"The Whig Party is dead and buried"

Apparently somebody is trying to revive the Whig Party. I certainly agree we need a new party, but I doubt the Whigs are it. As a historical phenomenon, the Whigs are fascinating, and there is much to admire about them, as Daniel Walker Howe has argued. But, as Edward Stafford, a Republican newspaper editor from Jackson, Mississippi, noted in 1870, "The Whig Party died of too much respectability and not enough people." I'll go with Zebulon Vance's opinion, as described by Michael F. Holt at the close of his magnificent history of the Whigs:

[Zebulon Vance] was also realistic enough to know the task [of reviving the Whig Party] was impossible. When asked to do so in 1865, therefore, he replied with cold finality: "The [Whig] party is dead and buried and the tombstone placed over it and I don't care to spend the rest of my days mourning at its grave." To this brutally candid and totally accurate extinguisher, there was -- and is -- only one appropriate response. Amen!

The Anti-Rent Era

Although I'm working on James Madison, I made the mistake of picking up Charles McCurdy's The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics 1839-1865 today. What a great, great book. Very dense -- I recommend it only if you're deeply interested in the era. But if you are, the book does an excellent job of immersing you in the politics and worldviews of Whigs and Democrats in a particular state, New York, and providing a close-up examination of the interaction between state and national political and economic developments.

Thanks, Sean!

About the illustration:

A satire on the Democrats' defeat in the fall [1838] New York state elections, here viewed as a referendum on Van Buren's independent treasury, or "Sub-treasury" system. A large ball labeled "Sub Treasury" is pushed down a hill by successful Whig gubernatorial candidate William H. Seward, who says, "A long push, a strong push, and a push all together, and down goes Tyranny and Oppression!" He is assisted by three other men whose arms are linked, one of whom holds a banner with the Whig motto "Preserve Credit and Commerce." Inside the ball is a sleeping Van Buren, who exclaims, "I must be dreaming, for it seems to me, I am going down hill!" The ball rolls onto New York Democratic incumbent governor William Marcy, wearing a uniform with a "50 cents" trouser patch (See "Executive Marcy and the Bambers," no. 1838-5), and several other men, including Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton. Benton cries, "Push Governor; or down you goes!" Another holds a flag with the words "Trades Union" and cries "Lord ha! Marcy upon us!" In the lower left a crowd of workingmen applaud the scene. Among them are a farmer, a seaman, and a driver or husbandman who waves his hat and says, "Huzza! for the Empire State, she has sent the Ball rolling back again, in double quick time!"

"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.

Clay in 1844: Four Key States

Some months ago, I opined that Henry “Clay's best chance of winning the presidency probably came in 1840 -- the year he wasn't nominated.” See also here.

Daniel Walker Howe doesn’t quite come out and say so, but he seems to suggest that Clay’s best shot was in 1844. In addition to Howe’s point discussed here, he repeatedly refers to events that might have turned the election in Clay’s favor:

Clay’s narrow defeat in 1844 may well have been due to massive Democratic ballot-box stuffing in New York, Georgia and Louisiana.

* * *

One cannot confidently attribute the result of a close election to a single tactical mistake [Clay’s “Alabama Letters” during the 1844 campaign], but it is a fact that enough voters turned to the unambiguously antiannexationist Liberty party in New York and Michigan to give Polk pluralities in those states.

* * *

[Horace Greeley] felt very bitter toward those Liberty Party voters who cost Clay New York and the election of 1844.

Let’s take a closer look, then, at the election of 1844, focusing on the four states that Howe mentions: New York, Georgia, Louisiana and Michigan. The numbers in parentheses are the number of electoral votes allotted to the states:

Polk Clay Birney
New York (36) 237,588 232,482 15,812
Georgia (10) 44,147 42,100 0
Louisiana (6) 13,782 13,083 0
Michigan (5) 27,737 24,185 3,638

Now Clay lost in the Electoral College by 65 votes: 170 to 105. A quick look at the electoral vote totals shows that Georgia, Louisiana and Michigan combined had a total of 21 electoral votes. Polk got them all. But even if all three of those states are put in the Clay column, that only narrows Polk’s margin of victory to 149 to 126.

