1. THE PRESIDENCY OF MARTIN VAN BUREN
Jackson respected the tradition of the founders and did not seek a third term (though like all of them, he could have won one), and he urged Martin Van Buren as his successor. Van Buren was nominated by the Democrats, with, for vice president, Colonel Richard M. Johnson, the supposed killer of Tecumseh and a successful militia leader and colorful figure who cohabited with a black woman, to whom he was not married, just a few blocks from the slave market in Washington. The disparate elements of the Whig movement could not agree on a candidate, so they adopted the tactic of nominating regional candidates in the hope of denying the Democrats a majority and pushing the election to the House of Representatives (where the likely Democratic majority would have elected Van Buren anyway). The dissident anti-Jackson Democrats nominated Hugh L. White of Tennessee; the New England Adamsites nominated Daniel Webster; and the Anti-Masonic elements reached back 25 years to try to tap the Jackson formula of the military hero above politics and chose Colonel Richard Johnson’s old commander, General William Henry Harrison, victor of Tippecanoe and Moravian Town.
The election was essentially a referendum on Jackson, and Van Buren won, 762,000 to 550,000 for Harrison, 145,000 for White, and 41,000 for Webster. Van Buren had about 51.5 percent of the total vote but won more easily in the Electoral College, 170 votes to 73 for Harrison, 26 for White, and 14 for Webster. None of the four candidates for vice president was successful, so, for the only time in American history, the issue was decided by the Senate, where Richard Johnson was elected. Van Buren would be the only person in the history of the country, apart from Jefferson, who held the offices of president, vice president, and secretary of state. He had been state senator, U.S. senator, governor, and minister to Great Britain to boot, a political roué of great charm and cunning and no principles at all, and more of a maneuverer than a leader. After the four Virginia plantation owners and the two Boston academic lawyers, the country would alternately elect presidents who were generals or political wheelhorses, as it descended the slippery slope toward civil conflict.
No formula short of the three-fifths rule would have attracted the South into the Union; no alternate strategy to Jackson’s, varied by Clay’s compromises, was going to keep the country together until 1860. Only a war in the 1810s would elevate Andrew Jackson to the point of electability, no one else could have devised and implemented his formula for preserving the Union, and the United States could not have become the greatest power in the world without the South. American history has been like a bouncing (American) football, in unpredictable directions, dependent again and again on indispensable and often unlikely individuals, elevated improbably. Beyond its natural resources and its Constitution, few Americans could explain why the United States has been such a felicitous country, but almost all of them sense that it has been.
The U.S. economy, after Jackson’s draconian tinkering, hit the wall in 1837. Federal land sales collapsed, declining by almost 90 percent, foreclosures occurred in large numbers with the invalidation of the former notes used as consideration for land sales, and then commodity prices declined precipitously, especially cotton (by about half). In New York and other cities, there were mass protests against unemployment and food and fuel prices. New York’s main flour warehouse was ransacked. The relative absence of paper money created deflation, but the reliance on the banknotes of state banks made it very hard to monitor the money supply, and the lack of any supervision of financial institutions led to a great many bank failures, which was a condition facilitated and made more destructive by the disappearance of a large national bank. Van Buren advocated a paper currency, unsuccessfully.
The slavery debate, which would never subside for long, until, as Lincoln said, “every drop of blood drawn by the lash is repaid by a drop of blood drawn by the sword,” flared up again with debate over petitions for the abolition of slavery and of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The southern view was that endless discussion of the morality of slavery was abrasive to the well-being of the Union. Southern members of the Congress, led by Calhoun, considered these petitions insulting. When Senator James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a distinguished ambassador and future secretary of state and president, had moved such a petition in January 1836, Calhoun had moved that such petitions be barred. Buchanan achieved a compromise by establishing their right to be presented and their automatic rejection, including of his own petition. (This was a little like Calhoun’s fierce denunciation of the tariff he himself presented, in 1828.) In the House of Representatives, former President Adams defended the right of abolitionists to petition, and was anti-slavery, but believed the Congress had no power to abolish slavery, as it had been established and implicitly accepted by the Constitution. Resolutions were passed in 1836 and 1837 receiving but tabling without debate any resolutions about slavery, including ones declaring that the Congress had no right to deal with slavery at all and that it was inexpedient for the Congress to discuss the status of slavery in the District of Columbia. There was a good deal of discussion among southern members of the Congress regarding a resolution endorsing the legality and permanence of slavery, and declaring that if it were not passed, this would justify secession. Such a resolution was never proposed, but hypotheses ending in the right or desirability of secession were becoming more frequent. The murder of the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in Illinois in November 1837 caused a noteworthy inflammation of debate.
