James Knox Polk—congressional representative, governor of Tennessee, and eleventh president of the United States—was born in 1795 in North Carolina. During his youth, he suffered from poor health, so his formal education did not begin until he was well into his teenage years. Nevertheless, his academic achievements were such that he was given advanced placement at the University of North Carolina. There he joined the Dialectic Society, a debating group, giving him experience in public speaking. He turned his oratorical skills to good use in 1819, when his exquisitely worded arguments helped him win election as the clerk of the Tennessee state senate. Then, in 1824, Polk was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, an office he held for fourteen years, culminating with four years as Speaker of the House from 1835 to 1839. During these years he was a Jacksonian Democrat and a firm advocate of states’ rights. When the Democratic Party in Tennessee asked him to run for governor in 1839, he did so, and he won by arguing for states’ rights. Nationally, though, the Democratic Party was in decline, so when he ran for reelection in 1841 and again in 1843, he fell victim to that decline and lost. His political career seemed to be at an end.