James Knox Polk was born in 1795 in a log cabin in North Carolina, within twenty miles of Andrew Jackson, who was 28 years older. His family was Presbyterian, but his grandfather became a deist and Polk himself wasn’t baptized due to his father getting into an argument with the local minister. His family moved to Tennessee in 1806.

Young James was sickly due to urinary stones. In 1812, when he was 17, he survived surgery to remove the stones. He started attending the University of North Carolina when he was 20. At the time, the university was staffed by a single administrator, a single professor, and a few tutors. He graduated in 1818, but was too frail to travel home right away.

He was a law clerk and clerk of the Tennessee State Senate. He was admitted to the bar and his first legal case was defending his father who had been arrested for public fighting. He was a stickler for detail and once rejected legal paperwork from Sam Houston for being incomplete and not properly authenticated. Houston supposedly once said that Polk was “a victim of the use of water as a beverage.”

Polk was elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives. (To give an idea of how political campaigns operated back then, it’s interesting to note that Polk paid for gallons of cider, brandy, and whiskey as part of his campaign.)

Andrew Jackson was a family friend and became Polk’s mentor. Jackson was also a friend of the Childress family and Polk likely met his wife Sarah Childress through Jackson. He married Sarah in 1824. They never had children (the urinary stone surgery likely made Polk infertile), so Sarah devoted her life to helping her husband’s political career.

Polk was elected to US House of Representatives for seven terms and became speaker of the house. He supported Jackson, earning him the nicknames Old Hickory’s Boy and Young Hickory. His enemies called him a subservient tool and palace slave to Jackson. Like Jackson, Polk was both a slave holder and a slave trader, but he tried to keep it out of public view.

Jackson’s financial policies led to America’s first great depression, The Panic of 1837. 1 in 10 Americans were unemployed and many starved to death. Polk was one of the few Jacksonian Democrats to get reelected, but he was likely to lose his title as speaker of the house in the next election.

He decided to run for governor as a pathway to becoming Van Buren’s vice president. He was elected governor of Tennessee in 1839, but lost reelection in 1841, and lost again in the next election. Many considered his political career to be dead.

However, in the presidential campaign of 1844, Andrew Jackson’s successor Martin Van Buren came out as being against the annexation of Texas. This infuriated Jackson who decided to get Polk nominated in Van Buren’s place. Jackson began a letter writing campaign to rally support for Polk. Polk was happy to be Van Buren’s vice president, but would happily become president as well. He positioned himself to be appealing to both Van Buren’s friends and enemies so he’d get the votes of both. “Fortuna is in a frolic,” he commented, meaning anything might happen in all this confusion.

Van Buren had the majority of votes at the Democratic presidential convention, but not the required two thirds. Additional votes were held and his support evaporated. Polk ultimately won out as a compromise candidate, as he’d hoped. The news was sent from Baltimore to Washington by the newly-constructed telegraph. Polk was called a dark horse because he seemingly came out of nowhere, but as he was a former speaker of the house, he wasn’t exactly a nobody.

Like Harrison before him, Polk declared that if elected, he would not seek a second term. This made presidential hopefuls in his own party more likely to support him, since they’d only have to wait four years to get another shot at the presidency themselves.

Polk was a favorite in the South because he was in favor of adding Texas to the union as a slave state. In order to win votes in the North, he came out in support of a tariff that would help northern businesses.

In the election, he embarrassingly lost his home state of Tennessee. There were also fraud allegations since seemingly more people voted for Polk in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana than the number of eligible voters in that parish. However, in the end, the state that decided the election was New York. Whoever won that state would be the next president.

Polk barely won New York thanks to a third party candidate drawing just enough votes away from the Whig party to put him into the White House. Polk became president in 1845 at the age of 49, the youngest president up to this time. His wife Sarah started the tradition of playing the Scottish anthem “Hail to the Chief” to get people to clear the way for the president.

President Tyler stole some of Polk’s thunder by annexing Texas right before Polk was sworn in, but Polk was okay with it. However, Mexico considered Texas to be their territory, and viewed the annexation of Texas to be an act of war. Mexico did offer a treaty to recognize Texan independence if it wouldn’t annex itself to another country, but Texas joined the US instead.

Polk wanted to add more territory to the US than just Texas. He also had his eye on Oregon. Since they couldn’t agree on a boundary, the US and Britain had jointly occupied Oregon since 1827. Now that he was president, Polk was willing to go to war to acquire Oregon.

Polk also wanted California, but unlike Texas and Oregon, America didn’t even have a flimsy claim to it. That changed in 1841 when the Russians sold Fort Ross (located north of San Francisco) to John Sutter, a German.

American settlers joined Sutter in California but remained on good terms with their Mexican neighbors until John C. Frémont showed up with an army in early 1846, established a fort, and raised the American flag. When a Mexican militia showed up, Frémont retreated, but remained in the vicinity.

Meanwhile, Polk ordered Zachary Taylor to the Rio Grande to establish this as the new border with Mexico. The Mexicans considered the Nueces River to be the border with Texas and stood up to the American invaders. Hostilities ensued.

