Millard Dissed Again!

Longtime readers will know I'm a big Millard Fillmore fan and get seriously perturbed when Millard is dissed.  Well, it's happened again.  Over at the Daily Caller they've posted the Top Ten Hottest US Presidents in History and Millard is MIA.  I'm not of the female persuasion, but who would choose the violent and decrepit Andy Jackson or Franklin Pierce with his greasy locks over the dapper Millard?

Franklin Purse?

[Nathaniel] Hawthorne's steadfast support for his old schoolmate Franklin Pierce had enraged abolitionists, whose cause suffered major setbacks during his presidency, so much so that Lydia Maria Child thought his name should be pronounced to rhyme with "curse."

Bruce A. Ronda, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms.

H/T Caleb Crain at Steamboats are ruining everything.

Michael F. Holt on Franklin Pierce

For those of you who don't know of him, Michael F. Holt is one of our finest antebellum historians. His The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War – 1,000 pages of microscopic print describing the battles of the parties during the era of the Second Party System – is a masterpiece of political analysis. His The Political Crisis of the 1850s made my Road to the Road to Gettysburg top ten list.

The editors of Times Books's American Presidents Series recruited Prof. Holt to author the most recent volume of the Series, a biography of Franklin Pierce – and it has proved an inspired choice. The book is, in a word, superb.

Consistent with the format of the series, the book is short (133 pages of text) and non-academic (there are no footnotes). Packed in the thin volume is a remarkably detailed description of Franklin Pierce's life and career. It turns out that our fourteenth president had many positive attributes and was in some ways a tremendously sympathetic personality. Prof. Holt recounts, for example, that, after Pierce looked after the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne while Hawthorne's daughter was sick, Hawthorne rendered a remarkable and moving tribute:

“Never having had any trouble before, that pierced into my very vitals, I did not know what comfort there might be in the manly sympathy of a friend, but Pierce has undergone so great a sorrow of his own, and has so large and kindly a heart, and is so tender and strong that he really did us good, and I shall always love him better for the recollection of those dark days.”

But that is not, I suspect, why you would consider reading even a relatively brief biography of Pierce. If you know even a smidgen about him, you probably know that he traditionally ranks among our worst presidents. Does Pierce (you might ask) deserve the low marks he has generally received? If so, what exactly did he do that warrants criticism, and why?

Prof. Holt does not dissent from the consensus that Pierce's presidency was disastrous, and the reason is not hard to find. “Signing off on the Kansas-Nebraska bill . . . was the biggest mistake of Franklin Pierce's political career.” And “the second biggest mistake of his political career” occurred when he “signed the bill into law at the end of May 1854.” These events pulverized the Democratic party, which suffered “crushing defeats in the North” in the fall 1854 elections. Even worse, Pierce unwittingly set into motion a course of events that would give rise to the Republican party and civil war:

If the 1854 and 1855 elections witnessed a massive repudiation of Franklin Pierce's party and the policy he had foolishly endorsed, it was not instantly clear who had benefited most from that rebuff. Northern voters had begun a marked realignment against Pierce's party, but it did not necessarily benefit that party's traditional foe, the Whigs. Instead, a diverse conglomeration of new political coalitions emerged.

Among students of the period, the most interesting question is not whether Pierce made a catastrophic miscalculation, but why. And it is here that Prof. Holt truly shines, and why this book is well worth reading even if you are generally familiar with the events. Historians have traditionally cited one or more reasons, which Prof. Holt discusses and concedes “played a role in wrecking what had once been a dazzlingly successful political career” - explanations focused on personal weakness, grief and “a lack of farsighted statesmanship.”

To these, Prof. Holt, adds an additional suggestion that will resonate with those of you familiar with his earlier work: “I argue here that the primary factor bringing Pierce to grief was his obsession with preserving the unity of the Democratic party,” Prof. Holt has argued throughout his long career that the parties in the Second Party system defined themselves against each other and gained their strength by doing so. Franklin Pierce's decision, according to Prof. Holt, was the result of his understanding of this dynamic. Pierce perceived the need to stake out an issue that united the Democrats and placed them in sharp opposition to the Whigs. “Reuniting Democrats . . . may explain the president's decision.”

