American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The second quarter of the nineteenth century, moreover, was a time of contagious intellectual and political ferment in much of the Western world. During the late 1840s, workers revolted in Paris; Louis Philippe abdicated; revolutions swept Berlin, Milan, Venice, Vienna; Emperor Ferdinand fled; Kossuth was proclaimed president of the Committee for National Defense of Hungary; Rome proclaimed a republic under Mazzini; the German national assembly framed a constitution; revolts broke out in Dresden and Baden; England enacted the Great Reform Bill after street riots and political tumult. Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto. The Western world boiled with Utopian, revolutionary, millennial, communitarian, reformist, anarchist, radical ideas and activity.

  The dog that did not bark in the night was an American dog; it was the absence of that bark that had to be explained—and that suggested the different path Americans were taking from their forebears across the Atlantic.

  PART IV

  The Empire of Liberty

  CHAPTER 12

  Whigs: The Business of Politics

  A BROAD VALLEY OUTSIDE Dayton, Ohio, September 10, 1840. Under sunny skies General William Henry Harrison, the Whig candidate for President, is addressing a vast throng packed together on the field around him. Excited newspapermen report that 100,000 persons have gathered to hear the general—the largest political rally in the half century of the republic. For days people have been streaming into Dayton, by carriages, wagons, and horses, by packets and freight boats via the Cincinnati canal. Hundreds of flags and streamers float from trees and housetops, proclaiming: HAIL TO THE HERO. Banners stretch 150 feet wide across Main Street: HARRISON AND TYLER—THE TYRANT’S FOES—THE PEOPLE’S FRIENDS. Others proclaim the union between industry and high tariffs. Curtis’ mill has strung its own banner across to the rifle factory: PROTECT US AND WE’LL CLOTHE YOU. The banner of Pease’s mill on one side demands no standing army, on the other proclaims: ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE PRICE OF LIBERTY. On the morning of the tenth a mammoth crowd surrounds the Hero as he rides his white charger to the speaking platform.

  Though Old Tip looks slight and elderly, his voice seems to penetrate to the farthest edge of the crowd.

  “I will carry out the doctrines of my party, although I will make no more pledges than Washington, Adams, or Jefferson would. I was never, ever a Federalist.”

  The crowd breaks into cheering.

  “I am a true, simple Republican, aghast that the ‘Government under “King Mat” ’ IS NOW A PRACTICAL MONARCHY!”

  Louder and longer cheering.

  “As President I will reduce the power and influence of the National Executive”—ecstatic cheering—“At the end of one term in office, I will lay down…that high trust at the feet of the people”—cheering beyond the power of the reporter to describe—“And I will not try to name my successor”—nine cheers.

  Old Tippecanoe cites his sponsorship of the Public-Land Act of 1800. “Was I a Federalist then?”—cries of NO, NO, NO—But “methinks I hear a soft voice asking: Are you in favor of paper money? I AM!”—shouts of applause—“It is the only means by which a poor industrious man may become a rich man without bowing to colossal wealth”—cheers—“But with all this, I am not a Bank man, although I am in favor of a correct banking system, able to bring the poor to the level of the rich”—tremendous cheering.

  It was the climax of Harrison’s campaign. At first, he had refused to go on the stump. For a presidential candidate, campaigning was undignified, unthinkable; it had never been done. But his managers hoped to demonstrate that this gray-haired sixty-seven-year-old was fit to be President, that he would be a tribune of the people and not, as Van Burenites were charging, the tool of invisible party bosses. Soon Harrison was on his way to Columbus to show himself to the people. There, in a suddenly arranged speech from the steps of the National Hotel, he gave what was probably the first presidential campaign speech in American history. Once he started campaigning he would not stop; off went the presidential caravan to Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, to more crowds and parades and speeches.

  “This practice of itinerant speech-making,” old John Quincy Adams said glumly, “has suddenly broken forth in this country to a fearful extent.” No Adams had ever campaigned.

