 Good afternoon. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and it's a pleasure to welcome you to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. Whether you're here in person, in our theater, or participating through our Facebook or YouTube channels, I'm pleased that you could join us. Before we get started, I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up on Wednesday, February 27th. At noon, we'll host the National Book Launch of Joseph P. Reedy's new book, Illusions of Emancipation, The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery. And at 7 p.m. that evening, we'll show the PBS Nova documentary Addiction. The film examines how easy access to drugs, both illegal prescription and prescription medications, has fueled an epidemic of addiction. After the screening, a panel of experts will discuss ways to address the drug problem. Check our website, archives.gov, or sign up at the table outside the theater to get email updates. You'll also find information about other National Archives programs and exhibits. And another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports all of our education and outreach activities. In a recent review of Lady First, the World of First Lady Sarah Polk, written for the Wall Street Journal, Walter R. Borneman declared that Ms. Greenberg does an admiral job of analyzing various letters to and from Sarah Polk. The collection and publication of James K. Polk's correspondence at the University of Tennessee has long been supported by the National Archives Publications and Records Commission, a component of the National Archives here. NHPRC grants help preserve records, collections across the country so they may be accessible to as many people as possible. In fact, we are going to be celebrating, Amy and I, celebrating the Polk Papers Project in Knoxville in April with a two-day symposium sponsored by our friends at the University of Tennessee. The National Archives and Records Administration also operates the Presidential Libraries, which contain the records of Presidents Hoover through Obama. These records document the lives of not only those Presidents but also the First Ladies. Whether these women were in the White House during our lifetimes or were active nearly a century ago, the libraries and their museums keep the legacies in the public eye. The First Ladies, before Hoover and Roosevelt, however, are not so familiar. And that's why we're pleased to have Amy Greenberg tell us about Sarah Childress Polk. Mrs. Polk was a successful White House hostess, like other 19th century First Ladies, but she was also an influential political helpmate of her husband, President James K. Polk. If you're interested in women's history, we will open a new exhibit on May 10th called Rightfully Hers, American Women and the Vote. Located in the O'Brien Gallery upstairs, the exhibit will honor the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which extended the right to vote to women and tells the story and our exhibit will tell the story of the suffrage movement across race, ethnicity and class. Throughout this year and next, look for more National Archives programs relating to women and the centennial of women's suffrage. And I would like to bring Amy Greenberg, author of First Lady, up to the stage. She is the Edwin Earl Sparks Professor of History and Women's Studies at Penn State University, where she has taught since 1995. She is the author of four books, including A Wicked War, Polk, Clay Lincoln and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico, which received awards from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Western History Association, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received major fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society, among others. Penn State University gave her the George Atherton Award for Teaching, and Amy was named a top young historian by History News Network. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Amy Greenberg. Thank you, David. You know, as a historian, I can't tell you guys what a pleasure it is to be speaking at the National Archives. For American historians, this is really the holy grail, you know, the place where all of the best stuff is stored. And so it's really a treat to be here. So thank you for coming. When you guys think about powerful political women in the 19th century, who do you think of? I am going to guess it's one or perhaps more of these three ladies here. Now, some of you may recognize this statue from the rotunda of the Capitol Building. We have from the left, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony. And the reason that these three women are enshrined in the Capitol Building is because they were the mothers of women's suffrage. They were the women who the first two gathered with other reformers at Seneca Falls in order to first promote women's rights. And later went on to write about it and to sort of enshrine a story of women's rights as starting with this effort to vote. And it's a great story and it's one that we're all going to be celebrating starting in May here with the display on women voting and next year with the centennial of women actually winning the right to vote. But it's not the entire story of women's political power in the 19th century. And so what my book here or here offers is an alternative narrative or sort of you could say a pre narrative to the story of women's rights. This is the story of rights that women didn't have, but women used to exercise political power anyways. So in other words, what I'm going to talk about today is powerful political women who not only didn't have the right to vote, they didn't want to have the right to vote, they didn't need to have the right to vote because their political power stemmed from something other than being able to vote. And the prime example of this is my biographical subject, First Lady Sarah Childress Polk. So let me tell you a little bit about Sarah Polk. How she became what I believe to be the 19th century's most powerful woman. A role that the role she played in Polk's foreign policy. And finally, I'd like to make some suggestions about why she was able to accrue and exercise political power in a period when women were expected to be submissive. And I love this portrait. This is a print that Nathaniel Currier made of her when she was First Lady that I think shows her sort of gravitas at the time when she was First Lady. Okay. Sarah Childress was born in 1803 in Murphysboro, Tennessee. And were it not for her marriage to James K. Polk when she was 20 and he was 28, no one would know her name. She would have faded into obscurity like all the 19th century women whose identities were subsumed into their husbands upon marriage and who devoted their lives to their families. According to