What Hath God Wrought (122 page)

The partial irrelevance of the old Whig economic program resulted in part from the success of Polk’s legislative agenda. In accordance with the objectives the president had laid out to George Bancroft upon taking office, his first Congress scrapped the “pet bank” scheme in favor of the complete separation of bank and state, that is, the restoration of Van Buren’s Independent Treasury. In the past, the business community had felt a need for a national bank to provide a sound but sufficiently plentiful currency. Now, however, the Irish Potato Famine so boosted American grain exports that specie flowed into the country and provided a circulating medium that satisfied Democrats and Whigs alike. In the years to come, gold from California would solve the old problem of a currency shortage until after the Civil War. The reciprocal lowering of U.S. tariffs by Congress a month after Parliament repealed the Corn Laws further stimulated international trade. Together with deficit spending on the war, this completed economic recovery from the hard times of the early forties.

To some extent the Democrats had also preempted traditional Whig economic issues. A movement within the Democratic Party called “Young America” embraced internal improvements so long as they were built by private enterprise, not mixed public-private corporations. They saw themselves as a new generation of Democrats, emphasizing nationalism and expansionism rather than currency and banking as their issues. Internal improvements seemed to them a necessary corollary of geographical expansion; they expressed eagerness to spend government money, state or federal, to subsidize transportation. The Democratic Party had always had a commercial wing, so the Young Americans were not so innovative as they imagined, but they enjoyed particular strength in the Old Northwest. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois typified this kind of prodevelopment Democrat with his interest in railroads. From December 1844 on, Congress discussed federal land grants to a transcontinental railroad, with western Democrats eagerly competing to anchor the eastern terminus of such a route. No longer could the Whigs count on appealing to the business community with a sharp contrast between all the positions of the two parties.
⁹⁰

With the luck of world events playing into Democratic hands, Polk might have seemed a good bet to win reelection. However, he had promised to serve but one term, and felt so exhausted by the strains of his presidency, its crises and war, the bitterness of his critics and the dissension within his party, that for once he kept his word. The Democratic National Convention, meeting in Baltimore, passed over James Buchanan and bestowed its nomination on Lewis Cass of Michigan, a super-imperialist especially hostile to Britain, who had been a prominent contender for the nomination in 1844. Zealous enforcer of Indian Removal as Jackson’s secretary of war, Cass had wanted to annex more of Mexico and would have welcomed the chance to conquer British Columbia for the United States. He believed that an “unlimited power of expansion” constituted “our safety-valve,” underwriting American economic and political democracy.
⁹¹
The European Revolutions of 1848 provided Cass an opportunity to play up to the ethnic loyalties of immigrants with truculent gestures toward Old World monarchies. As a candidate from the Old Northwest, his selection helped reconcile Democrats in that section to their party. The convention quietly shelved the Wilmot Proviso, and most northern Democrats accepted as a substitute Cass’s own solution to slavery in the territories, called “popular sovereignty.” According to this doctrine, slavery should be left to the white settlers in the West to decide for themselves. The attraction of this policy was that it promised to keep the explosive issue out of the halls of Congress. But the Democratic Party platform, though it commended popular sovereignty as a principle for Europeans to adopt, said nothing about it applying to the U.S. territories. And Cass himself refused to specify whether settlers could legislate against slavery before the territory was admitted to the Union. Southern Democrats, accordingly, remained free to argue that the Constitution mandated the legality of slavery in every U.S. territory unless and until the voters exercised their option to end it at the time of statehood. To a Whig like Abraham Lincoln, a Cass presidency heralded “new wars, new acquisitions of territory, and still further extensions of slavery.”
⁹²

