James K. Polk and His Time: Essays at the Conclusion of the Polk Project ed. by Michael David Cohen (review)

Reviewed by: James K. Polk and His Time: Essays at the Conclusion of the Polk Project ed. by Michael David Cohen Jonathan M. Atkins James K. Polk and His Time: Essays at the Conclusion of the Polk Project. Edited by Michael David Cohen. ( Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2022. Pp. xvi, 384. $69.00, ISBN 978-1-6219-0733-6.) Like many nineteenth-century politicians, James K. Polk saved most of his public and private correspondence, including copies of letters that he wrote. By the time of his unexpected death in June 1849, Polk had amassed a collection that contained thousands of items. In 2019, more than sixty years after Vanderbilt University professor Herbert Weaver initiated the Polk Project, the University of Tennessee Press published the fourteenth and final volume of Correspondence of James K. Polk, an annotated edition of these letters making them easily available for research. To honor the completion of the series, a conference at the East Tennessee Historical Society held in April 2019 brought together "scholars and community members to discuss Polk and to recognize the impact" of the Correspondence (p. xii). James K. Polk and His Time: Essays at the Conclusion of the Polk Project presents revised and expanded versions of twelve out of the twenty-five papers presented at that conference. [End Page 559] Michael David Cohen, the Polk Project's final lead editor, likewise edited this collection. He has organized the essays in three parts. The first, "Polk Families, White and Black," focuses on the Polks' impact on nineteenth-century southern society. The collection opens with a careful genealogical excursion by John F. Polk that corrects some commonly held misunderstandings about James K. Polk's ancestry. Lucas P. Kelley argues that the Polk family's early investments in land speculation foreshadowed President Polk's commitment to manifest destiny, seen both in the dispossession of Native Americans and in the expansion of slavery. Zacharie W. Kinslow provides an account of the life of Elias Polk, a trusted Polk slave who, after the Civil War, became a popular Black spokesman for "the traditional southern way of life" (p. 98). Elias learned early that "Southern culture centered on the idea of deference," Kinslow asserts (p. 84). Because emancipation offered few opportunities for an elderly illiterate Black man, Kinslow argues, Elias embarked on his controversial public speaking career in order to survive, telling white southerners what they wanted to hear while subtly working to subvert white supremacy. Kelly Houston Jones contends that James Polk's letters provide a relatively rare "window into the history of absentee ownership" in the antebellum South (p. 61). Stressing the important role of Polk's kinship network in the management of his Mississippi plantation, Jones highlights his response to slave resistance, his concern for his political image as a slave owner, and Sarah Polk's competent management of the estate after her husband's death. The second section's essays address aspects of Polk's political career with a focus on the "individual connections and ideological beliefs that shaped Polk before he became president" (pp. xiii–xiv). Historians well know that Polk promoted Martin Van Buren's presidential aspirations with the hope of becoming vice president himself. In his review of their "ruptured" relationship, Mark R. Cheathem reminds readers that, throughout their politically convenient alliance, the two men "never became close friends," making it easy for Polk to "push Van Buren aside" when he unexpectedly received the Democratic nomination in 1844 (pp. 112, 119). The duo split permanently after Polk took office and found other political demands more important than satisfying Van Buren's patronage expectations. Thomas Coens, in contrast, presents a Polk "motivated primarily by heartfelt principle" (p. 157). As a young congressman, Polk's 1833 minority report from the House Ways and Means Committee provided Andrew Jackson with the charges the president needed to justify withdrawing federal deposits from the Bank of the United States, in the process shifting the focus of the "Bank War" from the institution's constitutionality and potential insolvency to its supposedly corrupt and dishonest leadership. If he had been motivated by expediency, Coens concludes, Polk would have supported the Bank, for that stance offered him...