Polk’s secrecy wasn’t an attempt to cover up something he was ashamed of. READ MORE: How Westward Expansion Breathed New Life Into Slavery In Public, Polk Played the Role of ‘Benevolent’ Slaveowner He then sent them to work on his Mississippi plantation, which he purchased as part of the land rush that occurred after the 1830 Indian Removal Act violently expelled the Choctaw Nation and other Indigenous nations from their ancestral lands.
Polk kept his slave trading a secret by instructing surrogates to buy enslaved children and young adults on his behalf and then discreetly transfer them to him, according to Mann. The youngest was a 10-year-old boy named Jerry. Of the 19 enslaved people Polk bought during his presidential term (1845 to 1849), at least 13 were children, writes Lina Mann, a historian at The White House Historical Association. Specifically, he concealed his purchase of enslaved children and young adults, whom he sent to work on his Mississippi cotton plantation while he lived in the White House. Yet as white northerners in particular became increasingly uncomfortable with slavery’s expansion, Polk sought to downplay his personal investment in the institution. border all the way to the West Coast, precipitating a heated national debate about whether to spread slavery to even more territories.
This territorial expansion pushed the U.S. Polk, the 11th president of the United States, is probably best known for growing the the size of the country by more than one-third.
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