Lady First: The World of First Lady Sarah Polk by Amy S. Greenberg (review)

In this engaging biography, Amy S. Greenberg brings to life “the first politically effective partisan First Lady” (p. xiii). Framing the study are two 1848 events: the U.S.-Mexican War and the Seneca Falls Convention. As Greenberg’s careful research reveals, Sarah Childress Polk championed the former but had no use for the latter, despite the many ways she herself deployed power.

In her youth, Sarah Childress was interested in learning, books, and politics. She knew Andrew Jackson and other powerful Democrats, including up-and-coming politician James K. Polk. After their 1824 marriage, she relished parlor politics and assisted in her husband’s political rise, which saw James Polk elected first as a U.S. congressman and then as governor of Tennessee. In her capacity as what Greenberg terms “communications director,” Sarah Polk wielded power but always under the guise of deference (p. 65). As First Lady, she presented herself as a model of thrifty Jacksonian anti-elite values and of Christian womanhood; aware of the value of appearance, she refused to dance at the inaugural ball. Americans wrote to her with requests for favors, implicitly acknowledging the power she held. And she was powerful: she once banished Martin Van Buren’s son from White House social events.

After James K. Polk’s premature death, the young widow lived long after the Civil War, which the debate over the fate of slavery during the U.S.-Mexican War had foreshadowed. During the Civil War, Sarah Polk continued to use her position as a lady—and a former First Lady at that—to claim neutrality and special favors from Abraham Lincoln. She met with Union officers who were eager to hold on to her allegiance—while she concealed Confederate property on the “neutral ground” of Polk Place, her Tennessee plantation (p. 217). After the war, she continued to wield power, working to uphold her husband’s reputation and being courted by Frances Willard for support of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

Sarah Polk, Greenberg asserts, was “a true believer in Manifest Destiny” (p. 141). She was also a firm supporter of slavery. Though apparently averse to separating families, she came into her own as “a cotton planter” after her husband’s death (p. 187). She thought of herself as a good mistress, but Greenberg reveals how this self-perception “stood in stark contrast to [Polk’s] efforts on behalf of slavery” and to her treatment of the enslaved population at Polk Plantation, from whom profit was exacted at high human cost (p. 190).

Greenberg describes her subject’s aversion to the radical ideas about woman’s place that were current in the America of 1848, noting that she was “so powerful she had no need for women’s rights” (p. xix). In addition to a canny wielding of womanly deference, another fact enabled her political power: she and James Polk had no children. Greenberg asserts that neither Polk lamented this fact, and it certainly allowed Sarah to wield a womanly power that was unconstrained by the travails, dangers, and hardships of childbearing and childrearing. Who she would have been able to become if she were a man never seems to have occurred to her (or caused her to question her ideal of womanly deference), but one wonders if she might have felt more constrained by the so-called womanly sphere she claimed, if she had been mother to a half dozen children while chasing (and loving) politics and power.

This richly researched book is a compelling read. Greenberg deftly brings into the work secondary scholarship on topics ranging from women and politics to slavery to help interrogate both Sarah Polk and the primary sources the author has amassed. This book will interest historians of women and presidential politics and especially those interested in conservative women in American history. Phyllis Schlafly and Ivanka Trump, Greenberg notes, “are political...