Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk

by William Dusinberre

James Polk was President of the United States from 1845 to 1849, a time when slavery began to dominate American politics. Polk's presidency coincided with the eruption of the territorial slavery issue, which within a few years would lead to the catastrophe of the Civil War. Polk himself owned substantial cotton plantations-- in Tennessee and later in Mississippi-- and some 50 slaves. Unlike many antebellum planters who portrayed their involvement with slavery as a historical burden bestowed onto them by their ancestors, Polk entered the slave business of his own volition, for reasons principally of financial self-interest. Drawing on previously unexplored records, Slavemaster President recreates the world of Polk's plantation and the personal histories of his slaves, in what is arguably the most careful and vivid account to date of how slavery functioned on a single cotton plantation. Life at the Polk estate was brutal and often short. Fewer than one in two slave children
lived to the age of fifteen, a child mortality rate even higher than that on the average plantation. A steady stream of slaves temporarily fled the plantation throughout Polk's tenure as absentee slavemaster. Yet Polk was in some respects an enlightened owner, instituting an unusual incentive plan for his slaves and granting extensive privileges to his most favored slave. Startlingly, Dusinberre shows how Polk sought to hide from public knowledge the fact that, while he was president, he was secretly buying as many slaves as his plantation revenues permitted. Shortly before his sudden death from cholera, the president quietly drafted a new will, in which he expressed the hope that his slaves might be freed--but only after he and his wife were both dead. The very next day, he authorized the purchase, in strictest secrecy, of six more very young slaves. By contrast with Senator John C. Calhoun, President Polk has been seen as a moderate Southern Democratic leader. But Dusinberre
suggests that the president's political stance toward slavery-- influenced as it was by his deep personal involvement in the plantation system-- may actually have helped precipitate the Civil War that Polk sought to avoid.

Genres: History, Biography, Presidents, Nonfiction, Politics

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Aaron Million · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Dusinberre has written a relatively short book (174 pages before appendices) focusing on James K. Polk's dual lives as both President and slavemaster. Don't let the length of the book fool you into thinking it isn't worth reading; it is. Dusinberre packs a lot into a small amount of pages, really narrowing his scope to Polk's management of his plantations in Tennessee and Mississippi, and his role as leader of the (southern) Democratic Party as President. Dusineberre augments the text with several helpful tables to buttress his analysis, along with copious endnotes.

Coming in between Andrew Jackson (who was a mentor to him) and Abraham Lincoln, Polk is largely brushed off today by history. He was a one-term President who died only three months after leaving office. This was during a period of relative non-entities and ditherers mostly occupying the office of President, with a few of them dying in office. Polk has always stood out from them though, at least to me, because he came into office with a mandate and he accomplished that mandate. The things that he said he was going to do, he did. While most of the things that he did - and more importantly how he did them - have not aged well at all, he was nonetheless dynamic during his four years at the helm.

But Dusinberre shows a different side of Polk - not so much his daily activities in the White House, but how he managed his cotton plantations, and equally so he tried to hide his activities from the general public. The book is divided into two parts, with the larger section being on Polk's plantations, the slaves who lived there, and how Polk handled them. Sometimes when reading about Presidents who owned slaves, biographers and historians will go out of their way to try to show the benevolent side of their management, no matter how slight it may have been. You see this with Washington and Jefferson especially. Not so here with Polk. Dusinberre rightly scours him for how he treated those unlucky souls forced to labor for his own personal profit.

This isn't so much a book that says "Polk was a bad man because he was a slaveowner", although that is definitely true, and Dusinberre certainly makes that clear. But his focus is more on what actions Polk actually took; how did he directly affect the people who were legally his? Dusinberre acknowledges that Polk was by no means an outlier here when it comes to being a slaveowner. What makes him unique is the high offices he held (Speaker of the U.S. House, Governor of Tennessee, and then President).

So how did Polk treat the enslaved persons on his properties? Not very well. Once in awhile he might do something that would benefit a specific slave when he didn't have to. But usually when he did do that, he himself also somehow benefitted from the action. And that benefit was typically economic in nature. Dusinberre shows that, while clearly there was a racial component to what men like Polk were doing (how could one argue otherwise?), there were also financial reasons. Polk made money off of these people! Pure and simple. Lots of money, in fact. Dusinberre writes that Polk realized substantial profits almost every year from his Mississippi plantation, profits that continued well after Polk died, all the way up to the Civil War.