New York, in other words, was the pivotal state; the others were irrelevant. With its 36 electoral votes, if New York alone had gone for Clay, he would have squeaked through with a vote of 141 to 134.

Clay lost to Polk in New York by just over 5,000 votes out of 485,000 cast – 5,106 to be exact. That was about one-third of the votes cast for the Liberty Party candidate, James G. Birney.

The statistics may be found here.

Just Cause You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean That They Aren't Out to Get You

Over forty years ago, Richard Hofstadter wrote about The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

Daniel Walker Howe's discussion of the phenomenon is the most interesting I have seen. Among other things, Professor Howe argues that the "conspiracy paradigm" shared by both Democrats and Whigs can be seen as a positive phenomenon. It assumed that that "American institutions were fundamentally good," and that "the American people . . . were fundamentally virtuous." It was for these reasons that "the explanation for perceived dangers must be moral rather than structural," and that "the moral evils must be those of designing minority rather than endemic in the general population." "Analyzed in this way, the conspiracy paradigm seems less paranoid, for it reveals trust as well as fear."

Second, Professor Howe argues that a belief in conspiracies was understable due to "the relative accuracy with which it represented the facts":

The Democrats believed that Nicholas Biddle and Henry Clay were conspiring to turn their hero out of office by manipulating the nation's finances; the Whigs believed that Andrew Jackson was conspiring to enhance the power of the presidency. Both, as it happens, were right.

In this connection, Professor Howe points out that the word "conspiracy" "once had a broader definition than it has since acquired": "any 'union or combination (of persons or things) for one end or purpose.'" In antebellum terms, what we would term a "faction" or an "interest group" could be a conspiracy. So understood, the paradigm loses much of its paranoid quality.

I would add only that conspiracy theorists today make their Nineteenth Century forbears seem like pikers. Just talk to any 9/11 Truther.

The Whigs vs. Modern Liberals

I have read all of thirty-odd pages of Daniel Walker Howe’s The Political Culture of the American Whigs. So far it’s wonderful. But I’m taking this post to explore the one sentence I have come across so far that I disagree with strenuously.

The opening chapter, entitled “The Whigs and Their Age," tries to outline and explain the core values of the Whigs from different perspectives and using different points of reference. Toward the end of the chapter, Professor Howe examines the idea that Whig policy “supported ‘the positive liberal state.’” He opines that this is “[o]ne of the most useful characterizations of Whig policy that has been offered.”

He then qualifies this endorsement, because characterizing Whigs as champions of “the positive liberal state” “makes them sound too much like twentieth-century liberals. Actually, the differences between the Whigs and twentieth-century liberals are more important than the similarities.”

Professor Howe then explains what he thinks those differences are. He begins:

Whig policies did not have the object of redistributing wealth or diminishing the influence of the privileged. Furthermore, the Whigs distrusted executives in both state and federal government (they had been traumatized by the conduct of Jackson), whereas twentieth-century liberals have endorsed strong executives more often than not. For all their innovations in economic policy, the Whigs usually thought of themselves as conservatives, as custodians of an identifiable political and cultural heritage.

So far, so good. All of these points seem fair, and I have no quarrel with them.

Then Professor Howe concludes as follows:

Most deeply separating the Whigs from twentieth-century liberals were their [the Whigs’] moral absolutism, their paternalism, and their concern with imposing discipline.

Here is where Professor Howe and I must part company. I infer that he is thinking of modern liberals as they like to think of themselves: inclusive, tolerant of alternate lifestyles, morally relativistic – think Woodstock and Haight Ashbury – as opposed to those mean, morally judgmental and intolerant conservatives – think Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

But these assumptions about modern liberalism and conservatism are caricatures that grossly distort both. In many ways – I would say in most ways – modern liberalism is far more morally judgmental and intolerant than is conservatism. The moral thought police in modern society are overwhelmingly on the left, seeking to condemn and regulate to death every deviation from the politically correct line on everything from gender and sex to race and religion. Just ask FIRE, Lawrence Summers and Ezra Levant.

