Slavery Dominates Dawn of New Political Era

Part 10 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 afterwards. 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. This week, we move from James Polk’s election in 1844 to the election of 1848 in which war hero and Whig candidate Zachary Taylor faced another veteran, Democrat Lewis Cass. The election focused on the two competing biographies of these two veterans, but behind this veneer, the issue of slavery was emerging as the primary political issue of the day.

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After eking out a narrow victory in 1844, James K. Polk set out to transform the country. Polk vowed to serve for only one term, a pledge that freed him to pursue his often-controversial goals without concern for re-election. Polk had four objectives. Two dealt with economic policy, and two dealt with expansion.  

On the economic front, Polk embraced Democratic policies that emphasized decentralization. He wanted to establish an independent Treasury modeled on Van Buren’s proposal from 1836. He also aimed to reduce tariffs, a measure that appealed to the Southern and largely agricultural wing of his party. Within a year, Polk realized both promises, an accomplishment that reflected his deft political skills.

Expansion proved more difficult. The acquisition and political organization of new territory raised the increasingly divisive question of slavery. Polk was an ardent expansionist, but he knew he had to plan his moves in this area with care. 

Polk first focused his attentions on the Oregon Territory, where U.S. territorial claims clashed with British claims. In his campaign, Polk took a strident position against the British by asserting that the United States controlled the territory up to the 54th parallel. Great Britain believed that their domain extended much further south. Up until Polk’s administration, both countries had jointly occupied the sparsely settled area in dispute. With more Americans pushing west, Polk wanted to establish American sovereignty. Tyler, Polk’s predecessor, had begun negotiations, and Polk redoubled those efforts. Eventually, he came to a compromise in which the United States received the land south of the 49th parallel, less territory than Polk wanted, but more than the British were originally willing to cede.

Having accomplished three of his four stated objectives, Polk shifted his expansionist gaze further south, to California. Mexico controlled this territory, but Polk wanted it. Mexico, still stewing over its loss of Texas, had no interest in giving up any more of its domain. Polk went to war to acquire it.

The Mexican-American War reshaped American politics. Whigs accused Polk of launching an unjust war waged for territory alone. Moreover, many Northerners believed Democrats’ ultimate war aim was to expand slavery and the South’s political clout. At the beginning of the war, one Northern Congressman, a Democrat named David Wilmot from western Pennsylvania, proposed that Congress admit all new territory acquired from Mexico as free states. The Wilmot Proviso failed, but its sentiment gave a hint of a new political era in which the question of slavery would divide the nation upon geographic rather than partisan lines.  

Polk managed a masterful war effort that forced Mexico to meet him on his terms. When the war ended in 1848, the United States possessed California and New Mexico. Polk hoped that this new territory would realize the nation’s grand destiny to stretch from coast to coast, but his expansionist actions also sowed the seeds of disunion and Civil War. Polk, however, remains perhaps the most successful American president – if success is judged by the ability of a president to realize his stated goals within a single term.

Polk kept to his one-term pledge, which meant that two new candidates would have to deal with the fall-out from Mexico in the 1848 presidential election. The Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor, a leading general of the Mexican-American War who had become a harsh critic of Polk. Taylor had shown no aspirations for office before this election. In fact, he told others that he had never before voted in an election because he believed the act could undermine his duty as an officer serving his nation. The Democrats nominated their own veteran, Lewis Cass, who had served as a Senator and territorial governor of Michigan. He had also served as a general during the War of 1812, though the extent of his service came under scrutiny during the election.

The addition of new territory meant that the nation would have to confront the issue of slavery in territories not covered by the Missouri Compromise. In the years since the Compromise, Northern and Southern interests had only grown further apart. The free states of the North had experienced enormous demographic growth and economic expansion since 1820. Their economic success rested on free labor, industrialization, diversified farming, and free enterprise. The economic opportunity in the North attracted new immigrants, and the region now held a powerful voting block in the House. Had the South still not benefitted from the three-fifths clause in Congress, Northern interests would have been even more powerful. The Senate, where apportionment was equal, was where pro-slavery forces could make a stand. Control of that institution was what was at stake with expansion.  

The two parties tried to hew a moderate course in 1848 by avoiding the issue of slavery directly. Instead, they ran on personalities. Taylor, a slave-holder from Louisiana, took no public position on slavery in California, and Whigs themselves were uncertain of his stand. The party believed control of the office was more important than principle, so they adopted no formal platform. Taylor, a figure with no political baggage, also solved the problems Clay encountered in 1844, when his years in politics hampered his ability to appeal across party lines.

The Democrats had a harder time threading this needle. They were the party of expansion, and they were the party of the South, so avoiding the question of slavery proved impossible. Their convention officially adopted a platform similar to the Whigs. They remained silent on the question of slavery, hoping reticence would appease Northerners in their party, but their choice of Cass, an expansionist who had voiced pro-slavery beliefs, split the party. A group of Northerners who opposed the spread of slavery (though not the outright abolition of slavery in the states that already had it) left the convention and formed a third party called the Free Soil Party. Martin Van Buren became their nominee. 

Van Buren had largely avoided the issue of slavery as president, but in his later years, he took a more pronounced stand against its extension. His position represented the sentiment of many Northern Democrats who could live with slavery in the old states – who, indeed, were most content when they did not have to confront the issue at all – but when forced to take a stand, opposed its extension.  

(1848 campaign ads videos on Page 2)