James K. Polk, the 11th President of the United States, is probably best known for increasing the size of the country by more than a third. This territorial expansion pushed the US border to the West Coast, precipitating a heated national debate over whether to extend slavery to even more territory. Yet as whites in the North in particular grew increasingly uncomfortable with the expansion of slavery, Polk sought to minimize his personal investment in the institution.
Specifically, he covered up his purchase of enslaved children and young adults, whom he sent to work on his Mississippi cotton plantation while living in the White House.
Of the 19 slaves Polk purchased during his presidential term (1845–1849), at least 13 were children, writes Lina Mann, a historian at the White House Historical Association. The youngest was a 10 year old boy named Jerry. Polk kept his slave trade a secret by ordering surrogates to buy enslaved children and young adults on his behalf and then quietly transfer them to him, according to Mann. He then sent them to work on his Mississippi plantation, which he bought as part of the land scramble that occurred after the Indian Withdrawal Act of 1830 violently expelled the Choctaw Nation and d other indigenous nations from their ancestral lands.
READ MORE: How the westward expansion breathed new life into slavery
In public, Polk played the role of a ‘benevolent’ slave owner
Polk’s secret was not an attempt to cover up something he was ashamed of. Polk believed that movable property slavery in the United States was morally correct, and there is no indication that he thought the purchase of children – a cruel but common practice during the days of slavery – was a fault. Nor was it an attempt to cover up the fact that he owned slaves. It was a well-known fact when he ran for president with the Democratic Party ticket in 1844; and when he took office he brought slaves with him to the White House. Polk was one of at least a dozen American Presidents who owned slaves, eight of whom had served before him.
Instead, the reason for its secrecy was likely related to changing opinions among whites in the North about the morality of breaking up enslaved families. In an 1846 letter, Polk wrote that if the public found out about his purchases of children and young adults, “it would subject me needlessly to newspaper assaults on abolition.” Furthermore, it would contradict some of the claims of his campaign.
READ MORE: Slaved couples faced heartbreaking separations or even chose family over freedom
“By the time you get to James K. Polk, slave owners say slavery is actually this really great system because slave owners really care about their slaves,” Amy S. Greenberg says, professor of history at Pennsylvania State University and author of A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the American Invasion of Mexico in 1846.
“It is becoming common for national politicians, if they own slaves, to say, ‘Well, I own slaves, but that’s only because I inherited them’; or “I own slaves because they are part of my wife’s dowry, but I would never buy or sell slaves unless that is what the slaves want,” she said. “And when Polk runs for president, that’s what all of his deputies do on the campaign trail. They say, ‘Oh, James K. Polk never bought or sold a slave except to keep families together.’ “
READ MORE: How Many US Presidents Owned Slaves?
He wanted them “young and efficient” – and cheap
If the public knew that Polk was buying enslaved children, they would know it had never been true. “He described in a letter to his cousin [that] he preferred “young and efficient” slaves, ”says Michael David Cohen, American University research professor and former editor of the James K. Polk Project at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
“He wanted them, younger ones, because… they’d be around for a long time to get his money’s worth,” he says. “And also in the case of the girls, they would have a whole lifetime in which they could give birth to additional slaves because any child born to a person he owned was also considered his property.” Basically, Cohen says, Polk viewed his Mississippi plantation and the slaves who worked there as a retirement plan for him and his wife, Sarah Childress Polk.
Buying enslaved children was cheaper than buying enslaved adults, so Polk may have seen buying children as a way to increase his profit margin on his plantation. Greenberg notes that the prevalence of diseases like malaria in Mississippi, combined with the brutality of slavery, meant the death rate was quite high. About 46 percent of children enslaved in the pre-war south died before the age of 15; and on the Polk plantation, this figure was “at least 51 percent, probably even higher,” writes historian William Dusinberre in Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk.
Polk died months after his presidency ended, and his wife – who had helped orchestrate his secret slave trade – continued to enslave the people he bought during his presidency. When the Civil War began two decades later, black men from the plantation escaped to join the Union Army. As soldiers, they fought to end the brutal system that their former owner – a President of the United States – worked so hard to preserve, even as he tried to hide the true scale of his investment.
READ MORE: The massive and neglected role of female slave owners