In December 1837, Senator Benjamin Swift of Vermont presented resolutions opposing the admission of Texas or any other new state as a slave state and upholding the right of Congress to deal with the slave trade in the District of Columbia. This brought forth John C. Calhoun, ever the supreme fire engine of southern legislators, with a series of resolutions at the very end of 1837 that reaffirmed the compact theory of the Union (which implied a right to secede or nullify legislation); asserted that the federal government had to resist all attempts by one part of the Union to use it against the domestic institutions of another part; and prohibited attacks on the institution of slavery and declared attacks on slavery in the District of Columbia to be a “direct and dangerous attack on the institutions of all the slave-holding states.” The fact that Calhoun got all this adopted demonstrates the extent to which the South was blackmailing the North already with the specter of secession. Even Clay, who was a slaveholder but also a supporter of the move to encourage slaves to move to Liberia (a supposedly sovereign African country created for them by American altruists who wanted slavery to end by emigration back to Africa) and a moral critic of slavery, periodically condemned abolitionists as insouciant about provoking a civil war. In debate in 1839, when advised by Senator Preston of South Carolina that he could lose support in the North, Clay uttered his most famous words: “I trust the sentiments and opinions [I expressed] are correct; I had rather be right than be president.” In 1844, John Quincy Adams, in one of the signal achievements of his very long and distinguished career, gained the repeal of the gag rule, which facilitated shutting down debate, and which he had consistently rejected as “a violation of the Constitution of the United States, of the rules of this House, and of the rights of my constituents.”
Foreign affairs were relatively quiet in the Van Buren years, as Jackson’s last secretary of state, John Forsyth, who had been an anti-Calhoun Jackson loyalist from Georgia, continued in that office under the new president. There were some frictions with Britain, over asylum given to the Canadian rebel William Lyon Mackenzie, and over a disputed lumbering area between Maine and New Brunswick (Aroostook). Popular sentiment flared up from time to time, but Van Buren enforced existing agreements and the well-traveled General Winfield Scott patrolled the border to prevent private-sector liberators of Canada from crossing. When they did sneak into Canada they were captured or put to flight promptly. Van Buren played it sensibly and the Aroostook question was referred to an arbiter and resolved by treaty in 1842.
2. THE LOG CABIN AND HARD CIDER ELECTION
The Whigs held their first nominating convention at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in December 1839. Though Clay was the logical choice, his support of a protective tariff alienated many natural supporters. Clay led initially, but the convention renominated General William Henry Harrison, the now 68-year-old hero of the Indian wars and the War of 1812. Harrison did not have a long record on policy and was acceptable to all the jostling factions under the Whig umbrella. John Tyler, a nullificationist who had broken with Jackson over the veto of the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States, and had resigned as senator from Virginia rather than follow the instructions of the Virginia legislature to vote for Benton’s bill to expunge the censure of Jackson, was chosen for vice president. He was a slaveholder and his views on most issues diverged sharply from those of his running mate and most of the delegates at the convention, and he would soon illustrate the dangers of using the vice presidential nomination exclusively for ticket-balancing.
Van Buren was renominated by the Democrats on a straight Jacksonian platform—support of slavery and opposition to a national bank. There was much opposition to Richard Johnson, partly because of his flamboyant miscegenation and adultery, and no one was chosen for vice president; Van Buren left it to the states to put up whomever they wished, a unique confession of electoral weakness by an incumbent president seeking reelection. The election quickly turned into a sophisticated political public relations job by the Whigs, touting Harrison as a war hero and simple man of the people and the frontier, born in a log cabin, whose favorite beverage was cider. It was the Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign, under the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” Policies were entirely avoided, apart from the Whigs unloading denigration on Van Buren as the author of the tenacious economic recession. Van Buren was falsely portrayed as a snobbish aristocrat living in “the palace” at the taxpayers’ expense.
