by Larry Tagg
Because the editors sustained the parties, the parties were obliged to sustain the editors, and their blessings flowed to those whose pages shouted the party line and ridiculed their opponents loudest and longest. This quid pro quo arrangement was no secret. An effective partisan editor could expect the government, if it were controlled by his party, to funnel public funds into his pockets in the form of immensely lucrative printing contracts for government documents—with no competition from lower bidders. Such tokens of the Administration’s favor, moreover, conferred a sort of official rank on the preferred editor, inspiring the like-minded to subscribe to his paper over all others. In addition, pet editors were awarded public offices. They particularly prized postmasterships, since every postmaster could send material through the mail for free. Government advertising was another cash reward to editors for their devotion.
Since the party’s blessings were bestowed on editors who proved themselves most loyal, editors outdid one another in praise of their party’s men and damnation of their party’s enemies. In stoking the boilers of the violent politics of the day, the newspaper business itself grew fraught with danger. The notorious and successful James Gordon Bennett, editor of the Democratic New York Herald, according to a horrified British observer, was “horse-whipped, kicked, trodden under foot, spat upon, and degraded in every possible way; but all this he courts because it brings him in money.”
It was not surprising that in a violent nation, its editors were violent, on the page and off. Bloody duels were fought between rival editors, the most famous being an 1846 combat between the Whig and Democrat editors in Richmond, Virginia, who went at each other armed with pistols, rifles, broadswords and broadaxes, tomahawks, and bowie-knives, starting with gunshots and then closing and hacking away at each other with edged weapons. The badly mutilated Whig editor died; the Democrat returned to work. A touring Scottish minister, David Macrae, wrote that some Southern papers employed a man on their staff “to attend exclusively to the fighting part of the business. If the writing editor branded you before the public as a liar, and you went in Southern fashion to demand satisfaction, he handed you over politely to the fighting editor—the gentleman who managed the pistolling department.” Also, it was not surprising that in a nation that had been ruled almost continuously by Democrats for decades, the hireling Democratic press ruled the nation’s news. The abuse of this brutish, unashamedly biased party press was the longest and sharpest spike in the bed of nails Lincoln would endure after he appeared.
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Another element introduced into politics in the two decades prior to Lincoln was the “dark horse” candidate. This gambit was the logical result of the policy of seeking the most “available,” least controversial candidate. At the Democratic national convention in 1844, James K. Polk, a man whose name had rarely appeared in the Democratic newspapers, and who had not had one vote until the eighth ballot of the deadlocked gathering, won the nomination. There was an immediate outcry. People wondered what he had done to give him prominence over Buchanan, Van Buren, Douglas, Lewis Cass, and Calhoun. But the naysayers were ignored. It was precisely Polk’s anonymity that translated into “availability” to delegates desperate for a candidate who would offend none of the party’s factions. Polk subsequently defeated Clay in the 1844 election on the strength of the same negative asset. In diarist George Templeton Strong’s opinion, Clay lost to Polk because Clay’s long, distinguished career had inevitably produced enemies, while Polk “was impregnable from the fact that he had never done or said anything of importance to anybody … . Henceforth I think political wire-pullers will be careful how they nominate prominent and well-known men for the Presidency; they’ll find it safer to pick up the first man they may find in the street.”
Strong was right: two more dark horse candidates were elected in the next four elections. The first was in 1852, when the Democratic convention was hopelessly deadlocked over three strong candidates after three days of balloting. The party bosses produced Franklin Pierce, a man from New Hampshire whose views no one knew, and the newly anointed Pierce won the nomination on the 49th ballot. Strong wrote: “Nobody knows much of Franklin Pierce, except that he is a decent sort of man in private life. Very possibly he may run all the better, as Polk did, for his insignificance. Democracies are not over-partial to heroes and great men. A statesman who is too much glorified becomes a bore to them… . Democracy is secretly jealous of individual eminence of every sort, not merely that which grows out of wealth or station.” Strong described Pierce as “a galvanized cypher, of whom nothing can be said but that he is a cypher.” Pierce the Cypher won the election going away. Eight years later, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the most famous dark horse winner in the nation’s history. His emergence from anonymity onto the doorstep of the White House at such a critical time would cause infinitely more woe than Polk’s or Pierce’s. Lincoln’s victory at the polls was widely seen as the failure of a debauched political system, a system that had produced an illegitimate leader at a time of crisis.
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All the features of the political “party game” in the Age of Jackson were well established by Lincoln’s time: its domination by state party bosses, the vulgarity of its manic campaign hoopla aggravated by a scandalous hireling press, and its avoidance of hard issues and strong personalities. As the parties strengthened their grip over the political process, serious observers bemoaned the decline in moral tone that resulted. Southerners, especially, noticed the loss of dignity in government. The Southern Quarterly Review in 1844 complained that a party “blasts where it is excited, and virtue, withering, shrinks from its presence.” A Carolina newspaper shouted about “The Dignity Departing,” and reported that senators had become obsessed with “long details of personalities and party matters” and the scene in the House was “Buncombe speeches, and party squabbles.” The Charleston Mercury in 1853 protested that “no one was safe, that men of sensitive and elevated character were being driven out of public life, leaving only the callous and unprincipled to possess public honors.”
