Demise of Whigs Foreshadows Civil War
Part 11 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. In our last installment, we saw the Whigs regain control of the White House by running war hero Zachary Taylor. The Whigs, however, suffered a similar fate as they did under William Henry Harrison. Taylor died unexpectedly, and his replacement, Millard Fillmore, proved unpopular with the party. In 1852, the Whigs nominated Winfield Scott, another prominent general from the Mexican-American War. The Democrats followed their own tradition of nominating a “dark horse” that could appease the various factions within their party. In this case, they settled on a largely unknown Democratic operative from New Hampshire named Franklin Pierce.
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Political neophyte Zachary Taylor inherited one of the toughest political environments in United States history when he assumed office in 1849. Indeed, the nation appeared to be on the brink of civil war. The admission of the recently acquired Mexican territory threatened to tear the Union apart. Southern interests wanted to admit California as a slave state, while Northerners wanted to keep it free. Meanwhile, Texas claimed that it had rights to a substantial portion of New Mexico and vowed to take it by force if necessary. Some southerners promised support for such an invasion. Other southerners began talking about organizing a secession movement. The acquisition of new territory, believed by many to be a necessary step towards national greatness, threatened to ruin the country.
Congress began to grapple with the issue of California and New Mexico just as Taylor entered office. Having never participated in politics, indeed having never even voted in a presidential election before, no one knew where Taylor, a slaveholder from Louisiana, stood on the issue, though Democrats were cautiously optimistic and Whigs nervous. In two speeches to Congress, he showed his hand and left southerners shocked and Whigs empowered. He wanted both California and New Mexico admitted as free states. Taylor, it turned out, may have been a slaveholder, but his perspective on the institution was largely economic; he saw no reason why slavery should expand into territories that could not support it. At the same time, he showed no inclination to abolish slavery in states that already permitted the institution.
Southerners viewed Taylor’s position on California and New Mexico as extreme. Admitting both California and New Mexico as free states would upset the balance of power in the Senate. They feared a free state majority would put their peculiar institution on a path to extinction. Congress – led by a cross-party coalition of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Stephen Douglass – began to devise a compromise that would save the Union by addressing some of the pressing issues and pushing others off for later.
The general outlines of the compromise went like this. California would enter the Union as a free state, while New Mexico would become a territory. The admission of only one state meant that the Senate would tip only slightly into the free state column, and pro-slavery forces could hold out hope that New Mexico might become a slave state. Texas, meanwhile, would relinquish many of its claims to New Mexico. In exchange, the state would receive a $10 million grant to pay down its heavy debts. The final piece was a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act, which aimed to curb the effectiveness of the Underground Railroad, paired with the outlaw of the slave trade within Washington, D.C.
Taylor, however, became something of an impediment to the Compromise because he opposed the creation of federal territories. This obstacle cleared in July, when Taylor suffered a deadly bout of gastroenteritis after gorging himself with fresh fruit and milk on a hot summer day.
The Whigs thus suffered the same fate as they had with their last president, another war hero-turned-politician, William Henry Harrison. This time, however, Taylor’s Vice President, New Yorker Millard Fillmore, had strong Whig credentials. Fillmore accepted the Compromise. Many in the country celebrated its passage, believing it saved the Union.
Fillmore’s base in the North, however, grew dissatisfied with the Compromise, especially the stronger Fugitive Slave Act. Some Northern states rejected it, passing their own nullification laws. Fillmore decided to strictly enforce the law, losing him more friends in the North. By the time of the Whigs’ nominating convention in 1852, Fillmore’s base of support had shifted South. He won some votes in the nominating convention, but it was not enough. He retired to New York, confident that his actions had saved the Union, even if they had made him unpopular within his own party.
For the third election in a row, the campaign for president was an open contest. Historical happenstance was part of the reason for this lack of consistent leadership (two presidents died in office, and one sought only one term), but the national parties faced a larger problem that fed into this weakness. Whigs and Democrats had to be national parties, but they struggled to bridge the chasm between Northern and Southern interests that was growing deeper as time passed.
The two parties had developed different ways to address this problem. Whigs tended to nominate war heroes with national prominence, while the Democrats nominated relatively unknown figures who party leaders believed they could rely on to do what the party wanted. Both parties also adopted vague platforms in an attempt to maintain their national coalitions, taking no clear position on controversial issues, especially slavery, even though most voters knew that the extremes of each party represented the general direction each wanted to take the country on the issue of slavery.
(Pierce and Scott campaign ads videos on Page 2)