rumor, it was Andrew Jackson who first encouraged James K. Polk then a young court legislator to court the teenage Sarah Childress. Polk had gone to school with Sarah's brother Anderson. Had met and admired Sarah. But he probably didn't need any advice to court her. She was what would have been considered a catch for any young man in central Tennessee at the time. She was rich. She was charming. And she was extremely well connected, so well connected that she called Andrew Jackson, Uncle Andrew. It probably also was a comfort to James that he and Sarah hailed from remarkably similar backgrounds. The children's like the Polk's were slave owning presbyterians at the very pinnacle of Western society. Sarah's father was a wealthy land speculator who recognized and encouraged his oldest daughter's unusual intelligence. Sarah attended the exclusive Salem women's academy in North Carolina, which was the very finest school open to women in the time period. And like her future husband, she excelled academically. The couple married at her parents' house near Murphysboro in Tennessee on New Year's Day in 1824. Let me come back to that. Now after her marriage, Sarah, James, and at least three of the seven slaves that made up Sarah's inheritance and that she was part of her appeal as a bridal option, moved into a small cottage on the larger Polk property. Her mother-in-law did all the entertaining, which freed Sarah from a great deal of the normal responsibilities of a young wife, first assuming control of a household. In the normal course of events, Sarah would have been busy with the demands of motherhood, but it quickly became clear that they would not have any kids. And this is because James, when he was a teenager, underwent experimental surgery for bladder stones that left him unable to father a child. Now Sarah, Childress Polk, was in many ways a conventional antebellum Southern lady. She venerated her husband above all other men. She spent a lot of money on clothes. And she believed in her heart that God intended black men and women to live their lives in slavery. She was a strict Presbyterian of what was called the old school. She continued to believe that hierarchy was predestined, white above black, man above woman, while more evangelical sex began to question this received wisdom, asserting the equality of all men and women in God's eyes. As a slave holding Calvinist Presbyterian, she knew that having power meant the difference between life and death, and that God intended the powerful to guide the weak with a firm hand. As a slaveholder and as a woman, she was able to understand this dynamic in a particularly nuanced manner, and to appreciate the value of power more than some other people might. But in other ways, Sarah was decidedly atypical. She was childless in an era when childbearing and rearing defined a woman's life. And even before she got married, she delighted in party politics, not just the legislation and principles that impacted the lives of all Americans and inspired fierce partisanship by both Democrats and Whigs, but also the practice of party politics, the campaigning, the gossip, the coalition building, the elections that consumed the majority of a candidate's time. She came by it naturally. Her father and her brother had both been political, and sharing that passion with her had been one way in which they had treated her as special. The first two decades of her life coincided with a vast expansion of the vote among white men. Women still couldn't vote. African Americans in some cases lost the right to vote, but Andrew Jackson made it part of his policy that all white men, no matter how poor they should be, should be able to vote. So you see a vast expansion of the franchise among white men, and at the same time the creation of party politics, as we know them now. And this all led to average Americans realizing that politics could be a means to power, particularly on the slaveholding frontier, where state legislation could bespoke immense profits or Senate's one to complete failure. Now, Sarah was the perfect partner to James Polk, and as the years passed, they forged a union of remarkable strength. She fulfilled all the normal expectations for political wives. She was social where he was not and every solicitous of his fragile health. She fought a valiant battle to get him to eat and sleep on a regular basis, but theirs was far from a normal 19th century marriage. Because she was childless, she was able to throw herself into her husband's work. And far from being threatened by her strong opinions and political acumen, James embraced his wife's capabilities. In fact, one of the things I found most remarkable when I wrote this book was the extent to which James pushed Sarah into political work, demanding more and more of her time and stretching her efforts by asking her to do things that other women would never be expected to do in the political world. Early in their marriage, when Sarah would lobby James to put out the lamp and come to bed, Polk instead put her to work. Taking up a newspaper, he would quietly reply, Sarah, here's something I wish you to read, and so he set me to work too, she remembered. Soon she was analyzing political debates for him. She became a regular companion on his political excursions, one of the only wives who traveled with their politician husbands. He always wished me to go, she recalled, and he would say, why should you stay at home to take care of the house? Why, if the house burns down, we can live without it. Whether James's primary goal was preventing his wife from being lonely in their childless house or whether he needed her advice, she became his closest political advisor. And this suited her fine. Knowing much of political affairs, she found pleasure in the society of gentlemen, a good friend of hers remarked, rather than socializing with other wives, Sarah could be found with the men. She was always in the parlor with Mr. Polk, people remember. Now the reason that all of this is important is that with Sarah, I mean with James, Sarah is going to transform the United States from this, which is what the map of the United States looked like when the Polk first entered the White House, to this. So the continental United States, as we know it, is a product of the Polk presidency. And I'm going to tell you how that happened. Here's the first known picture of Sarah Polk painted when we think she was about 24. And James loved this picture, he thought it was the only portrait of her that captured her spirit. Okay, James liked to joke that had he remained a clerk in the legislature, Sarah would never have consented to marry him, but he probably wasn't that far off the mark. Before they got married, Sarah extracted a promise from James that he would run for Congress and he did soon after their