The Tale of the Dog's Tail

Rep. Charles Ogle’s (Whig – PA) Gold Spoon Oration of April 14, 2009 is a real hoot. I have decided to highlight one discrete portion just because it is so odd.

Toward the end of the speech, Ogle started needling a Democratic representative from Pennsylvania, William Beatty, about what Ogle charged was the Democrats’ “political somerset [somersault] with regard to banks.” Beatty tried to get the floor to explain his position, but Ogle refused to yield his time.

Then, for reasons that are not entirely clear (to me at least), Ogle related the following:

I will just call the attention of my colleague to an ordinance passed by the Mayor and Common Council of a neighboring city, in prevention of the danger from hydrophobia; they decreed and ordained that every dog running at large through their streets should wear a muzzle.

Beatty apparently sensed that a story involving dogs, hydrophobia and muzzles was somehow aimed at him and would not be complementary. He accordingly “again endeavored to obtain the floor, and spoke with some warmth in reference to his colleague.” Unfortunately, the precise nature of Beatty’s warm remarks must remain a matter of conjecture, for “his words were lost to the Reporter.”

After noting with satisfaction that his story was having the desired effect on Beatty (“I see it takes admirably”), Ogle then resumed his story:

Well, sir, there was a certain yankee pedler [sic], who had a dog which he employed to guard his wagon; and, as he wanted his dog to have the power of biting thieves, and stood in awe of the ordinance of the Mayor, he had a muzzle made and attached it to his dog’s tail. [A laugh.] The dog was caught by the constable running about the street with the muzzle at the wrong end; the muzzle was taken off, and the owner arrested for a violation of the ordinance.

But when the yankee was brought before the magistrate, he plead that penal statutes were always to be rigidly construed, and as the law said nothing about where the muzzle was to be worn, he insisted that he had complied with the letter of the statute; and he then turned about and entered a complaint against the constable who had removed the muzzle, and had him fined $15, that being the penalty for taking off the muzzle from any dog, according to the same law. [Loud laughter.]

About the illustration:

A satirical attack on alleged excesses in the Van Buren administration and on the President's Loco Foco or radical Democratic supporters in New York. Martin Van Buren rides past New York's Tammany Hall in a luxurious British carriage. With him are editors and advisers Frances Preston Blair and Amos Kendall. The carriage is drawn by supporters, one wearing a fireman's hat marked "No.5." A crowd looks on, and two youthful "Loco Foco" match-vendors wave as the coach passes. Blair: "Well my democratic friends this is really a triumph! What will the Federal Whigs say to it." Kendall: "You told me Matty that you could make the Tammany men do do anything--I see you can!" Van Buren: "These are my loyal subjects! old Tammany never fails to do her duty on a Pinch!" Others: "This is truly royal--great as the Coronation--what a humbug is this Democracy." "This beats our reception of Hunt & Cobbett at Spittalfield." ". . . LaFayette's entry was a fool to this." An elderly man in the crowd: "I must have a seat in Congress again to speak of this Triumph." The coach's driver: "This is True Democracy--a triumph of principle." Weitenkampf dates the print 1838, but several factors argue against this. The matter of Van Buren's purportedly regal life-style and preference for foreign goods figured large in the Whig campaign of 1840. (It was given prominence by Pennsylvania Representative Charles Ogle's lengthy philippic on the subject in Congress during April of that year.) In addition, editors Blair and Kendall emerged as Van Buren's most powerful publicists during the 1840 race.

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.