearing and U.S. Empire: The Case of the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Act,” unpublished paper presented at the 17th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities, June 2, 2017, p. 2.
16. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 74–75; Wilma A. Dunaway, Women, Work, and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 144–46.
17. Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in 19th-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 2–86.
18. The most thorough study of conception in the Revolutionary era suggests that these views were far more unusual on the frontier than in urban centers in this period. Susan E. Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
19. Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for American Independence (New York: Knopf, 2005), 4–11; Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 19–22.
20. Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776, Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield, Wendell D. Garrett, and Marjorie Sprague (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), vol. 1, 370.
21. Benjamin Rush, Essays Literary, Moral, and Philosophical (Philadelphia: Thomas and William Bradford, 1798), 76–77.
22. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 2.
23. “State vs. Joel Childress,” Minutes of the Superior Court of North Carolina Including Mero District (Works Progress Administration transcript, 1938, TSLA), 2, 199–200; “State vs. Childress,” in Andrew Jackson, Legal Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. James W. Ely Jr. and Theodore Brown Jr. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 212–13.
24. Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (New York: Crown, 2017); Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011); Bruce C. Baird, “The Social Origins of Dueling in Virginia,” in Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, ed. Michael Bellesiles (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 87–112.
25. Inventory of Joel Childress estate, April 12, 1820, Polk Papers, LOC; “Robbery,” Daily National Intelligencer, July 15, 1818; “It will be recollected,” Mississippi State Gazette, September 12, 1818.
26. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, vol. 1, 538–40.
27. Tennessee Division of Archives, Land Office, and Museum, Early Tennessee/North Carolina Land Records, 1783–1927, Record Group 50, December 11, 1810, TSLA, p. 466; 1810 Census, Census Place: Nashville, Rutherford, Tennessee, Roll #63, p. 10 (NARA microfilm publication M252, 71 rolls), Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, DC.
28. Dunaway, Women, Work, and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South, 144–46. On the role of cotton production in driving territorial settlement, see Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 45–54, 177–78.
29. A. W. Putnum, History of Middle Tennessee; Or, Life and Times of Gen. James Robertson (Nashville: Printed for the author, 1859), 585. On cotton, see Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee: A Study in Frontier Democracy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1967), 150–52; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), 102–3.
30. Tennessee Division of Archives, Land Office, and Museum, Early Tennessee/North Carolina Land Records, 1783–1927, Record Group 50, December 11, 1810, TSLA, p. 466; 1810 Census, Census Place: Nashville, Rutherford, Tennessee, Roll #63 (NARA microfilm publication M252, 71 rolls), Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, DC; “Black Fox Camp Spring,” Tennessee Historical Marker 3A 162; Goodspeed Publishing Company, History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present (Nashville, 1886), 97.
31. Dodd and Dodd, Historical Statistics of the South; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 2; Lisa C. Tolbert, Constructing Townscapes: Space and Society in Antebellum Tennessee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 42–43.
32. Advertisements, Nashville Whig, December 28, 1813; Nashville Whig, January 3, 1815; Tennessee Division of Archives, Land Office, and Museum, Early Tennessee/North Carolina Land Records, 1783–1927, Record Group 50, December 13, 1812, TSLA, p. 323. See also Bradley and Benge to Joel Childress, Rutherford County, Register of Deeds, Roll #110, vols. H–L, 1811–1819, TSLA, vol. H, 227–28; John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 125.
33. The variety, quality, and number of household furnishings owned by the Childresses would have placed them “at the top” of society anywhere in the United States. Barbara G. Carson, Ambitious Appetites: Dining, Behavior, and Patterns of Consumption in Federal Washington (Washington, DC: AIA Press, 1990), 45.
34. Inventory of Joel Childress estate, April 12, 1820, Polk Papers, LOC; Susan Childress portrait courtesy of Rutherford County Archives. Mirrors were an especially valued feature in elite domestic interiors for their value in reflecting light. Carson, Ambitious Appetites, 45; Walter R. Borneman, Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America (New York: Random House, 2009), 12.
35. Rebecca L. Smith, “History of Dilton,” Rutherford County Historical Society publication no. 9 (Summer 1977): 67; Nashville Whig, October 25, 1814. Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 1795–1843 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 42–43.
36. Nashville Whig, September 27, 1814.
37. “She was out to see old Mrs. Smart who lives near Charlotte, the old lady is 87 years of age, knew you when you were a little boy & still insists upon calling you little Jimmy Polk.” Marshall T. Polk, West Point, to JKP, May 1, 1849, LOC, Polk Papers; Robert W. Ikard, “Surgical Operations on James K. Polk by Ephraim McDowell, or the Search for Polk’s Gallstone,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1984): 121–31. Ikard argues that the surgery most likely left Polk impotent.
38. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 3–4.
39. Ibid., 3.
40. While it’s easy to imagine that “ornamental accomplishments” like proficiency at needlework, drawing, and the piano were the antithesis of serious learning, Catherine E. Kelly makes the convincing argument that at the finest women’s schools the two were closely linked, and that reading was embedded in “a variety of polite practices.” The primary difference between Abercrombie’s School and Salem Academy was that there appears to have been very little reading or formal study at the former, not that “ornamental accomplishment” was missing from the latter. Catherine E. Kelly, “Reading and the Problem of Accomplishment,” in Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 124–43, quote on 124.
41. “Female Education,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 9 (September 1834): 143.
42. On the importance of refinement in the early American republic, and the place of academies like Abercrombie’s within the evolving culture, see Catherine E. Kelly, Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 14–54.
43. Caroline O’Reilly Nicholson, “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” Caroline O’Reilly Nicholson Papers, #547-z, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 39; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 8–10.
44. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 8–10.
45. Richard R. Beeman, The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746–1832 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 78–79, 180–81; Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Viking, 2016), 105–32.
46. Isenberg, White Trash, 105–32.
47. “Rules of the Boarding School at Salem,” 1805, Salem College Archives; Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 32, 263.
48. Claudia Jack, “Sarah Childress Polk,” typescript manuscript, Salem College Archives; “Rules of the Boarding School at Salem,” 1805, Salem College Archives.
49. “Rules of the Boarding School at Salem,” 1805, Salem College Archives; Salem Academy Class Schedule 1811, Salem College Archives; Maria Crockett to Robert Crockett, January 13, 1818, Crockett Family Letters, Salem College Archives.
50. Maria Crockett to Robert Crockett, February 24, 1818, Crockett Family Letters, Salem College Archives.
51. Maria Crockett to Robert Crockett, March 8, 1818, Crockett Family Letters, Salem College Archives.
52. Contents of Salem Academy Library in 1817, Salem College Archives.
53. Maria Campbell to Mary Humes, September 21, 1819, Campbell Family Papers, Box 4, Correspondence, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.
54. Ibid.; “From Sartain’s Union Magazine Mrs. James K. Polk,” Pittsfield (MA) Sun, February 28, 1850.
55. “Nashville Female Academy,” Nashville Whig, January 10, 1821. Sally Dickinson, later the wife of James’s leading middle Tennessee Whig rival, John Bell, was said to have attended Salem Academy at the same time as Sarah, although there is no documentation in the Salem Archives that this was the case. Goodspeed Publishing Company, History of Tennessee (Nashville, 1887), 735; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 3–4.
56. Joel Childress to Sarah Childress, April 22, 1818, Private Collection of Bobby Bennett.
57. Ibid.; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 117–48; Stephen M. Frank, Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century North (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 160–71; Lori Glover, Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 9–17. Glover also notes that fathers were anxious to avoid conflict with sons, and “often wanted to be friends as much as parents,” 32.
58. Joel Childress to Sarah Childress, April 22, 1818, Private Collection of Bobby Bennett. Stephen M. Frank notes that “the language of parental friendship was employed earliest and most often vis-à-vis daughters” in New England, but studies of the southern frontier suggest it was far rarer in this region of the country. Frank, Life with Father, 171; Joan Cashin, A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 25–26. Cassandra Good argues that in the decades after the American Revolution “friendships between elite men and women…were both common and highly valued.” Cassandra Good, Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1.
59. “Died,” Essex Register (Salem, MA), September 29, 1819; Will of Joel Childress, August 10, 1819, Rutherford County Archives, Record Book 4, 191–99; Division of estate of Joel Childress, November 26, 1822, Rutherford County Archives, Record Book 5, 242–45; Inventory of Joel Childress estate, April 12, 1820, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm.
60. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 12.
61. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, vol. 1, 537–39.
62. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 74–75, 79.
63. J. Roderick Heller III, Democracy’s Lawyer: Felix Grundy of the Old Southwest (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 119.
64. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 15–16.
65. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 76–78.
66. Ibid., 74.
67. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 16–20.
68. Nicholson, “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” 16; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 16–20.
69. Nicholson, “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” 3, 8.
70. M. C. Bass to Generals Harding and Barrow, June 24, 1862, Harding-Jackson Papers, 1809–1938, Tennessee Historical Society (Nashville).
71. Bill, January 1, 1824, Polk Papers, LOC; Amy Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Vintage, 2012), 29; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 18–19; Nicholson, “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” 5.
72. Tolbert, Constructing Townscapes, 14, 42–43; Eastin Morris, The Tennessee Gazetteer; or, Topographical Dictionary (Nashville: W. Hasell Hunt, 1834), 35, 107.
73. The slaves in Sarah’s portion of the estate were Charles, Milly and Harbert, Joseph, Letty, Big Jim, Sarah, Crease, and Mariah. The total value of all nine slaves was $2,915. Division of estate of Joel Childress, November 26, 1822, Rutherford County Archives, Record Book 5, 243.
74. Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 97.
75. Caroline Nicholson recalled that Elias at the time was “just large enough to stride a barrel,” but census records make clear that he was either seventeen or eighteen. 1870 Census, Census Place: Nashville Ward 5, Davidson, Tennessee, Roll M593_1523, p. 303A, Image 303131, Family History Library Film 553022; Nicholson, “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” 16; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 7, 8, 202–3.
76. Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston: Published for the author, 1861), 55; Tolbert, Constructing Townscapes, 191–196, 220–221; Morris, The Tennessee Gazetteer, 35.
77. Tolbert, Constructing Townscapes, 205–6, Morris, The Tennessee Gazetteer, 35.
78. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 94.
79. Ibid.
80. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 16.
1. Anson Nelson and Fanny Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk: Wife of the Eleventh President of the United States (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1892), 253. Sarah hung a portrait of Thomas Jefferson in the parlor of her home. Ibid., 144.
2. William Dusinberre, Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 203n7; Anderson Childress to SCP, December 21, 1825, Polk Papers, TSLA.
3. Anderson Childress to SCP, December 21, 1825, Polk Papers, TSLA.
4. JC to SCP, January 3, 1826, Polk Papers, TSLA.
5. Mary Jetton to SCP, September 25, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA; Crystal Nicole Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 8–9; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 84–85.
6. I am indebted to Annette Gordon-Reed for providing a framework for interpreting relationships in slave-owning households. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: Norton, 2008), 31–32. See also Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 22–24; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 132–35.
7. Robert Campbell to JKP, November 3, 1846, Polk Papers, LOC.
8. Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 111.
9. Caroline O’Reilly Nicholson, “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” Caroline O’Reilly Nicholson Papers, #547-z, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 30–32.
10. W. D. Moseley to JKP, December 1, 1830, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 1, 1817–1832, ed. Herbert Weaver and Paul H. Bergeron (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969), 348.
11. Anne C. Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 175.
12. Congressional Directory 19, no. 1, 41. Wendy Gamber suggests some of the difficulties of boardinghouse life for families, including a lack of privacy and questions about women’s “work” when housekeeping was “denied” them. Wendy Gamber, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
13. Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, ed. Ben Ames Williams (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 178; Rose, Victorian America, 175–77.
14. Nicholson, “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” 31; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 16–20.
15. JKP to Andrew Jackson, December 5, 1828, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 1, 213–14; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 2, 33–34; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 107–20.
16. Sellers, Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 96–99; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 212–13.
17. Nashville Republican Banner, July 10, 1839; Sellers, Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 96–99.
18. Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention, Convention of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to Propose Amendments to the Constitution (Harrisburg: Packer, Barrett and Parke, 1837), vol. 2, 98. On Sarah’s political views, see her 1884 Nashville Banner interview, in Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 198–200. For the political views of James K. Polk, Hugh White, and Sam Houston, see Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian.
19. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 28–30, 33.
20. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 111.
21. John C. Wormeley to JKP, December 27, 1826, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 1, 65. James also found it necessary to explain to his uncle that Sarah “spends the winter with me in Washington,” but was in “good health.” JKP to William Polk, December 14, 1826, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 1, 60.
22. Quoted in Barbara G. Carson, Ambitious Appetites: Dining, Behavior, and Patterns of Consumption in Federal Washington (Washington, DC: AIA Press, 1990), 2.
23. “Mrs. James K. Polk, the First Lady in the Land Thirty Five Years Ago—A Visit, and Pleasant Reminiscences of the White House,” Indianapolis Sentinel, February 21, 1881; James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 41–48; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 30.
24. Jan Lewis, “Politics and Ambivalence of the Private Sphere: Women in Early Washington, D.C.,” in A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic, ed. Donald R. Kennon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 122–51; E. Cooley, A Description of the Etiquette at Washington City (Philadelphia: L. B. Clarke, 1829), 50–56; Cassandra Good, Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 164–87.
25. Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Madison and Jefferson (New York: Random House, 2010), 273, 285–86; Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).
26. Allgor, Parlor Politics, 239–42.
27. Ibid., 73.
28. Ibid., 73, 82.
29. Margery M. Heffron, Louisa Catherine: The Other Mrs. Adams, ed. David M. Michelmore (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 302–4.
30. Ibid., 301–2.
31. Susan Radomsky, “The Social Life of Politics: Washington’s Official Society and the Emergence of a National Political Elite, 1800–1876” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2005), 114; Allgor, Parlor Politics, 147–52.
32. Heffron, Louisa Catherine, 313–51, quote on 351.
33. Ibid., 4–5.
34. Ibid., 347.
35. Ibid., 326.
36. Melissa Jean Gismondi, “Rachel Jackson and the Search for Zion, 1760s–1830s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2017), 216–19.
37. Cooley, Etiquette at Washington City, 59–60; Rachel Sheldon, Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
38. Levi Woodbury to Mrs. Woodbury, n.d., Levi Woodbury Papers, First Series (LC), CS.
39. JKP to William R. Rucker, Columbia, TN, September 4, 1828, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 1, 195; Gulian Verplanck to William C. Bryant, January 1, 1829, Bryant-Godwin Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library.
40. Charles Day, Etiquette (New York: Wilson and Co., 1843), 12; Radomsky, “The Social Life of Politics”; Carson, Ambitious Appetites, 117.
41. “Mrs. President Polk,” NYH, June 3, 1879; Irving H. Bartlett, John C. Calhoun: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1993), 121–22.
42. Jean Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln (New York: Norton, 1987), 138–41.
43. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 255.
44. Margaret Bayard Smith, First Forty Years in Washington (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 154; Lewis, “Politics and Ambivalence of the Private Sphere,” 129–32; Frederika J. Teute, “Roman Matron on the Banks of Tiber Creek: Margaret Bayard Smith and the Politicization of Spheres in the Nation’s Capital,” in A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic, ed. Donald R. Kennon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 89–121.
