What Hath God Wrought (87 page)

But the president underestimated the Whig Party’s cohesion and dedication to its program. In protest against his bank vetoes, in September 1841 the entire cabinet resigned, save Secretary of State Daniel Webster, who was involved in serious negotiations with Britain over the Maine boundary. The same month, a caucus of Whig members of Congress took an extraordinary action unparalleled in American history: They expelled a sitting president from his political party. But Tyler would not abandon his bid for Whig Party leadership. Webster had fancied himself Harrison’s prime minister and hoped to become his heir; when the old man died, Webster was reluctant to give up on this aspiration. Tyler exploited the New Englander’s vanity to prolong ties with his branch of the party. But by the summer of 1842, Tyler’s attempt to turn the Whig Party around had clearly failed. At this point the president switched to a new strategy: He would form a party of his own. With this in mind, he undertook a wholesale purge of the Whig appointees from federal offices, replacing them with state-rights men, most of them Democrats.

The midterm elections of 1842–43 inflicted terrible reprisals upon the Whigs. Their Senate majority was trimmed and their majority in the House lost altogether; the number of Whig representatives plummeted dramatically from 133 to 79. The depression continued, the party had not made good on its promises, and despite its repudiation of him, Tyler had muddied the waters enough so that many voters viewed the Whigs as a party rent by internal division and incapable of governing. The first-time voters whom the Whigs had recruited in 1840 now felt disillusioned and stayed away from the polls in droves. Furthermore, by purging the Whigs from their patronage, Tyler had robbed the party’s local leaders of the usual incentives and opportunities to mobilize supporters. Reapportionment following the census of 1840 compounded these effects and cost the Whigs many seats in states where Democratic legislatures had redrawn the constituencies.
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Tyler continued to delude himself that he could create a third party by the use of patronage, though as a practical matter he needed support from the congressional Democrats. The latter rested content to apply the principle of laissez-faire and wait for the country to struggle out of the depression as best it might. The Democrats showed no interest in Tyler’s Exchequer Plan, his belated attempt to craft a substitute for Van Buren’s Independent Treasury and the Whigs’ national bank—despite the plan’s intrinsic merits.
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In the spring of 1843 Webster, his treaty with Britain safely concluded and his dream of using the State Department as a springboard to the White House finally abandoned, resigned from the cabinet and returned to the Whig Party. Contrary to Black Dan’s advice, Tyler had begun to pursue the annexation of Texas.

III

Campaigners for Harrison in Illinois throughout the months of 1839–40 included the thirty-one-year-old Whig state legislator Abraham Lincoln. Though a strong admirer of Clay, Lincoln had backed Harrison even before the party convention. Much in demand during the campaign, Lincoln spoke before many audiences in varied circumstances—in the state assembly wearing his best sixty-dollar suit, out on the stump dressed in jeans, or traveling about the state debating against a young Democrat named Stephen Douglas, as the two men would do again in their more famous confrontations eighteen years later. Lincoln denounced Van Buren’s Independent Treasury and demanded a third national bank to replace it. The partisan presses reported that he also told jokes, poked fun at local Democrats, and matched wits with hecklers. The Democratic papers wrote him off as a “traveling missionary” for Harrison; Whig papers found him effective.
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Still a frontier agricultural state in 1840, with many Butternut settlers from the South, Illinois went for Van Buren in spite of Lincoln’s efforts. In Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, however, voters engaged in commerce, industry, and the professions delivered a majority to the Whigs.
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Lincoln’s political party reflected his choice of occupation and way of life, as well as, in a larger sense, his personal values. The son of a farmer, Lincoln had left home like countless other young Americans and struck out on his own. First he tried his luck in the tiny village of New Salem, clerking in a store. But New Salem never managed to get connected to any transportation that could sustain its commerce; Lincoln moved away to Springfield and helped it become the state capital. New Salem ended up one of the West’s countless ghost towns.

