What Hath God Wrought (71 page)

Socioeconomic factors underscored the alienation of Catholics from antislavery. Most American Catholics were also immigrants and poor. They despised what they saw as the hypocrisy of those abolitionists who deplored the plight of distant slaves while ignoring that of the hungry newcomers on their doorstep. Sadly but understandably, poor Catholic immigrants, especially the Irish, treasured the whiteness of their skin as their one badge of privilege over the free Negroes who competed with them for jobs as laborers. Abolitionists, especially black abolitionists, deeply resented the attitude of Irish Americans and their church, contrasting it with the sympathy American antislavery received in Ireland itself from nationalists like Daniel O’Connell. As a result, abolitionists sometimes allied with the cause of nativism.
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But not even Catholics argued that slavery was a “positive good” and the best way to organize a society. Those who wished to make that case generally found it necessary to invoke secular rather than religious ideologies to justify their position. John C. Calhoun, theorist of southern sectional unity and constitutional interpretation, made himself the most widely known exponent of the “positive good” of slavery. On February 6, 1837, the South Carolinian addressed the Senate to oppose reception of petitions calling for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. (Since Congress had no power to abolish slavery in the states, the District of Columbia became a favorite target for abolitionists wishing to focus national attention on their cause.) In his speech Calhoun abandoned the conventional Jeffersonian doctrine of slavery as an unfortunate legacy that the South must be left to deal with on its own. “I take higher ground,” he declared. “I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.” Without the coercion of slavery, Calhoun foresaw, white supremacy would be at risk; “the next step would be to raise the negroes [
sic
] to a social and political equality with the whites.” Slavery’s virtue lay not in its mere profitability but in its broad social consequences. It prevented both race and class conflict in the South, Calhoun claimed. “There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital,” he insisted. But southern slavery “exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict.” This speech prompted the historian Richard Hofstadter to label Calhoun “the Marx of the Master Class.”
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Proslavery propagandists seized with delight upon the Census of 1840, conducted by the Van Buren administration. Data which that census collected for the first time included statistics on the number of the insane. The census returns wildly inflated the number of insane free Negroes (in some communities it exceeded the total colored population). Southern politicians cited these numbers, seemingly indicating far higher rates of insanity among free than enslaved blacks, to demonstrate that African Americans could not handle freedom. Calhoun himself used the statistics in public statements on behalf of expanding and protecting the beneficent institution of slavery. Meanwhile, however, the absurdity and contradictions contained in the data had been exposed by Edward Jarvis, a northern statistician. John Quincy Adams secured a congressional resolution calling for an inquiry into how the mistakes had occurred. One William Weaver of Virginia had been in charge of the census, and (as secretary of state under Tyler) Calhoun appointed him to head the investigation too, thus assuring a cover-up. Weaver succeeded in delaying the inquiry and obfuscating its outcome; proslavery politicians continued to exploit the returns. How the erroneous data got into the census remained a mystery until the detective work of historian Patricia Cline Cohen, who traced it to small print and confusingly labeled columns on the forms the collectors filled out. The census of 1840, the first to show the United States surpassing Great Britain in population and the first to collect information on literacy, was also the last of the amateurish ones. The census of 1850, conducted by a Whig administration, took advice from Jarvis and made considerable advances in the collection and processing of social statistics.
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The hothouse political atmosphere of South Carolina nurtured the attitude that slavery was a “positive good.” William Harper, enthusiastic supporter of nullification and chancellor of the state’s high court of equity, joined Calhoun in repudiating Jefferson’s principles; he explicitly rejected the assertion that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence as well as its doctrine of natural rights. A disciple of Edmund Burke, Harper distrusted those who would rebuild society on theoretical principles. Though slavery had its evils, so too did “free society,” and who could say that there was more happiness or less immorality in England or the northern states than there was in the South?
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In the years between 1848 and the Civil War, other South Carolinians, including William Smith and James Henry Hammond, would elaborate this proslavery ideology. But the process reached its apogee during the 1850s in the writings of a Virginian. George Fitzhugh repudiated individualism and natural rights entirely in favor of a theory of universal social subordination: children to parents, wives to husbands, subjects to rulers. Abolitionists pointed out that by Fitzhugh’s logic, all workers, white as well as black, would be better off enslaved.
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Most often, however, the “positive good” school of slavery apologists followed Calhoun and based their arguments on race. They asserted that Negroes were inherently intellectually “defective” and therefore naturally suited to enslavement by their superiors. Josiah Nott, a Mobile physician, took this line to its farthest extreme in the 1840s. Black Africans represented an entirely different species, he claimed, created separately by God from whites. Racial interbreeding produced hybrid offspring inferior to either parent. Nott’s theory (called “polygenesis”) found some supporters among naturalists of the day but ran into trouble because it contradicted the creation account in Genesis, which clearly affirmed the descent of all human beings from a single original couple (“monogenesis”). The failure of Nott’s theory to win over southern public opinion—even though it pandered to popular prejudices and despite its claims to scientific respectability—testified to the strength of the prevailing conception of harmony between reason and revelation.
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Bible-centered Protestantism, synthesized with the Enlightenment and a respect for classical learning, helped shape the culture, determine the patterns of intellectual inquiry, and define the terms of debate in the antebellum American republic. On the slavery issue, the synthesis was ambiguous; in most other ways it underwrote democratic values. It supplied a young and rapidly changing society with a sense of stability. Without resolving moral controversy, it endowed moral standards and rational discourse with each other’s authority, strengthening both.