marriage. Her sister-in-laws wrote her long letters full of details about babies. But not long after James entered Congress, James's political allies and her own brother were writing her equally lengthy letters about partisan battles. It may not have been clear to Sarah Polk in the late 1820s that she belonged to the world of men more than that of women and had more to contribute to the world of men, but it soon would. Now, congressmen almost never brought wives with them to Washington. Washington was a very difficult place to live comfortably in the 1820s. And so James, when he first got elected to Congress, he came for the first session one year to Washington and he was miserable and so was Sarah. So before the second session of Congress, they agreed that she would return with him. James apparently realized that the discomfort of living in a boarding house would not have bothered his energetic and ambitious wife as it would women with children. So Sarah returned with him the following year and thrived in the intensely political atmosphere of the almost all male boarding house, which is where congressmen lived. Here's a early picture of James when he's in Congress. And this is what Washington looked like when Sarah first came to Congress. People called it a work in progress. A lot of the streets were still mud, most of the buildings weren't there. Of course, we had L'Enfant's plan laid out the city, but it was mostly empty and there were a lot of pigs in the streets. Here is one of the boarding houses that congressmen lived in in the 1820s and 1830s. And this is where Sarah moved with her husband when she first came to Washington. Now, Sarah really did something creative and great when she got to the boarding house, which is rather than look at living in a boarding house as a liability, she turned it into a strength. So she took extra rooms in the boarding house, not just the room that she and James shared, but extra ones just for entertaining. And she turned that space into a political salon where other politicians would be invited just to come eat, dine, drink, hang out. And this was her creation as the wife of this politician. And I think that the experience of her early buried life being under her mother-in-law's roof is one of the things that allowed her to do this. So I don't think she felt a lot of need to have her own home space, to have her own home. I think she saw, well, this is a space I'm living in and I'm going to use. And so she used it in a very unusual way. Now, to understand Sarah Childress Polk's rise to power, you need to understand how politics were practiced in Washington D.C. during the Jacksonian era. In 1830 Washington had a population of 18,000 people, but the political class was much, much smaller. It was in effect a small town and one that ran on gossip. Men exchanged rumors about personal and political indiscretions, about secret alliances, and about political fortunes. Women exchanged rumors about sexual indiscretion, courtship, and economic fortunes. Gossip became a fixture of the earliest congress. The very first congress Joanne Freeman has shown was really governed by gossip. And this was still true in 1830. Gossip allowed politicians a way to form alliances before there were political parties, but even after there were political parties, it was still very important. By the 1820s, Washington's men and women gossip constantly, but separately, for the most part, men with men, women with women. Talk of the sort did more than titillate and entertain. It could have a transformative impact on a man's political career, or even the fate of an entire presidential candidate, cabinet, as I'm going to tell you about. Sarah was the first political wife to successfully bridge the gap between male and female gossip. She was equally comfortable in both worlds, and she discovered that men were willing to tell her things that they were not willing to tell other men. And that wives were the best source of news about husbands and the men they entertained. Now in the 1820s, it was very, very difficult if you were actually a congressman to hear what people were saying in the new congressional chambers. And so as a result of that and a bunch of other reasons, most of the real congressional dealmaking took place outside the halls of Congress, in social clubs, in boarding houses, and in private homes. Sarah's facility in this realm was of crucial importance to Butcher Singer husband's position. She set the conditions, propel to formal alliances and influence others. Now her access to news and skill deploying it drew men to her. Sarah was not, by most standards, a beautiful woman. She had bad teeth, which she was very self-conscious about, at the very prominent nose, and people at the time of very pale complexion was considered ideal, and her skin was not particularly pale. But she had very nice hair, and she was skinny. She radiated intelligence and charm. So basically, even when she was surrounded by much more conventionally beautiful women, people talked about her, like she stood out in a room. Men often attributed her good looks or her attractiveness to her being childless. As an older woman, she was described as exceptionally handsome, remarkably well preserved. So people commented on the extent to which this was because she never had children. By all accounts, she was a remarkably good conversational very skilled at getting people to talk about themselves. She was much more of a listener than a speaker, but people loved talking to her. She had excellent manners, many of which she had learned when she was at the Salem Academy and her home too. So she was able to basically be comfortable in any social situation. Women were, for the most part, very fond of her, but her closest relationships were all with men. First, her father and her brother. Then, a lot of James's political colleagues in Tennessee and in Washington. None of the men who she became close to, I think, would be considered by any means enlightened on gender relations, but they were able to identify Sarah as separate from most women. That she was a different person and as such treat her the way they would treat other men. All of these men wrote to her as a political equal, discussing political matters with her exactly the same way they would discuss them with men. Now, her closest relationship, of course, was to her husband, James. And as I discovered in the course of my research, they were a remarkably harmonious and successful political team. Now, there isn't a lot of correspondence between James and Sarah Polk because they were together almost all the time. They were separated for a while when James was first running for governor and the experience was so excruciating that after that they tried to be together as much as possible. They were only separated about two