Lincoln took the experience of New Salem to heart; he early became and long remained an ardent supporter of internal improvements. The revolutions in transportation and communications captured his imagination. On one occasion, to demonstrate the potential of the Sangamon River as an artery of commerce, he took charge of a steamboat himself and piloted it along the stream from Beardstown to Portland Landing. Later, he even tried inventing a device to enable steamboats to float themselves off when they stuck on shoals; although he actually got a patent for the idea, he never marketed it. (Lincoln envisioned buoyant air chambers, collapsed when not needed and inflated to raise the boat and diminish its draft.)
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But mostly Lincoln worked through the political process to provide subsidies for canals and railroads. Remembering what the Erie Canal had done for New York state, he confided to his best friend his ambition to become “the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.”
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Like a good Whig, Lincoln would have preferred to see federal money spent for internal improvements, but when this was not forthcoming, he heartily endorsed state funding: “the Illinois System,” his plan was called, a small-scale American System. During the legislative session of 1836–37, by now Whig minority leader, Lincoln worked with the Democratic majority in the legislature, led by Stephen Douglas, to achieve this end, showing that Democrats too were happy to enable farmers to market their crops. When the Panic of 1837 ruined the economy of Illinois, however, Lincoln demonstrated much more reluctance than the Democrats to give up on the Illinois System.
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He differed from the Democrats even more in his insistence that the West needed credit and that a third national bank constituted the safest and most practical source of such credit. In the absence of a national bank, Lincoln defended the Illinois state bank against the Democrats. In a famous incident, while trying to protect the state bank, Lincoln and some other Whig legislators jumped out the window of the statehouse in a vain attempt to prevent a quorum.

Most fundamentally, Lincoln differed with the Democrats in broad political outlook. Democrats thought primarily in terms of local white communities; their nationalism consisted of a desire to extend across the continent the area where these communities could flourish. Lincoln and the Whigs thought in terms of an integrated nation, its diverse occupations, classes, and regions harmonized in economic complementarity. The protective tariff, a subject to which Lincoln devoted much attention and study, seemed to him to guarantee home markets for both agriculture and industry while saving on transportation costs. Within an economically developed and integrated nation, Lincoln believed, individual autonomy could flourish as never before. As his biographer David Donald sums it up, the Whig Party embodied for Lincoln “the promise of American life,” an opportunity for people to make something of themselves. For Whigs like Lincoln, this involved more than material betterment or upward social mobility. It meant a whole new kind of life away from the farm, the chance “to escape the restraints of locality and community,” as the historian Allen Guelzo puts it, “to refashion themselves on the basis of new economic identities in a larger world of trade, based on merit, self-improvement, and self-control.”
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To Lincoln, then, his membership in the Whig Party typified the new life he had made for himself. He remained an active and loyal Whig until the newly organized Republican Party absorbed most northern Whigs in the mid-1850s. This new party represented for Lincoln a continuation of the same aspirations as the Whigs, for the modernization of American society and the creation of new opportunities for personal self-fulfillment.
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An important part of Lincoln’s life as a Whig was his marriage to Mary Todd. Daughter of a prominent Whig family in Lexington, she had known Henry Clay personally all her life. Mary made no secret of her political opinions. She and her husband shared a strong loyalty to the Whig Party, though in the mid-1850s they briefly disagreed on what that implied: She backed Fillmore for president in 1856 when Abraham backed Frémont. Mary was a devout Christian (Episcopalian until 1850; thereafter Presbyterian), while Abraham never joined a church—not an uncommon pattern, for many more wives than husbands belonged to churches. Nevertheless, Abraham had absorbed biblical culture and a Calvinist sense of fatalism from his Baptist upbringing. When the Civil War came, his spirituality would deepen profoundly.
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In the meantime, he participated in some of the same redemptive reforms as the Evangelical United Front. One of these was the temperance movement.

