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Performance
If pressed, I might have remembered that James K.
Polk, the 11th American President, led the war with Mexico to acquire California. Thanks to John Seigenthaler’s contribution to the excellent American
Presidents series, I know even more about James K.
Polk. This short book will give you a quick look into someone Harry S. Truman
thought was an outstanding president because of how much he accomplished.
Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 5, “Measures of a Great President,” pp.
102-109:
For forty years, George Bancroft, the
gifted historian who served as Polk’s secretary of the navy, would remember
that moment early in the new administration when Polk, with uncharacteristic
animation, shared with him four specific goals that would make his presidency
meaningful and memorable. These achievements, Polk believed, would address
the immediate and long-term economic and expansionist needs of the nation.
They would combine substance and symbolism; pragmatism and vision. These, he
told Bancroft, would be his “great measures”:
• He would lower the tariff It would set the tone of his administration
and send the message to the nation’s working agrarian middle class that this
was their administration, not subservient to the powerful eastern
industrialists.
• He would re-create Van Buren’s
independent treasury. It
would bring an end to the financial control of the nation’s funds in private
banks. The government would secure the people’s money. He preferred to call
it a “Constitutional Treasury Act,” perhaps to put his own new imprint on an
old idea and perhaps hoping the name change would make enactment more
digestible to Whigs.
• He would acquire Oregon from the British. The time had come. The westward
expansion demanded it. He would have to make a strong, direct demand that the
British end their shared control of the territory. It would be land governed
solely by the United
States. He was prepared to draw a line in
the great Northwest and deny Great Britain
any right to rule the lives of U.S. citizens. He would make
“Manifest Destiny” more than a catchphrase for the national dream. He would
make it a mandate.
• He would acquire California
from Mexico.
This was to be a continental
nation, stretching from ocean to ocean. Mexico would not give up the
territory for a song. He would have to pay a dear price for it, but it would
be worth it. He would end forever the danger of European intrigues and
meddling in the country’s domestic affairs.
All of this he intended to do in four years. In Bancroft’s mind, there was no wishful
fantasizing here. Polk understood the limits of power, the hostility of the
Whigs, the dissension and jealousy in his own party, and the intransigence of
Great Britain and Mexico.
Still, Polk believed he would do it all. A little more than a century later,
Harry Truman published his list of eight great presidents and listed Polk,
chronologically, behind Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson.
“A great president,” said the
thirty-third chief magistrate of the eleventh. “He said exactly what he was
going to do and he did it.”
For four years there would be no rest
for James Knox Polk. He was an obsessed workaholic, a perfectionist, a
micromanager, whose commitment to what he saw as his responsibility led him
to virtually incarcerate himself in the White House for the full tenure of
his presidency. He rarely went out to visit. Sometimes he took a walk,
usually to attend church with his wife. On very rare occasions he took a
horseback ride for exercise. He almost never attended a social function and
took vacations only when Sarah convinced him that his health demanded it.
At forty-nine, the youngest president
was operating in a world he knew well, surrounded by veteran power brokers of
his own party: Calhoun, Benton, Cass, Woodbury, and Buchanan. They were men
with enormous egos and matching ambitions. Not one of them had lost the fire
in the belly, nor surrendered his own dream that one day he would occupy the
exalted position that had come to Polk. The new president had made no
promises or deals. In his mind, his only real debt was to Andrew Jackson—and
he owed him everything. With all of this in mind, he told Cave Johnson: “I
intend to be myself president.”
REBUILDING JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY
Some ten days after he knew he had won,
Polk traveled with Aaron Brown, Tennessee’s
governor-elect, from Nashville to the
Hermitage for a discussion with Jackson
about naming his cabinet and plotting the success of the administration. They
talked about the need for a harmonious cabinet—six able, knowledgeable
politicians who together would help Polk lead the administration, true to the
principles of the Jacksonian Democracy. Loyalty
would be the first requisite. Names, no doubt, were mentioned, but no
decisions were reached and Polk left without making any commitments. Of one
thing he was certain. He would not make the mistakes that had led to the
cabinet debacle in Old Hickory’s administration.
