James Knox Polk Essay Research Paper James

James Knox Polk Essay, Research Paper

James Knox Polk, (1795-1849), 11th President of the United States, he was one of the hardest-working presidents in American history, Polk was unusually successful in accomplishing in a single four-year term his ambitious goals in both domestic and foreign policy. The vigor with which he pushed the annexation of Texas, the settlement of the territorial dispute with Britain over Oregon, and the conquest of the Southwest through war with Mexico extended the territory of the United States to the Pacific and greatly strengthened presidential power.

Early Life

Polk was born on a farm in Mecklenburg county, N. C., on Nov. 2, 1795, the oldest of the ten children of Samuel and Jane Knox Polk. The Polks had moved from Pennsylvania a generation earlier, among the first pioneer settlers in that part of North Carolina. James’ great-uncle Thomas Polk was the most prominent leader in the community. His maternal grandfather, James Knox, was a farmer and blacksmith who had distinguished himself in the American Army during the Revolutionary War.

Through Uncle Thomas Polk, Polk’s father had benefited from a vast land speculation by which political insiders in North Carolina obtained claims on most of the good lands in what became the state of Tennessee. In 1806, Polk’s family moved to some of these lands on the Tennessee frontier, settling near the new town of Columbia in what later became Maury county.

James Polk was not a promising youth, being too sickly for frontier occupations and too poorly educated for a professional career. When he was 16, however, the celebrated Kentucky surgeon Dr. Ephraim McDowell operated on him successfully for gallstone. Returning health brought a rush of energy and ambition. A year at a nearby academy and another year at a more renowned one at Murfreesboro prepared him for the University of North Carolina, from which he graduated at the head of his class in 1818.

Entry into Politics

The Tennessee to which Polk returned was in the middle of the economic boom that followed the War of 1812, and opportunities seemed bright for ambitious young men. Polk went to Nashville to read law with the prominent criminal lawyer Felix Grundy. While he was there the Panic of 1819 plunged the state into unprecedented economic distress. As people cried out for relief from the hard times, a new style of politics developed, with Grundy emerging as the prototype of the politician who rises to power by championing, or seeming to champion, the cause of the distressed. So Polk learned politics as well as law from the best teacher he could have found.

In 1819, Grundy helped Polk secure the clerkship of the state Senate, which he held until his election to the lower house of the legislature in 1823. Meanwhile, having been admitted to the bar in 1820, he had been practicing law in Columbia. On Jan. 1, 1824, he married Sarah Childress, the daughter of a prominent family in Murfreesboro, where the legislature met. They had no children.

As a member of the legislature Polk took sides against the previously dominant faction of Tennessee politicians with whom his family had been allied. Supporting the policies of the popular reforming governor William Carroll, he emerged despite his youth as the legislative leader of the opponents of the land speculators and the bankers. But he broke with Carroll to support the presidential ambitions of Tennessee’s even more popular military hero, Gen. Andrew Jackson, a longtime friend of the Polk family. This was easier because Jackson, too, had come to question the land speculations and banking activities of his former political associates.

Member of Congress

In 1825, Polk entered the U.S. House of Represenatives. He held his seat in Congress for 14 years with only occasional challenges. Jackson had gotten more votes in 1824 than the other three candidates in the presidential election, but he had not won a majority, and the House of Representatives had passed over him to choose John Quincy Adams as president. Polk went to Washington with the paramount purpose of helping Jackson win the presidency in 1828. Increasingly trusted by Jackson himself, the young congressman played a large part in the four-year campaign that finally installed Jackson in the White House in 1829.

During Jackson’s first term his prot.g. Polk became a prominent administration spokesman in the House against internal-improvement projects and for tariff reduction. Polk’s Jeffersonian ideology of states’ rights and limited government made him originally sympathetic to the doctrine of nullification that John C. Calhoun developed to oppose high protective tariffs. But when Jackson broke with Calhoun, Polk pulled back in time to retain the president’s confidence.

Polk’s chance for greater prominence came in 1832 when Jackson vetoed the bill rechartering the Second Bank of the United States. As chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and chief administration leader in the House, Polk beat back the desperate efforts of the supporters of the Bank to reverse administration policy and secure recharter. His reward was election as speaker of the House in 1835, just as Congress entered one of the stormiest periods of its history. Polk’s skill and composure enabled Congress to ride out the furious debates whipped up by the abolition question and by an inflame