Lawmakers Urge That Ex president James Polk Be Exhumed Again
Plan to dig up U.South. president's body deemed "mortifying" by family unit
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- President James One thousand. Polk did large things for America, dramatically expanding its borders by annexing Texas and seizing California and the Southwest in a war with Mexico. Achieving undisturbed eternal rest has proved more difficult.
In a proposal that has riled some folks in Tennessee, including a very distant relative of the nation's 11th president, some state lawmakers want to move Polk's body to what would exist its fourth resting identify in the nearly 170 years since he died of cholera.
The plan is to exhume Polk'south remains and those of his wife, Sarah, from their white-columned tomb on the grounds of the state Capitol in Nashville and take them about l miles to his father'southward home, at present known equally the James K. Polk Home and Museum, in Columbia. A vote on the resolution could come up as early as Monday.
Teresa Elam, who says she is a seventh-generation great-niece of the childless Polk, called the whole idea "mortifying."
"I got then upset near it because they're going to have these bodies of these fine, wonderful people and bring them downwardly to Columbia and put them on brandish to make money," she said.
Backers of the resolution, including Sen. Joey Hensley, a Republican whose commune includes the museum, have argued that Polk's tomb is in an out-of-the-way spot on the Capitol grounds and that he deserves amend.
"I recollect I have been here 14 years and really didn't know, had never visited James M. Polk'due south tomb," Hensley said.
The curator of the Polk museum, Thomas Cost, who also backs the idea, argues that Polk spent a lot of time in Columbia and that museum visitors constantly ask why the quondam president isn't cached there.
"We've been open since 1929," Price said of the museum. "If this were merely a affair of money we probably would take washed information technology 50 years agone."
Polk died in 1849, merely three months after leaving the White Business firm, and was originally laid to residue in what is now the Nashville City Cemetery considering of an ordinance that said people who died of infectious diseases had to be buried on the outskirts of town inside 24 hours. Less than a year afterwards, he was moved to a tomb in the g of his Nashville mansion, just every bit he had specified in his will.
Then, afterwards his widow'south death in the 1890s, the two of them were cached on the Capitol grounds. (The mansion itself was sold to someone outside the family and was then demolished in 1901.)
While he is ofttimes overshadowed in the history books by young man Tennessean Andrew Jackson, Polk, a sometime Tennessee governor who chose to serve simply one term as president, played a cardinal role in helping the U.S. spread across the continent and realize what many Americans considered their Manifest Destiny.
Co-ordinate to a recent C-SPAN survey of presidential historians, Polk ranks 14th among all U.S. presidents, merely ahead of Bill Clinton.
He is probably America's most successful one-term president, said Walter Borneman, the author of "Polk: The Homo Who Transformed the Presidency and America." The United States, Borneman said, doubled in size during Polk's presidency.
Jeff Yarbro, a Democratic state senator from Nashville, said the Polks' relatives paid to have them taken to the Capitol and would have known their wishes better than those trying to move the bodies now. Lawmakers, he said, need to be careful here.
"There are but 45 people who've been president of the United states," Yarbro said, "and if a few years from at present there'southward a crew with shovels in the forepart k of the Capitol, it'due south going to exist a national news story, and there'southward going to be a lot of appropriate scrutiny on how this procedure got initiated."
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Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-james-polk-plan-to-move-his-body-stirs-trouble/
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