As to personalities, Calhoun, as Tyler’s secretary of
state, was a special problem. He had launched the initiative on Texas for the Tyler
administration and wanted to remain to finish that job, but he carried too
much nullification baggage. He would have to go. The president-elect would not
have admitted it, perhaps not even to himself but he was going to be his own
secretary of state. He was focusing already on the difficult and delicate
business of acquiring California from Mexico and Oregon
from Britain.
He would want someone overseeing the State Department who was the antithesis
of Calhoun; someone Polk could control.
There were natural questions on the
mind of the president-elect as he approached the task of cabinet making.
Should he wipe out the entire Tyler
crew of advisers? Francis Blair was demanding in his Washington Globe that
the new president clean house. The other option was to select a cabinet whose
members included one or more possible successors, so that Polk could have in
place a trusted candidate to succeed himself at the end of his term. Jefferson
and Jackson, his ideological role models, both had done just that. Jackson now advised
Polk, “Keep from your cabinet all aspirants to the presidency.” Perhaps Old Hickory realized that his
own knighting of Van Buren had caused deep and enduring schisms in the
Democratic party. Polk accepted the advice and required from his cabinet
officers a pledge that they would not campaign for any office while in the
administration.
When the time came to let Calhoun know
that he would not remain as secretary of state, Polk personally delivered the
bad news. He wanted a completely new cabinet, he said, and offered the
nullifier the post of minister to Great Britain. Calhoun said he
understood, took the news affably, but declined the offer to go to London. He would soon be
back in the Senate, his affability notably less in evidence.
Having told the sitting secretary of
state that he would clean out Tyler’s cabinet,
Polk promptly reneged and appointed his old classmate John Y. Mason, Tyler’s secretary of the
navy, as his attorney general.
He selected Cave Johnson, his closest
friend, as postmaster general and George Bancroft, who had made such a
difference in the convention, as secretary of the navy. Robert Walker, the Mississippi senator
who had been so helpful in guiding him through the drafting of the ambiguous
tariff statement during the campaign, was to be secretary of the Treasury.
Here were four men he knew to be able.
They were respected leaders of his party, and their loyalty to him was beyond
question. Skilled in politics and committed to the success of his administration,
they would bring a wide range of expertise to the cabinet table. From these
men he could expect honest, informed opinion and straightforward advice in a
collegial atmosphere. Among them there would be no chance of the tension and
anger that pervaded the Jackson
cabinet.
Only one of the four, Bancroft of
Massachusetts, brought geographic diversity to the inchoate cabinet, and
Polk relied on his choices for the State and War Departments to provide a
balance that would show his administration to be truly “national.” Both
selections would cause him trouble.
New
York,
the state that was widely credited with giving Polk the presidency, was
expected to provide the man for the top cabinet job, secretary of state. Van
Buren anticipated that he would be asked by Polk to recommend one of his New York allies, Silas
Wright or Benjamin Butler, for that assignment. Having lost the nomination to
Polk at Baltimore, the former president could
have gone back to New York
and sulked in defeat. Instead, he rallied his friends to help deliver his
home state’s crucial electoral votes to the Tennessean. As a result, he felt
entitled to recommend the person to head the State Department.
The new president had other ideas. He
knew Van Buren’s New York
associates. They were tough-minded, strong-willed, and remained extremely
close to Van Buren. Polk wanted a secretary of state whom he could guide and
control. He would not seek him in New
York.