In Pierce's defense, it was not entirely foreseeable that Kansas-Nebraska would be transformed from a partisan issue into a sectional one. Pierce was foiled by The Appeal to Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States - “one of the most masterful pieces of political propaganda written in the nineteenth century.”

I won't go on – after all, you should buy the book. Suffice it to say that Prof. Holt has provided us with a clear and succinct review of the relevant events and their consequences. More importantly, you will be the beneficiary of the insights of one of America's foremost historians into how and why things went so terribly wrong.

About the illustration:

The artist lays on the Democrats the major blame for violence perpetrated against antislavery settlers in Kansas in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Here a bearded "freesoiler" has been bound to the "Democratic Platform" and is restrained by two Lilliputian figures, presidential nominee James Buchanan and Democratic senator Lewis Cass. Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas and president Franklin Pierce, also shown as tiny figures, force a black man into the giant's gaping mouth. The freesoiler's head rests on a platform marked "Kansas," "Cuba," and "Central America," probably referring to Democratic ambitions for the extension of slavery. In the background left is a scene of burning and pillage; on the right a dead man hangs from a tree.

Franklin Pierce Selects a Cabinet

It's a beautiful Saturday morning, and it seems appropriate to say something nice about Franklin Pierce.

Selection of cabinet members was always a difficult process, what with the need to create geographical balance, satisfy feuding intraparty factions and the like - and that's before factoring in optional requirements like competence. Michael F. Holt suggests that Franklin Pierce did a pretty darn good job:

Carefully balanced by region, Pierce's cabinet would prove to be one of the most ethical and effective group of advisers to serve the nation in the nineteenth century. It was also the only cabinet during that century to remain intact for an entire four-year presidential term. By the end of the administration, the cabinet members had developed genuine esteem for Pierce, and some, like [Secretary of War Jefferson] Davis and [Secretary of State William L.] Marcy, possessed personal fondness for him.

"Purse" Pierce?

If true, it’s a new one on me: Benjamin Perley Poore asserts that Franklin Pierce’s friends called him “Purse”. No explanation as to why.

Millard and Franklin

If you think my fixation on Millard Fillmore is odd, pity poor David C. at Lugubrious Drollery, who's obsessed with Franklin Pierce!

Although I would adamantly maintain that the two men were utterly dissimilar, a quick search turned up a dissent: an 1856 book by one Anna Ella Carroll entitled A Review of Pierce's Administration; Showing Its Only Popular Measures to Have Originated with the Executive of Millard Fillmore. Take that, Frank!

About the illustration:

The artist belittles the Democrats' relatively undistinguished choice for presidential nominee in 1852, Franklin Pierce. The cartoon is based on Aesop's fable about the mountain which, being in labor, groaned so dreadfully as to arouse the attention of multitudes of onlookers, only to send forth a small mouse. Aesop so reproved those who through rumors, promises, and other great pretentions raise the expectations of mankind only to disappoint by meager performance. The cartoonist's analogy is to the Baltimore Democratic Convention of June 1852, which selected Pierce, a relatively obscure New Hampshireman, as its presidential nominee. Pierce, as a mouse, scurries from a small hole at the base of New Hampshire's White Mountains at right. At the lower left a bobcat, Whig candidate Winfield Scott, crouches behind the rocks, saying, "Come this way, my little fellow, I'm watching for you!" At right, a swan representing Free Democratic candidate John P. Hale floats by on a stream. In the background, on the far side of the mountains is a crowd of men, the "Baltimore Convention." One declares, "After all, this is rather a small affair of ours!" Another replies, "Very true: and there is the more necessitty for making great noise about one little mouse." "White Mountains in Labour" probably appeared in late summer or early autumn 1852, since Hale was not nominated until the Free Democrats' August convention.

"Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil"

Having posted several quibbles concerning minor inaccuracies and inconsistencies in Jonathan H. Earle’s Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854, I thought I should make sure that the record is clear: this is an eye-opening book.