  The Whig speechifying and ballyhoo camouflaged a most ingeniously run campaign. Whig leaders knew only too well the sorry fate of those Federalists and National Republicans who had allowed Jeffersonians and Jacksonians to pose as the “friends of the people.” Whigs would now be more populist than those populists, more pleasing to the people. And where were the people? In the countryside. America in 1840 was still overwhelmingly rural; only about a tenth of the populace lived in places with more than 2,500 inhabitants. The Whigs would strike directly into the rural hinterlands that had sustained the old Republican party.

  So Harrison was transformed from an aged general-politico, who had been born into a distinguished Virginia family in a fine plantation manor, into a simple farmer. Transparencies—an exciting media device of the day—showed him seated in front of his log-cabin “birthplace,” a barrel of hard cider at his side. “Log-cabin boys” were organized to produce loud huzzas for the speechifying. Horny-handed farmers lumbered to the stage to present a pitchfork to Harrison.

  The campaign brought marvelous theater into the villages and hamlets. Songs glorified the “Hero Ploughman” and his “Buckeye Cabin.” Hawkers sold Tippecanoe buttons, tobacco, lithographs, canes surmounted by a miniature barrel, whiskey bottles in the shape of log cabins. Whigs would have no truck with issues; their convention adopted no party platform. In the absence of genuine issues, invective flourished. Whigs routinely pictured “Old Van” as living in regal splendor, in a palace fit for Croesus, playing billiards with ivory balls. “Mr. Chairman,” demanded Congressman Charles Ogle, the Whigs’ chief billingsgate purveyor, “how do you relish the notion of voting away the HARD CASH OF YOUR CONSTITUENTS” for “SILK TASSELS, GALLON, GIMP AND SATIN MEDALLIONS to beautify and adorn the ‘BLUE ELLIPTICAL SALOON’?” Soon the crowds were chanting:

  Let Van from his coolers of silver drink wine,

  And lounge on his cushioned settee, Our man on a buckeye bench can recline,

  Content with hard cider is he.

  The Democrats, not to be outdone in bombast, attacked the Whigs as an unholy coalition of old Federalists and new abolitionists, scourgers of the poor and starvers of laborers. They charged that the victor of Tippecanoe was really “Old Tipler,” a “sham hero,” a “granny,” a blasphemer, the sirer of half-breed children by Winnebago squaws. Van Buren did not deign to take the stump, but the top cadre of the Democracy—veteran warriors like Thomas Hart Benton and Vice-President Richard Johnson, young stalwarts like James K. Polk and James Buchanan—counterattacked their Whig foes, and even feeble old Andrew Jackson was exhibited at balls and barbecues to remind the voters what a real hero looked like.

  Still, it was a battle more of party than of personality. Behind the scenes parties compiled master mailing lists of voters, mobilized state and local campaign committees, mustered the patronage brigades, ground out posters, leaflets, and propaganda tracts. Fifteen hundred newspapers—most of them partisan weeklies—carried news of the party battle even to the frontier. Whig newspapers were especially ingenious in publishing campaign sheets. Horace Greeley’s Log Cabin, full of chatty news about Harrison and his campaign, quickly went through a first printing of 30,000 and then sold at a weekly rate of 80,000 copies. Stealing the tune of “Jefferson and Liberty,” the Log Cabin published sheet music with lyrics ending “For HAR-RI-SON and LIB-ER-TY!”

  The result was the greatest outpouring of voters the nation had seen. Harrison beat Van Buren by about 53 percent to 47 percent, by 234 electoral votes to the Democrats’ 60. The Whigs carried the House elections, 133 seats to 102, and exactly reversed the Democrat’s previous margin in the Senate, 28 to 22. Harrison won the swing states of New York and Pennsylvania. The turnout was perhaps more remarkable than
the election results. Almost two and one half million voted—about 80 percent of the eligibles, compared with less than 60 percent four years before. Every state reached new peaks of participation, according to William Chambers, with New York achieving a turnout of almost 92 percent. Not until the crisis year of 1860 would such a large proportion of the eligibles vote again. Campaign organization plus campaign hokum had mobilized the electorate.

