In 1844, when Van Buren scuttled his own chances for reelection by declaring his opposition to the annexation of Texas, King wanted the Democratic presidential nomination to go to Buchanan, hoping his friend would advocate him as his southern, ticket-balancing running mate; instead Lewis Cass was nominated. Meanwhile President Tyler, who was tired of having his appointments rejected by the Senate, turned to one of its most popular members and nominated King to be his minister to France.
King had a successful tenure in Paris, being instrumental in neutralizing French objections to the U.S. annexation of Texas. But his heart remained in the Senate, and he wrote Buchanan, who was now secretary of state: “Most sincerely do I wish that we had both remained in the Senate.”8 Accordingly, he decided to seek his old seat in the next election through the Alabama State Legislature. But running as a Union supporter against the incumbent Dixon Lewis, who was a states’ rights defender, King suffered the only election defeat in his career. Seven months later, however, President Polk named the other Alabama senator, Arthur Bagby, minister to Russia, and Alabama’s governor appointed King to fill the vacancy. Later in 1848, King ran for and won a full term, beating the Whig leader Arthur Hopkins.
Meanwhile, King had continued to keep his eye on the vice presidency, whose function as presiding officer of the Senate often fell his way. At the Democratic National Convention of 1848, his name was among those offered for the second office, but the nomination to be Lewis Cass’s running mate went to General William O. Butler of Kentucky, another veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. The electoral appeal of military leaders continued to hold sway.
That outcome left King in a front seat in the Senate during a most contentious time. At this point, his feelings about remaining in the Senate seem to have changed. He wrote to Buchanan: “A seat in the Senate is, I assure you far from being desirable to me; bringing with it as it does at this particular time especially, great responsibility, great labor, and no little anxiety.”9 The bitter argument over the expansion of slavery into the western territories reached its height with Clay’s proposal of the Compromise of 1850, whose amendment was the subject of heated and extended controversy. King, as was his custom, urged that northern and southern colleagues find middle ground.
While King agreed with Clay’s general quest for compromise, he opposed the direct admission of California to statehood, preferring that it first retain territorial status for a time during this troubled period. Congress, he insisted, had “about as much constitutional power to prohibit slavery from going into the Territories of the United States as [it had] power to pass an act carrying slavery there.” But while he said the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia would unfairly impede the interest of slave owners in neighboring Virginia, he believed the trading of slaves there ought to be prohibited.10
As modifications to Clay’s compromise were being considered, King joined a majority view of the select Senate Committee of Thirteen: that state legislatures had a right to take action on slavery in their jurisdictions, but territorial legislatures did not until they became states. Many southerners were critical of the Alabamian while others applauded his conciliatory efforts. At the same time, he warned northern abolitionists that if they sought to undercut the South’s legitimate rights, its sons would “hurl defiance at the fanatical crew, and unitedly determine to defend their rights at every hazard and every sacrifice.”11
When the sudden death of President Zachary Taylor in July 1850 raised Vice President Millard Fillmore to the Oval Office, King was unanimously chosen as the Senate president pro tem to assume the presiding duties for the remainder of Fillmore’s unexpired term, another tribute to his fair-mindedness.
In 1852, the Alabama Democratic convention, in endorsing the amended Compromise of 1850, also directed the state’s delegates to the national party convention to back King for either the presidential or vice presidential nomination. A marathon forty-nine-ballot contest for the first office ensued. Those initially involved—Lewis Cass, James Buchanan, William Marcy of New York, and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois—were all set aside in favor of Franklin Pierce, another Mexican War general. As a consolation prize to the defeated Buchanan, the Pierce camp permitted him to select the vice presidential nominee, and he put forward his friend King, easily selected on the second ballot. At last King had within his grasp the office whose main duties he had so often performed as Senate president pro tem in the absence of elected vice presidents.
The Pierce-King ticket easily prevailed over the weak Whig entry of Winfield Scott and William A. Graham of North Carolina. But King’s deteriorating physical condition from tuberculosis limited his participation. Despite resigning his Senate several weeks after the selection in order to repair to the tropical climes of Cuba in the hope of a recuperation, one never occurred.
Upon King’s death, Pierce, who had paid little notice to him in his brief tenure as vice president, respectfully observed that his illness “was watched by the nation with painful solicitation” and “his loss to the country, under all circumstances, [was] justly regarded as irreparable.”12 But Pierce had given no evidence of consulting with or involving his vice president in the formation of his administration. It was considered likely in any event that, had King lived, he would have remained primarily occupied as president over the Senate. It was a task for which he was eminently well-suited, and he had fulfilled it with great bipartisan approval during all his years in Washington. But the vice presidency itself warranted greater employment, not yet granted by any president under whom King had served.
JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE
OF KENTUCKY
The man elected to the vice presidency as running mate to James Buchanan in 1856 was destined to become one of the most divisive and controversial figures in the Civil War, soon to follow. The thirty-six-year-old John Cabell Breckinridge, the youngest vice president ever to serve, was another veteran of the Mexican War, having spent six months as a volunteer infantry officer. Becoming a member of the Kentucky legislature at age twenty-eight, he had started in politics as a Jacksonian Democrat, but as a strong supporter of slavery he took a course that ultimately found him fighting against the Union he had vowed to defend.
