• Visit
    • Plan Your Visit
    • Dining Options
    • Military Branch
    • State Capitol
    • Tennessee Residence
    • Green McAdoo Cultural Center
    • Accessibility
    • Museum Store
    • About Us
      • History and Mission Statement
      • Museum Management
      • Douglas Henry State Museum Commission
      • Contact
    • Resources
  • Home
  • Exhibitions
    • Collections
      • Search Our Collection
      • Collection Scope
    • Permanent Exhibitions
      • Tennessee Time Tunnel
      • Natural History
      • First Peoples
      • Forging a Nation
      • The Civil War and Reconstruction
      • Change and Challenge
      • Tennessee Transforms
    • Temporary Exhibitions
      • Painting the Smokies
      • Tennessee at 225
      • STARS: Elementary Art Exhibition 2022
      • Early Expressions: Art in Tennessee Before 1900
      • In Search of the New: Art in Tennessee Since 1900
      • Why Do Museums Collect
    • Online Exhibitions
      • Tennessee at 225
      • Ratified! Statewide!
      • Canvassing Tennessee: Artists and Their Environments
    • Past Exhibitions
      • Best of Tennessee Craft
      • Ratified! Tennessee Women and the Right to Vote
      • Tennessee and the Great War: A Centennial Exhibition
      • Cordell Hull: Tennessee's Father of the United Nations
      • Lets Eat! Origins and Evolutions of Tennessee Food
      • The State of Sound: Tennessee’s Musical Heritage
      • Red Grooms: A Retrospective
      • Between The Layers: Art and Story in Tennessee Quilts
    • Children's Gallery
  • Education
    • Field Trips
      • On-Site Field Trips
      • On-Site Field Trip Request Form
      • Virtual Field Trips
      • Virtual Field Trips Request Form
    • Traveling Trunks & Reservations
      • Reserve a Trunk
      • From Barter to Budget, Financial Literacy in Tennessee
      • The Life and Times of the First Tennesseans
      • Daily Life on the Tennessee Frontier
      • Cherokee in Tennessee: Their Life, Culture, and Removal
      • The Age of Jackson and Tennessee’s Legendary Leaders
      • The Life of a Civil War Soldier
      • The Three Rs of Reconstruction: Rights, Restrictions and Resistance.
      • The Lives of Three Tennessee Slaves and Their Journey Towards Freedom
      • Understanding Women's Suffrage: Tennessee's Perfect 36
      • Transforming America: Tennessee on the World War II Homefront
      • The Modern Movement for Civil Rights in Tennessee
      • Tennessee: Its Land & People
    • Professional Development
    • Tennessee4Me
  • Programs & Events
    • Calendar of Events
    • Videos
    • TN Writers | TN Stories
    • Passport to Tennessee History
    • Newsletter Signup
  • TSM Kids
    • Kids Home
    • Junior Curators Blog
    • Storytime
    • Color Our Collection
    • Jigsaw Puzzles
    • Girl Scout Patch
  • Donate
  • Blogs and More
    • Thousands of Stories
    • Your Story Our Story
    • Junior Curators
    • Quarterly Newsletters
  • Plan Your Visit
  • Donate
  • Events
  • Search
TN State Museum logo Tn State Museum mark
  • Visit
    • Plan Your Visit
    • Dining Options
    • Military Branch
    • State Capitol
    • Tennessee Residence
    • Green McAdoo Cultural Center
    • Accessibility
    • Museum Store
    • About Us
      • History and Mission Statement
      • Museum Management
      • Douglas Henry State Museum Commission
      • Contact
    • Resources
  • Home
  • Exhibitions
    • Collections
      • Search Our Collection
      • Collection Scope
    • Permanent Exhibitions
      • Tennessee Time Tunnel
      • Natural History
      • First Peoples
      • Forging a Nation
      • The Civil War and Reconstruction
      • Change and Challenge
      • Tennessee Transforms
    • Temporary Exhibitions
      • Painting the Smokies
      • Tennessee at 225
      • STARS: Elementary Art Exhibition 2022
      • Early Expressions: Art in Tennessee Before 1900
      • In Search of the New: Art in Tennessee Since 1900
      • Why Do Museums Collect
    • Online Exhibitions
      • Tennessee at 225
      • Ratified! Statewide!
      • Canvassing Tennessee: Artists and Their Environments
    • Past Exhibitions
      • Best of Tennessee Craft
      • Ratified! Tennessee Women and the Right to Vote
      • Tennessee and the Great War: A Centennial Exhibition
      • Cordell Hull: Tennessee's Father of the United Nations
      • Lets Eat! Origins and Evolutions of Tennessee Food
      • The State of Sound: Tennessee’s Musical Heritage
      • Red Grooms: A Retrospective
      • Between The Layers: Art and Story in Tennessee Quilts
    • Children's Gallery
  • Education
    • Field Trips
      • On-Site Field Trips
      • On-Site Field Trip Request Form
      • Virtual Field Trips
      • Virtual Field Trips Request Form
    • Traveling Trunks & Reservations
      • Reserve a Trunk
      • From Barter to Budget, Financial Literacy in Tennessee
      • The Life and Times of the First Tennesseans
      • Daily Life on the Tennessee Frontier
      • Cherokee in Tennessee: Their Life, Culture, and Removal
      • The Age of Jackson and Tennessee’s Legendary Leaders
      • The Life of a Civil War Soldier
      • The Three Rs of Reconstruction: Rights, Restrictions and Resistance.
      • The Lives of Three Tennessee Slaves and Their Journey Towards Freedom
      • Understanding Women's Suffrage: Tennessee's Perfect 36
      • Transforming America: Tennessee on the World War II Homefront
      • The Modern Movement for Civil Rights in Tennessee
      • Tennessee: Its Land & People
    • Professional Development
    • Tennessee4Me
  • Programs & Events
    • Calendar of Events
    • Videos
    • TN Writers | TN Stories
    • Passport to Tennessee History
    • Newsletter Signup
  • TSM Kids
    • Kids Home
    • Junior Curators Blog
    • Storytime
    • Color Our Collection
    • Jigsaw Puzzles
    • Girl Scout Patch
  • Donate
  • Blogs and More
    • Thousands of Stories
    • Your Story Our Story
    • Junior Curators
    • Quarterly Newsletters