In fairness the Professor Howe, the book was published in 1979, almost thirty years ago. It may be that the march of liberalism toward fascism was not so apparent then.

Clay in '44?

I've posted before on the possibility that Henry Clay might have been elected president in 1844. In that connection, consider this stunning point by Daniel Walker Howe (emphasis added):

Only four states in the far Northeast allowed black men to vote on the same basis as white men; elsewhere black either had to meet higher qualifications than whites or were disfranchised [sic] altogether. In New York state, some 3,000 black men could meet the $250 property test imposed on them to vote; had they been exempted from it, as white men were, there would have been 10,000 black voters and Henry Clay would have been elected president in 1844.

The Birth of the Silver Greys

I've referred in several recent posts to the faction of New York Whigs known as the "Silver Greys." I thought I'd take a brief post to tell you where the name came from.

The Silver Greys were born at a New York Whig nominating convention that opened on September 26, 1850, shortly after Millard Fillmore, who was then president, had signed the bills known collectively as the Compromise of 1850.

William Seward and his mentor, Thurlow Weed, had been enemies of Fillmore for years. When Zachary Taylor had become president in 1849, Seward obtained Taylor's confidence and saw to it that Fillmore was deprived of patronage in New York, even though Fillmore was then vice president. Their rivalry also manifested itself in policy disagreements. Seward opposed and denounced the Compromise; Fillmore helped engineer it and insisted, after its passage, that it should be regarded as the "final settlement" of the slavery issue.

In this heated atmosphere, the Whigs met in September 1850 in New York to select nominees for state elections and congressional races. Weed and Seward had full control of the convention. They acquiesced in the selection of Francis Granger, a Fillmore man, as chairman. However, when nominations for office were made, the Fillmore partisans were largely snubbed.

The convention then turned to the party platform. William Duer, a Fillmore supporter, proposed a platform that included planks that were pro-Fillmore and pro-Compromise. They

praised Fillmore's virtues and declared that New York's Whigs had "the utmost confidence in his administration of the government and his maintenance of the well-know principles of the Whig party." They iterated New York Whigs' adamant opposition to slavery extension and their belief that Congress had a right to prohibit it. Nonetheless, they "acquiesce[d]" in the Texas-New Mexico boundary bill and the creation of territorial governments for New Mexico and Utah "in the confident belief that those acts of conciliation will result in the exclusion of slavery" and "restore cordial sentiments and fraternal ties" between the sections.

William Cornwell, "a Sewardite from Cayuga County," proposed amendments that contained substantive differences, but which also seemed designed to insult Fillmore and provoke a fight. Substantively, Cornwell "intransigently rejected acquiescence in the territorial bills" without the Wilmot Proviso, and maintained that it would be "'the solemn duty of Congress' to impose the Proviso on those territories at 'the first indication' that slavery would introduced into them."

Cornwell's modifications also pointedly omitted all reference to Fillmore's "maintenance of the . . . principles of the Whig party," followed by a new plank that clearly contrasted Seward's fidelity to those principles:

Our thanks are especially due to the Hon. William H. Seward for the signal ability with which he has sustained in the United States Senate, those beloved principles of public policy so long cherished by the Whigs of the Empire State, expressed in State and County conventions, as well as on the votes and instructions in our State Legislature.

"Pandemonium erupted." After the platform committee deadlocked, the dispute returned to the floor of the convention. Weed's forces, in control, passed Cornwell's substitute handily, the opposition walked out, and the Silver Greys were born:

When the resolution praising Seward passed passed 76-40, Duer and his thirty-nine supporters began to march ostentatiously out of the hall. Granger, who remained in the chair and who had presided with scrupulous fairness, then gave a short speech calling this the saddest day of his political career, relinquished his gavel, and followed Duer and his colleagues out the door. Granger, in short, did not lead the exodus, but forever afterward the bolters and other Fillmore men would be called Silver Grays in reference to Granger's hair.

All quotes are from Michael F. Holt's encyclopedic The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War, at 587-88.