The namesake of his grandfather and father, the third John C. was born on January 16, 1821, into a prominent political family. His grandfather was an Anti-Federalist ally of Jefferson who had served in the Senate and as Jefferson’s attorney general. The youngest John C. earned a bachelor’s degree at Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky, and studied law at Princeton and at Transylvania, in Lexington. Winning a seat in Congress soon after passage of the Compromise of 1850, involving slavery’s expansion into the western territories, Breckinridge became an outspoken voice for southern Democrats arguing that the federal government could not bar the peculiar institution anywhere in the territories.1
Despite his views on slavery, Breckinridge was a defender of the Union, a position that cast him as a moderate in many southern eyes. During his time in the Kentucky legislature he supported the Kentucky Colonization Society, which as a branch of a national organization advocated the resettlement of black slaves abroad. It was a view shared by Abraham Lincoln for a time. Breckinridge was not a cotton planter or a major slaveholder, but he did own some household servants and comfortably embraced the exploitation of slaves that was at the heart of southern society.
When in 1854 the Missouri Compromise was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act on the basis of the concept of popular sovereignty, individual territories were left to decide whether they would accept or outlaw slavery. Settlers in the territories, Breckinridge argued, should be “free to form their own institutions, and enter the Union with or without slavery, as their constitutions should prescribe.”2
The clash over the Kansas-Nebraska Act further ignited northern animosity toward slavery and its southern proponents, feeding the disintegration of the Whig Party. Its remnants gave rise to the new Republican Party, as well as the anti-immigrant
, anti-Catholic American Party, which came to be known as the Know-Nothings. The spread of the latter helped persuade Breckinridge that his reelection to the Senate as a Democrat was so imperiled that he did not seek a third term. Still in his mid-thirties, he returned to Kentucky and focused on land speculation in the western territories to restore his financial health.
Breckinridge’s loyalty to the Union while clinging to the peculiar institution made him an attractive prospect for the Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1856. Seeking reelection, President Franklin Pierce, soiled politically in the Kansas-Nebraska row, was challenged by Douglas and Buchanan. The latter, most recently minister to Great Britain, was thereby out of the line of fire in the heated dispute over Kansas and Nebraska. Douglas fell behind in the voting and withdrew in the cause of unity, making Buchanan the nominee as a less divisive figure in the slavery conversation.
As nominations for vice president began, the Kentucky delegation appeared to be throwing a monkey wrench into the prospects of native son Breckinridge by nominating a fellow Kentuckian, the former House Speaker Linn Boyd. Breckinridge rose and said he would not run against him, making a speech that so captured the convention that the delegates insisted on him, and he was nominated on the second ballot.
The Buchanan-Breckinridge ticket faced a new lineup in the fall. With the Whig Party in shreds, many of its leaders, including William Seward, threw in with the new national alignment calling itself the Republican Party, which convened in Philadelphia in June 1856. There it wrote a strong free-soil, anti-slavery expansion platform without condemning the practice where it already existed, and it nominated John Charles Fremont, a soldier and explorer, for the presidency. Meanwhile the Know-Nothings, another refuge for the fallen-away Whigs, having gained support in the latest state and congressional elections, nominated former president Fillmore.
While Buchanan dodged the slavery controversy as best he could, Breckinridge pitched for southern votes as a staunch defender of the right of (white) citizens in the territories to write their own laws. On a speaking tour through Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, he accused the Republican Party of threatening the existence of the Union, declaring, “He must be blind indeed, and given over to fatal delusion, who does not see that the Union of the States is in imminent peril.” He charged northern Whigs with “hurling every epithet of hate and ignominy against their brethren of the South,” fostering “sectional hostility … fed by misrepresentations of the opinions and feelings of the Southern people.” He warned that the Republican Party’s ulterior purpose regarding slavery was “to combine public opinion and public action in such a form as to abolish the institution wherever it exists.”3
In November the Democrats behind Buchanan and Breckinridge carried all of the slaveholding states except Maryland, which voted for the Know-Nothings, and won Kentucky for the first time in a presidential election, to Breckinridge’s gratification.4 But he soon realized that he was to suffer the same fate of isolation in the new administration that had fallen to most of his predecessors.
On one early occasion, when Breckinridge sought an interview with Buchanan, he was referred to the president’s niece and hostess, Harriet Lane, Buchanan being a bachelor. Insulted at the rude dismissal, Breckinridge left town without contacting her. When word of the apparent rebuff reached Buchanan, he had three of his aides write his vice president pleading a misunderstanding. Breckinridge was told that the instruction to contact Miss Lane was some kind of password to gain admission to the presidential presence. Still, Breckinridge never met with Buchanan privately over the next three years.