Enter a search request and press enter. Press Esc or the X to close.

Close
Stories Header
Stories Header
1 Stories Header
  • Home
  • Blogs and More
  • Thousands of Stories

Sarah Polk: A Natural Politician When Women Couldn’t Vote

by Peggy Burch

As writer Peggy Burch points out below in her review of Amy S. Greenberg's biography of Sarah Polk, Lady First, Polk "expressed no interest in the history-making women’s-rights convention held in Seneca Falls the last year of her husband’s presidency." Nevertheless, Polk is highlighted in the Museum's upcoming exhibition, Ratified! Tennessee Women and the Right to Vote, scheduled to open on April 24, 2020. She appears in a section focused on Early Women's Political Activites. It's clear in Burch's review, and Greenberg's book, why that is. And as Museum curator, Miranda Fraley Rhodes, Ph.D, writes in the exhibition, "[Polk] expertly used contemporary ideas about a wife’s role as her husband’s helpmate to advance her husband’s political career and exert considerable power in her own right."   

Lady First by Amy S. Greenberg

By Peggy Burch
for Chapter16.org

Amy S. Greenberg’s intriguing theme in Lady First, her biography of Tennessee’s Sarah Childress Polk, is that the wife of President James K. Polk was a political force in the 1840s because she was so good at seeming not to be.

This powerful “First Lady who was a lady first” presented herself as merely a dutiful helpmate at a time when it was a compliment to call her “a sweet exemplification of lowliness,” as one magazine did. In reality, as Greenberg documents, Sarah was a proactive impresario of James’s political career, his “communications director” and most trusted adviser, and the manager of strategic salons, dinners, and friendships that helped her disagreeable husband flourish in Washington. “By 1848, Mrs. Polk had perfected the ability to hide her power in plain sight under the mantle of female deference,” Greenberg writes in a preface—a “model of conservative female power” that has been adapted to contemporary times by such figures as Nancy Reagan and Ivanka Trump.


Amy S. Greenberg


The author, who has written about Manifest Destiny and the Polk administration in other histories, including A Wicked War and Manifest Manhood, creates a vivid and absorbing picture of nineteenth-century domestic life among the well-to-do planter and political families of Middle Tennessee, and of Sarah’s time in the White House. The book is meticulously researched, but facts about, say, the forty sheep and three hundred pounds of ham that fed thousands at a Murfreesboro political picnic, or a single order of Paris dresses for First Lady Polk that cost today’s equivalent of $12,600, give the story ballast without interrupting its flow.