But those profits came at immense human costs (not that Polk stopped to care about those for one minute). Polk - as was disgustingly common with slaveholders - readily bought children for use on his plantations. He had little to no qualms about breaking up families, tearing children from their parents or spouses from each other. He had no problem at all with whippings being administered by overzealous overseers. Polk's slaves ran away A LOT. Dusinberre painstakingly goes through the runaway episodes that he could find, and he found quite a few. Who knows how many such instances went undocumented. Why did they run away? Aside from the obvious reason (slavery) it was also due to how poorly they were treated. Infant mortality on the Polk plantations was much higher than normal for this time period. Polk didn't care. Instances of disease and ill health amongst his slave population was also higher than usual. Polk didn't care here either, except that if a slave was ill then that person could not work, or not work as much. And if a slave died? Well, Polk only cared about the lost labor and about finding a replacement.

Unlike perhaps Washington or Jefferson who tended more towards kindness, or at least less harsh treatment, for their enslaved populations (and I'm not holding those two guys up as paragons of virtue here - they all deserve to be condemned for this hideousness; yet, there are degrees of bad), Polk had no problem with harsh and cruel punishment being used to try to keep slaves in line. Given how frequently many of them escaped, it didn't work. Why did Polk operate this way? Because he could, and because he did not view these people as human beings, but rather as property to be used and controlled.

In the second part of the book, Dusinberre shifts his focus over to Polk's actions while President, specifically concerning the annexation of Texas (Polk was fully supportive of this, wanting to expand territory that could be open to slavery and to also appease the Democratic voters) and the War with Mexico that grew out of the Texas situation. Dusinberre argues - rightly I believe - that Polk could have accomplished almost as much, if not just as much, as he did by using less aggressive and more conciliatory means. Mexico did not want a war with the U.S. because they knew they could not win. Polk most likely could have gotten the same large area of land that he ended up with, by using diplomacy or money or some combination thereof. The war really was needless.

Dusinberre also argues that Polk's action, and specifically the war, helped pave the way for the Civil War fifteen years later. I do agree with that. Where I don't agree with him is when he writes that he thinks perhaps, had that war not occurred, the Civil War very well may not have happened. While of course we will never know, I suspect it still would have occurred because Southern slaveholders were not content to just keep slavery confined to the Southern states. They wanted it expanded, and more than that, they wanted no checks on it at all. Polk's actions definitely helped pave the way for the later conflict. I just think that it would have occurred at some point anyways despite what alternate decisions Polk could have made. Dusinberre also states that, had the southern Democrats not been so vociferous and insistent on the expansion of slavery, that the horrible practice probably would have continued for much longer than it did, that in fact these same people shot themselves in the foot by forcing open conflict with the North.

This is a very good book, and I found it to be a good antidote to so many of the history books covering this time period that just sort of gloss over how cruel slavemasters could be. The only issue I had - and it was not a big one - is that sometimes Dusinberre would repeat himself multiple times. It did not mar the book though. On page 169, near the end, he provides an excellent analysis of what type of person Polk was: "...one who so combined the roles of masterful deceiver, imperious organizer, jingoist bully, and lucky gambler that he could effect imperial conquests such as no other American president has aspired to."

Grade: A

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really sort of two books in one, and they don’t necessarily fully merge into one, but both halves are good enough that it doesn’t really matter.

James K. Polk is unique as a presidential slaveholder (with the possible exception of Andrew Jackson) in that he was not only entirely unrepentant about his participation in the practice, but it informed his political views and presidency in a very consequential way. There’s so much about Polk that is well-studied - from his dark horse candidacy, to his expansionism, to his conduct of the Mexican-American War, to his achievement of the major goals of his presidency - that any detailed discussion of slavery often gets lost in the shuffle.

This book hones in on slavery in a way that no other Polk study I’ve read - or no other book about any other presidential slaveholder - does. The first two-thirds of the book is devoted to an incredibly detailed and well-researched account of Polk as slaveholder amid a larger discussion about the workings of the southern plantation economy. Polk was an absentee owner, managing his Mississippi plantation from afar, and pragmatically bought and sold slaves without much regard for them as human beings. He was a businessman, and treated them as mere business expenses. "A slavemaster like James Polk,” Dusinberre writes, “mixed one part of benevolence with perhaps a dozen parts of indifference or callousness."

