The American Vice Presidency (20 page)

The developments that produced this outcome were among the more bizarre in national election annals. Polk was a disciple and favorite of Andrew Jackson, the former president and a fellow Tennessean. Dallas saw in Polk a vehicle to help restore the Jacksonian Democracy by making him the running mate of the Democratic front-runner former president Van Buren, seeking to regain the White House. The Little Magician first needed to claim the nomination in a large field in order to take on his old nemesis, Henry Clay, the Whig nominee, in the November election. But he was well ahead in delegates pledged to him. Early in April, Polk visited Jackson at his Hermitage mansion to discuss the strategy to team himself with Van Buren.

Several days later, in separate newspapers and apparently without collusion, Van Buren and Clay each declared his strong opposition to the annexation of the recently independent Republic of Texas. Rather than thus removing the issue from the campaign, their comments proved to destroy the presidential aspirations of both men. Public opinion for bringing Texas into the Union was very strong; Van Buren’s impolitic statement would soon cost him the Democratic nomination and ignite a Jackson plan to put “Young Hickory” Polk on a path to the presidency.

Other circumstances that would provide Polk a more direct and immediate route were at work, however. Jackson told Polk the plan had to be revised with Polk replacing Van Buren as the Jacksonian nominee. With
Clay so openly and categorically opposed to the annexation, the Democrats now clearly needed and wanted a pro-annexation nominee. Jackson earlier had embraced pro-annexation, saying, “The god of the universe … intended this great valley [Texas] to belong to one nation,”
¹
and he immediately recognized that Van Buren had committed political suicide with his statement. He wrote Van Buren a sharply candid letter telling him that in his judgment his old political strategist had about as much chance of being elected president again as there was “to turn the current of the Mississippi.”
²

Only five days before Van Buren wrote his anti-annexation declaration, Polk had written to a Democratic club in Cincinnati saying he was “in favor of the immediate re-annexation of Texas to the territory and Government of the United States,” believing he was simply following the party line. Learning how he had put himself in disagreement with Van Buren no doubt caused him temporary concern, but in the end this arrangement would work to his advantage.
³

In an utterly self-serving report, Polk told the Tennessee congressman Cave Johnson, an ally: “Gen. J says the candidate for the first office should be an annexation man, and from the Southwest, and he and other friends here urge that my friends should insist upon that point. I tell them, and it is true, that I have never aspired so high and that in all probability the attempt to place me in the first position would be utterly abortive. In the confusion that will prevail … there is no telling what will occur.” Then he added that in any event the development would leave him in a favorable position for the vice presidential nomination, declaring, “I aspire to the 2nd office.”
⁴

Van Buren meanwhile counted his delegates to the approaching Democratic convention in Baltimore, hoping the nomination would still be his. When the Whigs met in the same city, Clay was unanimously nominated with little stir over his own anti-annexation statement. President Tyler, abandoned by his adopted party, meanwhile held a rump convention of his own there, vainly holding out hope of running on the slogan “Tyler and Texas.” Elsewhere in Baltimore, the Jackson Democrats prepared to decide Van Buren’s fate, with Polk and friends now implementing a revised strategy. Van Buren suffered a severe setback when the convention voted to require a two-thirds margin for nomination, which killed his chances.

In competition with Michigan’s Lewis Cass for the presidential
nomination, Van Buren led but fell thirty-one votes short of the two-thirds majority. Cass and five other candidates received votes, but none of them was for Polk. On the fourth roll call Cass moved ahead but also fell short of the needed majority, and after an overnight recess Polk for the first time got forty-four votes and the flood gates opened for him, gaining the nomination by acclamation—arguably making him the first truly dark-horse nominee.