Breckinridge’s pro-slavery views found him in the middle of intensifying hostility between Buchanan and Stephen Douglas over Kansas, where rival groups split on slavery. Breckinridge sided with the president on admitting Kansas to the Union as a slave state but quietly favored Douglas’s reelection to the Senate, which Buchanan fiercely opposed. Invited by the Illinois Democratic Committee to speak in behalf of Douglas during his famous debates with Lincoln, Breckinridge politely declined. But he added he had “often in conversation expressed the wish that Mr. Douglas may succeed over his Republican competitor.”5
As president of the Senate, Breckinridge was in the chair on January 4, 1859, when the body met for the last time in its small chamber before moving to the new, larger Senate. Despite his stout defense of slavery, he remained at this time opposed to secession over it. He liked to tell of a dinner party conversation with a South Carolina congressman about meeting a state militiaman in South Carolina who said of the possibility of war over secession, “I tell you, sah, we cannot stand it any longer. We intend to fight.” Breckinridge said he asked, “And from what are you suffering?” The man replied, “Why, sah, we are suffering from the oppression of the Federal Government. We have suffered under it for thirty years, and will stand it no more.” Breckinridge suggested to his host that he invite some of his constituents to visit the North “if only for the purpose of teaching them what an almighty big country they will have to whip before they get through!”6
With the Buchanan administration in disarray and Breckinridge’s own prospects diminishing for a second term, another opportunity suddenly arose when Senator Linn Boyd of Kentucky died. Kentucky Democrats thereupon nominated Breckinridge for the Senate seat upon completion of his vice presidency, a welcome prospect to salve his uncertainty. Meanwhile, the presidential election year of 1860 approached with the controversy over slavery and its boiling point growing ever closer.
In February 1860, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi introduced a series of resolutions laying out the demands of the most extreme southern senators. They called for a national slave code protecting the peculiar institution in the territories, reaffirming personal liberty laws on slave ownership, and declaring attacks on it unconstitutional. Davis offered them on the floor but sought adoption only in the Senate Democratic caucus, to undermine Douglas and his advocacy of popular sovereignty in advance of the Democratic National Convention in Charleston in April.
There, Davis submitted his resolutions as a campaign plank endorsed by a majority of the platform committee, obliging the Douglas forces to fight for a rival minority report. One Ohio delegate warned the southerners, “You cannot expect one northern electoral vote, or one sympathizing member of Congress from the free states,” both of which were needed to put another Democrat in the White House.7 After several days of heated debate, a compromise was struck but was boycotted by the Deep South delegates, who walked out. An effort by the remaining delegates to nominate Douglas was defeated, and they decided to adjourn and meet again in June.
In the meantime, the Republicans convened in Chicago, where Lincoln, arguing that slavery had to be contained and that Congress had a right to exclude slavery from the territories, was the surprise choice over William Seward of New York. Hannibal Hamlin of Maine was picked as Lincoln’s running mate. Also in June, border-state and other remnants of the shattered Whigs met in Baltimore as the Constitutional Union Party and, hoping to head off secession, nominated John Bell of Tennessee for president and Edward Everett of Massachusetts for vice president.
In Baltimore as well, the mostly northern Democratic delegates reconvened in June and nominated Douglas, adhering to his support of popular sovereignty on slavery expansion, with Senator Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia as his running mate. The southern Democrats met separately in Baltimore and nominated Breckinridge for president and Joseph Lane as his running mate, an Oregon Democrat who was originally from Kentucky and shared southern sentiments. The divisions set up an unprecedented four-way general election for the Oval Office in November, with the fate of slavery at stake.
Breckinridge considered long about accepting the nomination of a splintered segment of his party, with fewer than half the Kentucky delegates to the original Democratic convention in Baltimore attending the subsequent gathering of the southerners. “When I discovered, though with regret, that my name had been presented to the countr
y,” he said later, “it did not take me long to determine that I would not meanly abandon those with whom I was determined to act.” Long afterward, Jefferson Davis’s wife wrote that Breckinridge had told her on accepting the nomination, “I trust that I have the courage to lead a forlorn hope.”8
The southern Democratic nominee vowed to campaign little before the November election, but charges from Douglas and other foes against his loyalty and consistency persuaded him to answer them. At a large barbecue in Kentucky, he delivered a three-hour defense, denying that he had ever petitioned for the pardon of abolitionist John Brown, or that he had supported the Whig Zachary Taylor against the Democrat Lewis Cass in 1848, or that he had once backed the emancipation of blacks in Kentucky or favored the admissibility of a territory to bar slavery. The last stance put him in conflict with Douglas, who charged that the southern Democrats were out to break up the Union. Breckinridge insisted he had never made “an utterance to reveal a thought of mine hostile to the Constitution and union of the States.” Douglas responded that while he was not saying “all the Breckinridge men” were “disunionists,” there was “not a disunionist in America who [was] not a Breckinridge man.”9
The Kentuckian, fearing that the Democratic split would put the Republican Party in power for the first time, initially considered bowing out but was persuaded by Jefferson Davis to stay in the race. As the prospect of a Lincoln victory loomed larger, Davis next proposed that all three Democrats—Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell—withdraw and back a compromise candidate. Breckinridge and Bell agreed, but Douglas refused, arguing that northern Democrats would never support the choice endorsed by the southern Democrats and would take their chances with Lincoln.
The American Vice Presidency Page 17