Out of their instinctive fear of great men, Americans had developed a genius for avoiding men of genius. This was aggravated by the torsions of the slavery issue at mid-century, and both parties avoided controversy by serving up a series of colorless placeholders for the nation’s highest office. Between 1848 and 1860, despair was everywhere expressed over the weakest string of presidents in the country’s history, before or since:
Zachary Taylor, a Whig army general utterly without political experience, who campaigned on nothing but the promise never to “dictate” measures, and leaned on the Senator from New York, William Seward, to direct his administration;
Millard Fillmore, thrust into the presidency by the death of Taylor, who presided over the Whigs’ final, fatal division and disappearance as a national party;
Franklin Pierce, a Democrat, too affable, too fond of liquor, who was controlled by his Cabinet and failed to be re-nominated after a four-year display of indecision;
James Buchanan, also a Democrat at the mercy of his advisors, who presided over a corrupt administration, stood by as his party committed suicide on his watch, and proved feeble to the point of paralysis as the national moment of truth over slavery approached.
Walt Whitman wrote that the country’s recent presidents had been “deformed, mediocre, sniveling, unreliable, false-hearted men.” He was seconded in the pages of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, who saw a pauper and idiot Government, the laughingstock of the world, “feeble-minded, non compos, worthy of guardianship by the strongest man.” Large groups in all sections of the country felt that something was radically wrong with the Presidency at the moment Lincoln inherited it. As the campaign of 1860 approached, an unbroken line of watery Chief Executives had set expectations for the presidency at their lowest point.
Chapter 4
The Spoils System
“Stupidity which has excited the wonder of mankind.”
The
voters increasingly resented being shut out of the nomination process by the political kingmakers during the rise of the political parties in the Age of Jackson. They protested the poor quality of presidents produced by this unfair system, and they saw a disastrous culmination in the appearance of Lincoln. Nearly as harmful to Lincoln’s legitimacy, though, was the fact that esteem for elected leaders had been slipping for a generation as a result of the corruption introduced by the spoils system.
Jackson and his handlers in 1829 had taken advantage of an attitude that had developed nationwide: public men were increasingly motivated by “the love of a snug office.” Until Jackson’s time, government jobs had been scarce, and seeking government jobs for profit had appeared unseemly among the original patriots who remembered the unselfish spirit of the Revolution. But these purists were dying off. At the same time, the number of government jobs was expanding along with the country, and so was the number of men seeking them.
Because business and industry in the new nation had not developed to the point where they could provide enough jobs, men who aspired to rise above manual labor were the most financially insecure. School teaching and the law were the only choices available to these increasing thousands of educated job seekers, but the former occupation was underpaid and the latter was overcrowded. Public office, then, became the principal hope of teeming, ambitious young men with families to support, and the competition for government jobs acquired the quality of desperation.
So when the clamor of Jackson’s election subsided, instead of going home and resuming their lives after a public-minded job well done, the banner-wavers and the speechmakers who had elected him descended on Washington in a swarm, eager to get a job in his administration, beckoned to the public trough by the President himself.
Jackson, combative to the core, saw himself as “the trustee of the people,” doing battle in their behalf with the aristocrats, the money men, the Congress, and the Court. Those battles, he figured, could best be won by an administration stacked with loyal men. After all, anybody could do the job of government. To a man like Jackson, whose own life was proof that a man could be many things—lawyer, general, farmer, politician—it stood to reason that the duties of government were plain and simple enough to be handled by ordinary citizens, who could—no, should—be hired and fired wholesale any time a new administration took office. One of his cronies, William L. Marcy of New York, put it most famously when he said defiantly of Jackson’s men: “When they are contending for victory they avow their intention of enjoying the fruits of it. … They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.” The “spoils system” cemented the loyalty of an army of mercenaries at thousands of desks in every government post, from postal clerks and city wards all the way up to the State Department. “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” became, without apology, the new way of doing the public’s business. The nation’s honored posts became places of profit.
And, to citizens appalled by the spoils system, those posts ceased to be honored. Jackson and his men had found the engine that would drive the new era of party politics, but it was one rotten with cynicism and self-seeking. There were some early Jeremiahs who foresaw the damage such a system would produce. James Madison wrote to a friend that wholesale rotation of offices “could not fail to degrade any Administration.” New England religious leader and newspaper editor Horace Bushnell protested, “Such a system would corrupt a nation of angels.”
But to the new mass of buckskin- and homespun-clad voters who had just turned their backs on aristocratic presidents and elected their man Jackson, such warnings from aristocrats were sour grapes, the deathbed curses of a bygone era. Spoils soon became accepted as part of the political game. There were few complaints at first, but when disillusionment with the party system itself arose, more and more worried observers began to see the spoils system as the adder whose bite could kill the republic. With increasing urgency, they prophesied the nation would fall into the hands of plunderers, corrupt spoilsmen whose only motivation was money and power. As early as 1842, a committee in Congress made a harsh pronouncement on the system’s consequences:
The election ceases to be a fair and calm expression of the popular judgment on the principles and policy of Government, and becomes a tumultuous scramble for place and power. It is not merely a contest between the candidates … but between the incumbent of each subordinate office in the Government and all those who have fixed their eyes on his place. The distribution of the minor stations often excites more interest than the election itself. Who shall dispense the patronage? is the absorbing question … . When the election has ended, nothing is decided more than when it commenced, except that one set of men are to go out and another set are to come in. The victors practice the abuses for which they condemned the vanquished.