45. Mary Louise Polk to SCP, November 5, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA; Sarah Myton Maury, An Englishwoman in America (London: Thomas Richardson, 1848), 203–4; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 50.
46. On the Eaton affair, see Kristin E. Wood, “ ‘One Woman So Dangerous to Public Morals’: Gender and Politics in the Eaton Affair,” Journal of the Early Republic 17 (Summer 1997): 237–75; Allgor, Parlor Politics, 190–238; Andrew Burstein, The Passions of Andrew Jackson (New York: Knopf, 2003), 173–80; Peggy Eaton, The Autobiography of Peggy Eaton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932).
47. Eaton, Autobiography, 64; Rudoph Bunner to G. C. Verplanck, January 9, 1830, Gulian C. Verplanck Papers, New-York Historical Society; Sellers, Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 143; “Miss Augusta W. Cole,” Daughters of the American Revolution, Lineage Book, vol. 36: 1901 (Harrisburg, PA: Telegraph Printing Co., 1912), 257.
48. Receipts, January 31, 1835, Polk Papers, LOC. Her subscription started with volume 2, January 31, 1831, and continued for three years, until the December 1834 issue. She paid $12 for this. A. Godey to SCP, January 24, 1835, Polk Correspondence, UT.
49. Nicholson, “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” 39.
50. “Woman—At Home,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 2 (February 1831): 97; “The Wife; or, Domestic Heroism,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 3 (December 1831): 308.
51. “Love,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 2 (May 1831): 237; “Happiness in the Marriage State,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 2 (May 1831): 289; “She weeps over the trinkets he gave her,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 2 (April 1831): 220.
52. “The Wife; or, Domestic Heroism,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 3 (December 1831): 308; “Distinguished Females,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 2 (February 1831): 63; “Female Education,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 9 (September 1834): 144; “The Sentiments of an American Woman,” Philadelphia, June 10, 1780, reprinted in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 18, no. 3 (1894): 361–64; see also Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 206; Salem Academy Library Contents, 1817, Salem College Archives.
53. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 206.
54. Ibid., 50.
55. Ibid., 53.
56. Ibid., 54; Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 329–30; receipt, January 18, 1838, Polk Papers, LOC. Comparative pricing based on Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, “Consumer Price Index (Estimate) 1800–,” https://www.minneapolisfed.org/community/teaching-aids/cpi-calculator-information/consumer-price-index-1800, accessed June 11, 2017.
57. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 91, 124; David Hume, “Of Essay Writing” (1742), in The Age of Authors: An Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Print Culture, ed. Paul Keen (Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2014), 161; Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 2.
58. On the persistence of the salon in the nineteenth century, see Kale, French Salons, quote on 37.
59. John Catron to SCP, January 7, 1840, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 19, Series 2; S. H. Laughlin to JKP, August 21, 1835, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 3, 1835–1836, ed. Herbert Weaver and Kermit L. Hall (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1975), 271.
60. “Mrs. President Polk,” NYH, June 3, 1879.
61. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, xiii–xiv, 13, 203.
62. JKP to SCP, September 26, 1834, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 2, 1833–1834, ed. Herbert Weaver and Paul H. Bergeron (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1972), 509; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 14–15.
63. Deposition of Caroline Drain, January 12, 1898, Deposition of Dafney Polk, November 3, 1888, January 11, 1898, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15.
64. On petitioning, see Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
65. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 114–15; receipts, January 31, 1835, Polk Papers, LOC.
66. SCP to Mary Childress, January 22, 1832, Polk Papers, TSLA.
67. Joanna Rucker to SCP, Murfreesboro, TN, June 13, 1834, Polk Papers, LOC.
68. Jane M. Walker to SCP, February 15, 1837, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 13, Series 2.
1. “The Rutherford Dinner,” Nashville Union, September 3, 1838; Nashville Republican Banner, September, 3, 1838; Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 1795–1843 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 355.
2. Nashville Republican Banner, September 8, 1838.
3. The opposition newspaper was sure James was prepared to announce before the Murfreesboro dinner. “The Campaign Opened,” Nashville Republican Banner, September 5, 1838.
4. Melissa Jean Gismondi, “Rachel Jackson and the Search for Zion, 1760s–1830s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2017).
5. JKP to Robert B. Reynolds, April 3, 1839, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 5, 1839–1841, ed. Wayne Cutler (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1979), 110–11.
6. John Bell to Henry Clay, May 21, 1839, Henry Clay, Papers of Henry Clay, vol. 9, The Whig Leader, January 1, 1837–December 31, 1843, ed. Robert Seager II and Melba Porter Hay (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 316; William Allen to JKP, April 6, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 111; Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 341, 362.
7. Nashville Union, September 5, 1838; John Bell to Henry Clay, May 21, 1839, Papers of Henry Clay, vol. 9, 316.
8. Thanks to Michael David Cohen for help with interpreting this request.
9. JKP to SCP, April 8, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 112.
10. JKP to SCP, June 2, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 139.
11. JKP to SCP, April 14, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 113.
12. On the pastoralization of housework, see Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
13. JKP to SCP, April 20, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 115; JKP to SCP, April 22, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 116; JKP to SCP, April 29, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 117.
14. See, for instance, JKP to SCP, April 17, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 114.
15. JKP to SCP, April 20, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 115; JKP to SCP, May 13, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 126.
16. J. G. M. Ramsey to JKP, June 28, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 155.
17. Lori Glover, Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 13; Dallett Hemphill, Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 89; JC to JKP, May 18, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 127.
18. JC to SCP, January 20, 1834, Polk Papers, LOC, Reel 8, Series 2; JC to SCP, June 18, 1839, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 18.
19. James Walker to JKP, July 12, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 165.
20. JKP to William Rice, August 26,1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 210.
21. JKP to SCP, May 2, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 120–21.
22. JKP to SCP, May 2, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 121; David Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 32, 72–73.
23. Lisa C. Tolbert, Constructing Townscapes: Space and Society in Antebellum Tennessee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 144.
24. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 371. See also M. R. Rucker to SCP, May 13, 1839, and J. W. Childress to SCP, May 27, 1839, both in the Polk Papers, LOC. On the masculine nature of urban public space, see Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Knopf, 1998). It’s not clear if Sarah made the visit to the office of The Democrat.
25. JKP to SCP, May 18, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 128–29; Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 370, 372–73.
26. JKP to SCP, May 2, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 121; JKP to SCP, May 18, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 128–29; JKP to SCP, May 18, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 128–129.
27. JKP to SCP, July 1, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 159; JKP to SCP, July 7, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 162.
28. Samuel H. Laughlin to JKP, August 10, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 183; Papers of Henry Clay, vol. 9, 317; Robert B. Reynolds and Lewis P. Roberts to JKP, August 5, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 176; Alexander O. Anderson to JKP, August 6, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 178; J. L. Martin to SCP, August 23, 1839, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 18, Series 2.
29. Aaron Brown to JKP, December 7, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 332. When Aaron and his wife subsequently named their new daughter Sarah Polk Brown, she sent the infant a bracelet. Mary Brown to SCP, February 4, 1849, Polk Papers, TSLA.
30. Samuel H. Laughlin to JKP, August 10, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 183; JKP to SCP, May 2, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 121: JKP to SCP, May 12, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 185.
31. SCP to JKP, June 25, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 154.
32. Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 60–63; Eastin Morris, The Tennessee Gazetteer or Topical Dictionary (Nashville: W. Hasell Hunt, 1834), 165.
33. Robert Barnwell Rhett to JKP, August 21, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 202; Anson Nelson and Fanny Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk: Wife of the Eleventh President of the United States (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1892), 63.
34. John Catron to JKP, September 1, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 221; Caroline O’Reilly Nicholson, “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” Caroline O’Reilly Nicholson Papers, #547-z, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 29; Daniel Craighead to JKP, September 3, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 227; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 16–20.
35. Daniel Craighead to JKP, September 3, 1829, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 227.
36. In 1842 she wrote him, “I have received a letter for you from Irwin at Savannah containing $50 in Alabama money the balance he says on your note. I suppose half is Knox’s though I have not said any thing to him on the subject. If I must give him his portion you must so write me.” SCP to JKP, June 24, 1842, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 6, 1842–1843, ed. Wayne Cutler and Carese M. Parker (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1983), 74; JKP to William H. Polk, October 26, 1839, NCSA.
37. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 380–81.
38. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 177–78; Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 380–81.
39. John Catron to JKP, September 1, 1839, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 221.
40. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 63–64.
41. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 381.
42. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 64.
43. Ibid., 66.
44. Ibid.
45. John Catron to SCP, January 7, 1840, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 19, Series 2.
46. A. O. P. Nicholson to JKP, July 27, 1840, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 519; Robert Armstrong to JKP, March 28, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 664; J. George Harris to JKP, June 18, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 699; SCP to JKP, June 18, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 700.
47. JKP to Alexander O. Anderson, August 16, 1840, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 541–43.
48. Andrew Jackson to JKP, December 19, 1840, Polk Correspondence, vol. 5, 603. See also Andrew Jackson to JKP, March 6, 1840, Polk Correspondence, vol. 5, 648; SCP to JKP, July 11, 1840, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 511; SCP to JKP, December 31, 1840, Polk Correspondence, vol. 5, 609; Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
49. SCP to JKP, August 11, 1840, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 511; Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 421–22.
50. SCP to JKP, December 31, 1840, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 609; Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 434–36.
51. SCP to JKP, April 8, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 673; SCP to JKP, April 10, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 675; SCP to JKP, April 14, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 677.
52. SCP to JKP, June 25, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 703.
53. SCP to JKP, December 31, 1840, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 609; SCP to JKP, April 8, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 673; SCP to JKP, May 2, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 683; SCP to JKP, December 31, 1840, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 609; SCP to JKP, June 18, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 700; JKP to SCP, April 11, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 676; JKP to SCP, April 16, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 678.
54. Joseph Howard Parks, John Bell of Tennessee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950), 7; SCP to JKP, June 18, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 700.
55. “Rules of the Boarding School at Salem,” 1805, Salem College Archives; “Female Education,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 3 (July 1831): 30.
56. J. L. Martin to SCP, August 23, 1839, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 18, Series 2.
57. William R. Rucker to SCP, May 13, 1839, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 18, Series 2.
58. JC to SCP, May 27, 1839, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 18, Series 2. It would be nice to know if Sarah had the article placed in The Democrat. Unfortunately, there are no surviving issues from the month following John’s suggestion.
59. JKP to SCP, April 16, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 678; JKP to SCP, May 9, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 686; SCP to JKP, March 28, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 665; SCP to JKP, April 19, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 675; SCP to JKP, April 25, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 681.
60. SCP to JKP, April 8, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 673; SCP to JKP, April 14, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 677.
61. JKP to SCP, May 9, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 686; SCP to JKP, April 25, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 681; Ephraim P. McNeal to SCP, June 22, 1841, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 22, Series 2; SCP to JKP, June 25, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 703; JKP to SCP, July 1, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 705; JKP to SCP, July 6, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 709; JKP to SCP, July 1, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 705.
62. SCP to JKP, July 5, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 706–7.
63. SCP to JKP, July 25, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 716.
64. SCP to JKP, June 18, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 700; SCP to JKP, July 5, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 706.
65. SCP to JKP, July 29, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 716.
66. JKP to Robert Armstrong, August 2, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 717; William H. Polk to SCP, August 6, 1841, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 22, Series 2; Hopkins L. Turney to JKP, August 12, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 722.
67. Samuel H. Laughlin to JKP, September 1, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 748; Samuel H. Laughlin to JKP, September 12, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 5, 757.
68. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 458–59.
69. SCP to JKP, July 1, 1842, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 78.
70. John Catron to SCP, August 17, 1842, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 23, Series 2.
71. JKP to SCP, October 9, 1842, photocopy held by the James K. Polk Project, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
72. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 68.
73. Ibid.
74. A. O. P. Nicholson to JKP, January 13, 1841, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 616; JC to SCP, March 6, 1843, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 24, Series 2.
75. SCP to JKP, March 3, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 238.
76. SCP to JKP, May 29, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 259.
77. JKP to SCP, April 4, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 263.
78. JKP to SCP, April 7, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 266; JKP to SCP, April 14, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 272.
79. SCP to JKP, April 17, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 273–74.
80. Ibid.
81. SCP to JKP, April 11, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 271; JKP to SCP, June 9, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 315; JKP to SCP, June 18, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 318.
82. SCP to JKP, April 11, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 271; SCP to JKP, May 3, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 276.
83. JKP to SCP, May 8, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 280.
84. SCP to JKP, May 23, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 313.
85. JKP to Martin Van Buren, August 18, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 332; JKP to Robert Armstrong, August 7, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 331.
86. William Dusinberre, Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 87.
87. M. C. Bass to Generals Harding and Barrow, June 24, 1862, Harding-Jackson Papers, 1809–1938, Tennessee Historical Society (Nashville); Walter Durham, Nashville: The Occupied City, 1862–1863 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008), 176.
88. Laura T. Polk to JKP, December 29, 1835, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 3, 1835–1836, ed. Herbert Weaver and Kermit L. Hall (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1975), 401–2; Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 458–59.
89. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 459.
90. Ibid.
91. Marshall Tate Polk Jr. to JKP, September 29, 1843, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 24, Series 2; Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 459, 358–59.
92. Sarah Mytton Maury, An Englishwoman in America (London: Thomas Richardson and Son, 1848), 210; Stephen B. Presser, “The Historical Background of the American Law of Adoption,” Journal of Family Law 11 (1971–72): 458–61; Gismondi, “Rachel Jackson and the Search for Zion, 1760s–1830s,” 122–55.
93. M. C. Bass to Generals Harding and Barrow, June 24, 1862, Harding-Jackson Papers, 1809–1938, Tennessee Historical Society (Nashville).
94. “Mrs. James K. Polk, the First Lady in the Land Thirty Five Years Ago—A Visit, and Pleasant Reminiscences of the White House,” Indianapolis Sentinel, February 21, 1881; “Mrs. President Polk,” NYH, June 3, 1879.
95. Aaron V. Brown to JKP, December 9, 1843, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 6, 371.
96. Aaron V. Brown to JKP, January 22, 1844, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 7, January–August 1844, ed. Wayne Cutler and James P. Cooper Jr. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989), 44.
97. Aaron V. Brown to SCP, January 14, 1844, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 25, Series 2.
1. On women and settlement in Florida, see Laurel Clark Shire, The Threshold of Manifest Destiny: Gender and National Expansion in Florida (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
2. Alfred Balch to Martin Van Buren, Tallahassee, April 3, 1840; Clarence Edwin Carter, The Territorial Papers of the United States, vol. 26, The Territory of Florida, 1839–1845 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1962), 128.
3. Joel H. Silbey, Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 145–76; John Hallam, The Diary of an Old Lawyer; or, Scenes Behind the Curtain (Nashville: Southwestern Publishing House, 1895), 107–8; Timothy S. Huebner, The Southern Judicial Tradition: State Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 65.
