By One Vote

I am reading Michael F. Holt's book on the 1876 election, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876. This is a period I know less about, and Prof. Holt is proving to be a superb guide. He provides an excellent overview of the tangled issues of corruption, high taxes, excessive spending, depression and monetary policy that combined to strangle Reconstruction in the mid-1870s.

In the opening chapters, Prof. Holt sets the stage by reviewing the "political revolt against [President Ulysses] Grant known as the 'Liberal Republican movement,'" reminding us that even pre-War radical Charles Sumner could be counted among its members.

Analyzing the 1872 election returns, Prof. Holt argues that Grant's landslide victory was founded on quicksand. First, "[a]lmost all of the increase in Grant's national [vote] total between 1868 and 1872 . . . came from former slave states, and most of those new Republican votes undoubtedly came from newly enfranchised freedmen." If those votes were lost, the Republican in the next election would no longer be assured a comfortable margin.

Second, and even more important in Prof. Holt's view, was the fact that Grant had benefited from a "marked decline in normal levels of Democratic voter turnout in most states." In 1872, the "Democrats had grudgingly endorsed Horace Greeley, the surprising choice of the Liberal Republican[s]." Democratic voters stayed away from the polls in droves rather than vote for the arch-Whig who had denounced them "as lawless, shiftless, drunken sots" for decades.

At the same time, Greeley's high-profile history hardly made him the idea Liberal Republican candidate when it came to issues such as tariff reduction and civil service reform. His strongest recommendation to them came from his endorsement of the "Liberals' demand for an end to federal intervention in the South, and a restoration of full political rights to those former Confederates still disqualified from holding office."

And yet even this stance proved a double-edged sword, for it left Greeley "vulnerable to vicious lampooning by Thomas Nast, the widely read political cartoonist for Harper's Weekly who had recently played a central role in toppling New York City's hugely corrupt Boss William M. Tweed from power."

Two of Nast's lampoons, both of which are reproduced in Prof. Holt's book, appear in this post. The first, entitled It Is Only a Truce to Regain Power (Playing Possum) depicts Greeley and Sumner (at the far right) "urging a freedman to reach across the bodies of murdered blacks to shake hands with two stock Democratic characters: a southern member of the Ku Klux Klan and an apelike Irish thug of the type who murdered blacks during the New York City draft riots of 1863."

The second, entitled Let Us Clasp Hands over the Bloody Chasm, "mocks Greeley's call for northerners and southerners to forget their sectional animosities," showing him "reaching in vain across the graveyard of Union prisoners at the notorious Andersonville prison camp."

"The Omnibus is smashed -- wheels, axles and body"

In a recent post, I referred to the origin of the term "omnibus bill" during the Crisis of 1850. In Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850, Holman Hamilton cites several examples illustrating how taken people were with the image of the bill as an actual "omnibus", a common carrier "for all" (dative plural!) passengers and their cargo.

Item 1: Toward the end of July 1850, Henry Clay was defending the inclusion in the bill of amendments that some argued were inconsistent. "In reply to criticism, Clay proudly said he saw no 'incongruity' in the freight or passengers 'on board our omnibus.'"

Item 2: The bill fell apart on Wednesday July 31, 1850, as various provisions were stripped away, leaving only that portion providing for the establishment of the Utah territory. "'The omnibus is overturned,' Thomas Hart Benton gloated, 'and all the passengers spilled out but one. We have but Utah left - all gone but Utah!"

Item 3: A few days later, Horace Greeley could not resist using the image. "And so the Omnibus is smashed - wheels, axles and body - nothing left but a single plank termed Utah. I even saw the gallant driver [Henry Clay] abandoning the wreck between six and seven this evening, after having done all that man could do to retrieve, or rather to avert the disaster."

"We could never discover that they were peculiar in that"

You've got to admit, in the War of the Names, the Barnburners beat the Hunkers hands down.

Herbert D.A. Donovan identifies two potential derivations of the term "Hunker." "The less probable explanation is that it derived from the Dutch word 'honk,' a post or station, reflecting on their supposed stationary attitude toward reforms."