The Polks enjoyed a congenial, fluid lifestyle made possible only because of slave labor, as Greenberg regularly reminds us. Sarah Childress’s dowry—when she left her family’s cotton farm near Murfreesboro to marry James K. Polk of Columbia—included ten enslaved people. She and her brother worked behind-the-scenes to buy slaves for James’s Mississippi Delta plantation while he was president, and she became the owner of fifty-six enslaved workers there when James died.

While Greenberg confronts how readily the wealthy in cotton-growing states made such cruel compromises, Sarah Polk nevertheless emerges in Lady First as an admired public figure and a graceful manipulator of the political landscape she inhabited. She didn’t drink and banned dancing in the White House, and she was a strict observer of the Christian Sabbath, but she was fluent in the kind of conversation that made Washington dinners and social receptions work. Her tireless support as an informed hostess may have been the main source of oxygen for Polk’s career in Congress and the White House, for he had a “profound and sustained lack of humor,” according to Greenberg.


\

"Sarah Childress Polk" by George Dury, after a G.P.A. Healy portrait, 1850. From the Tennessee State Museum Collection, and part of the upcoming exhibition, Ratified! Tennessee Women and the Right to Vote.


Sarah was a natural politician in an era when women couldn’t even vote. After James left his seat in Congress to serve as governor of Tennessee, Supreme Court Justice John Catron wrote to Sarah: “I miss you more here than any person living, and profit more by your information in regard to most things.” Greenberg makes a case that the liveliest discourse during James’s presidency was probably conducted without him, among his wife and her political correspondents.

As an avatar of feminist power, the first lady wasn’t an easy fit. She was an Andrew Jackson Democrat who expressed no interest in the history-making women’s-rights convention held in Seneca Falls the last year of her husband’s presidency, but she had this confident response to the speculation that Henry Clay’s wife would make a better first lady because she was good at housekeeping and butter-making: “If I should be so fortunate as to reach the White House, I expect to live on twenty-five thousand a year, and I will neither keep house nor make butter.”


Sarah Polk Morning Dress

Sarah Polk's blue silk morning dress, on display in Museum's Forging a Nation exhibition, On loan from the James K. Polk Ancestral Home Collection.


The Polks’ determination—and it was a joint project, Greenberg asserts—to extend the United States into the Republic of Texas and the Oregon Territory ensured James’s presidential election in 1844, and 800,000 square miles were added to the U.S. during his time in office. The march westward, glorified by the term “Manifest Destiny,” made the slave-holding Polks even richer; the value of their human property shot up after the war with Mexico sealed the U.S. land grab. While James maintained through friends that he purchased slaves only to keep families together, “his purchases were of a sort that would particularly horrify the public” if they had been revealed, Greenberg writes.

James died in 1849, the year after his term as president ended, and Sarah remained an object of public affection through her forty years of widowhood. She weathered the chaos of Union-occupied Nashville during the Civil War, keeping house at the (now razed) Polk Place within sight of the state capitol, negotiating pardons for family and friends and favors for herself from Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. It was her skillful deployment of deference to men that gave her power, Greenberg writes, and this biography lifts Sarah Polk from the obscurity to which her deference had consigned her.

For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.


Peggy Burch was books editor at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis for ten years, and she also worked as a deputy metro editor and Arts & Entertainment editor for the newspaper. She is a graduate of the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and holds a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Mississippi.


For more artifacts connected to Sarah and James K. Polk, see additional images in our Forging a Nation gallery.

For more about Sarah and James K. Polk, visit the James K. Polk Home in Columbia, Tenn.

Posted by Joseph Pagetta at 10:30
Women's History
  • « Artifacts Tell the Story of Pat Summitt’s Early Tennessee Life
  • Eliza Johnson: The Forgotten First Lady from Tennessee »

TN State Museum logo
Resources
  • About Us
  • Press Room
  • Title VI
  • Venue Rental
  • Jobs
  • Public Records Policy
  • Museum and Copyright Policies
  • Douglas Henry State Museum Commission
  • Public Meetings
  • Social Media Guidelines
  • Contact
Contact

Bill Haslam Center
1000 Rosa L. Parks Blvd
Nashville, TN 37208

(615) 741-2692

(800) 407-4324

info@tnmuseum.org

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Trip Advisor
Tennessee State Museum © 2022 Memphis Web Design by Speak