full weeks during the time that he was president. But what correspondence we do have shows that Sarah was comfortable advising James on political matters and that he took her advice. She warned him against running for a short session in the Senate and told him which editors were to be trusted. He almost never ignored her advice and Nora was James the only person who turned to her for advice. Congressmen, senators, and the justice of the Supreme Court sought her opinion on political matters and depended on her for the inside information that enabled the successful navigation of the fraught Washington political scene in the era of the second party system. One wrote to her to ask her if votes in a certain county were amiss, noting quote, no one is as likely to know as well as you. Now Sarah remained in Washington with James for 13 years accepting the 1830 to 1831 congressional term when an explosive debate over Peggy Eaton, the wife of President Andrew Jackson, Secretary of War, tore the cabinet apart. The Eaton affair shows just how important gossip was at the time in how much political power women actually wielded. Many Washington wives refused to speak to Peggy Eaton who they believed to be of low morals. Now Andrew Jackson believed Peggy innocent of the aspersions cast upon her and threatened members of his party with retribution if their wives didn't treat the Eatons with respect. Sarah was caught in the middle of the debate, torn between her friendship with wives like Florid Calhoun who shunned Mrs. Eaton and her concern for her husband's career. And not surprisingly she sided with her husband publicly acknowledging Peggy Eaton and asserting to other wives the necessity of putting country above political scruples. But she also laughed and went back to Washington, went back to Tennessee so she would not be further drawn into the debate. It was a wise gamble. James emerged from the controversy on Skate and with Jackson support won the post of Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1835. This position provided Sarah with a new authority among the wives of Washington's most powerful men. When James left Washington in 1839 to return to Tennessee and run for the office of governor a justice of the Supreme Court wrote a poem praising her playful mind and in the months that followed a number of Washington politicians wrote her letters including one that bemoaned her absence from a city where a woman can learn a great deal more than a man. Over a decade of political service to her husband meeting is often onerous demands for political news and analysis left her singularly able to provide it. So the years in Tennessee when James first was elected to one governor position and then ran twice unsuccessfully for them were not a great period in either of the Polk's lives. Sarah was not able to do the kind of networking and entertaining in Tennessee as she had in Washington and James basically was a failure as governor. So things were sort of bleak between them in this time period. The only real saving grace for me the historian was that they wrote each other a lot during this time period. So this enabled me to do a lot of things about their relationship which weren't obvious when they were separate. During the years they were in Washington when they were in Tennessee and especially when James was campaigning it became clear how much he depended on Sarah for political information and for coordinating his political campaigns with other politicians. He would write her repeatedly you must send me news ask her to lobby various editors and politicians directly and really seemed to set a standard that she was sort of unable to meet in terms of how much work he expected from her and how successful he expected her to be. She replied once with exasperation I'm unable to learn anything with a household of guests I trust you won't hold it against me that the housework is neglected and he wrote back and just said we didn't even take the joke he just said can you please go find out what's happening with this particular political race. But basically their correspondence indicates how playful they were with conventional gender roles he didn't care that she ignored the domestic as long as she continued to provide him with the political information that he needed. Sarah grew so depressed during his extended campaign absences that James adjusted his behavior and they were rarely separated again after that. Now James's fortunes improved dramatically in 1844 when President John Tyler attempted to annex Texas. The two front runners for the presidential race in the presidential race in 1844 were Henry Clay running for the Wake Party and Martin Van Buren who was the presumptive candidate of the Democratic Party. Now both of these men opposed the annexation of Texas because they believed that it would worsen sectional tensions between the north and south and it would lead to war with Mexico. But James K. Polk firmly believed in Texas annexation and manifest destiny. Both his and Sarah's family had grown rich speculating on land in the western frontier that was taken from Indians and moving slaves under that land and growing cotton so they believed that basically territorial expansion was the future of the country that was how people were going to make money that was where the country was going to be. James wrote a passionate letter in favor of Texas annexation and as a result became the first dark horse candidate for the presidency winning the nomination of the Democratic Party to many people's surprise. Now Sarah during James's presidential campaign served as his campaign coordinator. When Polk was first nominated one advisor encouraged him to put Sarah to work. James might lack quote the timer tack to conciliate employees but Sarah could. This man wrote the wife of a man aspiring to the White House is no minor circumstance. Mrs. Polk should be visited by wigs and Democrats of her own sex as the ladies of the other side uniformly speak well and generally high of her. Even Polk's allies recognized that young Hickory's prickly personality required management. Fortunately Sarah Polk unlike her husband quote was ever a good listener as people said. Now James didn't name me prompting he was fully aware of Sarah's political value. He took her job seriously and was willing to work every bit as hard as she would let him and together they advanced their agenda. Polk was elected president in 1844 in large part because of his stance on Texas. But Sarah's reputation for piousness she was extremely religious she didn't drink gamble play cards go to the horse races very very religious kept the Sabbath holy. That actually helped Polk a lot too. So he got a number of votes on because Sarah was such a religious figure. Even again opponents of the Democrats thought Sarah might