The Demise of the Whigs: New York 1854

Viewed from a distance, history often looks pretty tidy. Shortly before the Civil War – some one hundred fifty years ago – the Whig party died and was succeeded by the Republican Party. You can say it in a sentence; the transition is seamless; the appearance and eventual triumph of a new party organization seems predestined, inevitable.

Up close and personal, however, it is remarkable how messy the whole process was. There was nothing inevitable about the Republican party. Its leaders included clever tacticians, and they got lucky.

Ironically, it was not even the Republican party that killed off the Whigs. The mid-1850s witnessed a remarkable series of new political issues arise almost out of nowhere that battered both the old Jacksonian Democracy and the Whigs. The Democrats survived. For a variety of reasons, the Whigs did not.

Death took place at different times, and from somewhat different causes, in each state. However, if you had to pick a year in which the Whig party received a mortal blow, it was 1854. I thought I’d take a look at the New York State fall 1854 elections for governor and the state legislature to give you a feel for the utter political chaos of that year.

In his wonderful The Origins of the Republican Party, William Gienapp takes thirteen pages to sort through the election – which will tell you something about the utter confusion that reigned. Obviously, I will not do that here. But bear in mind that this account is tremendously simplified. All quotes are from Professor Gienapp’s book.

To begin with, we have to take a step back, because both the Democrats and Whigs were already badly fractured in New York. The Democratic fracture went back to 1848, when Martin Van Buren deserted the party to run as the presidential candidate of the Free Soil party. Van Buren and his followers, known as the “Barnburners” (as opposed to the “Hunkers” who remained in the party) eventually rejoined the Democrats, creating another fissure. “Hardshells,” or “Hards,” took the position that the Van Buren apostates should be punished by being barred from holding state or federal office. “Softshells,” or “Softs,” were inclined to forgive and readmit the prodigals. In part, these disagreements reflected attitudes toward slavery and the Slave Power, but more fundamentally they concerned factional fights over patronage and personality.

The Whigs, meanwhile, had their own problems. The fundamental division was between the wing of the party controlled by Thurlow Weed and his protégé William Seward, and the so-called “Silver Greys.” The latter were a more conservative, pro-Compromise group, which you can think of, for purposes of convenience, as associated with Millard Fillmore. As with the Democrats, the factions had policy differences, but a good deal of the rivalry grew out of personal animosity and patronage access. You were either fer Weed or agin’ him – and vice versa.

Cutting across these party and factional lines – essentially dicing them up – were a host of issues that were new or assumed increased importance. Old issues that had traditionally divided Democrats and Whigs in New York, such as the Erie Canal, had faded or been resolved. Taking their place were issues that included temperance, immigration, anti-Catholicism and the Slave Power.

As it turned out, there were four candidates for governor:

The incumbent, Horatio Seymour, was a Soft. However, in 1853 he had unexpectedly vetoed a prohibition bill sponsored by Myron Clark, a Whig legislator. A joint Soft-Barnburner convention renominated him. This meant that Seymour would run primarily as an anti-temperance candidate, particularly since disagreements between Softs and Barnburners over Kansas-Nebraska required that that issue be buried.

When combined, Softs and Barnburners significantly outnumbered Hards. Even so, the Hards so resented the rival groups that they went their own way. They nominated their own candidate, Greene Bronson. The Hards, oddly, were both anti-administration (Pierce had sided with the Softs and removed Bronson from a lucrative position) and pro-Nebraska.

At the Whig convention, the Weed-Seward wing battled the Silver Grey faction. Weed was not able to control the convention the way he usually did, but he did retain sufficient influence to engineer the elevation of a candidate he could live with: the pro-temperance Myron Clark, a “pliable” “incompetent who was an admirer of Seward and willing to follow directions from Weed.” The Whig platform and Clark were mildly anti-Nebraska, but Rum (or rather its elimination) was clearly their primary issue.

Late in the campaign, disaffected Silver Greys seized the chance to nominate their own candidate. Taking control of the Know Nothing organization, in October they nominated Daniel Ullmann, “a leading conservative Whig and perpetual office-seeker.” He was known to oppose Kansas-Nebraska, and privately (but not publicly) pledged to sign a temperance law. In effect, Ullmann headed “a separate Know Nothing ticket with a strong Silver Grey taint.”