“Andrew Jackson strengthened the presidency,” it is often claimed. True, Old Hickory extended the circle of presidential advisors, expanded the patronage to be dispensed, and broadened use of the veto power. He successfully combined the office of the presidency with leadership of his political party. He triumphed in confrontations with his rivals Biddle and Calhoun. Yet the power of President Jackson remained to a large extent a function of his personal popularity, that is, charismatic rather than institutional. He did not succeed in transferring all of his own power to his successors. Indeed, the second party system that resulted from his rule proved to be a period of weak presidents. (James Knox Polk was the only exception, and even he served but one term.) Jackson did not so much strengthen the institution of the presidency as set an example that later popular presidents could invoke. Martin Van Buren, however, did not make himself one of these. Adept at gaining power, he proved largely unsuccessful in wielding it. Jackson’s heir was fated to preside ineffectually over a time of economic hardship and bitter conflicts.

A son of Dutch innkeepers, Martin Van Buren of New York was the first president of non-British ancestry and the first to have been born a citizen of the United States. (His predecessors, all born before the Revolution, started life as British subjects.) Because he was Jackson’s chosen successor, Van Buren’s presidency has been dubbed Jackson’s third term. In most personal respects, of course, the New Yorker seemed utterly unlike Old Hickory: A small, dapper man, ingratiating, flexible, one who got his way through craft rather than assertiveness, he was famously evasive. A senator who made a bet that he could get the Little Magician to commit himself to an assertion once asked Van Buren if it was true that the sun came up in the East. “I invariably sleep until after sunrise,” replied the Fox of Kinderhook.
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Van Buren did, however, commit himself to “tread generally in the footsteps of President Jackson,” and in most respects he did so, retaining not only Jackson’s cabinet but the kitchen cabinet as well. In his inaugural address, Van Buren defined his goal as preserving the legacy of the Founders. He then humbly deferred to “his illustrious predecessor.” The personality of the outgoing president continued to dominate the occasion; “for once,” Thomas Hart Benton commented, “the rising was eclipsed by the setting sun.”
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Van Buren’s genial social skills impressed everyone, even his political enemies. A master of the new popular brand of party politics based on publicity, patronage, and organization, in private life he loved the traditional arts of conversation and hospitality. In combining political shrewdness with gracious living, Van Buren resembled the Republican patriarch Thomas Jefferson, whom he admired perhaps even more than he did Jackson. Van Buren played politics as a game, and he played it to win. He practiced a popular version of the game because the American playing field so dictated, but his instincts and tastes were deeply conservative. As U.S. envoy in England at the time of the great Parliamentary Reform Bill of 1832, he showed no sympathy for its modest extension of the suffrage. The personalities and mechanics of British politics interested him more than substantive issues.
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When she met Van Buren as president, Harriet Martineau observed, “His public career exhibits no one exercise of that faith in men and preference of principle to petty expediency by which a statesman shows himself to be great.” In fairness to Van Buren, however, if his brand of politics held little of high principle, neither did it evince the jealousy, spitefulness, and obsessive preoccupation with personal honor that characterized so many American politicians of the previous generation, including Alexander Hamilton, John Randolph, John C. Calhoun, and Jackson himself.
