What I Learned from Writing Who Is James K. Polk?

People sometimes ask me what new things I learned from writing a book. Early in my career, my answers were long, so much so that I came to recognize the glazed-over eyes that were my sign to wrap things up.

As a senior scholar (still a label I am finding hard to accept!), I’m still surprised at what I learn from writing about Jacksonian-era politics.

Who Is James K. Polk provided me with a few such moments. Here are three:

1. James G. Birney’s transformation from an enslaver to an abolitionist. I knew the general outline of Birney’s story, but I didn’t realize how significant his about-face was. He went from being a run-of-the-mill enslaver on a traditional path to becoming the two-time presidential candidate of the antislavery Liberty Party. Birney’s change of heart came from a religious conversion following years of turmoil, including the death of his 17-month-old daughter Margaret. As Birney later recalled, he “was rapidly pursuing the road to Hell.” His first wife Agatha was a devout Presbyterian, and her influence convinced him to attend church services and embrace Christianity in 1826. From that conversion came his gradual movement into the colonization movement and then into abolitionism. By 1840, Birney was a presidential nominee fighting the continuance of slavery.
2. John Tyler’s unpopularity. I knew Whig leaders kicked Tyler out of their party and that prominent Democrats wanted nothing to do with him. I was not prepared to find the level of hatred coming from regular Americans, however. In his first six months in office, they were burning him in effigy, hanging him, blowing him up, threatening to assassinate him. A drunken mob even marched to the White House one night, raising such a ruckus that one of Tyler’s daughters thought they were going to kill him. If public opinion polls existed in 1841, Tyler might have been in single digits!
3. The vibrancy of cultural politics. I knew from writing The Coming of Democracy that voter engagement with presidential politics via cultural politics increased significantly between 1824 and 1840. I thought that cultural politics might have tailed off until after the Civil War, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that political cartoons, political songs, political objects, etc., continued to play a significant role in driving voter interest. (The image accompanying this post, “Presidential Sweepstakes,” is one of my favorite political cartoons of the 1844 campaign.)