Essay on James Polk Biography is published for informational purposes only. The free papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a quality Essay on Essay on James Polk Biography at affordable prices please use our essay writing services offered by EssayEmpire.

James Knox Polk--congressional representative, governor of Tennessee, and eleventh president of the United States--was born in 1795 in North Carolina. During his youth, he suffered from poor health, so his formal education did not begin until he was well into his teenage years. Nevertheless, his academic achievements were such that he was given advanced placement at the University of North Carolina. There he joined the Dialectic Society, a debating group, giving him experience in public speaking. He turned his oratorical skills to good use in 1819, when his exquisitely worded arguments helped him win election as the clerk of the Tennessee state senate. Then, in 1824, Polk was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, an office he held for fourteen years, culminating with four years as Speaker of the House from 1835 to 1839. During these years he was a Jacksonian Democrat and a firm advocate of states' rights. When the Democratic Party in Tennessee asked him to run for governor in 1839, he did so, and he won by arguing for states' rights. Nationally, though, the Democratic Party was in decline, so when he ran for reelection in 1841 and again in 1843, he fell victim to that decline and lost. His political career seemed to be at an end.

By 1844 Polk was a wealthy man. He had built on his father's land speculations and expanded his family's holdings in property, including slaves. His thinking about slavery and its place in American life was complex and at times seemingly contradictory. On the one hand, as president he opposed the Wilmot Proviso, which would have outlawed slavery in all the new territories west of Texas, because he believed the proviso was unnecessarily inflammatory. It was his view that the climate in lands west of Texas would make slavery impractical. Therefore, it would never take hold in any of the new additions to the United States. On the other hand, he proposed extension of the Missouri Compromise, which would have outlawed slavery above the 36œ30' line west of Missouri but permitted it below the line. Such an extension would have given Texas and the Southwest the option of becoming slave states if they so wished.

Polk won the presidential election partly because he favored annexation of Texas. His election gave the outgoing president, John Tyler, the justification he needed to push the annexation of Texas through Congress during the last weeks of his administration. This left Polk with four objectives for his own administration: settle the dispute with Great Britain over the Oregon Territory; acquire California from Mexico; reduce protective tariffs to produce just enough revenues to pay for the federal government, making foreign goods more affordable to most Americans; and establish a national treasury for holding government funds rather than putting the people's money in private banks, which had led to corruption. He raised these issues in his inaugural address and farewell address, and war with Mexico was the topic of his 1846 message to Congress Polk was an independent thinker, which made him a maverick even in his own party. For instance, his ideas on states' rights evolved during his presidency and differed from those of many other states' rights advocates, to the point where Polk regarded states' rights as a matter of secondary importance. While others held that the states were the most important protectors of the rights of minorities, Polk believed that it was the federal government--not states--that was the protector of minority rights, even of people who were minorities within a given state. Furthermore, many politicians in slave states, taking an extreme view of states' rights, believed that any state had the right to secede from the Union if its rights seemed to be denied by a majority of other states. Polk rejected this view, believing that no state had the right to secede once it was part of the Union. In his major writings, Polk repeatedly insisted that the federal government represented the will of the people, even to the point of outlawing slavery. Even so, he was a master of political compromise. His presidential documents are carefully phrased to allow most sides of a dispute to believe their desires had been satisfied.

Polk was also a leader who knew how to maneuver other political leaders into doing what he wanted. His 1846 message to Congress about war against Mexico and his 1848 annual message to Congress both show how his thinking led him to the conclusion that the presidency had to be equal in power to Congress because the president was elected by a vote of all American citizens. Therefore, the president was the only figure who could speak to the needs and desires of all Americans. In these documents, he shifts the balance of power between Congress and the president, giving the president control over the military as well as the prosecution of a war and making Congress more of an adviser to the president in military matters than the controller of military affairs. He did this by making anyone in Congress who opposed him appear to be unpatriotic. In the process, he advocated a view of the United States as an expansionist power that should help the peoples of the world to become free. In Polk's view, the United States should be an advocate of democracy for all peoples.

References:

1. Bergeron, Paul H. The Presidency of James K. Polk. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987.

2. Borneman, Walter R. Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America. New York: Random House, 2008.

3. Haynes, Sam W. James K. Polk and the Expansionist Impulse. New York: Longman, 1997.

4. Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

5. Leonard, Thomas M. James K. Polk: A Clear and Unquestionable Destiny. Wilmington, Del.: S. R. Books, 2001.

6. McCormac, Eugene Irving. James K. Polk: A Political Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1922.

7. McCoy, Charles A. Polk and the Presidency. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1960.

8. Seigenthaler, John. James K. Polk. New York: Times Books, 2004.

Free essays are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can order a term paper, research paper or custom TOPIC at our site which offers professional essay writing services. Get your high quality custom paper at relatively cheap prices. EssayEmpire is the best solution for those who seek help in essay writing related to TOPIC and other relevant topics.