Imagine a baseball game in which your team loses 7-6. There are a number of ways of analyzing the loss. Your immediate reaction is, “It’s the umpire’s fault!” The lousy ump missed what clearly should have been a called third strike in the ninth; on the next pitch, the batter drove in the winning run with a clean single to left.
But that reaction is, perhaps, not entirely fair. After all, the opposing team scored six other runs that weren’t the ump’s fault. If your pitcher hadn’t given up that three-run homer in the eighth, the ninth wouldn’t have mattered. And even though the umpire clearly blew it, it was your pitcher who threw that next pitch.
And what about your hitters? Sure, they scored six runs – not bad at all. But didn’t your cleanup batter end the seventh inning by hitting into a double play with the bases loaded? A single would have scored two runs, kept the inning alive and put the game out of reach.
Or maybe it was the baserunning and fielding. Your shortstop’s error in the fourth accounted for one run, and then your plodding catcher ran you out of an inning when he tried to stretch that single into a double.
The manager probably deserves to take some heat as well. Your pitcher was far over his pitch count and clearly tiring. Why didn’t the skipper have the bullpen ace warmed up and ready to go?
One of the great things about Michael F. Holt’s The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party is the way he analyzes election results from multiple perspectives. Sure, the book is incredibly long, and the microscopic print is guaranteed to induce eye strain. But Holt takes his time because he is not content to go with the easy answer, the equivalent of, “It’s the umpire’s fault!”
Henry Clay’s defeat in 1844 is a case in point. Holt is the first to point out that “Clay came heartbreakingly close to victory:”
[James K.] Polk defeated [Clay] by only 38,000 votes out of 2,700,000 cast, and the Democrat lacked a popular majority because the Liberty party’s vote had burgeoned from 6,200 in 1840 to 62,000 in 1844. . . . Clay . . . lost eight other states that [William Henry] Harrison had carried in 1840, six of them by exceedingly narrow margins. Relatively miniscule changes in those six states would have thrown the race to him.
Holt, like Daniel Walker Howe, cites New York as the most important (lost by 5,100 votes, or 1.05%, out of 486,000 votes cast). In addition:
Why then did (in the words of one Whig) “[t]he people . . . elect[] a mere Tom Tit over the Old Eagle”? Turning to the causes of the defeat, Holt reviews the usual suspects: Thurlow Weed’s verdict that “the people have declared against the Tariff and for Texas”; Clay’s personal unpopularity among some voters (what analysts would now call his “high negatives”); and the conviction of many Whigs at the time that “angrily attribute[d] Clay’s defeat to the ‘asinine fatuity of the abolition party.’” Holt cites statistics that illustrate how crucial the Liberty party vote seemed to be:
Holt, like Howe, also points out that corruption and ballot-box stuffing (“’the utter mendacity frauds & villainies of Locofocoism’”) played a role:
But then Holt peels another layer of the onion. Looked at differently, the major Whig problem was that the party had failed to attract new voters. “But what disturbed the Whigs far more and what they recognized (far better than many historians) as the chief cause of their defeat was the disproportionate and unexpected growth of the Democratic vote since 1840.”
I will not cite all of Holt’s numbers, but the bottom line is that Clay in 1844 retained the large majority of the voters who had cast ballots for Harrison in 1840. Likewise, Polk retained virtually all of those who had voted for Martin Van Buren in 1840. The Democrats, however, captured the overwhelming majority of new voters in 1844. Of new voters nationwide, over 72% went for Polk (in the south, this figure was an “awesome” 86.1%); some 19% opted for the Liberty Party; the Whigs garnered only a pathetic 8.7%. “Even had all the additional Liberty voters backed Clay in 1844 . . . the Democrats would still have outpaced Whigs among new voters by almost three to one.”
Holt argues that “this surge of new voters to the Democrats in 1844, rather than abstention by former Whigs or their defection to the Liberty party, accounted . . . for Polk’s victory.”
In New York, for example, almost 25,000 more voters cast ballots for Polk in 1844 than had voted for Van Buren in 1840 (vs. a Whig gain of only 6,500). This was almost 10,000 votes more than the Liberty party earned in the state in 1844 (15,814), and almost 20,000 more than Polk’s margin of victory (5,106).
All that is well and good, but it still does not answer the ultimate question: why did the Democrats experience such an upsurge in voters?
To answer that question, Holt begins with the premise that “[t]he Whigs lost the election in the North, not in the South. If Clay had been able to carry New York and Pennsylvania, he could have lost Tennessee and North Carolina in addition to other southern states and still have won the election.”
Focusing, then, on the North, Holt’s analysis of voting patterns and trends in interim elections between 1840 and 1844 leads him to conclude that the common explanations do not tell the whole story. “[N]orthern voting returns strongly suggest that the issue differences of 1844 and Clay’s candidacy benefited the Whigs far more than the Democrats or the Liberty party.” In particular, in the north “the Texas issue, if anything, helped the Whigs . . ..”