The growth of the anti-slavery (or more properly anti-slavery extension) movement in the north in the decades before the Civil War is generally thought of as a Whiggish phenomenon. Whiggish types, absorbing via the Second Great Awakening the evangelical morality that also gave rise to the temperance campaign, increasingly came to regard slavery as a sin and moral blot on the body of the Republic. Yes, there may have been a few oddball Democrats who saw the light and ultimately tagged along, but for the most part northern Democrats seemed to be amoral at best: Lewis Cass inventing popular sovereignty, Franklin Pierce, Stephen Douglas and James Buchanan generally toadying to the south and the southern wing of their party.

Professor Earle sets out to correct this misimpression. In fact, a number of Democrats led the way in identifying slavery and the slave power as enemies. One of the delights of the book lies in meeting and getting to know previously unknown or indistinct political figures: Thomas Morris of Ohio and Preston King of New York (both of whom I have discussed before); John P. Hale, who unexpectedly precipitated a dramatic political realignment in New Hampshire, previously the “South Carolina of the North”; Marcus Morton of Massachusetts; and even David Wilmot, otherwise a vague figure who in most narratives mysteriously appears out of nowhere, only to disappear again into the mist.

More importantly, Professor Earle explores why there seems to have been a correlation between radical, hard-money, anti-Bank Democrats and opposition to the expansion of slavery. One key, he argues, was the tendency of radical democrats to perceive conspiratorial coalitions of interests that threatened to dominate yeoman farmers and urban proletariat: manufacturers who clamored for high tariffs, monopolistic corporations that shielded capitalists from ordinary rules of individual liability, and most famously the Monster Bank.

With a little squinting, Professor Earle suggests, slaveholders could look a lot like an aristocratic special interest. In an earlier post, I quoted from an 1839 speech by Senator Thomas Morris (Dem – Ohio), in which he not only drew the parallel but argued that the Bank Power and the Slave Power had joined forces:

But all will not do; these two powers must now be united; an amalgamation of the black power of the South with the white power of the North must take place, as either, separately, cannot succeed in the destruction of the liberty of speech and the press and the right of petition. Let me tell gentlemen that both united will never succeed. As I said on a former day, God forbid that they should ever rule this country. I have seen this billing and cooing between these different interests for some time past; I informed my private friends . . . that these powers were forming a union to overthrow the present [Van Buren] Administration . . ..

* * *

[T]he assertion has gone forth that we have twelve hundred millions of slave property at the South; and can any man so close his understanding here as not plainly to perceive tht the power of this vast amount of property at the South is now uniting itself to the banking power of the North, in order to govern the destinies of this country? Six hundred millions of banking capital is to be brought into this coalition, and the slave power and the bank power are thus to unite in order to break down the present Administration. There can be no mistake, as I believe, in this matter. The aristocracy of the North, who, by the power of a corrupt banking system, and the aristocracy of the South, by the power of the slave system, both fattening upon the labor of others, are now about to unite in order to make the reign of each perpetual. Is there an independent American to be found who will become the recreant slave to such an unholy combination? Is this another compromise to barter the liberties of the country for personal aggrandizement? “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.”

Almost ten years later, Pennsylvania Democrat David Wilmot spoke in similar terms:

“The gallant and true men who fought the battle of popular rights against privilege and monopoly – who aided in crushing the monster bank, and wresting from the grasp of eastern capital the hard earnings of labor, will never fight the battles of slavery propagandism” [Wilmot declared]. Again investing the rhetoric of antislavery with an older brand derived from the pen of William Leggett, Wilmot insisted that since southern capital had “a thousand millions of dollars invested in slaves,” the current struggle, like the bank war in the 1830s, was best viewed as one between “capital and labor.”

But what seems to given urgency to the threat presented by the Slave Power was the concept of Free Soil, which Professor Earle asserts is the crucial and overlooked component of the “free soil, free labor, free men” trilogy. Free Soil was not, Professor Earle argues, simply a “synonym for [the] more developed concept of free labor, an ideology . . . closely linked with the rise of capitalism in the North. . . . [M]any Free Soilers . . . came from remote rural areas or radical labor backgrounds and felt nothing but contempt for Whiggish free-labor views.”

