Lincoln had genuinely expected Clay to win this time and doubted the result, at least for a while. Less than a year after the loss, Lincoln wrote an acquaintance, “If the Whig abolitionists of New York had voted with us last fall, Mr. Clay would now be president, Whig principles in the ascendant, and Texas not annexed; whereas by the division, all that either had at stake in the contest, was lost.”127 Of course, it could also be said that if Clay had not kept shifting his position on Texas during the election, he might have been president. He also might have won if he had he given any thought on how to handle the third-party candidacy of James Birney of Michigan, who ran as the Liberty Party candidate, committed to abolition. He could not have kept him off the ballot, but he could have devised a strategy that might have prevented or minimized the damage it caused by siphoning votes away from Clay in key Northern states.
Lincoln never forgot the lessons of the 1844 presidential campaign: it was the closest Clay ever would come to winning the presidency, and he lost the office he most coveted through a series of mistakes and oversights, as well as through the inability of many Whigs to see beyond the moment. If, for example, Whig abolitionists had backed Clay, a lifelong opponent of slavery who owned slaves, they would have had a president much friendlier to the cause. If Clay had allowed his career and particularly his party to speak for him rather than publish letters where he said more than he had to and kept exposing himself to more trouble, he might have been president. If Clay had disposed of the Liberty Party or the appeal it had to abolitionist voters, he might have been president. If Clay had not compromised himself by shifting positions on the most important issue of the day, he might have won. Ironically, the man famous for his oratory was brought low by his own carelessness with words.
Later, as a candidate for the House and still later for the presidency, Lincoln would be a model of self-control, relentlessly staying on message and otherwise saying nothing, while party leaders, the party faithful, and Lincoln’s surrogates reassured constituents that he was their best bet. Clay’s mistakes would be among the most lasting lessons Lincoln learned from his mentor.
The Constitution gave the president-elect a six-month transition period between the election in November and inauguration in March. (The Twenty-Second Amendment, adopted in 1933, shortened the time between election and presidential inauguration from March to January 20.) True to character, President Tyler decided not to be idle during those six months. Working with his secretary of war, John Calhoun, the lame duck president developed a plan to get both houses of Congress to approve a treaty that Calhoun had negotiated with Texas for its annexation. Once they did, all that would be left to be done would be for Congress to admit Texas as a new state and for the next president to sign the bill authorizing Texas’s admission into the Union. The ensuing battles, which carried over to the newly installed Polk administration, would shape Lincoln’s presidency and years in Congress.
Chapter Three
Clay Man in the House
(1844–1850)
Henry Clay’s loss to Polk in the 1844 presidential contest was devasting. It meant much more than the end of his quest for the presidency and much more than a political defeat for the Whig Party. It was a constitutional defeat for the nation.
Jacksonian Democrats viewed the president as the central constitutional actor; he gave the orders, and it was Congress’s duty to follow them. Whigs like Clay and Lincoln saw this as a distortion of the proper constitutional order, a seizure of power at the expense of Congress. They viewed the legislative branch as the locus for the great debates on the Constitution and the future of American democracy; in Congress, the great issues were to be deliberated on and resolved. Once resolved through policy, it became the president’s duty to implement the policy formulated by Congress. Democrats, on the other hand, saw the president, and particularly Jackson, as the embodiment of democracy and the most legitimate servant of the popular will. Whigs countered that presidents should defer to their Cabinets and that Jackson’s dismissal of his was a flagrant abuse of power. Democrats believed that presidents should direct their Cabinets and that Jackson’s blanket dismissal was his prerogative.
Henry Clay, “the Great Compromiser,” embodied the great spirit of democracy at work in Congress and, in the perspective of the Whigs, the country. With Clay at its helm, Congress could set the terms of national debate (not just Whigs, in theory) could shape the priorities of the nation, and thus rise to the challenges the framers had left this generation to handle. Yet with the only Whig elected president dying ridiculously early in his administration, the members of the Whig Party had yet to see their vision ever put fully into practice.
From the time that Lincoln first cast a ballot in a presidential election, in 1832, to his vote for Clay in 1844, only once had he backed the winning candidate. At thirty-five, he had experienced only a single month of a Whig presidency. There had been a long string of Democrats—Jackson followed by Van Buren, Tyler (whom no one mistook for a Whig), and now Polk—all destroying Clay’s and Lincoln’s shared vision of constitutional ideals. Theirs was a gloomy view: Jackson’s eight years as King Mob, who tried to dominate Congress, had been followed by four years of Van Buren bumbling through the nation’s first depression in a failed effort to extend that legacy. Harrison never had a chance to stifle the tidal wave of Democratic control, while Tyler had realized the Whigs’ worst fears, turning out to be a staunch Jacksonian. Tyler and Clay had once been friends, but they were foes by the time Tyler left office.
If Henry Clay were president, he might have been able to restore the balance of power that his Democratic predecessors had upended, but of course he was not. Now Lincoln watched from afar as yet another Democrat, Polk, prepared to lead the nation for another four years in exactly the wrong constitutional direction.