While examining Polk’s actions in regard to slavery, Dusinberre also describes life on his plantation - how cotton was harvested, transported and sold - as well as describing the lives of his slaves themselves. Because everything was so well-documented, we know their names, their ages, their jobs, and often their ultimate fate, so there’s no need for supposition or extrapolation, nor the usual “probablys” and “maybes” that accompany many other slave stories. We learn about the conditions that caused many of them to die, and how many of them dispelled the myth of the “happy slave” by trying to flee - only to find that, in the middle of Mississippi, there was nowhere to flee to.

The last third of the book transitions to Polk’s political career. At times Dusinberre strains to link the two sections, by connecting Polk’s status as a slaveholder to his decisions as president (suggesting, for example, that the troubles he had in governing his slaves contributed to his later determination to show the Mexicans and British who was boss). His more convincing argument is that owning slaves helped to shape Polk's political vision - “Polk felt that running his slave plantation was his own private business, not a matter of legitimate public concern" - much as he felt about slavery in the country as a whole.

Discounting those who claim Polk launched the war with Mexico mainly out of a desire to expand slavery, and those who say slavery had absolutely nothing to do with it, Dusinberre charts a middle course, arguing that Polk didn't go to war explicitly to expand slavery, but naively and disingenuously just assumed that the newly-acquired territories should ultimately become slave territory. His main goal may indeed have been the expansion of the country for the benefit of all - even if he undertook questionable means to achieve it - but Dusinberre describes it as “continentalism… with a strong Southern flavor.”

It was Polk’s shortsightedness that led him to believe that a dispute over slavery would not naturally erupt in response to the acquisition of so much Southern territory. That, Dusinberre argues, was a fatal miscalculation - and he concludes that Southerners and slaveholders like Polk ought to have been satisfied with defending slavery where it already existed instead of overreaching by trying to expand it. Polk, he writes “had convinced himself, unnecessarily, that the defense of slavery in the states where it already existed required the assertion of Southern rights in the territories as well." The war with Mexico was therefore "as dangerous to the Union as though slavery expansion had been his primary aim."

This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book that strips away the “Polk achieved his every goal” sheen from his presidency, and takes an unflinching look at his status as a slaveholder, and the consequences of his efforts to defend the institution. Dusinberre draws a direct line between the Mexican-American War and the Civil War in a very well-argued, easy-to-understand way that doesn’t come across as though he has an ax to grind. It’s not a full Polk biography and doesn’t pretend to be, but it’s the best book on Polk I’ve read as yet.

[The other John · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing I enjoy about reading presidential biographies is that instead of seeing the American presidents as two-dimensional caricatures, I get to discover them as real men with personal concerns and beliefs. While this book isn't a biography, it did offer an interesting picture of James K. Polk, showing why he might have made the decisions and support the policies that he did. I don't recall learning, way back when I studied history in school, much about Polk. Oh, I knew that he had run for president on the promises of annexing Texas and Oregon, and of not seeking re-election. But beyond that I don't recall anything else. I don't think we learned that Polk was an ardent Jacksonian. And I really doubt if we were taught that Polk was a slave owner. Well, he was, and Mr. Dusinberre has documented that aspect of Polk's life, giving a vivid picture of slavery from the slave owner's point of view, where human beings are property and business concerns often trump human compassion. It's rather... disgusting, really. The book then goes on to look at Polk's presidency and shows how his concerns as a slave owner might have affected it. That also was a trifle disgusting, seeing how the politicians at the time were so caught up in grabbing more territory and preserving the "peculiar institution" that seems to define the antebellum South. I'm sure there's a fair amount of bias in the book, but Mr. Dusinberre makes a compelling argument for his conjectures. The only real quibble I have with him is when he takes Polk and his contemporaries to task for not setting the country on a course that might have avoided the Civil War. It's far easier to run a nation with hindsight. Anyway, check it out, it's interesting stuff.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book deeply fascinating, but I hesitate about giving this book a warm recommendation for a few reasons.  Few can deny, in light of our contemporary politics, that the issue of slavery in the United States is a relevant topic, and James K. Polk, the subject of this particular short book of under 200 pages of core material, is deeply important with regards to slavery and its spread and to the crisis of the Civil War as a mainstream politician who represented the mainstream of the Democratic party of the South during his generation.  This book has some sobering conclusions about American politics to the present era, and the author's perspective is one that would likely be judged as sympathetic to those contemporary revisionists who have sought to obliterate the regard that the American people have for political and military figures that are anything less than antislavery radicals from the period of the Civil War and before.  The author's interest in statistics and data, demonstrated to a great degree in this book, is something that will likely please those readers who enjoy mountains of data about slaves and slavery and the value of slaveholding to the antebellum South [1]--at least as far as James K. Polk and his plantation(s) are concerned, but those readers who want a more narrative account and are turned off by data should probably look elsewhere.