  THE WHIG WAY OF GOVERNMENT

  In out-huckstering the Democracy, the Whigs had opportunistically outflanked the Democrats “on the left,” through the use of democratic symbols rather than democratic substance. Their rustic, populist strategy had worked, at least for the moment. But to win one battle, they had disregarded, perhaps even betrayed, the essential conservatism of developing Whig doctrine, the elitist attitudes of many of its leaders, the skepticism about populist majorities the Whigs had inherited from the old Federalist party. Whiggery had tried to turn the shank of history. But history—a moving, organic network of causally related events—is hard to outwit or outflank. History embodies a logic and momentum of its own with resistances, rewards, and penalties. History soon outwitted the Whigs and left them in its dustbin.

  In picking the aged Harrison for President, the Whigs had sacrificed political conviction and clear policy positions for a largely media-created war hero. They had gambled on the health of an old soldier who would be seventy-two by the end of his term. History was cruel. The new President, after giving a vacuous Inaugural Address that promised presidential impotence and left policy up to Congress—a two-hour speech that found bored politicians roaming around the platform stamping their feet to get the blood running—moved into the White House and into the ceaseless importunings of Whigs hungry for office. Fatigued and dispirited, he caught cold one morning while shopping in Washington’s meat and fish markets, and the cold turned into pneumonia. Bled, blistered, cupped, leeched, and massaged, he died just one month after taking office. Vice-President John Tyler, ignored by Harrison, had been staying in Williamsburg in benign isolation. Summoned now to Washington, he arrived two days later after covering the 230 miles by boat and horseback.

  So John Tyler was President. In Tyler, a Virginian of the old school, history resisted the Whigs’ effort to outflank it. Raised amid the aristocratic republicanism of the tidewater, graduated from the College of William and Mary at the age of seventeen, Tyler had climbed the political ladder from the Virginia House of Delegates to the national House of Representatives, and later to the governorship and the United States Senate. He had come to be known as a strict constructionist and a leading member of the southern states’ rights bloc in Congress; and as such he gave only tepid support to Jackson. Tyler shifted toward the Whigs when the Virginia legislature instructed him to vote for expunging the censure resolution of Jackson and Tyler resigned his seat rather than comply. Independent in doctrine and party, Tyler was as critical of Whiggish economic nationalism as he had been of Jacksonian executive power. He had remained close enough to Clay, however, and to his old states’ rights ideology, to be chosen by Whig leaders as a ticket balancer with Harrison—although only after those leaders had offered the vice-presidential nomination to several other, more noted politicians.

  Tyler at fifty-one was still determined, on entering the White House, to stick to his conservative, old Republican principles. He immediately proved that he was indeed a strict constructionist. Soon labeled “His Accidency” by his Whig foes, he insisted on being considered the new, constitutional President, rather than a Vice-President acting as President, thus setting a precedent for all later Presidents elevated by chance. On the other hand, the new President decided to retain Harrison’s Cabinet intact—a Cabinet headed by Daniel Webster as Secretary of State and dominated by Webster, Clay, and other Whig senators and congressmen. Surrounded, as he said, by “Clay-men, Webster-men, anti-Masons, original Harrisonians, Old Whigs and New Whigs—each jealous of the others, and all struggling for the offices,” he resolved to move cautiously and to “work in good earnest” to reconcile “the angry state of the factions toward one another.”

  It was not to be. The Whigs had plastered over their factional splits with thick gobs of campaign hokum. Now they split over hard policy choices. The battle erupted not merely between two wings of the party, but two wings ensconced in two institutions separated by the Constitution and by Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Commander of the congressional wing clearly was Henry Clay. Now sixty-four years old, “Harry of the West” was still the engaging, impetuous, eloquent legislative leader who had electrified Congress three decades earlier in the days of the war hawks, though now more irascible and volatile. Clay was still cock of the walk in the Senate, chairman of the Finance Committee, policy spokesman for congressional Whigs, and leader of men occupying key positions in both houses. The Kentuckian had gone into a half-drunken rage when news of Harrison’s nomination had reached him at Brown’s Hotel in Washington. Pacing the room, shouting obscenities, he had denounced his friends as “not worth the powder and shot it would take to kill them,” and called himself the unluckiest man in party history—“always run by my friends when sure to be defeated, and now betrayed for the nomination” when sure of election.