The reasons for Clay’s defeat, then, lay elsewhere. In New York, ironically, the candidacy of Silas Wright – a protégé and ally of Polk’s rival Martin Van Buren – who ran for governor against none other than Millard Fillmore, helped the Democratic presidential candidate:
But more broadly and fundamentally, what did Clay in was a tidal wave of newly-naturalized immigrant voters:
Although the trend was nationwide, this was particularly true in the key states of New York and Pennsylvania, where the Whigs had flirted with the nativist American Republican party. In the former state, reports from Albany, Buffalo, New York City, and even non-urban upstate areas with pockets of Germans and Irish, reported large, virtually unanimous immigrant turnouts in favor of the Democrats. Whether the practice was illegal or at least abusive, as the Whigs believed, the fact is that across the country “tens of thousands of immigrants naturalized in the fall of 1844 cast their first presidential vote for Polk.” Democrats privately agreed that the votes of “’true-hearted Adopted Citizens’” amounted to “’an avalanche [the Whigs] could not resist.’”
If Professor Holt’s analysis is correct, ironies abound. Henry Clay’s 1844 candidacy was undone by the same complex of forces – disputes about immigrants and Catholics – that would tear his party apart shortly after his death. For the country, Polk’s razor-thin win clearly did not amount to a mandate in favor of Manifest Destiny or Texas. And yet, that is how it was interpreted. Annexation and war were the result.
But that reaction is, perhaps, not entirely fair. After all, the opposing team scored six other runs that weren’t the ump’s fault. If your pitcher hadn’t given up that three-run homer in the eighth, the ninth wouldn’t have mattered. And even though the umpire clearly blew it, it was your pitcher who threw that next pitch.
And what about your hitters? Sure, they scored six runs – not bad at all. But didn’t your cleanup batter end the seventh inning by hitting into a double play with the bases loaded? A single would have scored two runs, kept the inning alive and put the game out of reach.
Or maybe it was the baserunning and fielding. Your shortstop’s error in the fourth accounted for one run, and then your plodding catcher ran you out of an inning when he tried to stretch that single into a double.
The manager probably deserves to take some heat as well. Your pitcher was far over his pitch count and clearly tiring. Why didn’t the skipper have the bullpen ace warmed up and ready to go?
One of the great things about Michael F. Holt’s The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party is the way he analyzes election results from multiple perspectives. Sure, the book is incredibly long, and the microscopic print is guaranteed to induce eye strain. But Holt takes his time because he is not content to go with the easy answer, the equivalent of, “It’s the umpire’s fault!”
Henry Clay’s defeat in 1844 is a case in point. Holt is the first to point out that “Clay came heartbreakingly close to victory:”
[James K.] Polk defeated [Clay] by only 38,000 votes out of 2,700,000 cast, and the Democrat lacked a popular majority because the Liberty party’s vote had burgeoned from 6,200 in 1840 to 62,000 in 1844. . . . Clay . . . lost eight other states that [William Henry] Harrison had carried in 1840, six of them by exceedingly narrow margins. Relatively miniscule changes in those six states would have thrown the race to him.
Holt, like Daniel Walker Howe, cites New York as the most important (lost by 5,100 votes, or 1.05%, out of 486,000 votes cast). In addition:
Even without New York, [Clay] would have triumphed by taking Pennsylvania and Indiana, yet Polk’s margin in the former was 7,000 votes, 1.9 percent of the total, whereas Clay lost Indiana by only 2,300 votes, 1.7 percent of the total. Perhaps even more remarkable, the Whigs could have lost both New York and Pennsylvania and still have won with a total of 8,600 additional votes – 2,300 in Indiana, 2,000 in Georgia, 700 in Louisiana, and 3,600 in Michigan.
Why then did (in the words of one Whig) “[t]he people . . . elect[] a mere Tom Tit over the Old Eagle”? Turning to the causes of the defeat, Holt reviews the usual suspects: Thurlow Weed’s verdict that “the people have declared against the Tariff and for Texas”; Clay’s personal unpopularity among some voters (what analysts would now call his “high negatives”); and the conviction of many Whigs at the time that “angrily attribute[d] Clay’s defeat to the ‘asinine fatuity of the abolition party.’” Holt cites statistics that illustrate how crucial the Liberty party vote seemed to be:
Indeed, if Clay had captured only a third of [James M.] Birney’s 15,800 votes in New York, he would have won the election. Similarly, Clay lost Indiana by 2,300 votes, while Birney attracted 2,100 there. The Liberty party’s 3,600 votes in Michigan, added to his own total, would have given Clay that state too.
