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Several instances of relatively benevolent conduct toward slaves, directed usually toward a house servant, a skilled artisan, a “family slave,” or a mixed-race person, can be discovered in the Polk family records. White women sometimes pressed their husbands or their sons to act more benevolently than they would otherwise have done. But expressions of genuine feeling for a black person were exceedingly rare, and the actions of the Polk men (and some of the women) were normally governed by self-interest — sometimes dressed in beguilingly paternalist language. The Polk family records lend little support to the view that the men in this family acted largely in consonance with the paternalist code that was supposed to govern their conduct.

During a nineteen-year period after Beanland had finally been dismissed, more than half of the adult men at the plantation (at least thirteen out of 25 adult males) fled at least once. These fugitives fled, on average, on more than three separate occasions. Thus, the total number of flights was at least forty during the same period. Occasionally a fugitive voluntarily turned himself in to a well-disposed white man who he hoped would protect him from a brutal overseer. Flight was dangerous — one fugitive received buck shot in his thigh when he returned at night to fetch clothes for a comrade; sleeping out in the woods led more than once to serious illness. Recapture was normally punished by a severe whipping. Flight never, apparently, led to permanent escape. Yet it was the principal safety valve that gave Polk's slaves a vent for their discontent.

Polk was caught up in the expansive, entrepreneurial ethic of the cotton frontier, and his principal impulses as a slavemaster were acquisitive rather than paternalist. He sought, successfully, to keep his purchases of slaves after the presidential election of 1844 completely secret. Polk and his wife had inherited thirteen “family slaves” and they bought others from members of his family. But by 1844, Polk had already purchased fourteen other slaves from strangers, nearly always to secure labor for his undeveloped cotton land. Between the election of 1844 and his death in 1849, Polk secretly bought nineteen more slaves. Thirteen of these were children between the ages of ten and seventeen, who were separated from their parents.

Polk was a product of the entrepreneurial, fast-developing society of middle Tennessee. His father, Sam Polk, his father's cousin Colonel William Polk, and James Polk's brother-in-law James Walker were all hard-headed businessmen, who combined land speculation and other business enterprises with the ownership of slave plantations. They managed their plantations with the same keen eye for maximizing the return on their capital investments in land, enslaved labor, and equipment that they employed in their other business enterprises. The slave-labor system of this society was vastly different from the wage-labor system of the North, but in other respects the entrepreneurial ethos and the productive system were so similar that the South's might well be denominated a “semi-capitalist slave society”.

Like slaves elsewhere, Polk's bondpeople established as strong family and community lives as was feasible. But the strength of their family institutions was weakened by the prevalence of “abroad” marriages; by the discontent that impelled many married males to flee the plantation; and by the influx of newly purchased slaves, usually cut away from all of their previous family links. Fifteen years after the plantation had been established, the strength of community life also remained attenuated because many of the bondpeople had been only very recently purchased. By 1860, fewer than half of the twenty-one slaves originally deported to the plantation in 1835 were still there: eight had already died, and four more had been sent away, leaving only nine slaves from the original group to carry on a sense of community.

Polk had established a small cotton plantation in West Tennessee for three years, before selling up in 1834 and moving on to new cotton land in Mississippi. He had been inexperienced at plantation management and was uncertain about how best to impose discipline on his slaves. He depended on an overseer, Ephraim Beanland, whom Polk's brothers-in-law came to regard as a brutal tyrant, and who drove, within an eleven-week period, five of Polk's nine adult male laborers into temporary flight. While attempting permanent escape Chunky Jack hit the pursuing Beanland with a stick, whereupon Beanland stabbed him twice. Five months later Chunky Jack escaped for the second time to the Arkansas territory, but was recaptured and sold. When Polk transferred his plantation operations to Mississippi he felt he must impose strict discipline, and reappointed Beanland to manage the new plantation.