For all his successes as president, Polk had been much less successful as leader of his party. He had achieved his impressive legislative victories thanks to the support of northern Democrats. Vice President Dallas, although a Pennsylvania protectionist, had swallowed hard and broken a Senate tie in favor of the low Walker Tariff. Up to the time when he introduced his famous proviso, David Wilmot had been one of the most prosouthern of northern congressmen: He had defended the gag rule to the last, supported Calhoun’s plan for conciliation in Oregon, and voted to reduce the tariff.
⁹³
But in return for their loyalty, northern Democrats felt they had received little or nothing. The most disaffected of all from “Polk the Mendacious” were the followers of Martin Van Buren, who had been frozen out of the patronage. New York’s electoral votes had been critical in winning the presidency for Polk, yet Van Buren’s New York Democratic machine had received nothing from his administration; the only high-ranking New Yorker in it, Secretary of War Marcy, belonged to a rival party faction. When Van Buren had occupied the White House, he had accorded the slaveholding South plenty of favors; the Polk administration had not reciprocated. Finally convinced that Polk had lied to them repeatedly, the angry Van Burenites decided to break away from the Democratic Party. The party regulars gave them the contemptuous nickname “Barnburners,” after the legendary New York Dutch farmer stupid enough to burn down his barn in order to drive the rats out of it.
⁹⁴

In August 1848, the Barnburners met at a third-party convention in Buffalo, New York, to negotiate an alliance with two other political elements. One consisted of “Conscience” Whigs (that is, the radical antislavery, antiwar wing of their party) who could not accept the candidacy of Zachary Taylor, hero of a war they deplored and absentee owner of a Louisiana plantation. The other group attending represented the Liberty Party, those abolitionists who engaged in politics as well as moral suasion. The convention voted Van Buren their presidential nomination in return for a platform designed to appeal to the Liberty Party and antislavery Whigs. It opposed slavery in the territories and the District of Columbia, called for free western lands to homesteaders, and endorsed internal improvements and a protective tariff. The platform concluded with the slogan “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men!”
⁹⁵

Of course, the irony of the Free Soil movement escaped no contemporary. Van Buren, the person who legitimated political partisanship at a time when all conventional wisdom condemned it and the one who had done more than anyone else to create the national Democratic Party, now led a revolt against that party. The Free Soil convention underscored the irony by the running mate it chose for Jackson’s longtime protégé: Charles Francis Adams, son of Van Buren’s antagonist John Quincy Adams. Those who found the newborn party congenial included the land reformer George Henry Evans and a faction of the New York anti-renters who had become his followers; they had actually started using the term “free soil” two years earlier in 1846. Also enthusiastic were the little band of northern former Democrats whom that party had expelled for daring to criticize slavery; these included the Liberty Party’s new leader, Senator John P. Hale.
⁹⁶
On the other hand, a few Liberty Party members refused to stomach Van Buren and maintained their separate identity. The former president’s own motivation was the protection of the Democratic machine he had built up in New York state from destruction at the hands of Polk’s appointees. As a judicious biographer points out, “In 1848, Van Buren acted neither as a moral idealist nor as a revengeful cynic, but rather as the loyal New York Democrat he had always been.”
⁹⁷
What explained the nationwide significance of the new movement Van Buren temporarily headed was, however, the new strength of sectionalism. Twelve years later a new Republican Party, with a platform much like that of the Free Soil Party, would actually win the presidency.

November 7, 1848, witnessed the first modern presidential election; for the first time all the states chose their electors on the same day. All but South Carolina did so by popular vote. A uniform single day had been mandated by act of Congress following the notorious 1844 frauds organized on Polk’s behalf by John Slidell in Louisiana, where five thousand men had cast their votes in one parish on one day and then traveled to another to vote again a day later.
⁹⁸
Congress specified a Tuesday so rural voters could journey to the county seat on Monday, thus not forcing sabbatarians to travel on Sunday; November first was ruled out because Catholics went to mass on All Saints’ Day. Putting all the voting on one day still did not prevent voting at more than one precinct in urban areas; in the absence of voter registration, this kind of fraud remained common enough to provoke the joking admonition, “Vote early and often.” Because the telegraph network already linked much of the country in instant communication, some people worried that early reports of results in the East would affect voters in the West. (Though standard time zones still lay in the future, it was, of course, later in the day in the East than in the West.) Telegraph companies warned their employees not to divulge the contents of messages to anyone but the addressee, but the newspapers had agreed to pool information over the wires through the Associated Press in 1848. The time it took to hand-count ballots and print newspapers containing election returns mitigated the problem at this early stage of the communications revolution.
⁹⁹
Later, Maine secured an exception that allowed it to hold its presidential election in September, on the grounds that the weather was often bad in Maine by November.

