Socially keen and well informed, Sarah helped her husband's career with her hosting skills and advised him on political matters at times, though she stayed out of the public limelight.

She was well educated for a woman of her time and place, attending the exclusive Moravians' Salem Academy in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1817, one of the few institutions of higher learning available to women in the early 19th century.

Sarah Childress met James K. Polk while both were receiving instruction from Samuel P. Black at his house in Murfreesboro, Tennessee; he was 19, she was 12.

Shortly after he began courting her, legend says Andrew Jackson called her "wealthy, pretty, ambitious, and intelligent," and urged Polk to marry her.

[2] They raised a nephew, Marshall Tate Polk (1831–1884), as their ward for a few years before James sent him to a school in Washington, D.C., and later Georgetown University.

During his political career, Polk assisted her husband with his speeches, using her insight to guide his outlines and provide needed assurance.

Mrs. Polk maintained correspondence with national leaders gaining access to global issues that were relevant to her husband's campaign.

Not only did she keep up with this measure of communication, but she also wrote for a local newspaper expressing her support for James Polk's administration and his proposed policy initiatives.

One of the more controversial topics she was able to write about was on the idea of expansionism which delved into the concept of manifest destiny pertaining to the United States' rights as a sovereign power.

In Washington as a congressman's wife during the administrations of John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren, Polk very much enjoyed her social duties.

[6] Unlike Julia Tyler's waltzes, the Polk entertainments were sedate and sober affairs which earned the First Lady the nickname "Sahara Sarah".

[14] During the American Civil War, Polk was officially neutral, but she indicated sentiments in favor of preserving the Union during periodic visits to her home by several Union Army commanders, including Don Carlos Buell, George Henry Thomas, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman.

She was originally buried next to her husband at their home in Nashville and was later reinterred with him at the Tennessee State Capitol when Polk Place was demolished in 1901.