Ironic Quote of the Day (1840 Edition)

"General [William Henry] Harrison will be our next President, if he lives until the fourth of March next [1841]," said the Hudson River Chronicle on November 10 [1840].  "Nothing but death can prevent this glorious result."

Harrison barely made it.  He died on April 4, 1841, having served one month in office.

The quote is from Alasdair Roberts' America's First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder After the Panic of 1837.

About the illustration, entitled Uncle Sam's Pet Pups! (1840):

A crude woodcut satire showing Harrison luring "Mother Bank," Jackson, and Van Buren into a barrel of "Hard Cider." Jack Downing chases Jackson and Van Buren toward the barrel as Mother Bank crawls into it. While Jackson and Van Buren sought to destroy the Bank of the United States, one of Harrison's election campaign promises was to reestablish it, hence his providing "Mother Bank" a refuge in this scene.

William Henry Harrison

Over at Frances Hunter's American Heroes Blog, FH has an excellent post on Old Tippecanoe: Forgotten Giant: William Henry Harrison, Part 1. Get thee thither!

The Missouri Crisis: A Prequel

In The Missouri Controversy 1819-1821, Glover Moore points out a prequel to the dispute over slavery in Missouri of which I was unaware of.

On Monday November 23, 1818, a “resolution declaring the admission of the State of Illinois into the Union, on an equal footing with the original States, was read a third time.”

At that point, New York Representative James Tallmadge, Jr. – who three months later would ignite the Missouri controversy – rose and “assigned the reasons why, in his opinion, the resolution ought not to be adopted.” Rep. Tallmadge's principal objection related to the failure of the proposed Illinois constitution specifically to bar slavery. “The principle of slavery,” he maintained, “if not adopted in the constitution, was at least not sufficiently prohibited.”

Pointing first to Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance, which barred slavery, Rep. Tallmadge first argued that it “was in the nature of a convention between the United States and the people of the States and Territories to be formed out of that territory.” Consequently, “[i]f the [proposed state] constitution was found to comport with that provision, it ought to be received by Congress; if not, it ought to be rejected. “Mr. T.” contended that the proposed Illinois constitution “contravened this stipulation, either in the letter or the spirit.”

Turning (as it were) to the merits of slavery, Rep. Tallmadge condemned it as “despotism” that contradicted the Declaration of Independence:

It had often been cast as a reproach on this nation, that we, who boast our freedom, and pride ourselves on our independence, yet hold our fellow-beings in service. Americans had been represented, indeed, with one hand exhibiting the declaration of independence, and with the other brandishing the lash of despotism.

Rep. Tallmadge softened the blow of his words by placing the blame for the “original sin” of slavery on the British. He recognized that the southern states were trying to “control and regulate the evil,” and had no desire to interfere with their efforts in states where slavery already existed. “But, Mr. T. said, if Congress should voluntarily recognise this feature in a constitution submitted for their decision, and in violation, too, of a compact forbidding it, they would take upon themselves the unjust imputation he had alluded to.”

Rep. George Poindexter of Mississippi then took the floor. He believed that the proposed Illinois constitution was not a bar to admission, but his statements concerning slavery were remarkable given the rancor of later debates:

Mr. POINDEXTER, of Mississippi, said he fully concurred with the gentleman from New York, in his solicitude to expel from our country, whenever practicable, anything like slavery. It is not with us, said he, a matter of choice whether we will have slaves among us or not; we found them here, and we are obliged to maintain and employ them. It would be a blessing, could we get rid of them; but the wisest and best men among us have not been able to devise a plan for doing it.

Rep. Poindexter did not deny that the federal government could condition Illinois' admission on the wording of its constitution, but he did assert that it was a futile exercise, for the people of a state could change their constitution at will, since [i]n the nature of free governments, no law could be irrepealable.” Remarkably, however, “he hoped that neither Ohio, Indiana, nor Illinois, would ever permit the introduction of slavery within their limits. He hoped, as far as we could, we should expel slavery from this country.”

After an intervening speech by Rep. Richard C. Anderson, Jr. of Kentucky, Rep. Tallmadge took the floor again. The most interesting part of his response (to me at least) addressed Rep. Poindexter's contention that, after statehood, citizens of Illinois could amend their constitution to permit slavery. Rep. Tallmadge argued that the Republican Form of Government clause of the Constitution might bar them from doing so – the first articulation on the floor of Congress of that argument of which I am aware:

With respect to the power of a State to change its constitution, he was not prepared to say that a State was, in that respect, under no restraint. Would Gentlemen admit a State into the Union to-day under a republican form of government, and permit it to call a convention to-morrow, and change its form of government to a monarchy? That State would cease, by the very act, to be a component part of the Union, and the same result would follow, he presumed, if a State were to violate the condition on which it was admitted into this Union, by admitting the introduction of slavery.