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In his appreciation for the role of party in politics, Van Buren went well beyond his model Jefferson. The Magician’s election as president put the final nail in the coffin of Monroe’s Era of Good Feelings, which John Quincy Adams had tried to perpetuate, and buried the Founders’ aspiration to nonpartisanship. A defender as well as a practitioner of the new politics, Van Buren pioneered the modern analysis of political parties as a legitimate feature of government instead of considering them (as all conventional political philosophers then did) a dangerous perversion. “It has always therefore struck me as more honorable and manly, and more in harmony with the character of our People and of our Institutions, to deal with the subject of Political Parties in a sincerer and wiser spirit—to recognize their necessity, [and] to give them the credit they deserve,” he wrote in his autobiography.
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The Bucktail faction that he led in New York state politics, nicknamed the Albany Regency once it gained power, exemplified the techniques of party manipulation and control that Van Buren transferred to the national stage. And it was a prominent member of the Albany Regency, William Marcy, who, when defending Van Buren’s New York state patronage policies, coined the famous phrase: “To the victor belong the spoils.”
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Party itself became a partisan issue in the presidential election of 1836. The Democrats held a national convention at Baltimore a year early in 1835, ostensibly to assemble representatives of their party’s faithful to choose their national ticket. In practice, the convention demonstrated the effectiveness of Jackson’s control over the party. Van Buren won nomination easily enough, but the Virginia delegation challenged Jackson’s choice for vice president, Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky. A fellow Indian fighter, reputed killer of the Shawnee chief Tecumseh during the War of 1812, Johnson enjoyed the favor of Old Hickory and his kitchen cabinet. He gained popularity with antievangelical voters through a congressional committee report (ghostwritten by postal clerk Obadiah Brown) resisting sabbatarian demands on the Sunday mail issue.
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He had also championed the abolition of imprisonment for debt, a favorite cause of eastern artisans. But the unmarried Johnson had kept an enslaved mulatto mistress named Julia Chinn and acknowledged his two children by her, making him persona non grata in some genteel southern circles. As a vice-presidential alternative Virginia fielded William C. Rives, a respectable planter and diplomat who gained enough support to prevent Johnson from getting the two-thirds vote he needed for nomination. Party leaders rode roughshod over Rives’s candidacy. Tennessee was one of four states that had sent no delegates to the Democratic convention; its state organization had been taken over by Jackson’s opponents. Jackson’s people simply brought in a man from Tennessee off the street and empowered him to cast all that state’s fifteen votes for Richard Mentor Johnson, putting the Kentuckian over the top. The statement issued instead of a platform identified the party with Old Republican principles of state rights and strict construction.
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Whigs declared the Democratic convention a mockery, deplored “the excesses of party” and pointed with pride to their own failure to hold any party convention at all. The Democrats, they charged, substituted party loyalty for independent judgment on issues.
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The Bank War had provoked defections from Jackson’s support in all parts of the country except New England, where the Democratic Party started out weak. As a result, Jackson’s top-heavy majorities in the South and West disappeared in 1836, and Van Buren faced serious opposition everywhere. However, disillusionment with Jackson did not immediately translate into a well-disciplined opposition party. Not all critics of Jackson and Van Buren even embraced the name “Whig”; Antimasons and Nullifiers maintained separate identities. A national convention of Whigs proved impossible to organize. Northern economic nationalists and southern state-rights Whigs could not get along; Calhoun refused altogether to join their cause. Absence of federal patronage to dispense compounded the opposition’s difficulties. The Whigs, in origin a congressional coalition, lacked the tangible basis for building a national party from the ground up that the Democrats possessed. Organizing a party was more difficult when one was out of power and critical of most of the methods by which the Democratic Party had been built. Mass politics as we know it developed only gradually, and the election of 1836 represented a stage in the process.