4. Alfred Balch to Martin Van Buren, November 22, 1842, Martin Van Buren Papers, Series 1, Reel 39, September 1841–November 1842, LOC Microfilm.
5. Omaha Daily Herald, October 28, 1879; Ben Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1886), 130–31.
6. Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Varon argues that women were “marginal to the discourse and rituals of partisan politics before 1840” (p. 74). “The Ladies Coming to the Rescue,” Hartford Daily Courant, September 1840; Alfred Balch to Martin Van Buren, November 22, 1842, Martin Van Buren Papers, Series 1, Reel 39, September 1841–November 1842.
7. Alfred Balch to Martin Van Buren, November 22, 1842, Martin Van Buren Papers, Series 1.
8. Quoted in Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 2, Continentalist, 1843–1846 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 71–72.
9. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 2, Continentalist, 71; James K. Polk, “Letters of James K. Polk to Cave Johnson, 1833–1848,” Tennessee Historical Magazine 1 (September 1915): 240–41. Although, as Tom Chaffin notes, Polk never actually used the term “Manifest Destiny,” its enthusiasts flocked to his support. Tom Chaffin, Met His Every Goal? James K. Polk and the Legends of Manifest Destiny (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014), 22–23.
10. “Texas—The Prospect,” The Liberator, May 24, 1844; Amy Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Vintage, 2012), 38.
11. Quoted in Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 2, Continentalist, 1843–1846, 91; Greenberg, A Wicked War, 39.
12. George H. Hickman, The Life and Public Services of the Hon. James Knox Polk: With a Compendium of His Speeches on Various Public Measures, Also a Sketch of the Life of the Hon. George Mifflin Dallas (Baltimore: N. Hickman, 1844), 26; Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, 321; Greenberg, A Wicked War, 39–41.
13. “The Responses to the Nomination of Mr. Polk,” Easton Gazette (Maryland), June 8, 1844, vol. XXVII; “The Loco Foco Candidates,” Daily Atlas, June 4, 1844; Caroline O’Reilly Nicholson, “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” Caroline O’Reilly Nicholson Papers, #547-z, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 35.
14. “The Democratic Nomination at Last,” NYH, May 31, 1844; Wendy Moonan, “Antiques: A Gothic Tale of a Bedstead Fit for a President,” New York Times, November 3, 2000.
15. “Mrs. James K. Polk, the First Lady in the Land Thirty Five Years Ago—A Visit, and Pleasant Reminiscences of the White House,” Indianapolis Sentinel, February 21, 1881.
16. John C. Catron to JKP, Nashville, July 17, 1844, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 7, January–August 1844, ed. Wayne Cutler and James P. Cooper Jr. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989), 355–57.
17. “Sarah Childress Polk,” in First Ladies: A Biographical Dictionary, 3rd ed., ed. Dorothy Schneider and Carl J. Schneider (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2010), 70–78, quote on 74; “Colonel Polk at Home,” NYH, November 16, 1844.
18. “The Lady of the President Elect,” Boston Evening Transcript, published as Daily Evening Transcript, December 2, 1844. See also “Mrs. President Polk,” Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics, December 14, 1844.
19. “Colonel Polk at Home,” NYH, November 16, 1844.
20. “The Private Character of Mr. Polk,” Journal of Commerce, reprinted in NYH, November 16, 1844.
21. Ibid.
22. “The Democratic Nominations,” Barre (MA) Gazette, June 14, 1844; Anson Nelson and Fanny Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk: Wife of the Eleventh President of the United States (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1892), 96, 43–44.
23. David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler, Henry Clay: The Essential American (New York: Random House, 2010), 172.
24. “The Democratic Nominations,” Barre (MA) Gazette, June 14, 1844; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 96, 43–44.
25. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 79–80.
26. Ann Thomas to SCP, Liberty (now Bedford, VA), n.d; Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 85–93.
27. “Gallant Harry, the song of the Clay club of Germantown,” in John S. Littell, The Clay Minstrel, or National Songster, 2nd ed. (New York: Greeley and McElrath, 1844), 158; Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 83–87; Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Voices Without Votes: Women and Politics in Antebellum New England (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2010); Nathan Sargent, Public Men and Events, from the Commencement of Mr. Monroe’s Administration, in 1817, to the Close of Mr. Fillmore’s Administration in 1853 (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott and Co., 1875), vol. 2, 246.
28. Jayne Crumpler DeFiore, “COME, and Bring the Ladies: Tennessee Women and the Politics of Opportunity During the Presidential Campaigns of 1840 and 1844,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 15 (Winter 1992): 201, 203; “Progress of the Campaign,” Nashville Republican Banner, July 17, 1844.
29. “Progress of the Campaign,” Nashville Republican Banner, July 17, 1844.
30. Nashville Republican Banner, September 4, 1844; John Shofner quoted in Lisa C. Tolbert, Constructing Townscapes: Space and Society in Antebellum Tennessee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 78–79.
31. Ann Thomas to SCP, Liberty (now Bedford, VA), n.d.
32. “Presentation of the Texas Banner,” Nashville Republican Banner, August 5, 1844.
33. Daniel Craighead to JKP, October 21, 1844, Polk Papers, LOC. Jayne Crumpler DeFiore notes that Democratic women were invited to a rally in Nashville on August 15, 1844. But this was unusual. “COME, and Bring the Ladies,” 203.
34. DeFiore, “COME, and Bring the Ladies,” 203. According to Elizabeth Varon, the Democratic Party in Virginia was somewhat more welcoming of female partisanship. We Mean to Be Counted, 87.
35. W. D. Moseley to SCP, December 1, 1830, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 1, 1817–1832, ed. Herbert Weaver and Paul H. Bergeron (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969), 348.
36. Elizabeth Bosworth to SCP, June 12, 1844, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 26, Series 2; John W. P. McGimsey to JKP, September 27, 1844, and November 1, 1844, Polk Papers, LOC; Jane Frindlay to SCP, Cincinnati, March 25, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA.
37. Ann Thomas to SCP, Liberty (VA), n.d., TSLA.
38. Sally Denton, Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 249; Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 443.
39. Susan Radomsky, “The Social Life of Politics: Washington’s Official Society and the Emergence of a National Political Elite, 1800–1876” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2005), 30–37; Nicholson, “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” 30–32, 84–85.
40. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford, 2007), 688.
41. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 78.
42. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 67–96, quote on 77.
43. Dallas to Mrs. Dallas, February 18, 1845, Dallas Papers, CS; Gilpin to Van Buren, February 24, 1845, Van Buren Papers, both quoted in Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 2, Continentalist, 193; James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 12, January–July 1847, ed. Tom Chaffin and Michael David Cohen (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013), 287n3; Zboray and Zboray, Voices Without Votes, 146–47.
44. “A Memory of a Trip,” NDA, March 2, 1889.
45. John Robert Irelan, The Republic; or, The History of the United States of America (Chicago: Fairbanks and Palmer, 1888), vol. 11, 675; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 81.
46. “Seven Washington Belles no. 4—Sarah Childress Polk,” Idaho Statesman (Boise), May 14, 1911; Leonard Jones to SCP, Shelby County, KY, December 26, 1844, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 32; undated letter from “A Christian Friend” to SCP, Polk Papers, LOC, Series 9.
47. Undated letter from “A Christian Friend” to SCP, Polk Papers, LOC, Series 9.
48. E. S. Davis to SCP, March 7, 1845, James K. Polk Papers, Microfilm, Reel 34, Series 2.
49. Ibid.; Leonard Jones to SCP, Shelby County, KY, December 26, 1844, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 32; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 36–66.
50. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 17, 75–77. Dix quote on 76.
51. Ann Thomas to SCP, Liberty (VA), n.d. See also A. D. Mitchell to SCP, Oakland, Bedford County, VA, May 1, 1845; Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 89.
52. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 49.
53. Joanna Rucker to SCP, December 1, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 49.
1. James D. Richardson, ed., The Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington, DC, 1901), 373–82; Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 2, Continentalist, 1843–1846 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 209.
2. Excerpts Concerning President and Mrs. James K. Polk (Diary of Elizabeth Dixon), December 6, 1845–January 1, 1846, TSLA. Original source: Elizabeth Dixon, “Excerpts from the Diary of Elizabeth Dixon of Connecticut, 1845–1847,” Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford.
3. Henry Gilpin to Martin Van Buren, February 14, 1845, Martin Van Buren Papers. The average age of First Ladies before Julia Tyler was 51.7 years. Data drawn from Katherine A. S. Sibley, ed., A Companion to First Ladies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). Sarah’s height and weight are based on an analysis of textiles in the collection of the Polk Family Home, Columbia, TN.
4. Excerpts Concerning President and Mrs. James K. Polk (Diary of Elizabeth Dixon), December 6, 1845–January 1, 1846, TSLA; Sarah Mytton Maury, An Englishwoman in America (London: Thomas Richardson, 1848), 202. Maury said her “dark eye and complexion give her a touch of the Spanish Dama”; John W. Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men (New York: Harper and Bros., 1873), 312; Mary Cathryn Cain, “The Art and Politics of Looking White: Beauty Practice Among White Women in Antebellum America,” Winterthur Portfolio 42, no.1 (Spring 2008): 27–50.
5. Sibley, A Companion to First Ladies, 75–158.
6. Robert Seager II, And Tyler Too: A Biography of John and Julia Gardener Tyler (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 243–45, quote on 243; Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 2, Continentalist, 62.
7. Seager, And Tyler Too, 248–49.
8. Ibid., 263, quote on 333; E. S. Davis to SCP, March 7, 1845, James K. Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 34, Series 2.
9. Elizabeth Fries Ellet, The Queens of American Society (New York: Scribners, 1867), 219; Mrs. C. W. Denison, “Mrs. James K. Polk.” Sartain’s Union Magazine VI (January–June 1850): 156; Anson Nelson and Fanny Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk: Wife of the Eleventh President of the United States (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1892), 92–93.
10. “A Memory of a Trip,” NDA, March 2, 1889. Invitation to Democratic Inauguration ball sent to Mrs. Sydney Kimmel, Frederick County, MD. “Ball at National Theater, March 4, 1845. In honor of the President and Vice President,” Polk Papers, TSLA; “No Need of Flogging in the Navy,” Naval Journal 16 (August 1844): 387.
11. James D. Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), vol. 5, 2226.
12. Elizabeth Fries Ellet, The Court Circles of the Republic; or, The Beauties and Celebrities of the Nation, Illustrating Life and Society Under Eighteen Presidents; Describing the Social Features of the Successive Administrations from Washington to Grant (Hartford: Hartford Publishing Co., 1869), 216; receipts, July 1846, Polk Papers, LOC.
13. Ellet, The Court Circles of the Republic, 216; E. S. Davis to SCP, March 7, 1845, James K. Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 34, Series 2.
14. Charles Dickens, American Notes: A Journey (1842; New York: Fromm, 1985), 124; “Washington News,” NYH, November 27, 1844; Donald Barr Chidsey, And Tyler Too (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1978), 121.
15. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 2, Continentalist, 306–7.
16. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 88–89.
17. Ibid.; Seager, And Tyler Too, 333.
18. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, “Consumer Price Index (Estimate) 1800–,” https://www.minneapolisfed.org/community/teaching-aids/cpi-calculator-information/consumer-price-index-1800, accessed June 11, 2017; William Seale, The President’s House: A History, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), vol. 1, 251; Ester Singleton, The Story of the White House (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1907), vol. 1, 304.
19. Jessie Benton Frémont, Souvenirs of My Time (Boston: Lothrop Co., 1887), 103; Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, September 9, 1846, Polk Papers, TSLA.
20. Singleton, The Story of the White House, vol. 1, 317; Ophelia Polk Hays to SCP, December 12, 1848, Polk Papers, TSLA; Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 2, Continentalist, 307; James K. Polk, Diary of a President, ed. Milo Quaife (Columbia, TN: James K. Polk Memorial Association, 2005), vol. 1, 321. On the popularity of these events, see Sophia Towson to SCP, n.d., Polk Papers, TSLA.
21. William Woodbridge to Lucy, January 7, 1846, William Woodbridge Papers, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library; Ellet, The Court Circles of the Republic, 382; Polk, Diary, vol. 1, 264.
22. Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, January 7, 1846, Polk Papers, TSLA; Benajah Ticknor, Journal, May 23, 1848, Ticknor Collection, Yale University Library.
23. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 2, Continentalist, 308; Polk, Diary, vol. 1, 321; Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men, 312. On the political nature of the dinners, see, for example, G. M. Dallas to R. Rush, April 25, 1846, Benjamin Rush Papers, 15.
24. Polk, Diary, vol. 1, 146; Varina Banks Howell Davis to Margaret K. Howell, January 30, 1846, April 3, 1846, in Jefferson Davis, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, vol. 2, June 1841–July 1846, ed. Will McIntosh (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 420, 534.
25. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, both quotes on 112.
26. William Woodbridge to Lucy, January 7, 1846, William Woodbridge Papers, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library; Varina Banks Howell Davis to Margaret K. Howell, January 30, 1846, in Davis, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, vol. 2, 420; Seale, The President’s House, vol. 1, 253; Dixon, “Excerpts from the Diary of Elizabeth Dixon of Connecticut, 1845–1847,” December 6, 1845; Polk, Diary, vol. 4, 402.
27. Frémont, Souvenirs of My Time, 103; receipts, January 1846, Polk Papers, LOC; Seale, The President’s House, 253; John Smith the Younger, “Portraits for the People: The Eastern Heiress,” The National Era, March 11, 1847; Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 271. Robert Seager’s assertion that Sarah Polk’s “nonalcoholic White House functions did save the taxpayers a few dollars” is based on two faulty assumptions: that because the Polks did not themselves drink, they didn’t serve alcohol, and that the “taxpayers” paid for the entertaining expenses of the president, neither of which was true. Equally flawed is his view that Sarah’s “four-year tenure in the President’s Mansion was generally dubbed a social failure from beginning to end, though it was cheered by the prohibitionists and certain lunatic-fringe ecclesiastical groups as a great triumph of Christian virtue.” Seager, And Tyler Too, 333, 319.
28. Excerpts Concerning President and Mrs. James K. Polk (Diary of Elizabeth Dixon), December 6, 1845–January 1, 1846, TSLA; Polk, Diary, vol. 4, 146. Thanks to Michael David Cohen for this final reference.
29. Seale, The President’s House, vol. 1, 255–56.
30. “Memorandum of Persons to be employed at the President’s House,” Polk Papers, LOC. Thanks to Michael David Cohen for this reference. Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 152–53; Frémont, Souvenirs of My Time, 103; Seale, The President’s House, vol. 1, 251–53; Schwartz, Ties That Bound, 318.
31. Polk, Diary, vol. 1, 115.
32. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 90.
33. JKP to Cave Johnson, December 21, 1844, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 8, September–December 1844 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 456.
34. Richard R. Stenberg, “President Polk and California: Additional Documents,” Pacific Historical Review 10 (1941): 217–19 (Gideon Wells quote on 219); Amy Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Vintage, 2012), 69–72.