Lincoln’s interest in running for Congress was thus motivated by concerns more important than merely satisfying his personal ambitions. True, he was ambitious, and election to Congress was another step on a path to achieve national fame, but this would have been equally true for all of Lincoln’s contemporaries who were no less ambitious and aspired to the same offices. Lincoln ran for the House because he desperately needed to be a part of the solution, which included the larger debate on the great constitutional issues of the day, to assert the Whig conceptions of presidential and congressional power and national unity, and to push back against—if not thwart—Jacksonian domination of the presidency and, thereby, of the entire federal government, including Congress. He did not run merely for fame or fortune or even for rewards to his district. He was heeding Clay’s call. He ran to secure Clay’s American System.
But, on March 4, 1845, it was James K. Polk who took the oath of office as the eleventh president of the United States. His rise to power marked a corresponding decline in the influence of the Whig Party. Polk became president with solid Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, yet his single four-year term turned out to more momentous than he ever dreamed. It coincided with the most serious military conflict that Americans had been involved in since the War of 1812. As a candidate and member of Congress, Lincoln attentively studied how a president actually handled a war and its aftermath, coming to believe, like Clay and so many other Whigs, that Polk had abused his power in starting the war, misleading Congress in the process.
In 1847, Lincoln joined what was called a “president-making Congress,” because it coincided with the 1848 presidential election and many of its members were eyeing the presidency for themselves or their party. From his desk near the back of the chamber, and in the hallways and rooms of the Capitol, Lincoln watched as the most prominent politicians of the day vied to become (or to control the selection of) the next president, so consumed with their own ambitions they missed what was happening on the floor of the House in front of them. Many Democrats and Republicans who fought in Congress from 1847 to 1849 were still battling a decade later—some on the battlefield—over the fates of the Union and slav
ery. Jefferson Davis was in the Senate, as Clay returned for a platform to fight for at least one last time for the Whig nomination for president and the preservation of the Union. Initially, Lincoln aligned with Clay, but he soon felt compelled to choose between backing Clay or the same vision championed by a different man, Zachary Taylor, a Whig who had a much better chance of being elected president in 1850. He chose Taylor.
I
* * *
James K. Polk justly earned his nickname, “Young Hickory.” Though he was a half foot shorter than Jackson and thicker around the middle than his sinewy mentor, no one was more loyal to Jackson than Polk. Jackson’s temperament had been forged in war, while Polk’s had been forged in more refined, less violent venues, the halls of state legislatures, the House of Representatives, and the Tennessee governor’s mansion. Though Polk lacked Jackson’s fiery demeanor, he was no less a partisan, and—like Jackson—never forgot a slight. Jackson exploded in anger; Polk quietly seethed and plotted revenge.
Polk was born in North Carolina in 1795, grew up in central Tennessee, and attended college at the University of North Carolina. After graduation, he went back to Tennessee, where family connections and his background as a college debater earned him a law apprenticeship with a powerful Tennessee Democrat and attorney, Felix Grundy. With Grundy’s help, he became clerk to the Tennessee Senate in 1819. Four years later, he was elected to the Tennessee House. Once there, he increasingly sided with Andrew Jackson, who was beginning in earnest his campaign for the presidency, instead of Grundy, in skirmishes over what instructions the Tennessee state legislature should have been giving its senators in Washington on such issues as the national bank and land reform. Polk married into a well-connected political family, for whom Jackson was a close friend and was affectionately known as Uncle Andrew. In 1823, Polk successfully led an effort to break a deadlock in the Tennessee legislature over Jackson’s appointment as a senator; Polk’s intervention helped to tip the balance in favor of Jackson, who was then able to add the title, if not the experience, of U.S. senator to his military accomplishments. In 1825, at twenty-nine, Polk was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. His first speech, proposing to replace the Electoral College with the popular vote, fell largely on deaf ears. He had greater success in advising Jackson in the run-up to the 1828 presidential election, after which President Jackson never missed a chance to assist Polk’s rise in the party and in Congress.
In Jackson’s second term, he was so grateful for Polk’s loyalty and his ability to calmly but firmly advance his policies in Congress that in 1833 Jackson placed Polk in charge of the congressional battle over the national bank’s future. Jackson arranged for Polk to be appointed chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, which meant that any issue relating to the national bank would have to go through him. Polk promptly directed investigations into corrupt practices of the bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle, and wrote a minority report approving of Jackson’s transferring federal funds from the national bank to state banks as a way to thwart Biddle’s control. Polk supported Jackson’s opposition to the bank and to Clay’s beloved internal improvements, while Jackson reciprocated by rallying support for Polk to win election as speaker of the House in 1835. (The two men must have been delighted to have Polk now in the position that Clay once held in the House.) As speaker, Polk was instrumental in supporting Jackson’s and Van Buren’s fiscal policies and in 1836 implementing the controversial “gag rule.” The Constitution guarantees to citizens the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances,” and in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, Congress was receiving thousands of petitions, most of them sponsored by the Anti-Slavery Society. In response to these petitions, the House adopted the gag rule—a series of resolutions barring the House from hearing or taking any action on any of these petitions. The rule stayed in effect until former president John Quincy Adams, who, after leaving office, had been a member of the House in 1831, eventually assembled a coalition of Northern and Southern Whigs and Northern Democrats to get it repealed in December 1844.