Holt, like Howe, also points out that corruption and ballot-box stuffing (“’the utter mendacity frauds & villainies of Locofocoism’”) played a role:
[T]he charges [of corruption] represented more than sour grapes. Historians agree that the Democrats carried Louisiana, at least, only by padding the vote of Plaquemines Parish, a veritable Democratic rotten borough. The Democratic vote in that parish jumped from 250 in 1840 to 1,007 in 1844, even though only 538 white males over twenty and only 577 over fifteen resided there in 1840 . . ..
But then Holt peels another layer of the onion. Looked at differently, the major Whig problem was that the party had failed to attract new voters. “But what disturbed the Whigs far more and what they recognized (far better than many historians) as the chief cause of their defeat was the disproportionate and unexpected growth of the Democratic vote since 1840.”
I will not cite all of Holt’s numbers, but the bottom line is that Clay in 1844 retained the large majority of the voters who had cast ballots for Harrison in 1840. Likewise, Polk retained virtually all of those who had voted for Martin Van Buren in 1840. The Democrats, however, captured the overwhelming majority of new voters in 1844. Of new voters nationwide, over 72% went for Polk (in the south, this figure was an “awesome” 86.1%); some 19% opted for the Liberty Party; the Whigs garnered only a pathetic 8.7%. “Even had all the additional Liberty voters backed Clay in 1844 . . . the Democrats would still have outpaced Whigs among new voters by almost three to one.”
Holt argues that “this surge of new voters to the Democrats in 1844, rather than abstention by former Whigs or their defection to the Liberty party, accounted . . . for Polk’s victory.”
In every northern state that the Democrats narrowly carried – New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Michigan – the difference between the Democratic and Whig gains since 1840 exceeded both the Liberty party’s vote in 1844 and the margin by which the Democrats won.
In New York, for example, almost 25,000 more voters cast ballots for Polk in 1844 than had voted for Van Buren in 1840 (vs. a Whig gain of only 6,500). This was almost 10,000 votes more than the Liberty party earned in the state in 1844 (15,814), and almost 20,000 more than Polk’s margin of victory (5,106).
All that is well and good, but it still does not answer the ultimate question: why did the Democrats experience such an upsurge in voters?
To answer that question, Holt begins with the premise that “[t]he Whigs lost the election in the North, not in the South. If Clay had been able to carry New York and Pennsylvania, he could have lost Tennessee and North Carolina in addition to other southern states and still have won the election.”
Focusing, then, on the North, Holt’s analysis of voting patterns and trends in interim elections between 1840 and 1844 leads him to conclude that the common explanations do not tell the whole story. “[N]orthern voting returns strongly suggest that the issue differences of 1844 and Clay’s candidacy benefited the Whigs far more than the Democrats or the Liberty party.” In particular, in the north “the Texas issue, if anything, helped the Whigs . . ..”
The reasons for Clay’s defeat, then, lay elsewhere. In New York, ironically, the candidacy of Silas Wright – a protégé and ally of Polk’s rival Martin Van Buren – who ran for governor against none other than Millard Fillmore, helped the Democratic presidential candidate:
The widely popular Democratic gubernatorial candidate [Silas Wright] ran ahead of Polk, thus pulling out votes for the presidential ticket that might not otherwise have been there. Moreover, his well-known opposition to Tyler’s Texas treaty had helped Democrats obfuscate party differences on annexation.
But more broadly and fundamentally, what did Clay in was a tidal wave of newly-naturalized immigrant voters:
[Horace] Greeley, [Thurlow] Weed, and scores of other Whigs . . . pointed quite correctly to a more important cause of the Democratic gains that defeated Clay, a complex of issues and events that most Whigs had considered peripheral to the campaign – the increase in ethnic and religious animosities that had turned the vast majority of foreign-born and Catholic voters against [the Whig] party. . . . [T]he Democrats had been terrifyingly successful in mobilizing massive numbers of new immigrant voters behind Polk and their other candidates.
Although the trend was nationwide, this was particularly true in the key states of New York and Pennsylvania, where the Whigs had flirted with the nativist American Republican party. In the former state, reports from Albany, Buffalo, New York City, and even non-urban upstate areas with pockets of Germans and Irish, reported large, virtually unanimous immigrant turnouts in favor of the Democrats. Whether the practice was illegal or at least abusive, as the Whigs believed, the fact is that across the country “tens of thousands of immigrants naturalized in the fall of 1844 cast their first presidential vote for Polk.” Democrats privately agreed that the votes of “’true-hearted Adopted Citizens’” amounted to “’an avalanche [the Whigs] could not resist.’”
If Professor Holt’s analysis is correct, ironies abound. Henry Clay’s 1844 candidacy was undone by the same complex of forces – disputes about immigrants and Catholics – that would tear his party apart shortly after his death. For the country, Polk’s razor-thin win clearly did not amount to a mandate in favor of Manifest Destiny or Texas. And yet, that is how it was interpreted. Annexation and war were the result.
Just a side-note... The Modern Whig Party is back. So far it has 3,000 members, a strong military membership and word is will be featured in the media soon.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.modernwhig.org