  Clay’s relationship with President Harrison deteriorated so rapidly that the two were at the point of a break when the general died. For a time it seemed that the senator and his old friend John Tyler might be able to work together despite their doctrinal differences. But history was remorseless: the Whigs’ campaign preference for rhetoric rather than policy positions that might serve as rough guides to party policy makers; the Whigs’ desire to balance their ticket even if it meant choosing a states’ rights doctrinaire; the Whigs’ antipathy to executive leadership, and their doctrine of legislative supremacy—all these combined to rob Whiggism of the fruits of its 1840 victory.

  The crisis came over banking, still the most divisive political issue facing the nation. In accordance with the President’s states’ rights views, Tyler’s Secretary of the Treasury, Thomas Ewing, presented to Congress a bill for a “Bank and Fiscal Agent” to be chartered by Congress in its capacity not as the national legislature but as the local government for the District of Columbia, to be authorized to establish branches elsewhere but only with the consent of the states concerned. Thus elaborately were Tyler’s constitutional scruples cosseted. Clay was unimpressed. Like Tyler, he would repeal Van Buren’s Independent Treasury Act, but in its place he wanted an effective and truly national bank. Tyler’s idea for an agency that would have to beg a state to allow a branch to be set up within it—“What a bank would that be!” Clay wrote to a friend.

  The two men—the President of the United States, who stuck gamely to his states’ rights dogmatism but felt that Congress should make policy, and the “Great Pacificator,” who considered himself a kind of prime minister—met in the White House. Neither would yield. The President’s amiability broke under Clay’s pounding.

  “Go you now, then, Mr. Clay, to your end of the avenue, where stands the Capitol, and there perform your duty to the country as you shall think proper. So help me God, I shall do mine at this end of it as I shall think proper.”

  Clay did modify his bill to provide that, while no branch of the proposed bank could be established without the consent of the state, such consent would be presumed automatically granted unless the state legislature specifically opposed it at the next session. It was a reasonable compromise, but Tyler would have none of it. Increasingly captive to a “Corporal’s Guard” of extreme states’-righters such as the Virginians Thomas W. Gilmer, Henry A. Wise, and Abel P. Upshur, he called Clay’s compromise a “contemptible subterfuge.” Tyler’s Cabinet—still Harrison’s Cabinet—wanted their chief to sign the bill.

  Washington waited while Tyler teetered back and forth between assent and veto. His veto, on August 16, 1841, set off a tumultuous debate in the Senate. That evening Benton, Calhoun, and other Democratic senators of the old sch
ool, delighted by Tyler’s defiance of the congressional Whigs, came to the White House to celebrate with Tyler over cigars and brandy, but they were followed by a mob of Whig protestors who aroused the Tyler family with their clamor and disbanded only after burning the President in effigy.

  The presidential and congressional Whigs mobilized against each other. Chastising Tyler on the Senate floor, Clay moved unsuccessfully to override the veto. In the deadlock that followed, presidential-congressional relations unraveled. Tyler allowed Webster and other cabinet members to involve themselves in a compromise bill that easily passed both House and Senate. “Give your approval to the Bill,” his Attorney General, John J. Crittenden wrote him, “and the success of your Administration is sealed.” Veto it, and “read the doom of the Whig party and behold it and the President it elected, sunk together, the victims of each other, in unnatural strife.” Again Tyler vetoed, and again a great hue and cry broke out, as Whig leaders throughout the country castigated the President, letter writers threatened assassination, and burning effigies swung from tree limbs.

  Then, on a September afternoon, five of Tyler’s cabinet members strode into his office, one by one, and laid their resignations on his desk. The President knew well that the walkout was devised and coordinated by Clay in an effort to punish him—and even more, to force his resignation and bring into the White House the president of the Senate, a Clay lieutenant. Tyler became more determined to stay. One man who had not resigned that day was Daniel Webster. Busy with delicate foreign negotiations, reluctant to serve Clay’s interests, the “Godlike Daniel” saw his own opportunities in the Tyler-Clay hostilities.