The other, which Donovan finds more plausible, is somewhat similar to the traditional one of "hunkering" (i.e., hankering) after spoils:

To their rivals for party supremacy, the equally inappropriate and mystifying name "Hunkers or "Old Hunkers" was given. This was supposed to ridicule their strenuous efforts to get a large "hunk" of the spoils of office; though, as [Horace] Greeley slyly observed, "we could never discover that they were peculiar in that," and it is true that during the epoch of the struggle, the Barnburners probably surpassed their rivals both in getting and keeping offices.

Maybe We Should Give Them Back the Southwest

U.S. military report warns 'sudden collapse' of Mexico is possible.

About the illustration:

An indignant James K. Polk takes issue with Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster's public attacks on his Texas policy. In 1844 Webster had been opposed to the annexation of Texas and in 1846 he criticized attacked the war with Mexico over Texas as highly unjustifiable. Webster's first public speech on the war was made in late June, and the print probably did not appear before that. In the center, Polk (left) confronts Webster, warning, "If you say the Mexican War is a War of my own makeing you tell a falshood!" Raising his fists, Webster retorts, "I did say it & say it again!" To the left of Polk stand Thomas Ritchie and James Watson Webb, newspaper editors supporting the administration. Webb holds a bottle of "Tom and Jerry" and a sponge, commenting, "Principles, not men!" The Whig editor had opposed the annexation of Texas, but once hostilities commenced he urged military action to bring about a speedy termination. Webb's insistence on "principles" reflects his uneasiness in an alliance with a Democratic administration which stood to gain politically from the conflict. Ritchie reassures Polk, "In Union [a double entendre referring to his newspaper the "Washington Union&1] there is strength, Nous Verrons!" To the right of Webster stand an unidentified man (probably another journalist) and Horace Greeley, editor of the New York "Tribune. "Greeley, who was severely critical of Polk's policies, holds a bottle of "Lemon Soda" and (like Webb) a sponge, and remarks, "I wish Dan had eaten more Graham bread he's too fat for Polk!" (Graham bread was a well-known Greeley dietary preference.) The unidentified man remarks, "A Daniel come to blows, if not Judgment." The sponges and bottles are apparently intended for the relief of the fighters, much as the port and the "Old Monongohala Whiskey" figured in Anthony Imbert's "Set to between Old Hickory and Bully Nick"(no. 1834-4), on which "The Issue Joined"seems to be based. The precise significance of the "Tom & Jerry" and "Lemon Soda" is unclear. "The Issue Joined"is executed in a style similar to that of Edward Williams Clay. The faces of the characters may in fact be attributable to Clay, but the drawing of the figures and costumes are not up to that artist's standard.

The Origin of the Term "Know-Nothing"

Researching the origins of the term “Know Nothing” turns up the same tired explanation virtually every time. Here, for example, is Wikipedia:

The origin of the "Know Nothing" term was in the semi-secret organization of the party. When a member was asked about its activities, he or she was supposed to reply, "I know nothing."

***

Fear of Catholic immigration led to a dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party whose leadership in many areas included Irish American Catholics. Activists formed secret groups, coordinating their votes and throwing their weight behind candidates sympathetic to their cause. When asked about these secret organizations, members were to reply "I know nothing," which led to their popularly being called Know Nothings.

Wikipedia, in turn, cites to the Encyclopedia Britannica online, which reports that “[m]embers, when asked about their nativist organizations, were supposed to reply that they knew nothing, hence the name.”

Unfortunately, this universally accepted story is probably wrong.

In his meticulous Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s, Tyler Anbinder examined the evidence more closely and debunked the myth:

The precise origin of this term [“Know Nothings”] is a mystery, but it apparently made its public debut in November 1853. At that time, the New York Tribune reported that the Whig candidate for New York district attorney had lost “through the instrumentality of a mongrel ticket termed the 'Know-Nothing.' . . . This ticket,” continued the Tribune, “is the work of the managers of a secret organization growing out of the Order of United Americans, but ostensibly disconnected therefrom.” A few days later the Tribune again mentioned “the Know-Nothing organization,” calling it “but a new dodge of protean nativism.”