After seven terms in the House, Polk faced a turning point. He was concerned how he could fulfill his own presidential ambitions, and staying in the House felt like a handicap, as no speaker had ever been elected president. Instead, he ran for governor of Tennessee. As it turned out, Polk served only a single term before being defeated in the Whig wave of 1841 in response to the nation’s first great depression, which had begun on Van Buren’s watch and torpedoed his presidency.
Neither Jackson nor Polk forgot the importance of Jackson’s support and mentoring in Polk’s career. Particularly as a presidential candidate, Polk frequently consulted Jackson. After his victory in the 1844 election, Polk exchanged letters with Jackson on appointments and the new administration’s priorities. In January 1845, Polk traveled to Jackson’s home to speak personally with the former president before heading to Washington for his inauguration. Jackson was pleased that Polk intended not only to have a geographical diversity of Cabinet officers but also to secure a promise from anyone serving in his Cabinet to forgo any presidential ambitions while serving Polk as president. Aware that he might be viewed as merely Jackson’s tool, Polk made clear to the party, congressional leaders, and the public that he intended not just to keep anyone else or Congress from hijacking his administration (as Calhoun had tried to do with Jackson), but also to prevent Jackson from doing the same. More than once, Polk declared that he alone would be responsible for everything his administration did.
As a candidate, Polk shrewdly made another vow—that he intended to serve only a single term. Harrison had been the first president to pledge serving only a single term but died long before he could complete even those four years. Polk and Harrison had nothing else in common, but such an affirmation made sense for them both: Harrison could appease voters concerned about a possible Whig tyrant in the White House, Polk’s lame duck status immediately distinguished him from Jackson, who had run in three successive elections, and from Clay, who in 1844 was making his third run for the presidency. Thus, Polk reassured undecided voters that as president he would pursue what he believed to be the right policies and not just the expedient ones that would have been good for him or, at least in theory, his chosen successor.
Polk distinguished himself further from Jackson—and all previous presidents—by announcing only four ambitious goals as president. In both the campaign and in his Inaugural Address, Polk declared his plans (1) to lower tariffs (and thereby avoid funding or supporting the internal improvements favored by Whigs); (2) to complete the acquisition of the Oregon territory; (3) to acquire from Mexico the Western territories of California, New Mexico, and Texas; and (4) to reestablish the independent subtreasury system that Van Buren had championed.1 Polk’s concerns about the Oregon territory and those that he wanted to secure from Mexico reflected his overriding determination to realize the nation’s “manifest destiny” (a term that publisher John Louis Sullivan had coined in an unsigned editorial in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review in the summer of 1845) to control as much of the continent between Mexico and Canada as possible. Yet acquiring total control of the Oregon territory (comprising the present-day states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, along with parts of Montana, Wyoming, and British Columbia) would not be easy, since the United States and Great Britain had signed a treaty in 1818 providing them both with “joint occupation,” a settlement that lasted until 1846. Meanwhile, Mexico laid claim to the lands of California and New Mexico, as well as Texas, in spite of a declaration of independence by the Republic of Texas in 1836. Polk prioritized the quest to control the Oregon territory, whose northern boundary was the latitude line 54°40′, memorialized the slogan “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight.”
Acquiring Texas was complicated. It was unclear what if any diplomatic mechanism the United States could use to annex Texas legitimately. A treaty seemed unlikely because of Mexican intransigence—perhaps through some other agreeme
nt, since a portion of Texas had proclaimed its independence from Mexico, and therefore Mexico’s assent to its acquisition was unnecessary. As a candidate, Polk expressly approved Tyler’s annexation of Texas and had even helped behind the scenes during the transition to secure the passage of the annexation resolution. Tyler teed up the issue nicely for Polk by publishing his plan on the annexation of Texas on the evening before Polk’s inauguration, though resistance persisted; Democrats, such as John Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, made clear they supported the acquisition because Texas would likely be admitted into the Union as a slave state, tipping the balance of power in Congress in favor of the proslavery forces. Whigs would never consent to any such thing.
In his Inaugural Address (the second longest after Harrison’s), President Polk characteristically left no doubt where he and the country stood. He declared that two states “have taken their positions as members . . . within the last week,”2 referring to Florida and Texas. He emphasized that he was as committed as Jackson had been to maintaining the Union. “Every lover of his country,” he proclaimed, “must shudder at the thought of the possibility of its dissolution, and will be ready to adopt the patriotic sentiment, ‘Our Federal Union—it must be preserved.’”3 These last words had been taken verbatim from Andrew Jackson’s toast given at the annual Democratic Jefferson Dinner on April 13, 1830, as a retort to John Calhoun’s nullification efforts. In sealing the divide between the two men, Calhoun had responded with his own toast, “The Union, next to our liberty, most dear. May we always remember that it can only be preserved by distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union.”4
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