35. Dixon, “Excerpts from the Diary of Elizabeth Dixon of Connecticut, 1845–1847,” December 19, 1845; Benajah Ticknor, Journal, May 23, 1848, Ticknor Collection, Yale University Library.
36. JKP and SCP to Dolley Madison, May 27, 1845, Madison Papers, University of Virginia; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 93.
37. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 2, Continentalist, 192; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 93.
38. SCP to Dolley Madison, July 23, 1845, Dolley Madison to SCP, January 18, 1845, Madison Papers, University of Virginia; Taylor, A Slave in the White House, 155–56; Schwartz, Ties That Bound, 348.
39. Dolley Madison to SCP, November 6, 1846, April 4, 1845, November 6, 1846, Madison Papers, University of Virginia.
40. Dolley Madison to SCP, July 23, 1845, Madison Papers, University of Virginia; Conover Hunt, “Fashion and Frugality: First Lady Sarah Polk,” White House History 32 (Fall 2012), online at https://www.whitehousehistory.org/fashion-and-frugality, accessed May 8, 2017.
41. John Morrill Bryan, Robert Mills: Architect (New York: AIA Press, 1989), 57; James K. Polk, Diary of a President, ed. Milo Quaife (Columbia, TN: James K. Polk Memorial Association, 2005), vol. 3, 175, 323; Polk, Diary, vol. 4, 1–3; Elisha Whittlesey to SCP, June 21, 1848, National Archives, entry 468, CS.
42. Margery M. Heffron, Louisa Catherine: The Other Mrs. Adams, ed. David M. Michelmore (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 303.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.; Caroline O’Reilly Nicholson, “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” Caroline O’Reilly Nicholson Papers, #547-z, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 31; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 16–20.
45. Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, January 7, 1856, Polk Papers, TSLA; Paul H. Bergeron, “All in the Family: President Polk in the White House,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 46, no. 1 (1987): 15.
46. Bergeron, “All in the Family,” 10–20, quote on 10–11; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 161–62.
47. Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Childress, July 7, 1846, Polk Papers, TSLA; Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, January 18, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA; Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, n.d. (probably June 18, 1847), Polk Papers, TSLA. Joanna Rucker’s correspondence makes clear what a powerful figure Sarah was in the imagination of her nieces. Joanna Rucker correspondence, Polk Papers, TSLA. See also Mary S. Jetton to SCP, September 25, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA.
48. Dixon, “Excerpts from the Diary of Elizabeth Dixon of Connecticut, 1845–1847,” December 19, 1845; Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, November 29, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA. Sarah didn’t appear to have enough time to write thank-you notes, either. See Mary Taylor to Mrs. Niles, February 23, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA.
49. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 251–52; Hunt, “Fashion and Frugality: First Lady Sarah Polk.”
50. Bergeron, “All in the Family,” 11. The christening gown is in the Polk Family Home Collection.
51. Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 2, Continentalist, 301; Polk, Diary, vol. 2, 345–46.
52. Hunt, “Fashion and Frugality: First Lady Sarah Polk.”
53. John Grigg to SCP, March 7, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA; see also Joshua Lane to SCP, undated, Polk Papers, TSLA.
54. John Rees to SCP, May 28, 1845, Polk Papers, LOC.
55. Septimus Huston to SCP, Washington, June 25, 1845, Polk Papers, LOC; Nathaniel Freeman to SCP, New York, February 2, 1845, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 39, Series 2; Charlotte J. Hairres to SCP, New York, March 22, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA.
56. Thomson to SCP, April 10, 1845, TSLA; Sylvia Glover to SCP, March 15, 1845, Polk Papers, LOC, Reel 49; Ann Thomas to SCP, Liberty (VA), n.d., Polk Papers, LOC. See also Ann Nichols to SCP, April 24, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA; Mary Houston to SCP, March 23, 1845, Polk Papers, LOC.
57. Mary Throckmorton to SCP, April 10 [1845], Prince William County, VA, Polk Papers LOC; C. C. Porter to SCP, September 28, 1845, Polk Papers, LOC.
58. Sylvia Glover to SCP, March 15, 1847, Polk Papers, Microfilm, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 49; Caroline Brewerton to SCP, February 5, 1846, Polk Papers, TSLA. See also M. Lyttle to SCP, November 16, 1847, Polk Papers, LOC; Thomas Childress to SCP, May 17, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA.
59. Carl Sferrazza Anthony, First Ladies, The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives and Their Power, 1789–1961 (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 140.
60. E. Elliott to SCP, February 20, 1848, Polk Papers, TSLA.
61. JC to SCP, February 20, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA.
62. JKP to Thomas Childress, October 17, 1845, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 10, July–December 1845, ed. Wayne Cutler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 242; JKP to Daniel Graham, April 26, 1847, Daniel Graham to JKP, May 4, 1847, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 12, January–July 1847, ed. Tom Chaffin and Michael David Cohen (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013), 200–201, 226; Elizabeth Bancroft to SCP, n.d., Polk Papers, TSLA.
63. Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 5; Joanna Rucker to SCP, October 23, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA; Mary Louise Polk to SCP, November 5, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA.
64. Maury, An Englishwoman in America, 202; Hunt, “Fashion and Frugality: First Lady Sarah Polk.”
65. Frémont, Souvenirs of My Time, 100–103.
66. Ellet, The Court Circles of the Republic, 217.
67. Cornelia H. Richardson letter to Mrs. Dr. R. Worthington, December 17, 1847, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. See also Elizabeth Dixon, “Excerpts from the Diary of Elizabeth Dixon of Connecticut, 1845–1847,” December 19, 1845, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford; receipts, 1845, Polk Papers, LOC.
68. Joanna Rucker to SCP, October 23, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA; Hunt, “Fashion and Frugality: First Lady Sarah Polk”; Joanna Rucker to SCP, December 1, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA; Jacob L. Martin to JKP, December 1, 1845, Robert Armstrong to JKP, December 4, 1845, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 10, 399, 403; Jacob L. Martin to JKP, September 10, 1847, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 13, August 1847–March 1848, ed. Michael David Cohen (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2017), 156–57.
69. Joanna Rucker to SCP, December 1, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA; receipts, February 1849, Polk Papers, LOC; Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, April 7, 1845, January 7, 1846 (quote), Polk Papers, TSLA; Mary Louise Polk to SCP, Polk Papers, November 5, 1847; Hunt, “Fashion and Frugality: First Lady Sarah Polk.”
70. Dixon, “Excerpts from the Diary of Elizabeth Dixon of Connecticut, 1845–1847,” December 6, 1845; Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, October 17, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA; Seager, And Tyler Too, 259, 262, 263; Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, November 29, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA.
71. Hunt, “Fashion and Frugality: First Lady Sarah Polk”; Seager, And Tyler Too, 263; Seale, The President’s House, vol. 1, 260.
72. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 101–2.
73. Laura Holloway, The Ladies of the White House (New York: U.S. Pub. Co., 1870), 445.
74. D. Levy to SCP, November 28, 1845, James K. Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 43, Series 2; Reverend Mr. Bells to SCP, August 29, 1846, Polk Papers, TSLA. Sarah would have appreciated the gesture—at a dollar a dozen, oranges were consistently the most expensive produce she purchased. June 1846 receipts, Polk Papers, LOC; Augustus A. Parker to JKP, August 8, 1845, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Series 2, Reel 4. Parker wasn’t the only American intending to name a daughter after Mrs. Polk without knowing her “Christian name.” See also Jesse Chase to JKP, September 22, 1845, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 10, 494, and Alex Jones to JKP, April 4, 1845, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 9, January–June 1845, ed. Wayne Cutler and Robert G. Hall II (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 253; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 93–95; Barre (MA) Patriot, June 13, 1845, vol. 1, issue 47, p. 3.
75. Seager, And Tyler Too, 333; Lydia Howard Sigourney, Noble Deeds of American Women; with Biographical Sketches of Some of the More Prominent (Buffalo, NY: G. H. Derby and Co., 1851), 418.
76. Seale, The President’s House, vol. 1, 256; Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 111–12; Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, March 1, 1846, Polk Papers, TSLA; Patrick Phillips-Schrock, The White House: An Illustrated Architectural History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 44; Dixon, “Excerpts from the Diary of Elizabeth Dixon of Connecticut, 1845–1847”; Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, vol. 1, Jacksonian, 1795–1843 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 111. The piano cost $500, and was made in Baltimore. Lewis Stirn to SCP, Washington, February 13, 1845, Polk Papers, LOC.
77. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 94.
1. James D. Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), vol. 4, 373–82.
2. Anson Nelson and Fanny Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk: Wife of the Eleventh President of the United States (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1892), 100.
3. Edmund C. Watmough to SCP, October 24, 1844, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 29; Edmund C. Watmough, Scribblings and Sketches: Diplomatic, Piscatory, and Oceanic, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: E. Sherman, 1844); Edwin Williams, New York Annual Register for the Year of Our Lord, 1836 (New York: Edwin Williams, 1836), 475.
4. Watmough, Scribblings and Sketches, 120; Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (Boston, 1841), 12, 36. On Beecher’s role in formulating and promoting domesticity, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton, 1973).
5. Lynnea Magnuson, “In the Service of Columbia: Gendered Politics and Manifest Destiny Expansion” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 23–50.
6. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 169; Catharine Beecher to SCP, September 20, 1845, Polk Family Home Collection.
7. Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West, 2nd ed. (Cincinnati: Truman and Smith, 1835), 10–11.
8. Catharine Beecher to SCP, September 20, 1845, Polk Family Home Collection.
9. Ibid.; Catharine Beecher, The Duty of American Women to Their Country (New York: Harper and Bros., 1845), 64.
10. William Seale, The President’s House: A History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), vol. 1, 244.
11. Alex Jones to SCP, March 29, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA. On Jones, see James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 9, January–June 1845, ed. Wayne Cutler and Robert G. Hall II (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 253; John Rees to SCP, May 28, 1845, Polk Papers, LOC.
12. John Price to SCP, January 31, 1845, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 33.
13. Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, April 7, 1846, Polk Papers, TSLA; Amy Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Vintage, 2012), 76–79, 84–85.
14. On Anglophobia, see Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).
15. John C. Catron to SCP, September 24, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA.
16. John C. Catron to JKP, September 16, 1845, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 10, July–December 1845, ed. Wayne Cutler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 237; JKP to John C. Catron, October 4, 1845, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 10, 277; William L. Marcy to Zachary Taylor, October 16, 1845, in Messages of the President of the United States…on the Subject of the Mexican War, House Executive Documents, 30th Congress, 1st Session, No. 60 (Washington, DC: Wendell and Van Benthuysen, 1848), 90–91; James Polk, Diary of a President, ed. Milo Quaife (Columbia, TN: James K. Polk Memorial Association, 2005), vol. 1, 171, 189.
17. Gideon Pillow to SCP, January 8, 1846, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 44, Series 2.
18. Greenberg, A Wicked War, 98–104.
19. Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 4, 442–43; Greenberg, A Wicked War, 104
20. Greenberg, A Wicked War, 113–22.
21. JC to JKP, June 15, 1846, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 11, 1846, ed. Wayne Cutler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 209.
22. Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 94n3; Greenberg, A Wicked War, 104–7, 192–94.
23. Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, May 30, 1846, Polk Papers, TSLA.
24. Salem Academy Copybook, Polk Family Home; Paul Wells, “Music in the Life of Sarah Childress Polk,” Bulletin of the Society for American Music 30, no. 1 (2004): 4–5; Seale, The President’s House, vol. 1, 261.
25. Laura Holloway, The Ladies of the White House (New York: U.S. Pub. Co., 1870), 452–53.
26. Ester Singleton, The Story of the White House (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1907), vol. 1, 317–18; Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, May 30, 1846, Polk Papers, TSLA.
27. Greenberg, A Wicked War, 146–99.
28. Ibid., 137–49.
29. M. Lyttle to JKP, M. Lyttle to SCP, November 16, 1847, Polk Papers, LOC.
30. “Mrs. Polk,” Daily Sentinel and Gazette (Milwaukee), December 23, 1846.
31. Joanna Rucker to SCP, February 5, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA.
32. Mary Louise Polk to SCP, November 5, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA.
33. Ibid.
34. Susanna A. Harney to SCP, January 4, 1848, Polk Papers, TSLA.
35. Anonymous to JKP, April 19, 1847, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 12, January–July 1847, ed. Tom Chaffin and Michael David Cohen (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013), 183–84.
36. “The War,” Berkshire County Whig (Pittsfield, MA), May 20, 1847; “First Lady Biography: Sarah Childress Polk,” National First Ladies Library, http://www.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=12, accessed June 19, 2015; Greenberg, A Wicked War, 72.
37. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 199; Aaron Brown to JKP, June 10, 1846, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 11, 202; “Mrs. Polk,” Mississippi Free Trader, December 27, 1848. See also the two letters addressed to “Mrs. President,” John M. Niles to SCP, n.d., Polk Papers, TSLA; Polk, Diary, vol. 3, 326.
38. George M. Dallas to Mrs. Dallas, January 15, 1849, Dallas Papers, CS.
39. JKP, Washington, to SCP, New York, November 13, 1848, Polk Papers, LOC.
40. JKP to Robert Armstrong, June 13, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 347–48.
41. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 118.
42. John F. H. Claiborne, Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman (New York: Harper and Bros., 1860), vol. 1, 237; Polk, Diary, vol. 2, 74, 456.
43. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 115–16.
44. Polk, Diary, vol. 4, 245–46.
45. NYH quoted in the Portsmouth (NH) Journal, December 4, 1847.
46. Holloway, The Ladies of the White House, 451–52; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 52; George Bancroft to JKP, November 18, 1847, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 13, August 1847–March 1848, ed. Michael David Cohen (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2017), 198–99; George Bancroft to JKP, January 19, 1847, June 3, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 54, 328.
47. Thomas Hart Benton to SCP, Senate Chamber, February 14, 1845, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 33; Robert B. Campbell to SCP, November 12, 1846, Polk Papers, TSLA.
48. Thomas Richie to SCP, n.d., Polk Papers, LOC. Said letter has disappeared. There is no surviving evidence of correspondence between JKP and Colonel Hiram Paulding. J. H. Wailes to SCP, April 15, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA.
49. Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Childress, July 11, 1846, Polk Papers, TSLA; JKP to Vernon K. Stevenson, October 3, 1846, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 11, 339–40; Tom Price, “Comfort in My Retirement: Polk Place,” White House History 33 (Summer 2013): 12–21.
50. JKP to Vernon K. Stevenson, October 3, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 11, 339–40.
51. JKP to John Catron, October 7, 1846, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 11, 344–45; JKP to Aaron Brown, November 8, 1846, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 11, 388–89; Mary Louise Corse Polk to SCP, October 8, 1848, Polk Papers, TSLA.
52. John M. Bass to JKP, April 10, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 172; Tom Price, “Comfort in My Retirement: Polk Place,” 15.
53. JKP to John M. Bass, April 19, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 184; John M. Bass to JKP, April 10, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 172.
54. JKP to SCP, July 4, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 409–10; Wayne Cutler, ed., North for Union: John Appleton’s Journal of a Tour to New England Made by President Polk in June and July 1847 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1986), 10–11, 32; James Buchanan to SCP, July 4, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 410; Joanna Rucker to Elizabeth Price, August 18, 1846, Polk Papers, TSLA.
