President James Knox Polk

President James Knox Polk. James Knox Polk was born in Mecklenburg, North Carolina in 1785. The Polk family moved to Tennessee's Duck River Valley in 1806 when he was eleven years old. His father, Samuel Polk, was instrumental in the creation of Maury County and the town of Columbia. In 1813, a young James K. Polk began his schooling at Zion Presbyterian Church located southwest of Columbia and later attended the University of North Carolina, graduating with top honors in 1818. After passing the bar in 1820, Polk practiced law in Columbia. It was at this time he entered the world of politics, first as the elected Clerk of the State Senate and then as a member of the Tennessee House Representatives in 1823. He met and married Sarah Childress in 1824. , In 1825, at age twenty-nine, Polk was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he spent the next fourteen years. There he was one of Congress' chief supporters of fellow Tennessean, President Andrew Jackson. In 1835, Polk was elected Speaker of the House, becoming the only Speaker to later become president. , (Continued on other side), Reverse Side , Polk successfully ran for Governor of Tennessee in 1839. After his first term, he lost two successive bids for reelection and returned to his law practice in Columbia. In 1844, he was selected as a "dark horse" presidential candidate at the Democratic National Convention and went on to defeat Whig candidate Henry Clay. Having made a campaign promise to serve only one term. President Polk is remembered for completing a rigorous agenda in those four years. Through negotiations with Great Britain in the Northwest and a war with Mexico in the Southwest, Polk extended the US boundary to the Pacific Ocean and increased the size of the country by approximately one million square miles. He also established the Independent Treasury system, the modern postal system, the Smithsonian Institution, and the United States Naval Academy. , James K. Polk left the White House in 1849 and died three months later at the age of fifty-three during a cholera epidemic in Nashville.