be a good influence on the presidency. Sarah pressed and hail of Massachusetts who came from a wealthy old wig family. Was 48 years old when Henry Clay to her great sorrow lost to Polk and she wrote to a friend perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Polk together will make a very good president. The two headed to Washington and set up a shared office in the domestic space of the White House. James left her piles of newspapers every morning to digest. Sarah diligently worked through them and then carefully folding the papers with the mark pieces outside handed them over to her husband and told them what to look at. They regularly put in 12 to 14 hours a day of work and James said none but Sarah knew so intimately my private affairs. Even at the height of his powers president Polk was open about the degree to which he and his wife worked as a team. Typical was his comment when Sarah broke up an impromptu concert given by Democrats in his honor on the Sabbath. He said Sarah directs all domestic affairs and she believes this is domestic. Now the hopes of all of Sarah's constituents are revealed in the letters they wrote her upon James's election. For the most part the letters expect her to be a religious force in the administration and do not recognize that in fact she was also a political figure. In reality she was very political and in some senses James was actually more moral than she was and what I mean by that is that there are several examples and their correspondence of James admonishing her for gossiping or saying unfair or not nice things about other people and she believed that he set a moral standard she was trying to live up to. The men in Washington however had not forgotten who she was and they welcomed her back with open arms. A young anti-slavery wig from Massachusetts named Charles Sumner was surprised upon meeting her that her sweetness of manner won him entirely and he quickly came back to visit with her again. As first lady her power and influence grew with the guidance of our mentor Dolly Madison who pioneered the art of mixing politics and socializing together. She learned how to employ domestic skills which were never her strong suit in the service of the political but she took a lot of liberties that Dolly never would have taken including gossiping directly with men. Although her religious piety required that she shun quote the follies and amusements of the world and therefore ban hard liquor dancing and carplaying from the White House she managed to pull off entertaining executive dinners in which gracious hospitality combined with lobbying. Dressed in simple but meticulously tailored gowns of deeply hewed velvets and satins she cultivated a restrained elegance in keeping with her democratic ethos. She held receptions twice a week that were open to the public and once the U.S. went to war she added a third and then a fourth. A congressman were invited to these dinners in many cases members of the Supreme Court she made socializing a priority. When James was unable to attend her social functions which was quite often because he preferred to work she hosted them alone. Powerful men cultivated her goodwill more than one leading politician declared he would rather discuss the issues of the day with her than with her dourer husband. Now records from this period suggest that she met politicians in the White House privately in the day time as well and that they searched her out. She was a very good entertainer but she didn't care about domestic matters. She forced kind of brilliantly one of her innovations was to force the nieces who came and stayed with her in the White House to return all of her social calls. So in the 19th century there was a very particular etiquette involved in making calls on other women. So a woman would go to somebody's house and would leave a card and in return they expected a call back and Sarah just decided that she didn't have time for any of this so she made her nieces return the calls. Here's a portrait of Sarah from her White House period and here's what the White House this is the first photograph of the White House taken during the Polk administration and here we have a picture of what you could call the White House family which is James and Sarah there in the center and right next to Sarah is kind of a dour looking young woman her name was Joanna she was one of the nieces who wrote a diary about how Sarah forced her to go out day and night to return calls and how she was too busy to do anything because she was constantly returning calls on women. This was the work Sarah had her do. Sarah was the first White House occupant to establish a separate space a social space in the White House just for women but she was never in there people noted she preferred to be with the men. So on April 25th 1846 Polk told his assembled cabinet that the time had come to take a bold and firm course on towards Mexico and that forbearance was no longer either a virtue or patriotic and he wanted to invade Mexico. He thought that matters with Mexico were a matter of honor and as a southern slave holding man he believed that America's honor was being besmirched by the fact that Mexico would not pay back a bunch of debts that were owed to the United States. Now at the time his cabinet said to him sir you can't declare war on another country because your honor has been insulted over money. Fortunately just the next day Polk received word that blood had been shed in a disputed area between the United States and Mexico when Mexican soldiers crossed over the Rio Grande and attacked some U.S. soldiers who were had been sent by Polk into that area. So Polk had his reason for war and the war started. Sarah clearly supported James's view of national honor. She spoke extensively about the need for American honor to be upheld. And she also I believe supported the idea that Mexico was racially inferior because she wrote and spoke quite extensively about racial inferiority of people who were not white and how this was part of God's plan. Sarah said at a dinner party whatever sustains the honor and advances the interests of this country whether regarded as democratic or not she admired and applauded. So it's a service of international relations. Now a perusal of Polk's diary during the 16 months of the war reveal a man who was strangely out of touch with reality hardly aware that the country was turning against his war. And I think Sarah played a crucial role in this by controlling access to Polk and by editing his news intake she was able to limit his exposure to the increasingly vindictive partisan attacks on his presidency while her social skills and mastery of gossip played a crucial role in enabling him to assuage competing factions of his party during the increasingly unpopular war. And while the U.S. was at