Then the convention turned to nominating Polk’s running mate. Nothing was heard of George Dallas of Pennsylvania. The convention, also by acclamation, nominated Senator Silas Wright of New York, leader of the Van Buren forces, in a conciliatory gesture. But Wright declined, whereupon the offer was extended to James Buchanan, Dallas’s bitter rival for leadership of the Pennsylvania Democrats, who also declined. Five more men turned it down, until the Pennsylvania delegation rallied to Dallas and gained his nomination. Dallas’s backing of Texas annexation as well as his Pennsylvania connection brought a mostly positive response at the convention and in important quarters in the South. Calhoun was reported as praising the nomination because there would be no New Yorker on the ticket.
⁵

The Whigs, not surprisingly, were lulled by the prospect of running against the Democratic ticket of a twice-defeated Tennessee governor and a Pennsylvania political leader of little national experience. The Philadelphia Whig leader Sidney George Fisher wrote, “Polk is a fourth rate partizan
[sic]
politician, of ordinary abilities, no eminence or reputation and chiefly distinguished for being a successful stump orator in Tennessee.” He called Dallas “a reckless partizan totally devoid of principle and capable of upholding or relinquishing any opinions whenever his own or his party’s interests require it.”
⁶
A surprised Dallas made a request of Polk if at any time he was to become a burden in the campaign: “Pray cut me loose instantly and resolutely. Personally I have not the slightest wish to quit the pursuits of private life.” Aware of the functional shortcomings of the vice presidency, he described himself as “a bobtail annexed to a great kite.”
⁷

To make his best contribution to the Democratic ticket during in the 1844 campaign, Dallas concentrated on bringing home Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. The question of the protective tariff that continued to divide the northern and southern states posed his diciest challenge. As a Tennessee congressman, Polk had voted against the Tariff of Abominations of 1828
and for reducing its rates in 1832, positions sharply opposed in industrial Pennsylvania and by Dallas at the time. Polk was warned that to carry Pennsylvania he would have to offer at least a nod to the needs of northern manufacture. Dallas therefore had to put party before state and region and also take a softer position on the tariff question in harmony with the presidential nominee.

Under pressure from Dallas and other Pennsylvanians, Polk wrote a letter saying while he opposed the tariff for the purpose of industrial protection only, he supported it to raise needed revenue, at the same time offering reasonable shelter to domestic industries dependent on the making of iron and steel. A relieved Dallas replied, “I think your doctrine on the tariff will impair your strength here very little if at all, and perhaps it is the matter on which brevity would be the soul of wit.”
⁸

Dallas also counseled Polk to tread lightly on the discussion of immigration policies that were stirring up considerable talk in Philadelphia and elsewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania. He warned of coalitions of Whigs, abolitionists, and nativists imperiling a Democratic victory in the state and raised the specter of abolition further dividing North and South, urging Polk, “Postpone the tariff question until the country is secured against the alarming strides of abolition.”
⁹
In the end, all such fears were swept aside as the two centerpieces of the Democratic strategy, New York and Pennsylvania, went for Polk and Dallas, beating Clay and Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, though only 1.5 percent separated the two parties in the popular vote.

Even before Dallas’s election as vice president, he had reason to consider that the presidency itself was not out of his reach. Less than five months before the election, Polk had announced that, if elected, he would “enter upon the discharge of the high and solemn duties, with the settled purpose of not being a candidate for reelection.”
¹⁰
He kept that pledge, but other subsequent circumstances made Dallas’s musings first unlikely and later impossible.

For one thing, his political fight with James Buchanan, which occupied much of Dallas’s time and energies in Pennsylvania, followed them to Washington. Polk, over the strenuous objections of his vice president, appointed Buchanan as his secretary of state and as such the first among equals in the Polk cabinet. Dallas himself was not a member, but from the outset Polk listened to him in dealing with heavy patronage demands from the politically important Keystone State.

Both Dallas and Buchanan, as the leaders of the major factions in the Pennsylvania Democracy, vied for Polk’s ear and largesse in distributing lucrative and influential federal offices in the state and desirable diplomatic posts abroad. Shortly after the election, Dallas himself unwittingly paved the way for Buchanan’s appointment to the State Department, proposing that Polk dismiss all Tyler men, particularly John C. Calhoun as his secretary of state, blaming him for the Senate’s defeat of the Texas annexation treaty Tyler had sought.