In this four-way race, Dry Weed Whig Clark actually prevailed, by all of 309 votes out of 469,000 cast, over Soft Wet Seymour:

Clark (Dry Weed Whig) 156,804 33.4%
Seymour (Wet Soft) 156,495 33.3%
Ullmann (Silver Grey KN) 122,282 26.0%
Bronson (Hard) 33,850 7.2%

Even so, the true winners were the Know Nothings – and the true losers were the Whigs. Ullmann had entered the race very late. The Know Nothings had not yet organized in many counties; Ullmann was lackluster and uninspiring; and his pro-temperance views not widely known. Yet where they were organized, the Know Nothing vote swept away the old parties. Observers were stunned:

“Nothing can be assumed from former Elections,” the Albany Evening Herald remarked the day after the election. “Nearly all the old political landmarks are obliterated. Of all parties there has been a regular ‘smash-up’” in the face of “a complete ‘Know Nothing’ stampede.”

Foremost among those swept away were traditional Whigs, who deserted the party in droves. “[T]he nativist vote came primarily from former Whigs and earlier non-voters.” In addition, many of Clark’s votes were based on his dry position – a position that largely overlapped with the views of the KNs (think whiskey-swilling bogtrotters). In short, Clark did not win as a Whig but largely as a pro-temperance KN stand-in, with a few anti-Nebraska votes thrown in:

Despite Clark’s narrow victory, the traditional Whig electoral base had been thoroughly disrupted, since as many Whigs voted for Ullmann as for Clark. [Clark] suffered massive losses among native-born voters, and in fact he ran behind Ullmann in a number of Whig strongholds . . .. At the same time, Clark picked up unexpected support in northern counties, no doubt in part because the Know Nothings had not yet extensively recruited in that area, but also in response to the Whig candidate’s anti-liquor and anti-Nebraska positions.

As a result, most New York Whigs saw the party as finished:

The election had left “the old Whig Organization a mass of ruins,” a Whig paper in upstate New York commented ruefully. “We are utterly wrecked. It is altogether idle to think of a reconstruction of the Whig Party. It is past surgery, past all medicine.” . . . Nativism had sealed the party’s fate. The Know Nothings, as one New York politician remarked, had “torn the Whig strength to pieces.”

One other observation: in New York, there was not a Republican in sight. Former Barnburners had decided not to bolt their party (again), since Soft Seymour was the standard bearer. On the Whig side, Weed and Seward actively resisted the formation of an anti-Nebraska fusion party, because Seward needed Whig votes in the legislature to win reelection to the Senate. But they had at least hoped to make Nebraska the central issue of the campaign. In this they failed utterly: the issues of Rum and Romanism clearly predominated:

With the Nebraska issue swallowed by the forces of ethnocultural conflict, the major parties in turmoil, and a powerful new party having arisen almost overnight (“as if by magic,” one paper claimed), even experienced politicians were at a loss as to what the future would bring. “Parties are now in a state of disorganization – rather of utter anarchy,” a veteran New York Democratic leader observed at the end of the year. “What is to come out of it, no one can foresee.”

The greatest irony, perhaps, was that, as of the end of 1854, many “experienced politicians concluded that the unprecedented opportunity offered by the Nebraska controversy to organize a northern antislavery party had been irretrievably lost.” The analysis of moderate New York Whig Hamilton Fish, surveying the wreckage on December 16, 1854, was not unusual:

Noting that thousands of Whigs, to say nothing of free soil Democrats, had opposed Clark in New York “while the Nebraska issue was still blistering,” [Fish] saw little hope that a new antislavery party could be organized. “The time for ‘fusion’ is in my opinion past,” he proclaimed. “Fire will not burn a second time over the same field.”

Fish and other observers could not know that David Atchison would set fire to same Kansas field again in 1855, and that the flames would burn on and off for three years, until the resolution of the Lecompton crisis in 1858.