This was too much for future president William Henry Harrison, then serving as a Representative of the State of Ohio. Although “the introduction of slavery” was “the object of” Harrison's “abhorrence,”

he protested against the doctrine of the gentleman from New York. He could assure the gentleman that the people of that State [of Ohio] were fully aware of their privileges, and would never come to this House, or to the State of New York, for permission so to alter their constitution.

The resolution to admit Illinois passed by an overwhelming margin, 117 to 34. At the same time, those 34 negative votes – thirty-three from the north, one from Maryland – were an omen of the future.

Favorite Presidents

In honor of Presidents' Day, National Review has solicited fourteen commentators to identify their favorite presidents and briefly explain their choices.

What is interesting is the variety of opinions. The usual suspects -- George Washington and Abraham Lincoln -- appear: Lincoln gets 2 1/2 votes and Washington gets 1 1/2. As you might expect, Ronald Reagan gets a vote, and William Henry Harrison gets two tongue-in-cheek nods (for dying before he could do any harm). But serious arguments are made in favor of no fewer than seven other candidates: Chester Alan Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge, Warren G. Harding, James K. Polk, Teddy Roosevelt and . . . wait for it . . . none other than Millard Fillmore!

"The people have elected a mere Tom Tit over the Old Eagle"

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:

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.

Henry Clay, President

Over at Civil War Talk some time ago, another member asked a "what if" question: how would history have changed if Henry Clay had been elected president? Could the Civil War have been avoided? What follows is a slightly modified and expanded version of my answer.

Boy, that's a tough "what if." I suppose the first issue is, when is it that Clay would have been elected? In my view, Clay's best chance of winning the presidency probably came in 1840 -- the year he wasn't nominated. This appears to be the opinion of both Michael Holt and Merrill Peterson.

The Whigs held their convention at the beginning of December 1839. Clay had a plurality of the delegates on the first ballot, but Harrison ultimately garnered the nomination. There was a brief economic recovery in late 1839, and the perception at the time was that Harrison was more electable. In 1840, the economy collapsed again. If the Whigs had held their convention in mid-1840, the Whigs' concerns about electability would have been less, Clay would likely have been nominated and would likely have won.

Here's Peterson on Clay's reaction to his loss of the nomination and his chances of winning if he had been nominated:

Hearing the news at his hotel room in Washington, Clay could not conceal his disappointment. "My friends are not worth the powder and shot it would take to kill them," he reportedly said. "I am the most unfortunate man in the history of parties: always run by my friends when sure to be defeated, and now betrayed for a nomination, when I, or any one, would be sure of election." In this latter judgment he was undoubtedly correct. Regardless of his political liabilities, the Democratic depression combined with the appeal of the Whig economic program would have assured Clay's election in 1840.

So what would have happened if Clay had taken the presidential oath in March 1841, rather than Harrison (who died within a month and was succeeded by John Tyler)? Certainly Clay as president during 1841-45 would not have pressed for the admission of Texas as Tyler did during the latter half of his presidency, but after that it's hard to say. Would Clay have been re-elected in 1844? Presumably, the Whigs would have enacted their full economic package of legislation in 1841 under Clay, but there is no particular reason to think it would have speeded economic recovery. Would voters have become disenchanted and thrown the scoundrels out in 1844? Or would they have given Clay and the Whigs a second term in the belief that things were moving in right direction, however slowly?

Clay got the nomination in 1844, but his stance on the annexation of Texas lost him the election after the Democrats dumped Van Buren (who shared Clay's views on annexation) for Polk. Would the Dems have hit upon the same magic formula in our hypothetical world? Impossible to know. Assuming that they did not, let us posit that Clay remained for two terms, through March 1849. Then you're in such a different world that it's hard to know what would have happened. The economic recovery was well underway by 1848. Would the Whigs have gone from triumph to triumph based on their economic record? And if so, with whom? (Not Zach Taylor! Millard Fillmore?) Or would the Dems, desperate for victory, and anxious to avoid economic issues, have used Texas as their springboard to victory in 1852?

Meanwhile, none of this would have necessarily derailed the approaching crisis over Kansas. Perhaps if the Texas and Kansas issues had peaked at the same time, the war would have come sooner! Or perhaps not.

My head is spinning . . . .

John Randolph of Roanoke, Abolitionist

As difficult and ornery a man as Randolph was in many respects, he had one highly unusual quality: he seems to have truly detested slavery. Unlike Jefferson, Randolph even freed all of his slaves upon his death.