Buchanan’s friends in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, sought the State Department for him. They got the state’s presidential electors to urge the appointment in casting their electoral votes for Polk, a move that outraged Dallas. He wrote, “A more grotesque and humiliating movement could not well be made,” and he denounced them “for their precipitous meddling.” Dallas said he did not intend to stand idly by in his new eminence. “I have become vice president willy-nilly,” he said, “and anticipate the necessity of enduring heavy and painful and protracted sacrifices, as the consequence. Well! I am not, in the bargain, disposed to be considered a cypher! On the contrary, I am resolved that no one shall be taken from Pennsylvania in a cabinet office who is notoriously hostile to the vice president. If such a choice be made, my relations with the administration are at once at an end.”
¹¹

In light of Polk’s pledged retirement after a single term, Dallas already seemed to be anticipating a drag-out fight with Buchanan for the 1848 Democratic presidential nomination. He insisted that Pennsylvania’s Democrats would never accept as their voice in the Polk administration “the distinguished gentleman so prematurely and arrantly foisted upon Mr. Polk.”
¹²
He fervently hoped that Senator Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, married to his niece, would become secretary of state instead of Buchanan. But Polk had no intention of letting his vice president, essentially a stranger to him, pick his cabinet for him.

Walker meanwhile told Dallas in January that he expected Polk to keep Calhoun at State for at least a time, and therefore he was pursuing the top job at the Treasury, but Dallas continued to pitch Walker for secretary of state. In late February, when Polk’s selection of Buchanan became known, Dallas called it “a most dangerous choice” and groused about trouble ahead that could have been avoided had Walker gotten the State appointment.

Dallas, nonetheless, continued to press for an influential position for
Walker. Polk finally gave him the Treasury Department to make peace with his vice president and with the South. But Jackson, for one, warned Polk that the Dallas-Walker alliance could cause trouble, as the struggle for Pennsylvania dominance between Dallas and Buchanan was certain to go on.

Polk for his part made clear to his cabinet appointees that he intended to be in charge and expected loyalty. “I desire to select men who agree with me,” he pointedly told Buchanan on his appointment, “and who will cordially cooperate with me in carrying out my principles and policy.” He warned at the same time that any cabinet member who pursued the next presidential nomination while serving would be told to resign.
¹³
Nevertheless, Polk found himself repeatedly enmeshed in refereeing the patronage wars between Dallas and Buchanan, finally promising to pay more attention to his vice president.

One vote Dallas cast to break a Senate tie proved to be his own biggest challenge. In 1846, after Polk’s decision to seek tariff reductions, the balloting on doing so ended in a tie. After much soul-searching Dallas supported it, against the interests of his state’s iron and steel industry.
¹⁴
To make the choice more palatable to Dallas, Richard Rush, a Pennsylvania ally of his, wrote to him: “Pennsylvanians are small men.… You are not of their race and they left you. The
union
put you where you are, and can keep you there and do more.… Pennsylvania cannot lead, she can only follow and bellow. You cannot repudiate the state, you must love her openly, and your notion of elevating her in the scale of the union is noble, and may
begin
to come about, but at present the union is your element and platform.”
¹⁵

To his Pennsylvania constituents, Dallas rationalized, “An officer, elected by the suffrage of all twenty-eight states, and bound by his oath and every constitutional obligation, faithfully and fairly to represent, in the execution of his high trust, all the citizens of the Union [could not] narrow his great sphere and act with reference only to [his own state’s] interest.”
¹⁶

Dallas was so concerned about the negative reaction back home that he had the Senate sergeant-at-arms deliver a handwritten message to his wife, Sophy, that at the slightest indication of riot in the city of Philadelphia because of passage of the tariff bills, she should “pack up and bring the whole brood to Washington.”
¹⁷
His fears were well-founded. When news of the tariff’s passage and Dallas’s tie-breaking role in it reached the City of Brotherly Love, he was hanged in effigy from telegraph wires on a main street.
Diarist Philip Hone castigated a “faithless, corrupt administration” that had destroyed Pennsylvania’s domestic industry, declaring that the names of Polk and Dallas “be recorded on the same page with those scourges of mankind, war … small pox, cholera and yellow fever.”
¹⁸