Acknowledging at least some debt to the
former president, he requested that Van Buren recommend names for secretary
of war, rather than secretary of state. Disappointed, the former president
accepted the invitation and began to consult with Wright, New York’s newly
elected governor, who told Van Buren he was not interested in returning to
Washington in any role in the Polk administration. Van Buren gave the
president’s request long and studied consideration (too long and studied, as
it turned out), and finally wrote a letter promoting Benjamin Butler or
Churchill Cambreleng as war secretary. At the same
time, Van Buren warned Polk that there was one New Yorker who, under no
circumstances, should get the job: former governor William Marcy. To appoint
Marcy to the cabinet would he “a fatal mistake in this state,” Van Buren
said. The virus of factional politics infected New
York as Tennessee,
and Marcy had fallen into disfavor with Van Buren. Whether it was impatience
or arrogance or both, Polk did not wait for Van Buren’s letter of
recommendations to arrive at the White House before he named his secretary of
war. And he proceeded to make the “fatal mistake.” He selected Marcy and
later claimed that he was unaware of the friction inside the Democratic party
in New York.
It was an unforgettable and
unforgivable cut that Van Buren deeply felt. It gave him and his New York
Regency colleagues every reason to think Polk an ingrate. The president, for
his part, felt no twinge of guilt. He may have suspected that the Van Buren
crowd was not really serious about the recommendations of Butler and Cambreleng,
since Van Buren’s letter was hardly a prompt response to a presidential
request. He may have heard that Butler, like
Wright, had been less than enthusiastic about returning to Washington to serve in the administration.
At any rate, while a measure of cool courtesy defined the ongoing
relationship between the president and the former president, the bad feelings
persisted. More than two years later, while traveling through New York on a
presidential tour, he turned down a chance to visit Van Buren at his home in
Kinderhook. The invitation was not sincere, Polk said, and had been extended
by the former president only because Van Buren feared “public opinion.”
For secretary of state, Polk selected
James Buchanan, the Pennsylvania
senator who one day would become president. Of all his cabinet appointments,
this, the top one, caused Polk the most grief Vice President George Dallas,
himself from Pennsylvania,
implored Polk not to give the job to Buchanan. The Democratic party in Pennsylvania, as in New York
and Tennessee,
was torn by factionalism. If Marcy’s appointment was a political slight to
Van Buren, Buchanan’s designation as secretary of state was a political slap
in the face to Dallas.
Polk meant it when he said he intended himself to be the president,
and he disregarded Dallas’s
plea.
The Buchanan appointment is intriguing
because of what Polk certainly knew about the Pennsylvania senator. There had been a
bizarre performance by the Pennsylvanian almost twenty years earlier when
Buchanan was a newly elected congressman. At the time, preliminary reports of
the “corrupt bargain” were circulating in the Washington gossip mill but had not been
consummated. Buchanan called on Jackson
to propose something close to a corrupt bargain of his own. Jackson was warning his
friends that “corruption and sale of public office” were about to take place
when Buchanan showed up to confirm Old Hickory’s worst fears. Robert Remini described Buchanan’s conduct: “He kept winking at
Old Hickory as he spoke. . . . Jackson stared in disbelief at the. . . fidgeting
little busybody. Everything he had related to. .
.his other friends about intrigues and plots now stood twitching before him.”
Buchanan led Jackson to believe that Clay’s agents had
sent him as their messenger, to say that the Kentuckian wanted to be
secretary of state. If Jackson
would assure Buchanan that Clay would get the post, it could “end the
presidential election within the hour.” Old Hickory sent him packing. Shortly
afterward, when Adams appointed Clay secretary of state, Jackson
exposed his strange conversation with Buchanan as proof that he had rejected
the corrupt bargain Adams had made. Then, in
a gasp of humiliation, the Pennsylvania
congressman explained that he had not acted as Clay’s intermediary but on his
own initiative. Jackson
concluded that Buchanan was either a charlatan or a liar.
After that odd incident Buchanan went
on to become a power in Pennsylvania
politics, and Polk knew that he had worked hard to deliver his state to Jackson in 1828. Old Hickory forgave Buchanan
that quirky introduction, though he never forgot it. As president, Jackson rewarded Buchanan with a two-year ministerial
post in Russia
hut later said, “It was as far as I could send him out of my sight. . . . I would have sent him to the North Pole
if we had kept a minister there!”
Polk
did great things, and with Seigenthaler’s help,
readers will come to appreciate him better on the pages of James K.
Polk.
Steve
Hopkins, March 23, 2004
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