The term originally referred to land reform: “the free distribution of the public lands to poor settlers, in the form of inalienable homesteads.” Although containing slavery was an incidental benefit, the scheme also enhanced democracy (more of those Jeffersonian yeoman farmers), reduced unemployment and raised wages, and attacked privileged land monopolists and speculators.

In time, however, “the Free Soil ideology [evolved] from a program for land reform to a bulwark against slavery expansion.” It was precisely the elusiveness of the phrase that made Free Soil so politically potent:

During the 1840s and 1850s, homesteads became unalterably fused with the issue of slavery expansion . . .. This link underscored Free Soil’s rhetorical elusiveness and ambiguity. The potent term was appropriated by a host of other groups, movements, and political parties, including the Free Soil Party and, later, the Republicans. No matter who appropriated it, however, Free Soil always potentially implied the double meaning . . .: land free of charge and at the same time free of slavery. Free Soil managed to speak directly to the anxieties of poor or vulnerable northern whites, creating a new source of support for limiting slavery’s expansion.

The radical Democratic critique of slavery was thus very different from the moral and religious foundations of abolitionism and abolition-based political organizations such as the Liberty Party. The emphasis on Free Soil and the Slave Power also focused the political debate squarely on the territories.

The genius of the Free Soil and Republican parties was to incorporate the double meaning of Free Soil – and its radical Democratic message – into their platforms. By doing so they were able to broaden their base to include large numbers of Democrats who became convinced that their former party had become “a tool of the slaveholding oligarchy.” These Democrats, moreover, often came from hardscrabble rural districts that had consistently resisted the lure of the Whigs -- areas such as New York's "Passed-Over District" and the Wilmot District of Pennsylvania. It is no accident that in 1862 the Republican Party produced the Homestead Act as well as the Emancipation Proclamation.

Quibbles and all, Professor Earle's book is excellent. Highly recommended.

About the illustration:

An election-year satire favoring Free Soil candidate Martin Van Buren in the 1848 presidential contest. A long-legged John Van Buren carries his father piggyback through Salt River, heading toward the White House on the far shore. "Matty" says, "Thanks to your long legs, John, I believe that I shall pass over this Jordan dry shod." The younger Van Buren assures his father, "Hold on Dad & I'll put you through." Meanwhile, abolitionist editor Horace Greeley and candidates Taylor and Clay are having a more difficult time fording the river. Clay is immersed head first, leaving only his legs visible. Taylor is neck-deep in the water. Greeley yells to Kentucky Whig leader Cassius M. Clay, seated on the near bank, "Help, Cassius, or I Sink." Clay replies, "Can't come there, Horace, I risked my life in Mexico, & I don't like to do it again." (Cassius Clay was a hero of the recent Mexican War).

Some Thoughts on the Compromise of 1850

I was struck by this observation by Jonathan H. Earle:

Without the lifeblood of constant agitation to nourish its ranks, the Free Soil movement languished in the years between the compromise [of 1850] and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

* * *

When the 1852 votes were counted, the Free Democrats were pummeled in every quarter, even where they had done well four years before. With the exhausted David Wilmot in retirement, voters in Pennsylvania's 12th Congressional District voted overwhelmingly for [Franklin] Pierce . . .

* * *

For fourteen months after the 1852 election, Free Soil -- as a movement, an ideology, and a party -- was practically moribund. Then on January 4, 1854, the diminutive Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced a bill . . ..

The quote highlights the fact that, in many ways, the Compromise of 1850 was a striking success. 150 years later, a combination of hindsight and the tendency of events to get telescoped together makes it appear that the Compromise was doomed from the start. The history of the late 1840s and 1850s is often portrayed as a series of waves cresting ever higher as the flood tide of discord rushes in and eventually envelops the country (or, as David M. Potter has put it, "a kind of a vortex, whirling the country in ever narrower circles and more rapid revolutions into the pit of war"). But the men who crafted the Compromise did not, and could not, know that.