war Sarah was careful when she had parties to invite veterans and if they were injured all the better to invite authors who were writing about the inferiority of Mexico and she was the first lady to play hail to the chief when the president entered the room. So we're all very used to this now. There have been various reasons given for why she instituted this but what I can tell you is that when you look at her copy book from when she was at Salem Academy she was so taken by hail to the chief that she copied the music down in her notebook as a 15 year old girl. So then later when the U.S. was at war whenever Polk would enter the room she would play hail to the chief and everything took on a kind of martial air while she was there. Now one thing I think is really interesting is the press seems to be have been completely aware of how powerful Sarah was in the Polk presidency. They could hardly miss it and she directed newspaper editors to legislation and James's support and letters that vindicated her husband at the expense of other politicians or when she pulled an impromptu senator aside in order to list the reasons why he should support a Polk policy against the interests of his constituents and she would always say well the president believes blah blah blah she would never present it herself but she would always say it's what the husband thought. And these stories were reported in newspapers and they were clearly political and they but at the same time newspaper editors would assert that she was actually a model of female decorum and that was because everything Sarah was doing she was doing in support of her husband. So in a way they presented her political activities as evidence of her subservience to her husband. So in contrast to women who were asking for political rights Sarah was just doing what was natural which was helping out her husband. So therefore she could do really anything that she wanted as long as she was doing it in her husband's interest and for him. But Sarah also knew how to control her political image. She staged media events which highlighted her charity, her decency, her piousness and her thrift and she was universally esteemed for sort of setting a model of a down-to-earth woman which was in reality pretty different from how she actually lived her life. She also while she was first lady bought and sold slaves for the Mississippi plantation that she and James owned and she served as the go-between in these sales because it was considered not socially acceptable for a president even a slave-owning president to buy or sell slaves. When James ran for president he asserted that he only owned the slaves that either he or Sarah had inherited and if he ever bought or sold slaves it was to keep families together. So he was very invested in promoting this image of himself as a kind of beneficent slaveholder but in reality he was actually buying a lot of young people to go work on a cotton plantation that had a very high mortality rate was basically deadly work. Okay, so Sarah as I pointed out here played a key role in her husband's presidency and also played an important role in the U.S.-Mexico war that he masterminded. So the question here is why have her contributions as a political figure been overlooked? And I'd like to suggest there's four main reasons. The first reason is that Sarah herself worked hard to make sure that nobody noticed how political she was. She was careful to always downplay her political skills. She was better informed than it was her disposition to make known. Early learn to be silent where anything was at stake never told more than she knew and seldom made an effort to display what she said as wisdom. That was a quote actually from a friend. She conferred about matters of national importance with her husband's associates but always said Mr. Polk thinks this or Mr. Polk thinks that when expressing her opinion. She was, quote, familiar with the great matters exercising the minds of public men and read every book by any author that came to the White House. She was a very well-read woman. So she could converse with the authors about the books when they showed up. But she also had what one of her contemporaries called intuitive tact. She was, quote, too delicate and reserved to proclaim political opinions or to join in discussions of party differences with a crowd of people. Being so intelligent and well-informed yet so unintrusive she was a charming companion. In other words she was very good at what she did and what she did was disguise her political acumen so she could fit with social standards of the day. The second reason why I think her contributions as a political woman have been overlooked is because she came to power at the same time as the early women's rights movement. So in comparison to radicals like Elizabeth Kady Stanton she appeared to be a model of conservatism and this was an image she cultivated. She wanted people to think she was a model of conservatism that she was religious that she was moral that she believed in hierarchy. She really embraced this image so in a way she was the anti-radical in the time period the woman who hit her power behind her deference to her husband. Newspapers described her repeatedly as quote in the highest sense a lady a model for every woman to imitate and even in the approving words of one paper a sweet exemplification of lowliness. Isn't that a great phrase? I want to name my book sweet exemplification of lowliness but the press didn't like that. That's not actually true. The third reason why I think her contributions have been overlooked is because the presidency and particularly war are heavily gendered and they're heavily gendered in a masculine manner. We all understand this on some level. Why does there continue to be hostility towards female soldiers in combat positions? Because war is the territory of men. Why is it that the United States has not yet elected a woman president? Despite the fact that Germany, England, India and Pakistan have had female chief executives because some segment of the population continues to believe that the commander in chief should be a man. Now if that's true now what must it have been like in the 1840s? And the fourth reason why Sarah Polk's contributions have been overlooked have to do with her very mixed legacy and this will be the final portion of my paper the 42 years that Sarah spent as a widow after James K. Polk died just three months after leaving the presidency. Oh, here's a great example of presidential socializing and here's a contemporary drawing of what the Polk White House looked like at the time. So in the last months of Polk's presidency his health was visibly failing. Sarah did everything she could to try and keep him healthy but it was to no avail and he died just three months after he retired