(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format. Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship.
https://www.amazon.com/crisis-demands-Missouri-delivered-January/dp/B003TV3H20?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B003TV3H20
He was born on May 29, 1811 on a farm in Sussex County, Delaware, United States. His mother was Lavenia (Causey) Polk, a sister of Peter Causey who was governor of Delaware from 1855 to 1859, and his father was William Nutter Polk, descended from Robert Bruce Polk (or Pollok), who had settled in Maryland by 1687.
Trusten Polk attended a grammar school in Delaware, and an academy at Cambridge, Maryland, before he entered Yale College, where he graduated with honors in 1831.
He wished to enter the ministry, but his father persuaded him to study law, and after about a year in the office of James Rogers, attorney-general of Delaware, he took a two-year law course at Yale.
Perceiving that legal practice in Delaware "was monopolized by a few old lawyers" he moved in 1835 to St. Louis, Missouri, where he soon rose to a position of recognized leadership at the bar. Polk was appointed city counselor of St. Louis in 1843.
His health failed, and he traveled (1844 - 45) through the South, Cuba, and Canada in a successful effort to restore it. While on this tour he made a careful study of the public school systems of several states. During his absence he was elected (1845) one of the two St. Louis delegates to the convention to revise the state constitution. In this body he served as chairman of the committee on education, and, keenly aware that the census of 1840 placed Missouri almost at the "tail end of the Union" in education, devoted himself to the double aim of devising a better state educational system and a scheme of taxation which would render that system practicable. He was largely successful in the realization of both objects.
In 1856 he was elected governor on the anti-Benton Democratic ticket, but a few weeks later was elected United States senator, and on February 27, 1857, resigned the governorship.
In the Senate he was counted a worthy colleague of the pro-Southern senior senator from Missouri, James S. Green. Among the half dozen really able speeches defending the Southern cause in 1860 and 1861, those of Trusten Polk must be accorded a place. In two powerful addresses (January 14 and July 10-11, 1861) he marshaled the arguments for the South in a masterly analysis of the national crisis. Conscientious convictions forced him to absent himself from the Senate in the session beginning December 2, 1861, and upon the basis of a resolution introduced by Charles Sumner December 18, and formally voted upon January 10, 1862, he was expelled from that body.
Late in 1861 he went to New Madrid, Missouri, and enlisted as a colonel in the Confederate military service. He held, until he was taken prisoner in 1864, the position of presiding military judge of the Department of the Mississippi.
At the close of the war he returned to St. Louis, where he continued the practice of law until his death.
Trusten Polk was one of the two St. Louis delegates to the convention to revise the state constitution, where he obtained improvements in the work of state educational system and a scheme of taxation. He also took an active part in the framing of a constitutional provision prohibiting the future creation of state banks empowered to issue paper money. Besides, he was appointed as a colonel in the Confederate States Army and served as a judge in the military courts of the Department of Mississippi.
(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
He was a prominent and faithful member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.
Although his convictions were Southern, he was not a fire-eater.
Polk was a man of the purest private character.
On December 26, 1837, he married Elizabeth Skinner of St. Louis, who with four daughters survived him, a son having died in infancy.