Even so great an historian as Professor Potter, who repeatedly emphasizes the contingency of history, sometimes falls into the trap. While admitting that "[a]ntislavery men were profoundly discouraged" after the Compromise, and that "outward appearances all indicated that the national yearning for harmony would banish the slavery issue from politics," he also refers to "the futility of the Compromise" and "the shibboleth of 'finality' as a slogan."

Professor Potter contends "that the sectional rapprochement" during the post-Compromise years "did not rest on broad or deep foundations." But if that is so, it only emphasizes the remarkable job done by those who constructed the Compromise. For ten crucial years the Compromise withstood a series of unforeseen and unforeseeable blows -- from Bloody Kansas and Lecompton to the caning of Sumner and Dred Scott -- that would have felled a less sturdy structure.

About the illustration:

A crudely drawn satire bitterly attacking Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Pierce and appealing to the "Freemen of America." The print, possibly executed by a free black, criticizes the Democrats' platform, as established by the Baltimore Convention, which in the interest of preserving the Union endorsed the Compromise of 1850. More specifically the artist condemns Pierce's pledge to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, included in the compromise as a submission to southern slaveholding interests. In the center Pierce prostrates himself before a "Slave holder & Peace Maker," a bearded man in wide-brimmed hat and striped trousers holding a cat-o-nine-tails and manacles. The upper half of Pierce is over the Mason Dixon line, his face in the dirt on the "Baltimore Platform." The slaveholder says: "Save the Union, / And with the "meanest" Yankee grease / Smear the hinges of your knees / And in "silence" pray for peace." Pierce, dubbed "one of the Southern "dirt" eaters "Saving" the Union," replies, "I accept this cheerfully." The Democratic platform is labeled "Southern pine" and is inscribed with reference to the compromise, "Fugitive Slave Law and nigger catching, and resist agitation on the Slavery question &c." On it lie a skull and crossbones, manacles, and a serpent. At far left is "the Devil come up to attend his revival," who commends, "Well done my faithful servants!" On the right is the infamous Hungarian general Julius von Haynau, who carries a whip and wears a "Barclay's Brewery" pitcher on his head. (Haynau was assaulted by Barclay employees while in England.) The Hungarian extends his hand toward the slaveholder, saying, "I feel quite at home in this company give me your hand my good fellow." Further to the right are Lewis Cass and Stephen A. Douglas, disappointed aspirants for the 1852 Democratic nomination. Cass says, "We are down Douglass, "Pierce" has bid lower than either of us." Douglas: "There is nothing impossible for a New Hampshire "Hunker" [i.e., conservative] Democrat to do in that line." On the ground nearby are the words, "the "slave&1ocratic miscalled the Democratic party, how they obey the "crack" of the slaveholder's whip!"

Kansas-Nebraska 5: Douglas Casts the Die

Stephen A. Douglas planned to formally introduce the territory bill and begin debate on Monday January 23. But before he did so, he needed to get President Pierce on board.

To accomplish this, he arranged for a horde of senior legislators to descend on the weak-willed president on Sunday January 22, when he was alone. I have previously described aspects of this meeting in another post. For present purposes, the important point is that Douglas and his cohorts got the president write out, in his own hand, a statement that the Missouri Compromise “was superseded by the principles of the legislation of 1850, commonly called the compromise measures and is hereby declared inoperative and void.”

Douglas was now armed with the president’s endorsement. On Monday January 23, 1854, Douglas reported the bill in a dramatically revised form. Those of you who have been wondering when Kansas would make its appearance need wonder no longer. The new version proposed to create two new territories (Kansas and Nebraska) rather than one; the southern boundary of Kansas territory was shifted north from 36° 30’ to the thirty-seventh parallel, so as to avoid dividing lands of the Cherokee nation.

For our purposes, however, the key changes were those relating to the Missouri Compromise. You will recall that Douglas’s original January 4, 1854 bill included a Section 14 that provided that the Constitution and all laws of the United States would have the same force and effect in the Territory of Nebraska as elsewhere within the United States. The Missouri Compromise was not excepted.