leaving her in a home in Tennessee by herself. She put on black and she did not take it off for the next 42 years so she spent the final 42 years of her life embracing the image of a widow. She also took into her house a grand niece I think was what you would call it this young lady you see here whose name was Sally and Sally lived with her so she finally got the child that she never had although it's kind of notable that she never actually adopted this child which is sort of important in my book when you read it. So Sarah's 42 years of life basically nobody really paid any attention of them until I read this book and I found out a lot of really interesting things about her that kind of explain why nobody knows about her now. She continued to be very political and she said she wasn't political she asked favors from politicians and got them but if anybody asked she claimed she never asked favors for politicians. She wrote to politicians about political matters but again if anyone asked she said that she wasn't doing that. She ran a cotton plantation in Mississippi a very tragic story but from her perspective a good one she turned out to be a very successful business woman made a tremendous amount of money off of the bodies of slaves that James in his will suggested she might consider freeing at some point instead she sold them but that made her a lot of money so from that perspective I guess it worked that well for her. During the civil war she lived in Tennessee and she managed this remarkable trick of claiming to be neutral. She claimed that her house was neutral and she claimed that she was neutral because she was a first lady and here's a picture of the Polk home in natural Tennessee with James' tomb right there in the front of the building. So during the civil war Sarah met with presidents and she met with generals. Generals all came and called on her in Polk place and she maintained that she was an upstanding American citizen. She supported the union but at the same time she was secretly doing all kinds of things to help the Confederacy. She asked for clemency for Confederate soldiers. She provided money to Confederate soldiers. She helped sew uniforms for Confederate soldiers. She worked in a hospital. She took and hid a bunch of valuables for Confederates because people knew that nobody would ransack the house of the late president. And kind of most importantly she ended up spearheading a movement to preserve Confederate cemeteries and here we see actually an early Confederate cemetery memorial. She raised money to start the first Confederate cemetery outside of Tennessee and her work on behalf of the Confederacy would end up I think having very interesting and pernicious effects not just on her legacy but actually on the United States. And she also devoted herself to trying to redeem James K. Polk's legacy and that's because after the Civil War the Republican Party came into ascendance and a bunch of men who before the war had either been wigs or had decided that the Democrats were unredeemable because of their stance on slavery they all came to power and James K. Polk's reputation really suffered. People started talking about the US-Mexico war as a land grab for slavery as immoral as not the kind of the war that the United States had a lot of people forgot about the US-Mexico war all together. I find it astounding that when people are asked today how California came to be part of the United States almost nobody knows that it was through war with Mexico. The knowledge of the US-Mexico war is almost nothing and there's reasons for that. In fact there are no monuments to the US-Mexico war here in Washington D.C. None. There's monuments to every other war but not the US-Mexico war. That's not a coincidence. So Sarah tried as hard as she could to argue that the US-Mexico war had been one of the greatest events in American history and said that yes of course there were some people who were opposed to it at the time but quote there's always someone opposed to everything whether of her sustains the honor and advances the interests of the country she admires and applauds. Here's a picture of Sarah and her later life. I love this from the New York Historical Society. Sarah with her daughter Sally who now is grown up and has a daughter of her own named Sadie and Sally's husband and their dog. She looks pretty happy and here's the portrait of her late in life. Now in the last decades of her life Sarah wasn't forgotten by everybody. She became an inspiration to two different groups of women. The first was the women's Christian Temperance Union. The women's Christian Temperance Union looked to Sarah's non-drinking stance in the White House and the way she kept the White House a supposedly religious pious space and her devotion to her husband and they found this extremely inspiring and Frances Willard became a huge fan of Sarah Polk's visiting her writing about her and using her to drum up support for the effort to ban alcohol in the South where it wasn't as popular as it was in the North. With Willard's help Willard raised enough money to have a portrait of Sarah Polk painted to be placed in the White House alongside James's portrait which was painted of course when he was president. So this was a major spearheading campaign by the women's Christian Temperance Union but you know the women's Christian Temperance Union did not age well as an organization. The reason for that is that at the end of prohibition anybody who supported prohibition looked like a fool or they looked like they were uptight or they looked like they were terrible because prohibition turned out to be so terrible. So the women's Christian Temperance Union looked very very different in the 1890s then it would look in the 1830s and afterwards. So that didn't age well for Sarah. So this is kind of how people remember it now. And the other group that were inspired by Sarah were the Neo Confederates the Daughters of the Confederacy and their effort to whitewash the history of the Civil War. Sarah's memorials that were written by good friends of hers the book about her life was for sale in the newspaper of the Confederate sons of America and the Confederate Daughters of America and she had further effects on the position that we live in now in terms of race relations that I won't share with you but I will leave for you to discover yourself when you read the book which I hope you will do but none of it was good. Let me say that. So her legacy was extremely mixed let me just close by saying that Sarah Polk managed the trick of excelling in the male sphere of politics without seeming to threaten anybody. This was because as one approving commentator put it she lived behind her husband as a politician in an era of increasing agitation for women's rights Mrs. Polk cultivated a deferential