While the Democrats celebrated the natural man and held up Andrew Jackson as his prototype, Whigs like Lincoln celebrated the artificial—that is, self-constructed—personality. An address Lincoln delivered to the local chapter of the Washingtonian Temperance Society in Springfield’s Second Presbyterian Church reveals much about his ideal of the self-controlled, autonomous personality. A teetotaler himself, Lincoln declared forthrightly, “The world would be vastly benefited by a total and final banishment from it of all intoxicating drinks.” Nevertheless, he spent the first part of his speech criticizing temperance advocates for their self-righteous denunciations. The strength of the Washingtonian movement, he declared, was that it comprised reformed alcoholics, who understood at first hand the meaning of resolve and self-control. They should lead the “temperance revolution,” a worthy successor to “our political revolution of ’76.” In this new revolution, “we shall find a stronger bondage broken, a viler slavery manumitted, a greater tyrant deposed.” Like so many other American reformers of his day, Lincoln roused millennial expectations. “Happy day,” he concluded, “when, all appetites controlled, all passions subdued, all matters subjected, mind, all conquering mind, shall live and move the monarch of the world. Glorious consummation! Hail, fall of Fury! Reign of Reason, all hail!” Lincoln’s version of the millennium was the supremacy of rationality over impulse and passion. And, like most other American millennialists, he made a special place for his own country: “When the victory shall be complete—when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth—how proud the title of that
Land
, which may truly claim to be the birth-place and the cradle of both those revolutions.”
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Temperance and antislavery partook of the same moral impulse, for both sought to redeem humanity from bondage, whether to the passions of others or to those of oneself.

IV

Under Jackson, the Democratic Party celebrated popular sovereignty and expressed relative indifference to the rule of law when this conflicted with the will of “the people” as defined by the party. Even violence had been shrugged off when directed against unpopular minorities. Whigs, on the other hand, emphasized that the people had imposed legal limitations on their own sovereignty; in controversies like deposit removal they cast themselves as upholders of the law. The late 1830s saw a continuation of this pattern. Both Arkansas and Michigan drew up state constitutions without waiting for legal authority from Congress. Democrats and Whigs disagreed about whether to accept such behavior and admit the territories as states, but the Democratic predilection for popular sovereignty eventually carried the day. More worrisome was the Democratic proposal to circumvent amendment in favor of popular sovereignty as a method of changing the constitution of Maryland in 1836; Maryland voters, however, opted for the legal procedure by a large margin. In 1838, a Pennsylvania mob inflamed by Democratic editorials burst into the capitol building in Harrisburg, sending the state senators fleeing. Although the Van Buren administration refused the governor’s request for aid, state militia managed to restore order.
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Then, in 1842, the bizarre episode in Rhode Island known as the Dorr Rebellion (or, more hyperbolically, as the “Dorr War”) provoked both Democrats and Whigs to reaffirm their principles in the light of experience.

Alone among American states, Rhode Island had not drawn up a new constitution since the Revolution, and as late as 1842 operated under its colonial charter of 1663. Extraordinarily democratic by seventeenth-century standards, the charter had been rendered anachronistic by the industrial revolution. The charter conveyed “freemanship” (the right to vote, sue in court, and serve on juries) to native-born adult white males who either owned real estate or were the eldest sons of freemen. What fraction of Rhode Island men could meet these archaic qualifications in the 1840s is unclear; modern estimates range from 40 percent to two-thirds.
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The system favored farmers at the expense of residents in the new textile mill towns, not only in the voting requirements but also in the apportionment of the state legislature. While the city of Providence had one-sixth of the state’s population and contributed two-thirds of its taxes, it chose only one-twentieth of the state representatives.
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Rhode Island’s old charter endured for reasons both procedural and substantive. In the first place, the document contained no provision for its own amendment. (Originally, it had been assumed that the Privy Council in London could change it; now that was out of the question.) Second, the two major parties had come to terms with the charter. The Democrats won the state in 1836; the Whigs in 1840. Would-be reformers disagreed about what changes to make. The textile mills had recruited French Canadian and Irish immigrants, mostly Catholic in religion; a free Negro population dated back to the days when Rhode Island had been a center of the Atlantic slave trade. If the suffrage were to be expanded, Democrats wanted to include immigrants but not black men; Whigs preferred the opposite.