I just wanted to be the first to recognize the November 2, 1795, birthday of someone’s favorite president, James K. Polk. You know who you are.
James Knox Polk surely is history’s most underappreciated president. Few Americans have any awareness that in four years he engineered the annexation of Texas, bluffed the British out of Oregon, waged war with Mexico to take California and New Mexico, enlarged the country’s land mass by a third and made the United States a continental nation. To read his presidential diary is to be retrospectively introduced to a chief magistrate who was tough-minded, strong-willed, egocentric, sometimes petty, usually predictable, often duplicitous, and always partisan. He served but one term by his own choice, pledging as a candidate that he would not seek reelection. He kept his word. A complete workaholic, he left office worn and ill and went home to Nashville to recover his health. It hardly seems fair that three months after leaving the White House he was dead.
— John Siegenthaler, James K. Polk
That doesn’t include finally burying the Second National Bank, or lowering the tariffs like he promised.
