Slavemaster President

James K. Polk held the office of President from 1845 to 1849, a period when the expansion of slavery into the territories emerged as a pressing question in American politics. During his presidency, the slave period of Texas was annexed and the future of slavery in the Mexican Cession was debated. Polk also owned a substantial cotton plantation in northern Mississippi and fifty-four slaves. He was an absentee master who had a string of overseers or agents manage his plantation and did not visit his estate while he was in the White House. In this book, William Dusinberre reconstructs the world of Polk's estate and the lives of his slaves, and analyzes how Polk's experience as a slavemaster conditioned his stance towards slavery-related issues. Dusinberre argues that Polk's policies helped precipitate the civil war he had sought to avert.

William Dusinberre is author of the award-winning Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps.

"A good look at the very hard, often harsh, conditions on a new plantation in a frontier area."--CHOICE
"This is a striking and important book. James K. Polk tried to keep his activities as a slaveowner and absentee planter separate from his public life as a politician and, eventually, president. William Dusinberre brings the two sides of Polk's career together again. He has done more than anyone else to examine the lives of Polk's slaves, and reveals often-disturbing evidence about the harshness of their conditions. He also shows how Polk's perspectives as a planter shaped his administration's expansionist policies. This will be essential reading for all interested in the debate on slavery and the origins of the Civil War."-Christopher Clark, University of Warwick
"Slavemaster President is a powerful combination of careful research, clear prose, and controlled passion. At the core of the book is a meticulous reconstruction of James Knox Polk's cotton plantation. But Dusinberre is after much bigger analytical fish than a single case study would suggest: he uses Polk as a launching pad for a full-scale reinterpretation of the antebellum South. In so doing, he reintegrates the social and political history of southern slave society, bringing us closer than ever to understanding precisely how the politics of slavery led ultimately to Civil War."--James Oakes, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
"No other study that I can think of juxtaposes so revealingly the personal experiences of the enslaved with those of their enslaver, or the career of a slaveholder with the leadership of a president. By bringing to life the world of the enslaved people for whom James K. Polk was responsible even as Polk himself became responsible for slavery's westward expansion, Dusinberre presents a truly original synthesis of biography and social history that challenges us to reexamine the politics of the sectional conflict."--James Brewer Stewart, Macalester