55. JKP to SCP, July 8, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 415.
56. Ibid.; JKP to John Catron, July 10, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 420; JKP to SCP, July 15, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 415; JKP to SCP, July 11, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 417.
57. JKP to SCP, July 12, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 417–18.
58. John Catron to JKP, July 14, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 12, 420; Joanna Rucker to SCP, September 9, 1848, Polk Papers, TSLA.
59. John Catron to SCP, August 14, 1848, James K. Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 53, Series 2.
60. Mary Louise Corse Polk to SCP, October 8, 1848, Polk Papers, TSLA.
61. Matilda Catron to SCP, October 14, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA.
62. Watch, Pendant, 1925.001.062a-c, October 18, 2016, Polk Family Home Collection, Columbia, Tennessee.
63. Greenberg, A Wicked War, 239, 260–61.
64. Catharine Beecher to SCP, September 20, 1845, Polk Family Home Collection; Catharine Beecher, The Duty of American Women to Their Country (New York: Harper and Bros., 1845), 64; Amy Greenberg, “Domesticating the Border: Manifest Destiny and the Market in the United States–Mexico Border Region, 1848–1854,” in Land of Necessity: Consumer Culture in the United States–Mexico Borderlands, ed. Alexis McCrossen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 84–112.
65. “The Mormon Emigrants,” New York Daily Tribune, March 19, 1849; Duff Green to JKP, January 10, 1847, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 13, 149–50.
66. Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History (New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2018), 346–47; “The Romance of an Historic Picture,” NDA, January 28, 1883.
67. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials, 143; Seale, The President’s House, vol. 1, 268. Other sources claim that Sarah didn’t hang the painting until she moved into Polk Place, where it had a special place of honor. “The Romance of an Historic Picture,” NDA, January 28, 1883.
1. Joanna Rucker to SCP, December 3, 1848, Polk Papers, TSLA.
2. K. Jack Bauer, Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 107, 215–39.
3. William Dusinberre, Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 12.
4. Ibid., 11–22.
5. JKP to JC, August 15, 1846, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 11, 1846, ed. Wayne Cutler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 280–81; JC to SCP, July 26, 1846, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 46, Series 2; JC to JKP, November 30, 1846, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 11, 405; JC to JKP, June 15, 1846, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 11, 209. See also JKP to JC, October 10, 1846, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 11, 347; Deposition of Jane Polk, January 13, 1898, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15.
6. Deposition of Jane Polk, January 13, 1898, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15; “From Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 30 June 1820,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified March 30, 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-1352, accessed May 17, 2017; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 178–79.
7. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 52.
8. Ingersoll to Buchanan, June 16, 1847, Ingersoll Papers, CS.
9. James K. Polk, Diary of a President, ed. Milo Quaife (Columbia, TN: James K. Polk Memorial Association, 2005), vol. 3, 482–507.
10. George Mifflin Dallas to Mrs. Dallas, June 21, 1848, July 15, 1848, Dallas Papers, CS; Polk, Diary, vol. 3, 483.
11. Walter R. Borneman, Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America (New York: Random House, 2009), 323–28.
12. Ibid., 323–25.
13. JKP to SCP, August 25, 1848, August 27, 1848, James K. Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 53, Series 2; JC to SCP, May 17, 1847, Polk Papers, TSLA.
14. “The Gold Regions of California,” The National Era, September 28, 1848; Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention, Held at Seneca Falls N.Y., July 19 and 20, 1848 (Rochester, NY: John Dick, 1848), 3; National Intelligencer, August 16, 1848; Valerie Palmer-Mehta cites biographies by John Reed Bumgarner and Barbara Bennett Peterson as the sources of this claim. Bumgarner, however, says only, “It has been suggested that she urged James to go and address the group,” without providing citation for the assertion. Peterson provides neither citation nor evidence for her assertion that Sarah “urged President Polk to address the group.” Valerie Palmer-Mehta, “Sarah Polk: Ideas of Her Own,” in A Companion to First Ladies, ed. Katherine A. S. Sibley (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 170; John Reed Bumgarner, Sarah Childress Polk: A Biography of the Remarkable First Lady (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), 95; Barbara Bennett Peterson, Sarah Childress Polk, First Lady of Tennessee and Washington (Huntington, NY: Nova History Publications, 2002), 41.
15. Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney to JKP, February 24, 1848, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 13, 346–47.
16. Alfred G. Hall to JKP, August 30, 1845, Polk Papers, LOC, Reel 41, Series 2. A. G. Hall, Womanhood, causes of its premature decline, respectfully illustrated: being a review of the changes and derangements of the female constitution: a safe and faithful guide to mothers during gestation, before and after confinement: with medical advice of the most salutary and important nature to all females: also, sixty vegetable and domestic recipes with directions: in three parts (Rochester, NY: E. Shephard, 1845); Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in 19th-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 117–18; Sarah Mytton Maury, An Englishwoman in America (London: Thomas Richardson, 1848), 203–4; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Vintage, 2003).
17. Ellis Lewis to SCP, February 5, 1849, Polk Papers, TSLA; Olin Browder, “Conditions and Limitations in Restraint of Marriage,” Michigan Law Review 39, no. 8 (1941): 1288–1336; American Law Reports Annotated (163), 1165; Burton Alva Konkle, The Life of Chief Justice Ellis Lewis, 1798–1871: Of the First Elective Supreme Court of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Campion, 1907), 131–32.
18. Ellis Lewis to SCP, February 5, 1949, Polk Papers, TSLA; Mrs E. B. Kinney, “Woman’s Champion,” in The Ladies’ Wreath: An Illustrated Annual, ed. Sarah Towne Martyn (New York: Martyn & Miller, 1850), 74.
19. JKP to Lydia Polk Caldwell, April 6, 1846, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 11, 122–23; JKP to Lydia Eliza Polk Caldwell, January 31, 1848, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 13, August 1847–March 1848, ed. Michael David Cohen (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2017), 310–11.
20. Elizabeth Blair Lee to Samuel Philips Lee, November 10, 1848, November 12, 1848, Blair-Lee Papers, CS.
21. JKP to SCP, November 11, 1848, November 13, 1848, James K. Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 53, Series 2.
22. Joanna Rucker to SCP, December 8, 1848, Polk Papers, TSLA, Polk Family Home Collection.
23. Vernon K. Stevenson to SCP, February 12, 1849, Polk Papers, TSLA; Mary Childress to SCP, February 11, 1849, Polk Papers, TSLA.
24. Joanna Rucker to SCP, February 7, 1849, Polk Papers, TSLA.
25. Mary Childress to SCP, February 11, 1849, Polk Papers, TSLA; Sarah Polk Rucker to SCP, March 21, 1849, Polk Papers, TSLA. Bettie’s birthday has been disputed. Her tombstone lists her date as 1845; other sources claim she was born in 1842.
26. Sarah Polk Rucker to SCP, March 21, 1849, Polk Papers, TSLA; Joanna Rucker to SCP, December 23, 1848, Polk Papers, TSLA.
27. “From Sartain’s Union Magazine Mrs. James K. Polk,” Pittsfield (MA) Sun, February 28, 1850.
28. Ibid.; National Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol. 9 (1926); Diane Long Hoeveler, “Denison, Mary Andrews,” in American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present, 2nd ed., ed. Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf (Detroit: St. James Press, 2000), vol. 1, 279, retrieved from Gale Virtual Reference Library (accessed September 9, 2016); Joanna Rucker to SCP, July 2, 1848, Polk Papers, TSLA.
29. John Allen Kraut and Dixon Ryan Fox, The Completion of Independence, 1790–1830 (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 368; Hoeveler, “Denison, Mary Andrews,” 279.
30. “From Sartain’s Union Magazine Mrs. James K. Polk,” Pittsfield (MA) Sun, February 28, 1850.
31. Ibid.
32. Polk, Diary, vol. 4, 361–62; Elizabeth Benton Frémont, Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Frémont (New York: Frederick H. Hitchcock, 1912), 15; Henry Gilpin to Martin Van Buren, February 14, 1845, Martin Van Buren Papers.
33. Polk, Diary, vol. 4, 357–59.
34. Polk, Diary, vol. 4, 373.
35. Nashville Republican Banner, September 26, 1851.
36. David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 122–29.
37. Mrs. Ann S. Stephens, “To Mrs. James K. Polk,” Peterson’s Ladies National Magazine XV (1849): 91.
38. “Example in High Places,” Vermont Chronicle, March 7, 1849, 38; see also “Mrs. Polk,” The Farmer’s Cabinet (Amherst, NH), vol. 47, issue 32 (March 22, 1849): 1.
39. William Thompson to SCP, February 28, 1849, Polk Papers, TSLA; J. W. Matthews to SCP, February 23, 1849, Polk Papers, TSLA; William L. Helfenstein to JKP, October 8, 1848, Polk, Correspondence: Transcriptions, April 1848–June 1849 (forthcoming).
40. Anson Nelson and Fanny Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk: Wife of the Eleventh President of the United States (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1892), 127–35.
41. Ibid., 136.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.; Polk, Diary, vol. 4, 413.
44. Nashville Union, April 3, 1849; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 136, 137; Nathaniel Baxter, “Reminiscences,” American Historical Magazine (Nashville) VIII (July 1903): 262–70, quote on 270, in CS.
45. Polk, Diary, vol. 4, 420.
46. Polk, Diary, vol. 4, 425; Bobby L. Lovett, The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780–1930: Elites and Dilemmas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), 17; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 138.
47. Elizabeth Blair Lee to SPL, June 20, 1849, Blair-Lee Papers, CS.
48. JKP to William Marcy, May 9, 1849, Marcy Papers, CS.
49. “Nashville City Cemetery Interments (1846–1979),” Data.Nashville.gov, https://data.nashville.gov/Genealogy/Historic-Nashville-City-Cemetery-Interments-1846-1/iwbm-8it6, accessed February 18, 2018; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 146–50.
50. Paul H. Bergeron, The Presidency of James K. Polk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 234–35, 260; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 16–17; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 146–50. Matilda, the Polk cook who died, was listed as 110 years old. “Nashville City Cemetery Interments (1846–1979),” Data.Nashville.gov.
51. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 146–50.
52. Elizabeth Blair Lee to SPL, June 20, 1849, Blair-Lee Papers, CS.
53. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 81.
54. “Nashville City Cemetery Interments (1846–1979),” Data.Nashville.gov; Ben Guarino, “James Polk: The Dead President Who Never Rests in Peace,” Washington Post, March 28, 2017; Peggy McDowell and Richard E. Meyer, The Revival Styles and American Memorial Art (Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1994), 53; “Death and Burial,” in James K. Polk: A Biographical Companion, ed. Mark Eaton Byrnes (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2001), 51–53; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 11, 153–57.
55. Mary S. Jetton to SCP, September 25, 1845, Polk Papers, TSLA; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 161.
56. Sarah Rucker to SCP, June 21, 1848, Polk Papers, TSLA; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 161.
57. 1850 Census, Census Place: Nashville, Davidson, Tennessee, Roll M432_875, p. 131A, Image 267; “Mrs. James K. Polk,” Macon (GA) Weekly Telegraph, published as Georgia Telegraph, vol. XXIV, issue 28 (February 26, 1850): 2.
58. Advertisement in New York Evening Post, vol. XLIX (July 29, 1851): 1. Sadly, this daguerreotype appears to have been lost.
59. Oscar Penn Fitzgerald, John B. McFerrin: A Biography (Nashville: M. E. Church, 1888), 243; Jeannette Tillotson Acklen, Tennessee Records: Tombstone Inscriptions and Manuscripts (Nashville, 1933), 442, 353, 357. My thanks to the Rutherford County Archives for confirming the two wedding licenses. Joanna sadly reported that one of the few advantages of life back in Tennessee was that she had “ample time for reading & improvement—& I spend most of my time with books.” Joanna Rucker to SCP, December 8, 1848, Polk Papers, TSLA.
60. 1850 Census, Census Place: Nashville, Davidson, Tennessee, Roll M432_875, p. 131A, Image 267; receipt, February 18, 1850, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 63; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 12.
61. Suzanne Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town (New York: Norton, 1985), 116–28; Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of White Womanhood, 1865–1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 88–106.
62. Last Will and Testament of President James K. Polk, 1849, Record Group 21: Records of District Courts of the United States, 1685–2009, Series: Civil Case Files, 1858–1911, National Archives and Records.
63. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 8.
1. On power relations between white women and their enslaved servants, see Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
2. Elizabeth Fox Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
3. William Dusinberre, Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 24, 92.
4. John A. Mairs to JKP, May 24, 1847, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 12, January–July 1847, ed. Tom Chaffin and Michael David Cohen (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013), 291.
5. Gideon Pillow to JKP, May 1, 1846, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 11, 1846, ed. Wayne Cutler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 150; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 46.
6. JKP to Gideon Pillow, April 20, 1846, Polk, Correspondence, vol. 11, 132.
7. Anson Nelson and Fanny Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk: Wife of the Eleventh President of the United States (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1892), 99.
8. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Penguin, 1968), 48–49.
9. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), quotes on xxi, xxiii; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 210–43; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 92–93, 105, 115. On slave community, see Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
10. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 46, 47, 51–53.
11. Isaac Dismukes to JKP, September 27, 1841, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 5, 1939–1841, ed. Wayne Cutler (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1979), 762; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 37.
12. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 52–54.
13. Ibid., 51–53.
14. Ibid., 39; Thomas Tooke, A History of Prices and the State of Circulation During the Nine Years 1848–1865 (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1857), vol. 6, 239–40.
15. John Mairs to SCP, August 19, 1849, James K. Polk Papers, LOC.
16. John Mairs to SCP, September 20, 1849, James K. Polk Papers, LOC. There is no way of determining whether Mairs adopted a different tone with Sarah than with James, as there is no surviving correspondence between the president and the overseer.
17. John Mairs to SCP, March 15, 1850, James K. Polk Papers, LOC; John Spencer Bassett, The Southern Plantation Overseer as Revealed in His Letters (Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1925), 180–82; Pickett-Perkins to SCP, December 27, 1852, Polk Papers, LOC; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 39.
18. Pickett-Perkins and Company to SCP, January 3, 1850, Polk Papers, LOC.
19. Perkins and Company to SCP, March 13, 1858, Perkins and Pickens, March 7, 1855, Polk Papers, LOC.
20. Bassett, The Southern Plantation Overseer, 269–71; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 92; Seth Rockman, “Plantation Goods and the National Economy of Slavery in Antebellum America,” manuscript in possession of author. On “Negro Cloth,” see Madelyn Shaw, “Slave Cloth and Clothing Slaves: Craftsmanship, Clothing, and Industry,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 37 (2016), http://www.mesdajournal.org/2012/slave-cloth-clothing-slaves-craftsmanship-commerce-industry/.
21. J. O. Cooper to SCP, September 8, 1857; see also R. B. Hays to SCP, July 29, 1857, Perkins to SCP, July 11, 1857, Polk Papers, LOC; Pickett to SCP, July 7, 1857, and September 10, 1857, Polk Papers, LOC.