Then came boom times. The end of the Mexican War and the discovery of gold in California in 1848 added a million square miles of territory to the United States and millions of dollars to the Treasury. With more land and wealth in the national till, there was less restraint by ambitious men scheming to get part of it. In the 1850s, the blessing on the national treasury became a curse to public ethics. With the slavery crisis heating up at the same time, the Whig and the Democratic parties, in avoiding the hard question of slavery, slackened their commitment to the issues and became merely dispensers of spoils—“both have degenerated into mere faction, adhering together by the hope of public plunder,” according to Georgia Senator Robert Toombs.
In the decade before Lincoln, corruption exploded. Daniel Lord, an eminent attorney, complained in 1849 that party patronage “has converted almost the whole body of ambitious young men into political hypocrites, and has resulted in filling the offices of the government with men who in every respect injure and disgrace the country.” Even William Marcy, who had put a name to the spoils system in Jackson’s day, was alarmed at what it had wrought. In 1851 he admitted to a friend, “The treasury doors have been so often opened that they appear to yield to the slightest pressure, & turn easily & smoothly on their hinges.” His friend agreed that “demoralization is rapidly spreading over the whole country, and threatens to engulf the land in a sea of black and stagnant corruption.”
The trend accelerated as the decade progressed, climaxing with Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan. Under Buchanan, offices across the land were bought and sold like commodities. In 1858, a newspaper editor visiting Washington was dismayed at seeing party leaders bartering public posts. He reported seeing office-brokers in the Senate, in the departments, even in the White House, “and the actual sum of money to be paid for an office is as publicly named … as the prices of dry goods are named between a dealer … and his customers.” Another disturbing practice demonstrated the zenith of the abuse of patronage as Lincoln approached. This was the use of Federal officeholders in a dual role as party delegates, which established an unholy union between the government and the party, and further estranged the people from the nomination process. Buchanan used federal appointees as bought-and-paid-for delegates in an attempt to secure his own renomination at the Democratic convention in 1860.
That same year, a British lord observed the debauchery in American democracy and listed its sins: “[H]onest men excluded from office, purchased state legislatures, government contracts awarded to incompetent in-laws of Cabinet members, a corrupted people embracing larcenous leaders.” That year, too, Jackson’s biographer, James Parton, warned, “The evil which he began remains, has grown more formidable, has now attained such dimensions that the prevailing feeling of the country, with regard to the corruptions and inefficiency of the government, is despair.” Since Jackson, he charged, “the public affairs of the United States have been conducted with a stupidity which has excited the wonder of mankind.”
By the time Lincoln appeared, the cancer of the spoils system had ravaged government so completely that Harper’s magazine printed a jeremiad on its evils to the magazine’s
million readers: “Corruption is … perhaps more prevalent than … in any other first-class nation,” it warned. “At every election many votes are bought.” In Washington, bribery and the buying and selling of government favors “is an art. … On all sides one hears of nothing but the spoils. … Here and there the feeble voice of a philosopher or a greenhorn mutters something about principle, but his utterance is drowned in the hoarse croak of the practical men who clamor for spoils.” In keeping with the peculiar terror of the times, Harper’s feared the approach of a despot. Unless “the intelligent people” woke up, the country might soon fall into the hands of “Vigilance Committees or an Augustus or a Bonaparte.” With each new scandal eagerly reported by a rabid partisan press, people read and watched in horror. Distrust replaced confidence in government.
* * *
Americans’ fear of corruption in their elected leaders was heightened by their sense of the fragility of republics. Americans still harbored deep skepticism about their own “democratic experiment,” and feared enslavement by government conspiracy. They were afflicted with a paranoid vision of a coming Caesar—a usurper, a president who would stack the government with his friends as a start toward tyranny. They remembered the colonies’ subjugation to the venal “informal constitution” of Great Britain before the Revolution: the web of family connection, preferment, privilege, and patronage—even bribery—by which the British leaders had cemented their power. The Revolution, indeed, had been seen as a victory not only of liberty but also of virtue, and the price of freedom was eternal vigilance lest another corrupt tyranny take root in Washington. Now, with corruption so apparently triumphant, the situation was seen bathed in a lurid, apocalyptic glare—the Republic was tottering. Henry Dawes of Massachusetts told the House that if the system of patronage were extended, “one might despair of the Republic.” An Illinois judge saw the same dark vision: “When official corruption can go unwhipt of Justice, … then organized society is ready to dissolve, and governments cease to exist.” “Our foundations are crumbling,” Reverend Henry Ward Beecher cried to his congregation. “The sills on which we are building are ready to break.”