| Journal Sources. John Appleton, born in 1815 and graduated from Bowdoin College in 1834, studied law at Cambridge Law School and practiced his profession in Portland, Maine, before assuming the editorship of the Eastern Argus in 1838. He served as chief clerk of the Navy Department from 1845 to 1848. He was confirmed as U.S. minister to Bolivia on March 30, 1848, and saw a year's service on that mission, which ended with the close of the Polk administration. He won election to a seat in the U.S. House in 1851, following which term he resumed the practice of law. During the Buchanan administration he served as assistant secretary of the State Department, 1857-60, and as U.S. minister to Russia, 1860-61. He died in Portland on August 22, 1864. |
| Appleton was, of course, a firsthand witness to all of the events about which he wrote, excepting the President's return trip from Portsmouth to Washington. For local reactions, texts of speeches, and names of host dignitaries, Appleton relied on press reports, chief among which were those rather extensive accounts written by "The Doctor" for the New York Herald. In general the Democratic and independent newspapers gave full and sympathetic treatment to the President's tour, and the Whig journals accorded it minimal and grudging coverage. Appleton's observations from inside the President's suite provide an important albeit biased perspective, for it probably reflects the President's point of view in most instances. In any case, Polk himself wrote very little about his journey, and for want of any better evidence Appleton's account supplies the best available mirror of Polk's thinking on the subject. |
| Editorial Method. Always concerned that the reader's primary focus fall on the text of the Journal and Correspondence, the editor has limited his annotations to the identification of Polk's correspondents and their oblique references of consequence. For identification of persons mentioned only by surnames in the Journal, the reader will want to consult the index. The editor has rendered the text faithfully with a strict regard for original punctuation and orthography, except for the following rules of normalization: (1) initial words of sentences have been capitalized and ending punctuation marks have been supplied; (2) conventional spellings have been followed except when misspellings have |
|