22. Bassett, The Southern Plantation Overseer, 181; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 188.
23. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 101–3.
24. Pickett-Perkins to SCP, March 30, 1855, Polk Papers, LOC.
25. Pickett-Perkins to SCP, April 25, 1855, January 18, 1856, Polk Papers, LOC.
26. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 53–54.
27. Deposition of Dafney Polk, November 3, 1888, Deposition of Caroline Drain, January 12, 1898, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 90–91, 94–95.
28. John Mairs to SCP, October 2, 1852, Polk Papers, LOC; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 96–98.
29. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 92.
30. Fitzgerald, John B. McFerrin: A Biography, 243; Acklen, Tennessee Records, 442, 353, 357.
31. John H. Bills to SCP, January 28, 1852, Polk Papers, LOC; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 74; Bassett, The Southern Plantation Overseer, 197.
32. John Mairs to SCP, January 7, 1856, Polk Papers, LOC; William Dusinberre claims that in 1860, Sarah removed two other runaways, Manuel and Giles, from their wives, Jane and Dafney, but Manuel and Giles were still living at the Polk Plantation in 1863, when they joined the Union army. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 101–3. Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15.
33. John Mairs to SCP, April 15, 1857, January 15, 1858, Polk Papers, LOC; Bassett, The Southern Plantation Overseer, 219–20.
34. “Negro Rebellion on Mrs. Polk’s Plantation,” Memphis Daily Appeal, August 5, 1858; “President Polk’s Slaves on Trial—A Negro Insurrection,” Chicago Tribune, January 15, 1859; “Acquitted,” Memphis Daily Appeal, November 16, 1858; “An Act Authorizing a Change of Venue in the Case of the State Against Giles and Emmanuel, and for Other Purposes,” November 25, 1859, Mississippi Legislature, Laws of the State of Mississippi (Jackson: E. Barksdale, 1860), 81. Thanks to Lisa Childs for making me take this case seriously.
35. Court case 11675 (Yalobusha Co.), Mississippi Department of Archives and History; “Emmanuel and Giles (slaves) v. State, 36 Miss. R, 627,” J. S. Morris, Mississippi State Cases, Being Criminal Cases Decided in the High Court of Errors and Appeals, and in the Supreme Court, of the State of Mississippi: from the June Term 1818 to the First Monday in January 1872, Inclusive (Jackson: Published by the compiler, 1872), vol. 2, 1217–20.
36. Ariela J. Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5.
37. A. Hutchinson, Code of Mississippi: Being an Analytic Compilation of the Public and General Statutes of the Territory and State (Jackson, Mississippi, 1848), 540; Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, eds., Historical Statistics of the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), table Bb212.
38. Deed between Mrs. Sarah Polk and James M. Avent, February 18, 1860, Pontotoc County Deed Records, Book R, 278-279, Mississippi Department of Archives; Tennessee State Marriages, 1780–2002, Nashville, TSLA, Microfilm.
39. 1860 Census, Census Place: Nashville Ward 5, Davidson, Tennessee, Roll M653_1246, p. 422, Image 648, Family History Library Film 805246; Deposition of Charlie Avent, January 15, 1898, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15.
40. Lewis Polk Affidavit, June 2, 1887, Deposition of Caroline Nelson, November 3, 1888, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15; MS 1860 Slave Schedule, Yalobusha County (Ancestry.com. Mississippi, Compiled Census and Census Substitutes Index, 1805–1890 [database online]. Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 1999), 461.
41. Deed between James M. Avent, Mary Avent, and Sarah Polk to D. C. Topp, Yalobusha County Deeds, January 1871, Book 24, p. 356, Mississippi Department of Archives.
42. She paid $12 a year to rent pew 137. Receipt, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 63; receipts, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 63. In 1857 she spent over $25 on fabric, including black silk, at L. F. Beech, dealer in English, French and Domestic Dry Goods, but nothing on dresses.
43. Receipt, Polk Papers, LOC, Microfilm, Reel 63; “Visit to Mrs. Polk,” Lebanon (PA) Courier and Semi-Weekly Report, January 20, 1854. Thanks to Alexis McCrossen for this reference. See also the Semi-Weekly Standard (Raleigh, NC), January 21, 1854; Annie S. Gilchrist, Some Representative Women of Tennessee (Nashville: McQuiddy Printing Co., 1902), 12.
44. “Congress,” Bangor (ME) Daily Whig & Courier, Friday, January 4, 1850. Inscriptions in books based on an examination of the library at the Polk Family Home. Richard Chenevix Trench, On the Study of Words (New York: Macmillan Co., 1853); Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
45. Sheppard M. Ashe, Monterey Conquered: A Fragment from La Gran Quivira; or, Rome Unmasked. A Poem (New York: C. Shepard and Co., 1852), v.
46. Ibid., 5.
47. Ibid., 37, 24.
48. SCP to Unknown, 1851, Polk Papers, LOC.
49. SCP to William Polk, March 17, 1852, Polk Papers, PC 75, 2, Correspondence 1850–1853, NCSA.
50. “A Visit to Mrs. James K. Polk,” Jeffersonian Democrat (Monroe, WI), vol. 1, issue 15 (November 20, 1856): 1.
51. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials, 261–262; Jefferson Davis to SCP, March 8, 1856, Papers of Jefferson Davis, Rice University.
52. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials, 199.
53. James Buchanan to SCP, September 19, 1859, in John Bassett Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan, Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1908–11), vol. 10, 331–32.
54. “Mrs. President Polk,” NYH, June 3, 1879.
55. SCP to James Buchanan, September 28, 1859, Papers of James Buchanan, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Reel 38, Incoming Correspondence August 1859–December 1859.
56. James Buchanan to SCP, September 19, 1859, in Moore, The Works of James Buchanan, vol. 10, 331–32.
57. “Gossip,” Provincial Freeman (Canada West), January 3, 1857.
58. SCP to James Buchanan, September 28, 1859, Papers of James Buchanan, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Reel 38, Incoming Correspondence August 1859–December 1859.
1. Many thanks to Tom Price for assistance with Sarah’s mourning garb. On mourning conventions, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 136–38.
2. Anson Nelson and Fanny Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk: Wife of the Eleventh President of the United States (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1892), 11; 1860 Census, Census Place: Nashville Ward 5, Davidson, Tennessee, Roll M653_1246, p. 422, Image 648, Family History Library Film 805246.
3. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 169–70.
4. Edwin T. Hardison, “In the Toils of War: Andrew Johnson and the Federal Occupation of Tennessee, 1862–1865” (Ph.D. diss., University of Tennessee, 1981), 58.
5. Ibid.; “The Union Ticket,” Nashville Patriot, July 23, 1861; “House of Representatives,” Nashville Patriot, October 30, 1861; B. F. Johnson, Makers of America: Biographies of Leading Men of Thought and Action, the Men Who Constitute the Bone and Sinew of American Prosperity and Life (Washington, DC: B. F. Johnson, 1915), vol. 1, 567.
6. Bobby L. Lovett, The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780–1930: Elites and Dilemmas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), 44–45; “Colonel William H. Polk,” Nashville Union, September 9, 1862.
7. Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860–1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 2–23; “Rattle and Snap,” in Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entry.php?rec=1109, accessed September 21, 2017; Glenn Robins, “Leonidas Polk,” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History, ed. David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler (New York: Norton, 2000), 1538.
8. Roy P. Stonesifer Jr., “Gideon Pillow: A Study in Egotism,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 25, no. 4 (Winter 1966): 345–49.
9. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 398–404.
10. The Great Panic: Being Incidents Connected with Two Weeks of the War in Tennessee. By an Eye Witness (Nashville: Johnson & Whiting, 1862), 19; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 401–3.
11. Walter Durham, Nashville: The Occupied City, 1862–1863 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008), 3–4.
12. Boston Post, May 6, 1861; Baltimore Sun, May 7, 1861; Stanley F. Horn, “Nashville During the Civil War,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 4, no. 1 (March 1945): 5.
13. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 170; Clarksville Jefferson, January 18, 1860, quoted in Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 66. On the role of women in the Civil War, see Judith Giesberg, “Women,” in A Companion to the U.S. Civil War, ed. Aaron Sheehan-Dean (New York: Wiley, 2014), vol. 2, 779–94. On female fears of rape during the war, see Crystal Nicole Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 17–22.
14. 1860 Census, Census Place: Nashville Ward 5, Davidson, Tennessee, Roll M653_1246, p. 422, Image 648, Family History Library Film 805246. See the essays in LeeAnn Whites and Alecia Long, eds., Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), particularly Lisa Tendrich Frank, “Bedrooms as Battlefields: The Role of Gender Politics in Sherman’s March,” 33–48.
15. George H. Armistead Jr. “The Void Provisions of a President’s Will,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1956): 138; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 170. Southern women leveraged their “dependence” in order to gain protection from (and by) the Union army. Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 97–98.
16. Annie Sehon to Bettie Kimberly, February 8, 1862, Kimberly Family Personal Correspondence, Manuscripts Dept., Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2; The Great Panic, 20–22.
17. Adam Rankin Johnson, The Partisan Rangers of the Confederate States Army (Louisville, KY: Geo. G. Fetter Co., 1904), 70–71.
18. Rees W. Porter to Andrew Johnson, March 1, 1862, in The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 5, 1861–1862, ed. Leroy P. Graf, Ralph Haskins, and Patricia P. Clark (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 168; Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 85.
19. Horn, “Nashville During the Civil War,” 11; Alfred Hudson Guernsey and Henry Mills Alden, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Great Rebellion, Part 1 (Chicago: McDonnell Bros., 1866), 241; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 170–71.
20. N. G. Markham to Eunice Markham, March 27, 1864, N. G. Markham Papers, Filson Historical Society.
21. William Haines Lytle, For Honor, Glory and Union: The Mexican and Civil War Letters of Brig. Gen. William Haines Lytle, ed. Ruth C. Carter (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 148; N. G. Markham to Eunice Markham, Marcy 27, 1864, N. G. Markham Papers, Filson Historical Society; Dan Lee, Kentuckian in Blue: A Biography of Major General Lovell Harrison Rousseau (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 57; “Mrs. Ex-President Polk,” Galveston Daily News (Houston), October 25, 1876; Lytle, For Honor, Glory and Union, 36.
22. “Mrs. Polk the Traitor,” Daily Cleveland Herald, April 26, 1862; Boston Daily Advertiser, March 27, 1862; Vermont Chronicle, April 1, 1862.
23. “From Nashville. The dejected secessionists,” New York Evening Post, March 7, 1862.
24. Many northerners were concerned that conservative generals treated the southern gentry with kid gloves, so critiquing Sarah’s potential loyalty to the Confederacy was also a way to critique the behavior of generals seen as not hard enough on the South. Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
25. Elizabeth R. Varon, Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 52–54.
26. Columbus (GA) Daily Enquirer, March 29, 1862.
27. John White Geary, A Politician Goes to War: The Civil War Letters of John White Geary, ed. William A. Blair (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1995), 125.
28. Mrs. John Trotwood Moore, “The Tennessee Historical Society, 1849–1918,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 3, no. 3 (September 1944): 195–225, quote on 207; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 175, 263.
29. “From the Tennessee Capital,” New York Times, March 5, 1862; Lee, Kentuckian in Blue, 57; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 172; Annie Sehon to Bettie Kimberly, February 8, 1862, Kimberly Family Personal Correspondence, Manuscripts Dept., Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2; Kate S. Carney Diary, May 24, 1862, Call number 139, Manuscripts Dept., Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
30. Lee, Kentuckian in Blue, 57; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 172–73.
31. “From the Tennessee Capital,” New York Times, March 5, 1862; “From the North,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 10, 1862.
32. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 175.
33. Lovett, The African-American History of Nashville, 49.
34. Brig. Gen. William Nelson to Major General Don Carlos Buell, July 24, 1862, quoted in Anne Karen Berler, “A Most Unpleasant Part of Your Duties: Military Occupation in Four Southern Cities, 1861–1865” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013), 71, 63–65.
35. William E. Blair, “Johnson in Civil War Nashville,” talk for the Richards Civil War Era Center Executive Tour, May 18, 2017, paper in possession of author.
36. William L. Barney, “Hood’s Tennessee Campaign,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 165–67.
37. James Birney Shaw, History of the Tenth Regiment Indiana Volunteer Infantry (Lafayette, IN: Burt Haywood Co., 1912), 163; Durham, Nashville: The Occupied City, 66.
38. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 80, 87–89; Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2016), 99–102.
39. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 93.
40. Quoted in Berler, “A Most Unpleasant Part of Your Duties,” 72–73.
41. New York Tribune, August 8, 1862; Edwin T. Hardison, “In the Toils of War: Andrew Johnson and the Federal Occupation of Tennessee, 1862–1865” (Ph.D. diss., University of Tennessee, 1981), 118–19.
42. Hardison, “In the Toils of War,” 84–95.
43. Berler, “A Most Unpleasant Part of Your Duties,” 85–91; Walter T. Durham, Reluctant Partners: Nashville and the Union, 1863–1865 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 20089), 132–36.
44. Horn, “Nashville During the Civil War,” 16; Berler, “A Most Unpleasant Part of Your Duties,” 91–92.
45. Boston Post, May 6, 1861; William E. Blair, With Malice Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 139–40.
46. SCP to General Miller, August 2, 1864, Miller Papers, Box 2, Folder 12, Stanford University; Andrew Johnson to William L. Utley, October 30, 1863, in The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 6, 1862–1864, ed. Leroy P. Graf and Ralph W. Haskins (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 444–46.
47. “An Interview with Mrs. Polk,” Nashville Daily Times and True Union, March 3, 1864.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. M. C. Bass to Generals Harding and Barrow, June 24, 1862, Harding-Jackson Papers, 1809–1938, Tennessee Historical Society (Nashville); Durham, Nashville: The Occupied City, 176.
51. M. C. Bass to Generals Harding and Barrow, June 24, 1862; Durham, Nashville: The Occupied City, 176.
52. Jackson (MI) Weekly Citizen, April 23, 1862; “More of the Nashville Ladies,” Daily Morning News (Savannah, GA), April 14, 1862.
53. Petition 108, Polk Papers, TSLA.
54. SCP to Capt. Goodwin, December 22, 1863, Small Collection, AC No. 77–75, TSLA.
55. SCP to David Tod, April 17, 1862, Polk Correspondence, UT.
56. SCP to Andrew Johnson, February 22, 1855, Andrew Johnson Papers, LOC.
57. 1860 Census, Census Place: Fort Camp, Rutherford, Tennessee, Roll M653_1271, p. 119, Image 241, Family History Library Film 80527; 1860 Census, Census Place: Murfreesboro, Rutherford, Tennessee, Roll M653_1271, p. 162, Image 330, Family History Library Film 805271; Hardison, “In the Toils of War,” 115; Kate S. Carney Diary, May 12, 1862, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
58. “From Rutherford County Citizens,” May 22, 1862, in The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 5, 410–11; Kate S. Carney Diary, June 8, 1862; SCP to Andrew Johnson, May 17, 1862, Andrew Johnson Papers, LOC; SCP to Andrew Johnson, October 27, 1864, Andrew Johnson Papers, LOC.