Andbinder points out that

[n]either reference mentions the now universal belief that the term “Know Nothing” derived from members' practice of feigning ignorance when queried about the organization. Nor does it appear that Tribune editor Horace Greeley coined the term. The Tribune's use of the phrase suggests that rather than having concocted the term itself, the newspaper was simply reporting what had been relayed by some outside source.

What, then, was the origin of the term? Anbinder suggests several possibilities:

Perhaps the ticket mentioned by the Tribune had been nicknamed the “Know-Nothing” ticket by its organizers. Local electoral tickets often assumed strange labels . . . [or] adopted names used as slurs by their enemies. Perhaps poll watchers coined the term during the November 1853 New York City election, because they could not discover the source of the OSSB [Order of the Star Spangled Banner] ballots. However the appellation originated, the influence of the Tribune, the most widely read newspaper in the nation, made it stick. From this point onward, the OSSB was referred to as the “Know-Nothings,” and the members initially did little to discourage the term's use.

About the illustration:

Sheet music cover for a schottisch (a dance similar to the polka), composed by Francis H. Brown and dedicated to "Miss Mary Leeds of New York." The illustration features the standing figure of "Young America," a young man in coat, waistcoat, and plaid trousers, holding an American flag. Virtually the same idealized, youthful male figure appears as "Citizen Know Nothing" and "Uncle Sam" in other nativist contexts. (See for instance "Uncle Sam's Youngest Son" and "Sam's Coming," nos. 1854-4 and 1855-6.) Behind him on the left a train moves along a track out of a tunnel, and on the right are two ships. These allude to the progressive (or "Young America") Democrats' emphasis on internal improvements, commerce, and trade.

Merry Christmas!

I extend my best Christmas wishes to all of you. My modest gift is the foregoing 1848 illustration, entitled "Shooting the Christmas Turkey." It's one of my favorites, featuring as it does a wide range of antebellum political figures, including of course Millard Fillmore:

While Democratic and Whig candidates debate strategies to win the presidency, or "shoot the Christmas turkey," Free Soil candidate Martin Van Buren makes off with the bird. At left Democrat Lewis Cass (facing front) and Whig Zachary Taylor (facing left), both in military uniform and holding rifles, quarrel about the turkey which is chained to a stake in the center. Taylor: "I tell you, Cass, that I prefer coming to close quarters. It will be as fair for you as for me." Cass: "But I prefer long shots. It will give more chance for the exercise of skill & ingenuity." Taylor running mate Millard Fillmore enters from the left and sighting Van Buren exclaims, "Blood and thunder! I thought that infernal fox was dead: but he has come out of his hole and carried off the prize, while we have been disputing about the preliminaries!" On the far right, Van Buren, as a fox, grasps the turkey by the neck as David Wilmot cheers, "Huzza! Huzza! Victory! Victory!" Wilmot holds up the famous and controversial Wilmot Proviso of 1846, which forbade slavery in territories acquired by the United States in the Mexican War. The measure, embraced by Van Buren but sidestepped by Cass and Taylor, was a burning issue in the 1848 campaign. On the ground in the center of the scene sits New York editor Horace Greeley with a tally sheet marked "Taylor" and "Cass" nearby. Greeley thumbs his nose at Taylor and Cass and says, "Well, Gentlemen, my place has become a sinecure. I need not keep tally for you now." An ardent and powerful Whig spokesman in the 1844 election, Greeley withheld his support for Taylor until late in the 1848 campaign. By that time his New York "Tribune" had become an established and successful newspaper.

"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.

"He has a crack across his brain"

I confess however that I cannot be inspired with confidence in any movement that [Horace] Greeley controls. With all his ability he has a crack across his brain that amounts to little short of derangement & will destroy anything which he may be allowed to lead.

Hamilton Fish to Thurlow Weed, March 22, 1856, quoted in William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, at 151.