persona that powerful men found non-threatening and in many cases intoxicating. She was a woman who venerated the work of men and excelled in it in large part because she publicly embraced an almost reactionary standard of female submission. So by brilliantly manipulating the gender codes of the day Sarah Childress Polk exercised a sort of political power that a narrative of women's rights would tell you no women had until they actually won the vote. Thank you very much. I am happy to take questions if anybody has them. What a wonderful question. So the question is were all of Sarah's political views shared by James or could you tell if there were separate political views. So there's only one area where I've seen Sarah's political views. No there's two areas. One has to do with the relationship between politics and religion. The only time that Sarah didn't do something James asked her to do was when he asked her to work on the Sabbath. So she was very committed to the idea that nobody should do any political work on the Sabbath and she was clear about that. The other one that I haven't really been able to figure out is James liked to tell a story that when they would travel by stagecoach which was the main way people would travel and he would need to get money he would send her to get money and she would have to root around and find coins in order to pay for stuff because James was opposed to paper money. The Democratic Party at this time thought paper money was not legitimate and not a good way to buy or sell things. Basically what Democrats believed in was specie. So the only kind of currency that was legitimate and moral was hard specie. And James would say that Sarah when she was forced to try and dig up these coins would say can you see how inconvenient this is? I wish we had paper money but I've never been able to see anything in her writings that suggested that she really had strong feelings about currency one way or the other. So I think it might have been more of a joke. So I will just say I think it's religion. Thank you so much for asking this question. The question is did do I sense that she ever had regrets about not having children? I struggled with this one for a long time because the narrative people always told about the Polk's was that they were so sad they never had kids. So that's why they invited all these nieces to come stay with them at the White House. But I eventually my head turned 180 degrees on this and I think that they didn't want children and here's my evidence for this. She never once expressed any sorrow about not having kids. He never once expressed any sorrow about not having kids. The letters suggesting that they were sorry were written by other people about them or letters written to him but never did any of these letters say oh as you were saying you're sad you didn't have kids. It was other people extrapolating how terrible that you don't have children. The other evidence I have that they didn't want children is they had plenty of opportunities to adopt children and other childless presidents including Andrew Jackson had adopted children. George Washington adopted Martha's children. So there's a long tradition in the United States of childless politicians or childless wealthy people adopting male children to have an heir and James had multiple opportunities to do this. One of his brothers died and left behind two very young children and I found a letter where his brother's widow wrote him and said I'm expecting that they will come live with you. I'm expecting that you are going to adopt this child and James never did it. He never did it. So I think looking at the whole thing and plus the as I pointed out in here the nieces were put to work. She clearly liked the nieces but she was getting them to do work for her. I don't think they were sad about it at all. That's a wonderful question. So the question is okay if Sarah is expressing her opinion through or saying it's her husband's opinion and if she is so powerful how do cabinet members feel about this? So this is a wonderful question. So Vice President George Dallas he was constantly writing to his wife and saying oh Sarah has too much power and in a way that expressed his belief that this diminished James that the fact that James listened to his wife that she was quote the mistress of him meaning that she was in charge of him that this diminished him as a political figure but eventually even he came around to her because he late in the presidency was bringing other politicians to meet with her and not meet with James. So he would write in his diary and say I took so and so to see Mrs. Polk. She was sick unfortunately we're going to come back in a couple days and see her again. So what I was more struck by were the many men who just thought that she was delightful and did not like James and would say oh James is such a horrible person he's a liar he has no honor but I admire his wife so much and I went to discuss politics with her. Oh the last thing I have to say about that too is Mifflin's wife just stayed home with her kids. I mean Dallas George Mifflin Dallas's wife so he was writing a woman who made a very different choice and that was sort of what I found was the politicians who were writing the wives who chose to stay home and not come to Washington and raise the kids that they would discuss her differently. Yes this story with the question is did things just didn't go well with Sally because she didn't adopt her. This is a this is a major sort of part of the final portion of the book is how Sarah navigated this interesting situation where she finally had this child forced on her that she never maybe never wanted and eventually grew to love deeply but she never adopted Sally either and it ends up having a tremendous impact on the Polk estate and on her later life and on Sally's later life and it's really a tragic story and I can only assume that she never adopted Sally because she still just didn't want to be a mother on some level like the adoption laws at the time would have completely supported it but yeah she just never accepted adoption but she did Sally had a hard time of it when she entered the house of this grieving widow as a very young child a three or four year old but eventually she and Sarah became very close and she lived out Sally lived her entire life in Polk Place and raised her daughter in Polk Place and one of the last things that Sarah did as a widow in her late 80s was she saw the marriage of her granddaughter and her granddaughter said look you know you got to come downstairs for the marriage or else we'll have to do it in your room and so she made it downstairs for that wedding and her Sarah's final words were about Sally Amy I'm afraid we're out of time okay well again thank you so much you guys for coming I appreciate it