59. John Williams Childress, “The Childress Family of Tennessee” (typescript, 1960), Rutherford County Historical Society publication no. 16 (Winter 1981); Annie S. Gilchrist, Some Representative Women of Tennessee (Nashville: McQuiddy Printing Co., 1902), 12–14.
60. Lytle, For Honor, Glory and Union, 172.
61. SCP to Mrs. Porter, n.d., Polk Papers, TSLA; Naomi Hays to Lucy Polk, July 21, 1863, Polk Papers, PC 75, 7, Correspondence undated, NCSA.
62. Naomi Hays to Lucy Polk, July 21, 1863, Polk Papers, PC 75, 7, Correspondence undated, NCSA.
63. Childress, “The Childress Family of Tennessee.”
64. Andrew Johnson to William L. Utley, October 30, 1863, in The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 6, 445–46; SCP to David G. Barniby, March 22, 1864, National Archives, Cotton and Captured Property Records, No. 905; SCP to J. G. Parkhurst, March 19, 1864, John G. Parkhurst Papers, Microfilm, 1860–1909, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan; SCP to J. G. Parkhurst, March 29, 1864, John G. Parkhurst Papers, Microfilm, 1860–1909, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. On the opportunities for provost marshals to become “petty dictators,” see Blair, With Malice for Some, 100–127.
65. David G. Barniby (?) to C. A. Fuller, April 4, 1864, National Archives, Cotton and Captured Property Records, No. 905; S. P. Chase to SCP, April 13, 1864, National Archives, entry 57, Letters Sent to Collectors and Assessors of Internal Revenue, State Officers, Banks and Corporations (GS Series); SCP to William Parkhurst, June 15, 1865, John G. Parkhurst Papers, microfilm, 1860–1909, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
66. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 313, 382.
67. SCP to Andrew Johnson, January 23, 1865 (enclosing Pickett & Joy to SCP, January 5, 1865), National Archives RG 56, Captured Cotton & Abandoned Property, May–June 1865, Treasury Dept., Box 13; Pickett & Joy, November 21, 1864, National Archives, Cotton and Captured Property Records, No. 905.
68. SCP to Andrew Johnson, January 23, 1865 (enclosing Pickett & Joy to SCP, January 5, 1865), National Archives RG 56, Captured Cotton & Abandoned Property, May–June 1865, Treasury Dept., Box 13; Pickett & Joy, November 21, 1864, National Archives, Cotton and Captured Property Records, No. 905.
69. SCP to W. W. Orme, December 20, 1864, National Archives, Cotton and Captured Property Records, No. 2273.
70. Deposition of Jane Polk, January 13, 1898, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15; William Dusinberre, Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 107–10.
71. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 171.
72. SCP to Andrew Johnson, March 3, 1865, Andrew Johnson Papers, LOC.
73. SCP to Andrew Johnson, June 13, 1865, Andrew Johnson Papers, LOC; Durham, Reluctant Partners, 108.
74. SCP to Andrew Johnson, July 28, 1865, in The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 8, May–August 1865, ed. Paul H. Bergeron (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 494. The pardon was issued on January 15, 1867. Amnesty Papers (M1003, Roll 48), Tenn., John C. Brown, RG94, National Archives.
75. Deposition of Charlie Avent, January 15, 1898, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15.
76. G. W. Peel testimony, March 1, 1864, Sarah K. Polk, claim no. 14664, Southern Claims Commission, NARA M1407, Davidson, TN; Deposition of Jane Polk, January 13, 1898, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15; Noralee Frankel, Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 18; Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 91–93; Lovett, The African-American History of Nashville, 58–60.
77. Deposition of Jane Polk, January 13, 1898, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15; Frankel, Freedom’s Women, 16–25.
78. Deposition of Lewis Polk, January 12, 1898, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15; Gideon Pillow to JKP, May 1, 1846, James K. Polk, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 11, 1846, ed. Wayne Cutler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 150; 61st Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry, Company E, Compiled Military Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers Who Served the United States Colored Troops: 56th–138th USCT Infantry, 1864–1866, National Archives, Record Group 94, M589 Roll 69; Lovett, The African-American History of Nashville, 58–62.
79. Lewis Polk Affidavit, June 2, 1887, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15; Deposition of Lewis Polk, January 12, 1898, Deposition of Dafney Polk, November 3, 1888, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15.
80. “Unknown Smith’s Expedition Battle of Tupelo,” Broadside, July 22, 1864, Gilder Lehrman Collection, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/collections/98dbcfba-72ba-43ed-8b67-389719905588?back=/mweb/search%3Fneedle%3DGLC06157%2A%2526fields%3D_t301001010, accessed October 11, 2017.
81. Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 174.
82. Lisa Childs, “Polks Serving in 61st Regiment, Co. E, US Colored Infantry, and History Thereof,” https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/tree/73259728/story/0583ddfb-65a8-4440-950d-7b9c567309c3?pid=&pgn=32798&usePUBJs=true&_phsrc=iuE133, Ancestry.com; Manuel Polk Pension File, U.S. Civil War Pension Index, General Index to Pension Files, 1861–1934, NARA; Deposition of Jane Polk, January 13, 1898, Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15; 1870 Census, Township 24, Yalobusha, Mississippi, Roll M593_754, p. 107B.
83. Many freedpeople returned to their neighborhoods at war’s end. Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 210–14; Frankel, Freedom’s Women, x–xi, 161–72.
84. Case of Dafney Polk, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, National Archives, Record Group 15.
85. Blair, “Johnson in Civil War Nashville.”
86. SCP to Mrs. Porter, n.d., Polk Papers, TSLA; Nashville City Cemetery Interments (1846–1979),” Data.Nashville.gov, https://data.nashville.gov/Genealogy/Historic-Nashville-City-Cemetery-Interments-1846-1/iwbm-8it6, accessed February 18, 2018; Manning, Troubled Refuge, 99–102.
87. SCP to Andrew Johnson, September 23, 1864, Andrew Johnson Papers, LOC; Employment Rolls and Nonpayment Rolls of Negroes Employed in the Defenses of Nashville, Tennessee, 1862–1863, TSLA; Manning, Troubled Refuge, 99–102.
88. M. C. Bass to Generals Harding and Barrow, June 24, 1862, Harding-Jackson Papers, 1809–1938, Tennessee Historical Society; Durham, Nashville: The Occupied City, 176; Naomi Hays to Lucy Polk, July 21, 1863, Polk Papers, PC 75, 7, Correspondence undated, NCSA.
89. 1870 Census, Census Place: Nashville Ward 5, Davidson, Tennessee, Roll M593_1523, p. 303A, Image 303131, Family History Library Film 553022; 1870 Census, Census Place: Nashville Ward 5, Davidson, Tennessee, Roll M593_1523, p. 303A, Image 303131, Family History Library Film 553022.
90. “Personal and General,” Daily Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), August 21, 1880.
91. “Elias Polk’s Death,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 17, 1887.
92. Ibid.; Geary, A Politician Goes to War, 152.
93. Lovett, The African-American History of Nashville, 78–79; Jesse Holland, The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House (Guilford, CT: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 173; “Elias Polk’s Death,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 17, 1887.
94. “Elias Polk’s Death,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 17, 1887; “HERE are the names of some of the more prominent colored men who have declared for Greeley,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, July 31, 1872; “Andy’s Victory,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), February 4, 1875, 19th Century U.S. Newspapers, Gale, https://www.gale.com/c/19th-century-us-newspapers, accessed November 10, 2016. See also Wisconsin State Register (Portage), February 6, 1875; Lowell (MA) Daily Citizen and News, February 9, 1875. “Mr. Alexander Williams, of Boston, owns a cane which, it is said, he is about to present to General Hancock,” Georgia Weekly Telegraph, (Macon), August 20, 1880.
95. “Uncle Elias,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, May 26, 1887; United States Department of the Interior, Official Register of the United States, Containing a List of Officers and Employees in the Civil, Military and Naval Service, on the First of July, 1881, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 10; E. B. Wight, and Special Correspondence of the Inter Ocean, “Washington Chat,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), December 26, 1886; “Uncle Elias,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, May 26, 1887. Many Americans saw echoes of Polk in Cleveland. See Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966), 271, 282–83; Denis Tilden Lynch, Grover Cleveland: A Man Four-Square (New York: Horace Liveright, 1932), 232.
96. “Personal and General,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, August 21, 1880; E. B. Wight, and Special Correspondence of the Inter Ocean, “Washington Chat,” Daily Inter Ocean, December 26, 1886; “Uncle Elias,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, May 26, 1887; “Multiple News Items,” Milwaukee Daily Journal, December 31, 1886; “Elias Polk’s Death,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 17, 1887.
97. “President Polk’s Body Servant,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, January 1, 1887.
98. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 176–77.
99. New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 12, 1868; William A. Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 77–105.
100. Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); McCurry, Confederate Reckoning; “Honor for the South,” Confederate Veteran I (January 1893): 17.
101. LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 86–91, quote on 90.
102. Polk Family Home Collection.
103. John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant (New York: American News Company, 1879), vol. 2, 447–48; Polk Family Home Collection.
104. SCP to Andrew Johnson, March 16, 1866, Andrew Johnson Papers, LOC; Henry S. Randall to Andrew Johnson, November 21, 1865, The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 9, September 1865–January 1866, ed. Paul H. Bergeron (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 413.
105. Henry S. Randall to Andrew Johnson, November 21, 1865, The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 9, 413.
1. “An Interview with Mrs. Polk,” Nashville Daily Times and True Union, March 3, 1864; Laura Holloway, The Ladies of the White House (New York: U.S. Pub. Co., 1870), 459, 462; Anson Nelson and Fanny Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk: Wife of the Eleventh President of the United States (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1892), 184.
2. “President Polk’s Widow,” Daily Inter Ocean, quoted in the Nashville Republican Banner, October 31, 1874; William Haines Lytle, For Honor, Glory and Union: The Mexican and Civil War Letters of Brig. Gen. William Haines Lytle, ed. Ruth C. Carter (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 148.
3. “President Polk’s Widow,” Nashville Republican Banner, October 31, 1874; Holloway, The Ladies of the White House, 458.
4. E. B. Wight, and Special Correspondence of the Inter Ocean, “Washington Chat,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), December 26, 1886; “President Polk’s Widow,” Nashville Republican Banner, October 31, 1874; Holloway, The Ladies of the White House, 458.
5. “Mrs. President Polk,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, December 27, 1869; Nashville Union and American, January 2, 1867; “Mrs. James K. Polk,” NYH, January 2, 1886; “Mrs. Ex-President P,” Nashville Union and American, January 2, 1872. Thanks to Alexis McCrossen for her analysis of New Year celebrations in Washington, D.C., and Nashville.
6. Elizabeth Fry Page, “Polk Memorial Hall,” Bob Taylor’s Magazine 1, no. 6 (September 1905): 651–59; Holloway, The Ladies of the White House, 458; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials, 181–87.
7. “Political and General Notes,” Worcester (MA) Daily Spy, February 23, 1881.
8. “The Grangers Visit Mrs. Ex-President Polk,” NDA, November 19, 1884.
9. “Mrs. Ex-President Polk,” NDA, September 5, 1883.
10. SCP to William H. Polk, April 25, 1875, Polk Papers, PC 75, 4, Correspondence 1875–1877, NCSA; SCP to Lucy Tasker Polk, March 31, 1877, Polk Papers, PC 75, 4, Correspondence, 1875–1877, NCSA; “Maj. John W. Childress,” NDA, October 9, 1884.
11. SCP to William H. Polk, April 25, 1875, Polk Papers, PC 75, 4, Correspondence 1875–1877, NCSA; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 220.
12. SCP to William H. Polk, March 31, 1877, Polk Papers, PC 75, 4, Correspondence 1875–1877, NCSA.
13. SCP to Lucy Tasker Polk, March 31, 1877, Polk Papers, PC 75, 4, Correspondence, 1875–1877, NCSA; SCP to William H. Polk, March 31, 1877, Polk Papers, PC 75, 4, Correspondence 1875–1877, NCSA.
14. SCP to William H. Polk, April 25, 1875, January 28, 1876, May 4, 1876, March 31, 1877, Polk Papers, PC 75, 4, Correspondence 1875–1877, NCSA.
15. J. S. Ingram, The Centennial Exposition Described and Illustrated: Being a Concise and Graphic Description of This Grand Enterprise Commemorative of the First Centennary of American Independence (Philadelphia: Hubbard Bros., 1876), 116.
16. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 183; “Mrs. Ex-President Polk,” Galveston Daily News (Houston), October 25, 1876; “Obituary,” Boston Daily Journal, August 14, 1891; SCP to William H. Polk, April 25, 1875, Polk Papers, PC 75, 4, Correspondence 1875–1877, NCSA.
17. HR Misc. Doc No. 251, 43rd Cong., 1st Sess. (1874), 2; Judith Giesberg, “The Fortieth Congress, Southern Women, and the Gender Politics of Postwar Occupation,” in Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War, ed. LeeAnn Whites and Alecia Long (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 185–94.
18. HR Misc. Doc No. 251, 43rd Cong., 1st Sess. (1874), 1; “Loyalty of the Widow of President Polk,” Critic-Record (Washington, DC), issue 1761 (April 20, 1874): 4.
19. Boston Journal, published as Boston Evening Journal, vol. XLIII, issue 14350 (July 18, 1876): 4; “An Act for the Relief of Mrs. James K. Polk of Nashville, Tennessee,” August 15, 1876, The Statutes at Large of the United States of America, from December, 1875, to March, 1877, and Recent Treaties, Postal Conventions, and Executive Proclamations, vol. XIX (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877); “Centennial Notes,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (New York), November 4, 1876.
20. “Editorial Brevities,” Richmond Enquirer, vol. LXVIII, issue 106 (May 3, 1874): 2.
21. “Death of Ex-Treasurer Polk,” New York Times, March 1, 1884.
22. Ibid.; “Tennessee’s Loss,” NYH, January 8, 1883. Barbara Bennett Peterson’s claim that Sarah’s “maternal instinct” was “well rewarded” when the “children cared for by the Polks became outstanding citizens” seems not to extend to Marshall. Peterson, Sarah Childress Polk, First Lady of Tennessee and Washington (Huntington, NY: Nova History Publications, 2002), 33; “The Wives of the Presidents,” Boston Herald, reprinted in the Wheeling (WV) Register, published as Wheeling Sunday Register, vol. 22, issue 131 (November 30, 1884): 6.
23. Page, “Polk Memorial Hall.”
24. “Nashville Reading Club,” NDA, October 23, 1875; “A Social Event at the Polk Mansion,” Baltimore Sun, vol. XCVIII, issue 4 (November 20, 1885): 4; “Society,” NDA, November 20, 1885.
25. “Mrs. James K. Polk,” NYH, January 2, 1886.
26. “Society” NDA, December 6, 1888; SCP to Frances Folsom Cleveland, February 4, 1886, Minnesota Historical Society; “Mrs. James K. Polk, the First Lady in the Land Thirty Five Years Ago—A Visit, and Pleasant Reminiscences of the White House,” Indianapolis Sentinel, February 21, 1881.