This book is divided into two parts that support the author's reasonable contention that James K. Polk's private life and public life were structured in order to support the interests of mainstream slaveowning Democratic elites of the antebellum South, but that he was simultaneously aware that his political career required the support of Northerners whose commitment to slavery was less robust despite the widespread nature of racism.  The first part of the book, which takes up two thirds of the book's text, deeply examines Polk's behavior as a private slaveholder, which he sought to compartmentalize from his successful career as a mainstream politician.  The author notes an important fact that Polk's slaveholding, and his intimate involvement with discipline and the internal slave trade, are known largely because he had no heirs who culled his papers of any potentially embarrassing episodes, so we have relatively uncensored, aside from Polk's considerable self-censorship, about his activities and conduct as a slaveowner, which are discussed here in rather grim and unpleasant detail.  The second part of the book looks at how Polk's political career served the interests of the slave power as best as he could make it, and contains some eloquent and rather gloomy reflections on how Polk and others like him could have better defended the long-term interests of slaveowners by rejecting secession and accepting a likely inevitable free state majority in the federal government that would eventually encroach upon and constrict and threaten the interests of Southern slaveowners.

It is both the extreme amount of data and the author's views that are worthy of reflection of a painful nature.  The Civil War would have been unnecessary had the Southern slaveowning elites been more reasonable people--they were painfully aware of the fact that there was a large and politically motivated population of free soil voters and politicians in the North led by people like Abraham Lincoln and David Wilmot and others who found the spread of slavery into further territories content, but but were unwilling to demand an American political culture free of racism, as if such a society could ever exist anywhere with imperfect human beings.  Polk was one of the leaders who could have encouraged the South to accept a permanent minority status, but such a solution would require the South to have been less honor-bound than it was (and to some extent is).  A great deal of our own contemporary political trouble, after all, has resulted from the ways that contemporary political radicals have refused to account for the combustible nature of honor and history in our own history and culture and in the ways that appeals to professed ideals of justice offend many people who could be allies because they are done in a clumsy and hostile fashion.  This is a very good book and it has a lot of worthwhile content, but it is the sort of book that will likely cost me at least some sleep to reflect upon its implications, and my sleep is a precious and much put-upon resource for any book, no matter how good.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dusinberre, Reader in History, Emeritus, at the University of Warwick in England, re-evaluates the nature of antebellum southern culture and its instigation of the Civil War through the political work of James Polk. He compares the slave records of Polk's own enterprises to the words Polk used to describe his relationship with his slaves. They don't match. Polk would publicly describe his master slave relations as paternalistic, in that gentle, caring racism acceptable in the 1830's - 40's. But his records show that he treated the people he enslaved like capital assets.

It's unusual that Polk's slaver records were not destroyed in the wake of the the Civil War. They provide damning context for Polk's actions as Congressman and President where he successfully defended the rights of some to enslave others. The book is an antidote to notions of a south fighting over abstract states rights and rather describes a motivation centered on maintaining a peculiar institution based upon one group giving itself the self-satisfaction of identity through the debased use of slander and then domination of another group.

A bit turgid. But worth the read all the way to the end.

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was very disappointing. Polk is hardly present in this book. Only the occasional mention of his name reminds the reader that the book is about an American President. If only Dusinberre could have found a way to bring the man a bit more to life.

The author also milks his source material to the limit. He repeats much of it it successive chapters and somehow managed to draw no new conclusions. The book ends up being an unexciting narrative and endless list of facts. The material is more finely suited to a larger, more broad southern plantation slave narrative. The source material hardly stands up on its own. It's simply not interesting, or at least Dusinberre is unable to present it as interesting.