Before news of the hostilities reached Polk, he was prepared to ask Congress to declare war against Mexico because American merchants claimed Mexico owed them 5 million dollars. Polk offered to forgive this debt in exchange for California and New Mexico, but Mexico declined. If Polk couldn’t buy the territory he wanted, he’d have to go to war to get it.

However, news of military conflict on the Rio Grande (that he instigated) finally reached him and he now had a better reason to go to war. He claimed American blood had been shed on American soil even though it was Mexican soil at the time and the Americans were the ones who had invaded.

Many members of Congress didn’t think the war was justified, but voted in favor of it because they wanted to provide support to the troops who were already engaged in hostilities. They weren’t voting for war so much as acknowledging war was already underway.

Secretary of State Buchanan thought they should include a statement that they weren’t going to war to steal California, but Polk rejected this because it was the whole reason he was going to war. Buchanan warned that this might provoke war with England or France, but Polk didn’t care.

However, Polk did back down from his “All of Oregon or War” stance (also known as 54°40′ or Fight). He compromised with England by drawing the boundary at the 49th parallel (except for Vancouver Island) to avoid fighting two wars at once.

Once war was underway in Mexico, Polk sent an army to take over New Mexico and California and establish local governments there. Only Congress could annex territory and provide for its governance, so this was unconstitutional. When Congress pointed this out, Polk claimed the general he’d sent had exceeded his orders, even though he was doing what Polk ordered him to do.

Santa Anna had been exiled from Mexico at this time. Polk thought bringing Santa Anna back to Mexico would be a good idea since Santa Anna seemed willing to give the US what it wanted. Once he was in power, however, Santa Anna worked to expel the Americans.

Meanwhile in California, Frémont and his men had taken possession of Sonoma on their own initiative. They joined up with other American troops and began conquering the rest of California.

Frémont signed a treaty granting a general amnesty when his superior officer should have made that call. He was named governor of California by Commodore Stockton who was outranked by General Kearny, but Frémont refused to accept Kearny’s authority. He was court martialed for insubordination. Polk approved the court’s findings, but allowed Frémont to not be dismissed from service in an act of leniency. Frémont however resigned. Frémont’s father-in-law, Thomas Hart Benton, was a senator. Benton had been friends with Polk, but their friendship was now at an end.

A good part of the country was opposed to what they called Mr. Polk’s War. The Whigs had won the House in the midterm elections although Democrats still held the Senate. A new congressman named Abraham Lincoln put Polk on the spot, asking him if American blood had actually been spilled on American soil and other things. Polk declined to answer Lincoln’s questions. Congress increasingly viewed the war as unconstitutional since Congress, not the president, was supposed to declare war.

After Mexico City was conquered, the Mexicans signed the treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo, giving the US the territory it wanted in exchange for 15 million dollars. If the Mexicans hadn’t accepted, the war would continue and Mexico might lose even more territory. They had to take what they could get.

Polk made good on his promise to serve only one term. The presidency had worn him out and he was often sick with gastrointestinal disease. As president, he was a micromanager, preferring to do things himself rather than delegate, leaving him with no real leisure time. Back then, anyone could show up at the White House during receptions or office hours to lobby for a particular issue or ask a favor. Job seekers were particularly irksome. Polk was happy to leave all that behind. Besides, he’d accomplished all he’d wanted to: he’d nearly doubled the size of the US, gotten a revenue tariff, and established an independent treasury.

After William Henry Harrison’s successful 1840 run, the Whigs wanted another general to run for president in 1848 and they picked Zachary Taylor, one of the heroes of the Mexican War. Polk didn’t endorse anyone to take his place. Cass got the nomination for the Democrats and would have won, however Van Buren’s Free Soil party took enough votes away from Cass in New York to give Taylor the win. Once again, a third party had decided the presidential election.

In his last days in office, Polk made Oregon a free (not slave) state. He was in favor of slavery, but viewed this as a necessary compromise. Polk was encouraged to invade Cuba, but didn’t. He did try to buy it from Spain, but they weren’t selling.

After retiring from the presidency, he toured the country. Polk suffered from chronic diarrhea throughout his life and was always afraid it was cholera. Some of the cities he passed through had cholera outbreaks, including New Orleans. He wanted to avoid New Orleans, but the locals assured him the city was healthy and were throwing banquets in his honor. It would be rude to refuse, so he attended the banquets, although he avoided the French cuisine.

On the journey home, people on his boat died of cholera and Polk himself began experiencing intestinal discomfort. He made it back home to Nashville, but some of his neighbors had cholera, which most likely killed him. He died at 53, just 103 days after leaving office. Although he attended Presbyterian churches regularly, he chose to receive Methodist sacrament on his deathbed. His wife Sarah wore widow’s black the rest of her life, which was 42 years.

I’ve been ranking presidents based on how many deaths they contributed to. After reviewing the first eleven presidents, James K. Polk appears to be the worst thus far. 38,000 people died in the Mexican American War which was fought simply to steal territory. Madison is a close second (35,000 died in the unnecessary War of 1812) and Jackson is third with his Indian removal program resulting in around 10,000 deaths. Of course, there’s still a lot of presidents left to review.