Calling on the Presidents: Tales Their Houses Tell. Clark Beim-Esche
including a desk/chair piece of furniture where he had often sat both to read and to write. Nestled near the wall of the room was a rather uncomfortable looking day bed which, our docent informed us, had been placed in the President’s office in the White House so that he could rest momentarily when the rare occasion to do so had arisen. There was also a small desk and selected legal volumes behind glass doors. But there was nothing particularly personal here, with perhaps the exception of a pair of dime-sized eyeglasses. Everything else could have been found in many mid-19th century American homes.
The bedchambers bore more evidence of Sarah’s presence than of her husband’s. Her sewing table was on display, as well as two golden lounge chairs that she had purchased for the White House and had brought back with them to Tennessee when the couple had left Washington after their four tumultuous years there. But here in Columbia, in a setting for which they had never been intended, these furnishings seemed sedate, mute, and curated rather than eloquent.
Leaving the upstairs, our docent pointed out the anachronism of a large, dark oil painting of Cortez, hanging over the stairway.
“This was a gift to the President from one of his generals at the conclusion of the war with Mexico,” she intoned with the same sonorous Southern inflection with which she had conducted our entire tour. The painting seemed a completely incongruous addition to the simple home in which it was displayed.
In fact, nothing here in the ancestral home gave evidence of the determined persistence, expansive aspirations, and tireless management which characterize the descriptions of President Polk forwarded by so many of his biographers. Rather than reflecting the grandiose vision of a President determined to extend the territory of his country as an expression of divinely authorized “Manifest Destiny,” the overall feeling of this beautiful but modest home was one of graceful, unpretentious comfort in a small country town. Polk himself remained an elusive presence, associated with, but hardly elucidated by, this locale.
We exited out a door at the back of the house into a garden area and then toured the separate kitchen building before circling around to the Visitor’s Center to visit the small but well presented museum therein. It contained a few items of particular interest which would aid our efforts to understand Polk the man.
First, and most centrally, displayed, was a fan that Polk had presented to Sarah at the time of his inauguration festivities. Each panel of the fan pictured one of the ten Presidents who had preceded him in office, his own image occupying the final panel. Washington’s portrait, appropriately enough, occupied the central, most prominent, panel, and then, starting from the left, came Adams through Quincy Adams, followed on the right half of the fan by images of Jackson through Polk. This fan, in and of itself, might be passed off easily enough as a piece of self-congratulatory fluff, but there were other hints in the museum that Sarah may have taken it more seriously.
In a frame that couldn’t have measured much more than four by six inches in size, Sarah had placed a picture of the meager log cabin in North Carolina where her husband had been born. The distance between that homely cabin and the splendid, hand-painted inaugural fan must have felt almost incalculable.
And then there was the Pillow fan and sword.
Gideon Pillow, at least according to Polk biographer Walter R. Borneman, may have been one of the very few men that President Polk had misjudged and overvalued. A longtime lawyer friend from Columbia, Pillow had wheedled his way into a military command during the Mexican war and, although acquitting himself with honor, insisted on claiming that the American victory in that conflict was largely his own doing. Counterclaims had been leveled by other officers involved in the war, and an embarrassing, and ultimately inconclusive, court martial hearing had only made matters worse.
None of this story, of course, was told in the museum. What was on display were two gifts that Pillow had given the President and First Lady: a gaudy, ornamental sword and a gold encrusted fan. As Polk had never served in the army, the sword was an odd, and, frankly, inappropriate gift. The fan, while undeniably splendid, was so heavy that Sarah had never attempted to fan herself with it, only holding it “on state occasions.” So why had the Polks kept these somewhat inappropriate and unwieldy mementos?
One final clue hung on the wall just at the point where visitors would be leaving the small museum. It was a photograph of Polk Place, the home to which the Polks had intended to retire. It was also the home where James Polk had died only three months after leaving office. The photograph had been taken sometime after his death, as his mausoleum, a prominent structure, had been erected in the front yard, only a few steps from the staircase leading to the main entryway. Why on earth would Sarah have placed her husband’s gravesite there? Why this constant reminder of her widowhood, a reminder that would be paralleled in her 42 years of continual mourning?
Like the somewhat confusing sign by the side of Route 31, these markers of the lives of President and First Lady Polk have remained to challenge and pique the interest of visitors here to Columbia, Tennessee. Perhaps they tell an all too comprehensible story of a man and a woman who found their ascendency to the highest positions in the land almost too grand to believe. Polk’s humble beginnings had ultimately led to showy swords, encrusted fans, and an elegant home, now destroyed. Only the fragments of their realized dream remain here in this quiet, modest place. Or perhaps James K. Polk was someone else entirely. His “ancestral home” gives only clues, no “Manifest” conclusions.
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