Beyond that, it was all parades, slogans, banners, placards, campaign buttons, and other innovations, and was the most substantively vapid presidential campaign in the country’s history up to that time. Harrison won by 1.275 million votes to 1.129 million for Van Buren, about 53 percent to 47 and 234 electoral votes to 60. Van Buren had not been an important president. He was an interesting and capable machine politician in New York, and a wheeler-dealer on an international scale. Charming and astute, he was an unprincipled fox completely preoccupied with getting, rather than filling, an office, the exact opposite to John Quincy Adams. Van Buren did not vanish from the scene, and retained great popularity and influence among the Democrats, whose cause he had so long and ably advanced. The 1840 vote was the first presidential election since 1796 that had not been won by some sort of Democrat (two terms each for Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson, and one for Adams, then a National Republican, i.e. non-Jackson Democrat).
Harrison had a fairly strong cabinet, with Daniel Webster at State (after Clay declined to take the post again), the capable John Bell in the War Department, and John J. Crittenden of Kentucky as attorney general. Most except Webster were Clay loyalists. Harrison has been rather misrepresented as a bumpkin. He was an able and intellectually curious man. Unfortunately, he put a wide range of ideas into his loquacious inaugural address, contracted a cold that escalated gradually into pneumonia, and died after only a month in office, on April 4, 1841. He was a considerable man and might have made a capable president. At 68, he was the oldest man elected to the office up to Ronald Reagan 140 years later. Unfortunately, the Whigs now paid the price for being such a broad church. The new president, John Tyler, the last Virginia slaveholder to hold the office, did a competent job rebutting suggestions that since he had not been elected president, he did not have the right to the full powers of the office. But he was an anti-Jackson Democrat, and so, especially as an accidental occupant of the White House, had virtually no support in the Congress or the country. It was only a month after inauguration day and no one had voted for him as president. Squeezed between Clay and the Jacksonites, he would try, without success, to attract a following.
In June, Clay introduced in the Senate a series of resolutions that amounted to the Whig program: a national bank, revenue-producing tariff protection, and the distribution of the proceeds of sales of public lands. In 1841 the Congress passed two bills setting up a new national bank, within the District of Columbia, but Tyler, who had broken with Jackson over the bank, vetoed both bills because they required states specifically to dissent, rather than specifically to adhere—absurdly narrow grounds to dispose of such hard-fought legislation. All of Tyler’s cabinet resigned in protest at the president’s vetoes, except Webster. He too retired in May 1843, to be replaced by Abel P. Upshur, the navy secretary.
3. THE TYLER PRESIDENCY
Never far from the surface, the ubiquitous slavery issue became prominent again in the
Amistad
case, in which slaves on a Spanish slave galley mutinied and were taken by an American warship to New London, Connecticut, where their status was litigated. John Quincy Adams successfully argued for their freedom at the Supreme Court of the United States. A further maritime controversy arose in March 1842, when an American brig, the
Creole,
sailed from Hampton Roads, Virginia, and the slaves mutinied, killed a white sailor, and forced the crew to steer the ship to Nassau, Bahamas. The British freed all the slaves except those who were directly responsible for the murder, who were charged and detained. Secretary Webster demanded the return of the slaves as the property of U.S. citizens. The British ignored the demand, which was eventually settled for the payment of $110,000, 13 years later. It showed the strains on the country when a man who did not approve of slavery, Daniel Webster, felt it his official duty to write belligerent notes to Britain for the return of self-liberated slaves. Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio offered a series of astringent anti-slavery resolutions that caused the southerners and their allies in the Jackson settlement (whereby, like Webster, the North loyally supported the right of the South to retain slavery) to pass a vote of censure against Giddings. He resigned his Ohio district and was reelected with a heavy majority in a special election, demonstrating with startling clarity where northern opinion was, whatever arrangements their leaders were making to overlook the strains slavery caused within the country.