Sections 14 (applicable to Nebraska) and 34 (applicable to Kansas) of the new bill now carved out Section 8 of the Missouri Compromise, using language similar to the text that Douglas had the president write out by hand the day before:

Sec. 14. And be it further enacted, . . . That the Constitution, and all laws of the United States which are not locally inapplicable, shall have the same force and effect within the said Territory of Nebraska [“Kansas” in Section 34] as elsewhere within the United States, except the eighth section of the act preparatory to the admission of Missouri into the Union, approved March sixth, eighteen hundred and twenty, which was superseded by the principles of the legislation of eighteen hundred and fifty, commonly called the Compromise Measures, and is hereby declared inoperative.

In addition, the new bill omitted the now-unnecessary Section 21 of the original bill (the “clerical error” section).

It is worth noting how gingerly Section 14 treated the 1820 Compromise. Rep. Phillips’s proposed language had declared the Compromise “inoperative, void and of no force and effect.” The statement that Douglas had Pierce write out declared the Compromise "inoperative and void." Douglas's January 23 amendment proposed to declare Section 8 “superseded” and “inoperative.” Silly as it seems, it's as if Douglas thought that fewer people would be offended if he used tender wording, even though it was a distinction without a difference. Nonetheless, however gentle the wording, it was clear that Douglas was proposing, in effect, to repeal Section 8. The die was cast.

Franklin Pierce Says "Ouch!"

The usual complaint about biographers is that they fall too much in love with their subjects. This was not, apparently, a problem that Franklin Pierce biographer Larry Gara encountered. He puts the best face on matters by emphasizing the difficult period in which Pierce held office, but his conclusion is fairly blunt:

[T]here is no question that by the mid-fifties it was no longer possible to persuade northern voters to accept a program of further slave extension. Yet that is precisely what Pierce tried to do. Moreover, it would have taken political genius to persuade the South to relinquish not only slavery itself but the power disproportionate to the southern voting population which derived from slavery. Franklin Pierce was no genius. Indeed, the ordinary demands of the office were often beyond his ability. He was a politician of limited ability, and instead of growing in his job, he was overwhelmed by it.

Franklin Pierce, Wimp

It is remarkable how irrelevant Franklin Pierce seems to be to the momentous events that shook the country during his presidency. In connection with the Kansas-Nebraska bill and the acrimonious debates and violence that ensued, Pierce typically gets only a line or two.

The little notice that Pierce does draw usually focuses on a visit he received from Jefferson Davis, Stephen Douglas, David Atchison, John Breckenridge and others on Sunday January 22, 1854. The circumstances surrounding that meeting only emphasize what a cipher Pierce seems to have been, and how little the legislators thought of him.

Douglas and his allies had decided the evening before to report the Kansas bill on Monday. Almost as an afterthought, they decided that they should get Pierce and his administration on board. They recruited Jefferson Davis, Pierce’s Secretary of War, and descended on the hapless president at the White House. Although Pierce and his cabinet had previously expressed disapproval of Douglas’s bill, Pierce was unable to resist the pressure and agreed that the administration would support the plan. Not content with his oral commitment, the conferees even bullied the president into writing out a statement that the Missouri Compromise “was superseded by the [Compromise of 1850] and is hereby declared inoperative and void.”

Pathetically, Pierce tried to maintain a little wiggle room by asking his visitors to consult Secretary of State William Marcy as well. They thought so little of Pierce that they never did so, later claiming that Marcy was not at home when they called.

William Gienapp provides a superb sketch of Pierce that explains why he was and remains virtually invisible – and why Douglas insisted on getting the president’s commitment in writing on that fateful day in January 1854:

A handsome, slightly built man with a generous head of hair and more than a touch of vanity, he carried himself with a graceful manner that imparted an imposing presence. Preeminently a social person, he was blessed with great personal charm and easily assumed a familiar air with callers, often throwing an arm around their shoulders. Such behavior betrayed the shallowness of his character. Wanting intensely to be liked and uncomfortable with confrontation, Pierce appeared to agree affably with whomever he was conversing, even when he had no intention of accepting the proffered advice; later, when he adopted a different policy, men naturally felt deceived. Politicians in Washington came to see how little his protestations of friendship really meant, how completely undependable he actually was. . . . Forceful politicians quickly realized that this unsteady and irresolute president could be intimidated.