As early as 1844, Polk extended to his plantation slaves the unusual privilege of raising some cotton of their own, by voluntarily working during their free time, especially on Sundays. This put an average of just over $6 into the pocket of each overtime worker. The sums were minuscule compared to Polk's own plantation revenues, but the scheme seems for some time to have allayed the slaves' discontent. For several years before 1848, Polk extended to Blacksmith Harry (his most privileged slave) the extraordinary favor of allowing Harry annually to find his own employer, so that he could live near his wife and children, some thirty miles south of the plantation. Harry's satisfaction with this arrangement led him into remarkable demonstrations of fealty to his master. These grants of privilege, however, did not alter the fundamental inhumanity of the slave system for the great mass of Polk's bondpeople.

Polk's purpose in securing the speedy annexation of Texas had been to expand plantation slavery into that vast domain. But this was not his aim in provoking war with Mexico; instead, Polk's principal purpose was continentalist — to expand the American empire — an aim he shared with many Northerners. Nevertheless, the Mexican War was as dangerous to the American Union as if slavery expansion had been the president's purpose. This was because Polk believed that the federal government must recognize Southern rights to extend slavery at least south of the Missouri Compromise line, even if it should prove impracticable to establish slavery very vigorously anywhere in the arid Southwest. Polk felt slavery could not be secure in the Southern states unless the right to take slaves into some of those territories were to receive federal recognition.

The spirit that infused the antebellum slave system was vigorously entrepreneurial. Although Polk inherited some of his slaves, he bought most of them from strangers to improve his own financial prospects. Polk's long struggle from 1831 into the 1840s to make a financial success of his plantation enterprise, and to impose order on his often unruly bondpeople, colored his stance on slavery-related political issues. When in 1846 he provoked the Mexican War, President Polk's concerns were not to extend slavery beyond Texas; but he sought to make slavery secure in the states (including Texas) where it already existed. However, he had persuaded himself — in what may have been a disastrous miscalculation — that slavery could not be secure in the Southern states unless the North gave substantial recognition to slavemasters' rights in the western territories too.

The health of Polk's slaves was poor. Child mortality at this plantation, up to the age of fifteen, was at least 51 percent: thus even greater than the norm for other Southern slaves. Of the twenty-one young adult women at the plantation (1835 to 1849), at least one-third died by the age of forty, usually during their twenties. The mortality rate of young adult males — 21 percent — though not so bad as for females, was also grim. The low-lying plantation land may have been unusually unhealthy; and the fact that Polk was an absentee planter meant that he was not regularly present to curb overseers' propensity to push slaves too hard.

Although during the 1840s James Polk cultivated the image of a Southern moderate on the slavery question, his early career contradicted this impression. In 1832 he had provoked a furious debate in the U.S. House of Representatives, aimed at discouraging any criticism there of slavery, which foreshadowed later debates over the “gag rule.” In October 1839, as governor of Tennessee, he publicly adopted the Calhounite view that it would be unconstitutional for the federal government to take any antislavery action, even in the District of Columbia or in the federal territories. Both publicly and behind the scenes, Polk promoted the view that disunionism would be an inevitable consequence of the enactment of the (allegedly) abolitionist-tainted slavery policies of the Whig Party. Polk acted from political conviction, but also in accordance with his own economic interest, as he doubled his Mississippi plantation investment during the twelve months before October 1839.

Polk's grandfather Ezekiel, his father, Sam, and the president himself had all established slave plantations on the westward-moving frontier; and the expansion of plantation slavery into Texas held deep personal meaning for the president. Polk had always felt a need to prove himself, and the early humiliations he had experienced in governing his slaves may have contributed to the belligerence of the diplomatic and military policies through which he demonstrated his determination to show the Mexicans who was in control. By whipping a war resolution through the House of Representatives against the wishes of 35 percent of its members, President Polk planted the seeds of a towering political conflict over the aims of the war with Mexico: was slavery to be legalized in the territory west of Texas that Polk wished to seize?