But while lacking a national organization, the opposition did have a constituency in all parts of the country. And so independent regional campaigns challenged Van Buren. William Henry Harrison, former governor of Indiana and victor over Tecumseh’s intertribal alliance at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, received the nomination of several state conventions and legislatures; he broke with tradition by actively campaigning. “Old Tippecanoe” gradually defined himself as the choice of most Whigs in the North and West. Deploring executive usurpation and expressing support for internal improvements and revenue sharing, Harrison gained Clay’s grudging endorsement.
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In the South, Jackson’s longtime Tennessee friend Hugh Lawson White had been antagonized by Old Hickory’s abuses of power and defined his own candidacy as a crusade to restore moral responsibility in government. White ran more as a disaffected Democrat than as a Whig. He exploited southerners’ fears that no northerner could be trusted on the slavery issue. Outside South Carolina itself, those who had sympathized with nullification generally backed White.
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Making the best of their lack of organization, some opposition leaders decided that sectional campaigns actually provided a promising strategy; if Van Buren could be kept from getting an electoral college majority, the contest would be thrown into the House of Representatives.
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The election took place between November 4 and 23, and by the end of the month the results showed that the Whigs’ ideological appeal had gained them votes over Clay’s showing in 1832, but not enough to win. Van Buren got only 50.9 percent of the popular vote; if South Carolina had held a popular vote for president, he presumably would have received less than half the nationwide popular tally. But he won the electoral college, 170 to 124 for his combined opponents. Harrison got 73 electoral votes and showed strength in the Ohio Valley, Upper South, and Antimasonic areas. White carried the previous Jackson strongholds of Tennessee and Georgia. Massachusetts voted for its favorite son Daniel Webster, and South Carolina’s legislature obeyed Calhoun, casting the state’s electoral votes for Willie Magnum of North Carolina. Compared with Jackson, Van Buren ran better in New England, worse in the South and West, showing the effects of having a Democratic candidate from the Northeast. On the whole, however, Democratic partisanship substituted satisfactorily for Jackson’s personal stature and delivered Van Buren the victory. Virginia’s Democratic electors withheld their votes from Richard Mentor Johnson, so he ended up one vote short of a majority in the vice-presidential contest. The race was therefore decided by the Senate, in accordance with the Constitution, for the only time in history. To no one’s surprise, the Democratic Senate elected Johnson. The percentage of eligible males participating in the popular vote rose from 55.4 in 1832 to 57.8 in 1836; most new voters cast their ballots for one of the opposition candidates.
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The outcome of the election of 1836 proved to contemporaries that partisanship trumped sectionalism as a basis for political effectiveness; the Whigs resolved to be better organized the next time. The Bank War, dominating Jackson’s second term, had polarized the voting public. Despite the Whigs’ inability to agree on a single presidential candidate, the election of 1836 provided a referendum on the administration’s financial policies. Opposition centered among the business community, which included not only industrialists and merchants but also the larger commercial farmers and planters producing export staples, all of whom relied on banking services and a stable credit system.
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Although the new incumbent hoped to put economic conflicts behind him, in fact they would dominate Van Buren’s presidency.

Former president John Quincy Adams contemplated a third term for the Jacksonians with deep forebodings:

II

Andrew Jackson’s greatest legacy to posterity was the Democratic Party. His popular appeal had created it; the decisions he reached in the White House became its policies. Where John Quincy Adams, like the framers, had believed in balanced government, Jackson believed in popular virtue—and in himself as its embodiment. A later admirer described the relationship well: “[Jackson’s politics] rested on the philosophy of majority rule. When a majority was at hand Jackson used it. When a majority was not at hand he endeavored to create it. When this could not be done in time, he went ahead anyhow.
He
was the majority pro tem. Unfailingly, at the next election, the people would return a vote of confidence, making his measures their own.”
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Until the Civil War transformed America, the Democratic Party continued along the trajectory Jackson had set, endorsing popular sovereignty, opposing a national bank and national economic planning, promoting continental expansion, and protecting slavery. Although it responded to the democratization of American life, the Democratic Party was not the spontaneous creation of a mass movement from the bottom up. There were “bottom up” movements in the young republic—among them Antimasonry, nativism, sabbatarianism, and the early labor movement—but the Democratic Party was not among them. The national party convention, for example, invented by the Antimasons, was adopted by the Democrats and later the Whigs in order to unify the respective parties and validate their leadership, not because of grassroots demand for it.