Lady First

Preface

Mrs. Polk's 1848


History can be capricious, as the following story about two events and one exceptionally powerful woman should make clear. For the twenty-three million residents of the United States and the seven and a half million residents of Mexico, the landmark event of 1848 was the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended a twenty-month-long war between the two countries, and transferred approximately half of Mexico’s prewar territory to the United States. Although the war left thirteen thousand Americans and at least twenty-five thousand Mexicans dead, and the contested status of slavery in the newly acquired territories, including California and New Mexico, was already provoking threats of secession in the South, it was recognized at the time as a remarkable victory for both the United States and that exceptionally powerful American woman. Her name was Sarah Childress Polk, and the defeat of Mexico was her reward for years of labor alongside her husband in the name of America’s “Manifest Destiny.”

President James K. Polk, a taciturn fifty-two-year-old left prematurely aged by compulsive work habits and chronic intestinal complaints, emerged from the war admired by some but loved by very few other than his wife. Humorless and secretive, he lied to members of his own party, to Congress, and to the American people. The war was divisive; antiwar agitators across the country condemned the president for prosecuting an immoral war, and the nation turned against his political party, the Democrats. The opposition party, the Whigs, easily won the presidency that year with a war hero, General Zachary Taylor, as their candidate.

But forty-four-year-old Sarah Polk, a slim, elegantly dressed woman whose vivacity, youthfulness, and ability to charm formed a perfect contrast to her husband, suffered no such backlash from the war that she helped promote. On one hand this is entirely unsurprising. An age-old set of assumptions enforced by both law and custom proclaimed women un t for public life. They weren’t citizens, and they couldn’t vote. If they were married, their identities were legally subsumed into those of their husbands. That even rich, well-educated white women like Mrs. James K. Polk were biologically and socially incapable of contemplating matters such as foreign policy was for most Americans an assumption so obvious as to go entirely unquestioned.

Were a woman intellectually capable of engaging with affairs of state, American politics was utterly unwelcoming for the “gentle sex.” Americans were justly proud of their democratic institutions, but those institutions were competitive, coercive, and quite liable to turn violent. Men physically fought over political positions, while partisans fueled by free alcohol attacked one another at the polls. The wrong political statement, put into print, could result in a challenge to a duel, or a surprise attack in the streets. Election-day riots were sadly common. This was considered no space for women.

There was little debate over this point because America’s men and women agreed that the two sexes were suited to different spheres. Men belonged in the political, competitive, public world of work and elections, and women in the peaceful, religious, domestic realm of children and home. Women who crossed this line and insisted on openly expressing their political views did so at their own peril. The abolitionist Grimké sisters became notorious in the 1830s for insisting on speaking in public, and were threatened with death by angry mobs. This was the reality of women’s lives in 1848.

Yet somehow Mrs. James K. Polk managed to stand above the constraints that bound other women. Her views on the Manifest Destiny of the United States were well known, as were her political efforts in support of her husband. Indeed, her dedication to her husband’s agenda, and the fact that the two were a seemingly inseparable team, was a large part of her appeal as a First Lady.

In 1848 she was the most powerful woman in America. She controlled access to her husband and helped coordinate the Democratic Party’s political agenda. She managed her husband’s political campaigns and negotiated on his behalf with men who understood her value as a conduit. No accident, her power was grounded in decades of work as a political spouse, her remarkable powers of innovation, a deep and abiding love of politics, and the unpaid labor of dozens of enslaved people who toiled for her in her home and on a cotton plantation. As a marital partner and her husband’s closest advisor, Mrs. James K. Polk (the name she preferred for herself) helped create the office of the First Lady. Her political partnership with her husband and the manner in which she expanded the First Lady’s role prefigured the activist First Ladies of our own era.