One Massachusetts Whig lamented after Henry Clay's shocking defeat. His despair about the party's continued viability was widely shared. Many historians have accepted these Whig obituary notices as correct, if slightly premature. They have interpreted the reasons for Clay's loss as auguries of the Whig party's eventual death and as the beginning of that end. Supposedly, President James K. Polk's policies would greatly inflame tensions over slavery expansion and thus split the Whigs along sectional lines. Allegedly, Clay's defeat had also shown that the Whigs' economic platform was not popular enough either to bring them victory at the presidential election or to divert public attention from the fatal sectional issues. The appeal of Whig economic issues purportedly continued to deteriorate after 1844, thereby exposing the feebleness of Whig ideas and destroying the fealty voters paid the two-party system.

Polk's plantation enterprise was a risky business. The first years of his Mississippi venture were discouraging, and Polk considered selling out in 1838. But he ended up by buying out his business partner, thus greatly increasing his investment in plantation land and slaves. Although he wavered again in 1843, he continued buying additional slaves when he felt he could afford it. By persisting in the face of difficulties, Polk established a splendid (from his own point of view) source of income for himself and later for his widow, the average annual profit rate of which was virtually 11 percent during the thirteen years from 1845 to 1857. This was much higher than the 6 percent return he received from investing some of his presidential salary into U.S. Treasury certificates.

This chapter pairs President Polk's entry into the Mexican War with President Roosevelt's movement toward World War II. Using the relational conception, it argues that while both Polk and Roosevelt behaved independently and made good use of the distinctive capacities of the executive branch, Roosevelt's behavior was more deeply relational in that it was more subject to legislative rebuff. Roosevelt's constitutional authority was also buttressed by a defensive security necessity. After World War II, repelling troops at the border was transparently revealed as an inadequate standard for judging whether a president was using the office's war powers “defensively.” Confronted with this transparent destabilization of the category of “defensive,” the United States embarked on a project of global institution building to reduce its vulnerabilities.

The South's response to the growth of an antislavery movement in the North proved disastrous to Southern white people. James Polk — the most powerful Southern politician in the late 1840s — imposed his will upon Mexicans and upon the Whig Party, but he failed to develop alternatives to the self-destructive tendencies of Southern Democrats. Instead of acknowledging that most Northern antislavery leaders respected the constitutional right of each Southern state to reach its own decisions about the future of slavery, Polk smeared every such leader with the “abolitionist” label. Instead of resolutely opposing Southern disunionism, he declared that disunionism was the natural response to the growth of an antislavery movement. The ultimate triumph of a secessionist policy arguably owed much to the suicidal policies pursued by influential Southern Democrats like James Polk.

The self-destruction of the slave system from 1860 to 1865 cannot be attributed primarily to an eccentric group of South Carolina extremists. The real responsibility for secession was widespread throughout the Deep South and the middle South, and it fell most heavily on Democratic Party leaders such as James Polk and his successors. Their ideology — an expanded version of states' rights, plus unconstrained economic individualism — meshed perfectly with the short-term interests of slavemasters and would-be slavemasters. But Polk and his Southern Democratic colleagues (aided by many of their Northern Democratic allies) did nothing at all to open the eyes of the electorate to the long-term interests of Southern whites. Secession was on the cards from the moment Polk launched his war against Mexico in May 1846. The language of key addresses by President Polk suggested that, when the crunch finally came, nearly the whole Southern Democratic Party would follow South Carolina into secession.

The Civil War era posed profound challenges to the six presidents. There is widespread agreement that Abraham Lincoln met that test in a superlative manner while Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan responded to it abysmally. It is also widely held that Millard Fillmore's performance was pedestrian and James K. Polk's was unusually effective. This chapter reviews the way each of these protagonists rose, or failed to rise, to the challenges of his times. It then explores the ways in which the leadership criteria employed in this book figured in the period under consideration. It concludes by discussing a pair of theoretical issues implicit in Allan Nevins' assertion in the epigraph to this chapter that if the nation had “possessed three farseeing, imaginative, and resolute” chief executives “instead of Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, the [Civil] War might have been postponed.”