James K. Polk by John Seigenthaler

Author:John Seigenthaler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

5

Measures of a Great President

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”:1

• 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.”2

* * *

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.

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