27. “Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland,” Daily Inter-Ocean (Chicago), October 17, 1887; Denis Tilden Lynch, Grover Cleveland: A Man Four-Square (New York: Horace Liveright, 1932), 347; “Calling on Mrs. James K. Polk,” New York Tribune, published as New-York Tribune, October 17, 1887, 5.
28. SCP to William H. Polk, April 25, 1875, Polk Papers, PC 75, 4, Correspondence 1875–1877, NCSA.
29. Occie Brooks to S. C. Polk, February 25, 1888, Huntington Library Manuscripts Collection, HM 28835.
30. S. C. Polk to Occie Brooks, February, 1888, Huntington Library Manuscripts Collection, HM 28835.
31. Richard Rush, “Report of Lieut. Richard Rush, U.S. Navy,” November 23, 1888, No. 16, Centennial Exposition at Cincinnati, in Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy for the Year 1888 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1888), 543.
32. “Mrs Ex prest Polk opened the exposition by signal from Nashville on Obsy time gong. Noon signal rec and clock connected,” telegram sent July 4, 1888, received at 11 p.m. from A. B. Clements, Cincinnati, Ohio, to R. L. Pythian, United States Naval Observatory, National Archives RG 78 E-15, USNO Telegrams Received ’86–’06; Alexis McCrossen, “Time Balls: Marking Modern Times in Urban America, 1877–1922,” Material Culture Review / Revue de la culture matérielle (June 2000), https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/17860/22101, accessed June 8, 2015.
33. “Cincinnati’s Centennial,” NYH, July 5, 1888; Tom Price, “Comfort in My Retirement: Polk Place,” White House History 33 (Summer 2013); “Cincinnati’s Centennial,” NYH, July 5, 1888.
34. “An Hour with the Telephone,” NDA, September 2, 1877.
35. “Cincinnati’s Centennial,” NYH, July 5, 1888.
36. Ibid.
37. U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York, 1885), 22–24; William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1981), 35; Richard Bruce Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1997): 202–6; Massachusetts—General Court—House of Representatives, “Documents Relating to the U.S.-Mexican War” (Boston, 1847), 3.
38. “Mrs. James K. Polk, the First Lady in the Land Thirty Five Years Ago—A Visit, and Pleasant Reminiscences of the White House,” Indianapolis Sentinel, February 21, 1881.
39. Ibid.; Baltimore Sun, vol. XCV, issue 153, supplement 2 (November 11, 1884).
40. “News and Other Items,” Portland (ME) Daily Press, March 12, 1875; “Mrs. President Polk,” NYH, June 3, 1879; “Forty Years Ago,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, issue 168 (November 6, 1884): column F, p. 6. Of course, the United States only gained Alta California in the U.S.-Mexico War. President Polk hoped for Baja California as well, but didn’t get it. Amy Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Vintage, 2012), 259–60.
41. The Vedette 1, no. 9 (June 15, 1880): 7; Wallace E. Davies, “The Mexican War Veterans as an Organized Group,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 35, no. 2 (September 1948): 221–38. The Mexican War service pension act was signed into law on January 29, 1887. By the end of that year there were a little more than eight thousand recipients on the pension rolls. The number of recipients reached its peak in 1890 when more than seventeen thousand veterans and more than six thousand widows were on the rolls. The amount of the pension was eight dollars a month. After the turn of the century, this amount was raised to twelve dollars, later to twenty dollars. On pension abuses, see “Five Separate Pensions,” New York Times, March 10, 1898; Philadelphia Record, March 6, 1898; The Independent, January 20, 1898.
42. “Mrs. James K. Polk,” Raleigh (NC) Register, issue 38 (November 12, 1884): column C.
43. “Mrs. James K. Polk, the First Lady in the Land Thirty Five Years Ago—A Visit, and Pleasant Reminiscences of the White House,” Indianapolis Sentinel, February 21, 1881.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Elizabeth Fries Ellet, The Queens of American Society (New York: Scribners, 1867), 222–23.
47. George Bancroft—J. G. Harris, April 8, 1887, Bancroft Collection, New York Public Library, CS; J. G. Harris to George Bancroft, April 10, 1887, Bancroft Collection, New York Public Library, CS.
48. “Octogenarians in Society,” in Milwaukee Daily Journal, April 18, 1887.
49. “Mrs. President Polk,” NYH, June 3, 1879; J. G. Harris to George Bancroft, April 25, 1887, Bancroft Collection, New York Public Library, CS.
50. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 261, 209.
51. J. Henry Hager to Sarah Childress Polk, February 11, 1888, Huntington Library Manuscripts Collection, HM 28834.
52. Ibid.
53. Holloway, The Ladies of the White House, 461; William Heth Whitsitt, “Annals of a Scotch-Irish Family: The Whitsitts of Nashville,” American Historical Magazine and Tennessee Historical Society Quarterly 9 (1904): 240.
54. Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 5, Pickering-Sumter, revised ed., ed. James Grant Wilson and John Fiske (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888), 55–56.
55. Gen. Grant Wilson to S. C. Polk, February 23, 1888, Huntington Library Manuscripts Collection, HM 28834; J. W. Weidermeyer to Sarah Childress Polk, February 1, 1888.
56. S. C. Polk to Gen. Grant Wilson, February 27, 1888, Huntington Library Manuscripts Collection, HM 28834. Grant eventually did write an addendum.
57. Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 5, 50–55.
58. Anson Nelson to J. G. M. Ramsey, July 4, 1877, James Gettys McGready Ramsey Papers, John Hodges Library, UT; E. B. Wight, and Special Correspondence of the Inter Ocean, “Washington Chat,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), December 26, 1886.
59. Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 86–90; Alison M. Parker, Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873–1933 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 26–27.
60. Holly Berkley Fletcher, Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2008), 108; Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 86–90; Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 117.
61. Ruth Bordin, Frances Willard: A Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 112.
62. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 284; “Mrs. James K. Polk,” Daily Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), December 6, 1881.
63. Bordin, Frances Willard, 113–14; Fletcher, Gender and the American Temperance Movement, 116–17.
64. Bordin, Frances Willard, 114; “Mrs. James K. Polk,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, December 6, 1881; Fletcher, Gender and the American Temperance Movement, 116–18.
65. “Mrs. James K. Polk”, NDA, October 9, 1881.
66. “Mrs. James K. Polk,” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), August 14, 1886.
67. On northern visions of sectional reconciliation, see Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
68. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 215–16.
69. Ibid., 214–16.
70. Daughters of the American Revolution, Lineage Book of the Charter Members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, vol. 1 (1890–1891) (Harrisburg, PA: Harrisburg Publishing Co., 1895), x; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 266.
71. Sara A. Gordon, “Make It Yourself”: Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 37–43.
72. E. B. Wight, and Special Correspondence of the Inter Ocean, “Washington Chat,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), December 26, 1886.
73. SCP to H. Jackson, April 12, 1882, Polk Papers, TSLA.
74. E. B. Wight, and Special Correspondence of the Inter Ocean, “Washington Chat,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), December 26, 1886.
75. “Forty Years Ago,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, issue 168 (November 6, 1884): column F, p. 6.
76. Ibid.; “Belva Lockwood,” New York Times, May 20, 1917.
77. “Campaigning in Tennessee,” NYH, October 20, 1886; “Cincinnati’s Centennial,” NYH, July 5, 1888.
78. “The Country’s Teachers,” Augusta (GA) Chronicle, July 19, 1889; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 256; “Mrs. James K. Polk’s 86th Birthday,” Trenton (NJ) Evening Times, published as Trenton Times, September 5, 1889.
79. Mrs. John Trotwood Moore, “The Tennessee Historical Society, 1849–1918,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 3, no. 3 (September 1944): 201, 216–17, quote on 216; Sarah Polk’s will, March 28, 1885, AGS 143–145/Davidson County, Roll 444, Book 31, TSLA.
80. Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 268–70.
81. Ibid., 274–75.
82. “Mrs. James K. Polk Dead,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 15, 1891; Nelson and Nelson, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk, 276–80; “President Polk’s Widow Dead,” New York Tribune, August 15, 1891.
83. “Mrs. James K. Polk Dies at Nashville,” NYH, August 15, 1891.
84. “Mrs. Polk’s Will Probated,” Birmingham Age-Herald, October 5, 1891, Polk Papers, TSLA; “President Polk’s Widow Dead,” New York Tribune, published as New-York Tribune, August 15, 1891.
85. George H. Armistead Jr., “The Void Provisions of a President’s Will,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1956): 138.
86. Daniel R. Goodloe to “My Dear Madam” (likely Lucy Polk), May 26, 1892, Polk Papers, PC 75, 7, NCSA.
87. Armistead, “The Void Provisions of a President’s Will,” 137–38; Harlow N. Higinbotham Journal, undated entry, 1886, Small Manuscript Collections, Rubenstein Library, Duke University; “Harlow Higinbotham,” Chicago Tribune, April 19, 1919.
88. “President Polk’s Widow Dead,” New York Tribune, published as New-York Tribune, August 15, 1891. Marshall actually fled to Texas and died in a U.S. jail.
89. Stephen B. Presser, “The Historical Background of the American Law of Adoption,” Journal of Family Law 11 (1971–72): 466; William H. Whitmore, The Law of Adoption (Boston, 1876), 77.
90. Sallie Fall to Lucy Polk, September 17, 1888, Polk Papers, PC 75, 6, Correspondence 1887–1889, NCSA.
91. Armistead, “The Void Provisions of a President’s Will,” 139; Naomi Hays to Tasker Polk, undated, Polk Papers, PC 75, 7, Correspondence undated, NCSA.
92. Maria Naomi Hays to Tasker Polk, undated, Polk Papers, PC 75, 7, Correspondence undated, NCSA; “Illustrious Dead,” Nashville Banner, September 19, 1893; Armistead, “The Void Provisions of a President’s Will,” 140.
93. Maria Naomi Hays to Tasker Polk, undated, Polk Papers, PC 75, 7, Correspondence undated, NCSA; “Booming,” Nashville American, April 10, 1897; Armistead, “The Void Provisions of a President’s Will,” 140. The Polk Papers at the North Carolina State Archives contain a wealth of information about the court cases discussed here, and the disposal of Polk Place.
94. Page, “Polk Memorial Hall.”
1. Caroline Bermeo Newcombe, “The Origin and Civil Law Foundations of the Community Property System, Why California Adopted It and Why Community Property Principles Benefit Women,” University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class 11, no. 1 (2011): 1–38.
2. Whitsitt, “Annals of a Scotch-Irish Family: The Whitsitts of Nashville,” American Historical Magazine and Tennessee Historical Society Quarterly 9 (1904): 240.
3. Anne-Leslie Owens, “John Calvin Brown,” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/john-calvin-brown/; Annie S. Gilchrist, Some Representative Women of Tennessee (Nashville: McQuiddy Printing Co., 1902), 12–16.
4. Owens, “John Calvin Brown”; Anne-Leslie Owens, “Neill Smith Brown,” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/neill-smith-brown/; Joseph O. Baylen, “A Tennessee Politician in Imperial Russia, 1850–1853,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 14 (1955): 227–52.
5. Robert Vincent Remini, Henry Clay: A Statesman for the Union (New York: Norton, 1992), 6.
6. “To Old Confederate Veterans and Their Sons,” Confederate Veteran XXV (July 1917): 338; Chester L. Quarles, The Ku Klux Klan and Related American Racialist and Antisemitic Organizations: A History and Analysis (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), 32.
7. Tennessee, General Assembly, Senate, Committee on Military Affairs, Report of Evidence Taken Before the Military Committee in Relation to Outrages Committed by the Ku Klux Klan in Middle and West Tennessee (Nashville: S. C. Mercer, 1868), 46–47; John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 150–69; Tennessee, General Assembly, Report of Evidence, 47; Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 265–70; Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 3–6.
8. Julia C. Brown, “Reconstruction in Yalobusha and Grenada Counties,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society XII (University, MS, 1912): 235–43.
9. Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 265–70; David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, 3rd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 15.
10. Susan Lawrence Davis, Authentic History, Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1877 (New York: American Library Service, 1924), 21; J. Michael Martinez, Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 23. Brown’s membership in the Klan, like many things about the Klan, is difficult to prove. His name appears in various histories of the Klan, including Davis’s Authentic History, but the KKK, not surprisingly, appears in none of his formal biographies. Given that there were only 2,070 people living in Pulaski in 1870, and that the population of Giles County increased precipitously between 1865 and 1870, it seems hard to imagine that John Calvin was not involved at the outset. “Census of Population and Housing: Decennial Censuses,” United States Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/. Writing about his father, John William Childress asserted, “There can be no doubt that he was one of the boys who started the KKK. It was in Pulaski that my father became one of the organizers of the original Ku Klux Klan.” Childress, “The Childress Family of Tennessee”; “Judge John W. Childress,” Confederate Veteran XVI (May 1908): xxxiii.
11. William S. Speer, Sketches of Prominent Tennesseans: Biographies and Records of Many of the Families Who Have Attained Prominence in Tennessee (Nashville: Albert B. Tavel, 1888), 27; Childress, “The Childress Family of Tennessee; “Judge John W. Childress,” Confederate Veteran XVI (May 1908): xxxiii; John William Jones, The Davis Memorial Volume; or, Our Dead President, Jefferson Davis, and the World’s Tribute to His Memory (B. F. Johnson, 1889), 563.
12. “Mrs. President Polk,” NYH, June 3, 1879; Gilchrist, Some Representative Women of Tennessee, 12–16.
13. SCP to Governor J. C. Brown, December 9, 1871, John Calvin Brown Papers, TSLA.
14. “Mrs. President Polk,” NYH, June 3, 1879.
15. Owens, “John Calvin Brown,” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture; Gilchrist, Some Representative Women of Tennessee, 12–16.
16. Daughters of the American Revolution, Lineage Book (Washington, DC, 1901), vol. 35, 342; Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 80–81; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
17. Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 8–13; Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 148–59.
18. “Honor for the South,” Confederate Veteran I (January 1893): 17; Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 209–11.
19. LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 89–94, quote on 93; Davis, Authentic History, 310; Crystal Nicole Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 125–57.
20. “Books Supplied by S. A. Cunningham, Nashville Tennessee,” Confederate Veteran I (December 1893): 381; “Judge John W. Childress,” Confederate Veteran XVI (May 1908): xxxiii.
21. Mrs. A. A. Campbell, “The United Daughters of the Confederacy: Some of Their Aims and Accomplishments” Confederate Veteran XXX (March 1922): 86; Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 242–44; Cox, Dixie’s Daughters, 13–20.
22. Campbell, “The United Daughters of the Confederacy,” 86; Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 243–44; Cox, Dixie’s Daughters, 21.
23. Mrs. Alexander B. White, “Mrs. John Calvin Brown,” in Minutes of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (Richmond, VA: Richmond Press, 1918), 529; Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 243.
24. Mrs. Alexander B. White, “Mrs. John Calvin Brown,” 529.
25. “Mrs. President Polk,” NYH, June 3, 1879.