Although at least one biographer attributes Randolph’s dislike of slavery in part to moral qualms, it seems safe to say that his principal motivation may be ascribed to more practical concerns: he was convinced that slavery was devastating to the prosperity of the white society that harbored it.

The most well-known manifestation of Randolph’s stance came in 1803. On February 8 of that year, the House of Representatives received a petition from a convention held in Vincennes, Indiana Territory in December 1802, chaired by future president William Henry Harrison. The petition sought the suspension, for ten years, of Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance, which barred slavery from the Territory. The petition apparently argued that the Territory was suffering from a shortage of labor and that it was necessary, for the time being, to import slaves until a sufficient white population became available.

The House referred the petition to a Select Committee headed by Randolph. The other members were Roger Griswold (Fed - CT), Robert Williams (Rep - NC), Lewis R. Morris (Fed - VT) and William Hoge (Rep - PA).

On March 2, 1803, Randolph delivered to the House the Committee’s Report, written apparently by Randolph himself, which strongly endorsed the exclusion of slavery as “wisely calculated to promote the happiness and prosperity of the Northwestern country.” It was the Committee’s view

That the rapid population of the State of Ohio sufficiently evinces, in the opinion of your Committee, that the labor of slaves is not necessary to promote the growth and settlement of colonies in that region. That this labor, demonstrably the dearest of any, can only be employed to advantage in the cultivation of products more valuable than any known to that quarter of the United States. That the committee deem it highly dangerous and inexpedient to impair a provision wisely calculated to promote the happiness and prosperity of the Northwestern country, and to give strength and security to that extensive frontier. In the salutary operation of this sagacious and benevolent restraint, it is believed that the inhabitants of Indiana will, at no very distant day, find ample remuneration for a temporary privation of labor and emigration.

For these reasons, the Committee recommended rejection of the petition:

Resolved, that it is inexpedient to suspend, for a limited time, the operation of the sixth article of compact between the original States, and the people and States west of the river Ohio.

How odd it is to think that fierce John Randolph of Roanoke played a potentially key role in preserving the free-labor status of the old Northwest. It is also worth noting that, Old Republican though Randolph was, it clearly did not occur to him that the federal government lacked the power to exclude slavery from the Territories.

Martin Van Buren, Pervert!

The presidential campaign of 1840 pitted Whigs William Henry Harrison and vice presidential candidate John Tyler against incumbent Democrats Martin Van Buren and Richard Mentor Johnson. The campaign is most famous for the Whigs' use of potent symbols -- Log Cabins and Hard Cider -- and slogans -- "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" -- to whip up support for their notably mediocre candidate.

However, the Whigs also did not hesitate to "go negative" on Van Buren. In the process, they managed to create one of the most bizarre caricatures in the history of American politics.

One of the Whigs' principal "attack ads" was a pamphlet that reprinted a speech by Charles Ogle, a Whig congressman from Pennsylvania, entitled "The Regal Splendor of the Presidential Palace." Much of the pamphlet was devoted to the opulent splendor in which Van Buren allegedly lived while the nation suffered through a major depression. But it also included lurid suggestions of sexual depravity. As Sean Wilentz relates, Ogle asserted that

the degenerate widower Van Buren had instructed groundskeepers to build for him, in back of the Executive Mansion, a large mound in the shape of a female breast, topped by a carefully landscaped nipple. Van Buren . . . was a depraved executive autocrat who oppressed the people by day and who, by night, violated the sanctity of the people's house with extravagant debaucheries -- joined, some whispered, by the disgusting Vice President Johnson and his Negro harem.

In order to fully appreciate the closing reference, you need some background on Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson (shown seated in the cartoon above). He was a Kentucky slaveholder who made no effort to disguise his liaisons with black women. Again, Sean Wilentz tells the story succinctly:

Johnson had two daughters, Imogene and Adeline, by his housekeeper, a mulatto ex-slave named Julia Chinn. After Chinn died in 1833, Johnson took up with another woman of partial African descent, and in Washington he accompanied his out-of-wedlock daughters (whom he had provided with excellent private educations) to public functions and festivities, sometimes in the company of their respective white husbands.

* * *

[After Johnson's election in 1836, there was] talk that he had entered into yet another illicit liaison with a mulatto woman, aged eighteen or nineteen, who was the sister of one of his previous consorts. (After a trip to Kentucky, Amos Kendall informed friends that Johnson was devoting "too much of his time to a young Delilah of about the complexion of Shakespears swarthy Othello.")

Harrison won the election, but Van Buren and the Democrats had the last laugh. Harrison died after only one month in office. Henry Clay and Tyler, now president, fell into heated disagreement, and Clay ultimately read Tyler out of the Whig party. The Democrats won the next election, although their candidate was not Van Buren -- but that's another story.