A Mess of an Election over Texas
Part 9 of a series. See complete list of series here.
This spring, a small cadre of Williams College students is participating in an experimental history course on the American Presidents. Instead of producing papers, as is the norm in most history classes, the students will create video campaign ads for the presidential elections from Washington to Lincoln.
There’s a catch, though. The students can only use images, quotes, documents, and music from the era. They cannot use anything that came afterward. An image of the White House burning in 1812 would not work for the election of 1808. They cannot use images of Leutze’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware, a product more reflective of the 1840s than the 1770s. Their assignment is to capture the spirit of the age – not the spirit of our historical memory.
RealClearHistory has agreed to partner with our class. Every week or so, RealClearHistory will display the best videos the students produce.
We began with John Adams’ 1796 election, and we will continue to Abraham Lincoln’s in 1860, stopping at all the major elections along the way. In our last installment, we watched William Henry Harrison and the Whigs seize the White House from Jackson’s heir, Martin Van Buren. By the election of 1844, the Whigs had lost control of the White House because of historical happenstance, and the Democrats have selected a new heir to Jackson, James K. Polk, to take it back. The results of the 1844 election set in motion a chain of events that led to the Civil War. This campaign also produced the video that students voted the class’s best.
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William Henry Harrison’s term in office proved the shortest of any president. Harrison came from a distinguished Virginia family, was well educated, and served in numerous political offices before his election to the presidency. After being cast as something of a frontier bumpkin during the 1840 campaign, he felt he had to show his erudition in his inaugural, so he penned one of the longest addresses on record. It would have been longer, but Daniel Webster got his hands on a draft and, as he famously joked, “killed 17 Roman proconsuls.”
Unfortunately, Webster did not cut enough. Harrison’s speech in the midst of a cold March morning spelt his undoing. Harrison developed pneumonia days after the speech and died 30 days after his inauguration. His death meant that for the first time in the country’s history, the Constitution’s clause that mandated the Vice President fill the role of President had to be exercised.
John Tyler, a Virginian, was Harrison’s running mate. Tyler had been a Democrat but left the party after growing disillusioned with Jackson. A states-rights Whig and proud Southerner, Whig party leaders hoped his geographic affinities and ideological bent could temper Southerner’s impression that the Whigs were a Northern, mercantile, and exclusivist party. No one expected that he might one day serve as President.
Harrison’s death created something of a Constitutional crisis. The Constitution was clear that the responsibilities of the presidency would devolve to Tyler, but there was debate over what office Tyler would technically hold. Some believed he would continue as Vice President, others as President. Whig leaders were especially uncomfortable with their chosen Vice President serving as President, so they called him “Vice President, Acting as President.” His Cabinet, filled with traditional Whigs, wanted to play an active role in all decisions. Tyler rejected these arguments and established the Constitutional precedent that the Vice President assumed the office of the President and all of its powers.
As Tyler settled into the presidency, his Southern and states-rights inclinations came to the fore, much to the consternation of Whigs in Congress who still supported Clay’s American System. Whigs had overlooked Tyler’s past positions out of political expediency when they nominated him as Vice President, but they soon grew all too familiar with them. Tyler held antiquated views on federal power. He opposed a standing army and believed the Missouri Compromise was an abuse of federal power. He had resigned his Senate seat in 1836 and left the Democratic Party because he opposed Jackson’s view that states could not nullify federal laws. He was not the typical Whig.
His views of federal power remained unchanged in office. As President, he obstructed the nationalist platform that the Whigs had waited to implement. After twice vetoing the reestablishment of the national bank, a long held Whig goal, his Cabinet resigned en masse (only Daniel Webster, his Secretary of State stayed, and only because he was in the middle of important negotiations). Within a year, the Whigs disowned their president.
Tyler felt no great loss with the Whig’s abandonment, but he did want to remain in the presidency, so he devised a way to curry favor with the Democrats. Tyler set his sights on Texas. Americans had begun to rush into this Mexican Territory in the 1830s. In 1836, these American settlers formed their own government and declared themselves an independent nation, though they soon asked the United States to annex them.
Both Jackson and Van Buren declined their entreaties. Annexation threatened a war with Mexico. It also raised the thorny question of slavery’s status in the new territory. Annexation seemed too politically risky for both presidents. With Tyler in office, the Texans tried again, and Tyler saw annexation as an opportunity to gain supporters in the South and among ardent expansionists. In 1843, John Calhoun, Tyler’s new Secretary of State, entered into a treaty of annexation with the independent Texas nation and promised to protect slavery in the newly admitted state. The treaty had to be ratified in the Senate, however, where it met its defeat.
Tyler’s Texas gambit won him few friends. After failing to win the Democratic nomination, “His Accidency,” the nickname he earned from opponents, tried one last ditch effort to remain president. As the election of 1844 neared, the president without a party used the power of patronage to appoint allies to offices who would vote for him. He also tried to rally federal workers to campaign for him. He even held a convention, composed primarily of federal employees, to nominate him. It too failed.
The election thus became the first truly open election since 1828. After the Tyler fiasco, Whigs quickly nominated their trusted standard-bearer Henry Clay, while Democrats scrambled to find a candidate. Texas became the key issue within Democratic Party. Martin Van Buren, the member of the party with the greatest stature, wanted to regain the presidency, but he had declared his opposition to annexation. He, like Clay, believed incorporating the new territory would lead to Civil War.
The Democratic Party required that their candidate receive a two-thirds majority at their convention in order to receive the nomination. Van Buren represented a minority opinion within the party, so the party passed him over. The party then began a search for a new candidate. Eventually James K. Polk emerged as a compromise candidate. The first “dark horse” candidate, Polk was a Tennessean with strong ties to Jackson and whose strident views on expansion appealed to southern and western interests who supported annexation. Polk agreed with annexation, but he wanted to do more than that. He also wanted to rapidly extend American sovereignty to the West Coast.
Thanks to Tyler, and much to the Whigs’ chagrin, Texas annexation and geographic expansion more generally became the central issue of the election. Polk’s campaign slogan “Fifty-Four Fifty or Fight” referred to his position that the United States refuse to cede any disputed Oregon Territory (the area around 54th degree latitude) to the British. Clay ran strong on his old platform, but popular opinion forced him to retract his opposition to annexation. The waffling did him no favors. Worse, his new position that seemed to support annexation emboldened growing antislavery sentiment that opposed expansion. Abolitionists formed a third party called the Liberty Party that gave opponents to slavery and expansion a third option. It would prove fateful.
(Polk and Clay campaign ads videos on Page 2)