Counting the votes proceeded so slowly it took a week to reveal the outcome. Taylor won the election with 163 electoral votes to 127 for Cass; Old Rough and Ready carried both North and South. Polk could leave office having achieved his original goals more completely than most presidents, but the election also realized his nightmare: The war he waged created a Whig military hero who succeeded him in the White House. Van Buren’s Free Soil ticket carried none of the states but came in second in New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Like the communications revolution, the sectional revolution in American politics was only just beginning in 1848. Both major parties had dodged the Wilmot Proviso: the Whigs by having no platform and the Democrats by running a candidate who favored popular sovereignty. Most American voters and politicians stuck with their old party loyalties. Even Van Buren’s friends Benton and Francis Blair supported Cass; surprisingly enough, so did David Wilmot. On the Whig side, even such opponents of slavery extension as Lincoln and Seward supported Taylor. The Free Soil Party took away enough Democratic votes in New York to give that state to Taylor; in Ohio, it took away enough Whig votes to give that state to Cass. Overall, the third party does not appear to have determined the outcome of the election, which Taylor would have won even without its intervention.
¹⁰⁰
Yet the Free Soil Party had served notice on national politicians that a critical fraction of the northern electorate found additional slave states unacceptable. Thereafter, Congress admitted no more slave states.

After the election, Clay claimed that he too could have beaten Cass, carrying every state that Taylor did except Georgia, and he may well have been right, though Clay should perhaps also have conceded Florida and Louisiana, which Taylor carried. Whig politicians who thought Clay could not win were probably too cautious, as politicians often are. Taylor helped the Whigs only in the Deep South; in the North, Whig voters would have turned out as well or better for Clay. The Walker Tariff was deeply unpopular in protectionist Pennsylvania, a critical state that went for Taylor and presumably would have gone for Clay too. Unlike the national bank, the tariff had not died as an issue. Unlike Taylor, Clay could have held Ohio for the Whigs even with the Free Soil ticket in the field. As for Van Buren, his moment of rebellion past, he returned to the Democratic Party and remained there for the rest of his life. His caution prevailed over principle. He endorsed Pierce and Buchanan for president in the 1850s and in 1860 supported Douglas and popular sovereignty rather than Lincoln and free soil.
¹⁰¹

As the United States faced the future at the close of 1848, the newly elected president from the opposition waited to assume power in March. Zachary Taylor could take a certain personal satisfaction in having beaten Lewis Cass. In 1832, Colonel Taylor, in accordance with War Department policy, evicted some white squatters from Indian land. The irate settlers sued Taylor personally. But when Taylor asked Secretary of War Cass for a deposition stating that he had obeyed orders, Cass refused. Taylor concluded that the secretary acted from “timidity, or perhaps from worse motives.”
¹⁰²
Although his southern supporters touted his candidacy in 1848 as that of a slaveholding planter, the outlook of Old Rough and Ready reflected more his years of national service in the army than his absentee ownership of a Louisiana plantation. Before an untimely death cut short his presidency, this veteran soldier would antagonize the extreme southern rights advocates by his insistence that California should become a free state and that New Mexico remain separate from Texas.

Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party had appealed to a militant sense of egalitarianism among males of the favored race and had built a strong nation, even while keeping the role of the national state as limited as they could. The Democrats had also demonstrated a receptivity to immigration and a tolerance of cultural diversity that would prove valuable qualities for the nation in the years ahead. The extension of American sovereignty across the continent had been largely an achievement of Democrats. Yet the expansion of the economy and of educational opportunities reflected the contribution of National Republicans and Whigs. Although the Democrats had been more politically successful in the national party competition of the previous generation, on the whole the Whigs had more accurately anticipated the directions in which the country moved: toward economic diversification and industrialization, away from dependence on slavery and a uniformly agricultural economy. The leaders of the Whig Party, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, had both foreseen and intended the kind of empire that America would become. Adams was now dead, and Clay had lost his final try for the presidency. Still, America’s future lay predominantly within the Whig vision of economic development and a stronger central government. Abraham Lincoln, admirer of Henry Clay, would apply the principles of John Quincy Adams to save the Union, purge it of slavery, and promote both education and economic expansion.