Democrats Take on Brand New Parties
Part 12 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 look back at how the Democrats took on a new party after the Whigs faded into history
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Though both parties tried to avoid the question of slavery in the election of 1852, Franklin Pierce could not avoid the issue during his presidency. The prospect of admitting more territory to the Union once again threw the country into a crisis. In this case, Congressmen began to prepare Kansas and Nebraska, territory Thomas Jefferson acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase, for official settlement. With the country now stretching from coast to coast, this region in the middle seemed ripe for organization and development.
Democrats, led by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, initiated the process of statehood with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Whigs believed that the Missouri Compromise meant that this district would be free territory because it was north of the 36th parallel. Douglas and others surprised the Whigs in the Kansas-Nebraska Act by making a bold new claim about the future of slavery in unorganized territories. They argued that the Compromise of 1850 superseded the Missouri Compromise and that all new territories, regardless of location, would draft their own constitutions, and address the question of slavery for themselves, through the principle of popular sovereignty.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act reopened a debate many – including President Franklin Pierce – had hoped would lie dormant. Though Pierce opposed the proposal at first, party pressure led him to endorse it by 1854. Some Democrats saw popular sovereignty as an opportunity to expand slavery, while others viewed it as a moderate solution to the slavery question because it transferred responsibility for the contentious issue from the federal government to local governments. A beleaguered Pierce seemed to find comfort in the latter rationale. The foundering Whig Party protested, but it proved incapable of mustering a successful opposition. Eyes then shifted to Kansas to watch the implementation of the law.
No one doubted that Nebraska, the northernmost new territory, would be free. But Kansas, which shared a large border with the slave state of Missouri, became a battleground as pro- and anti-slavery forces advanced their respective causes. Though few expected Kansan soil would support the labor-intensive crops that seemed necessary to sustain slave economies, pro-slavery advocates seized the opening the act created and sent settlers to the region in hopes to counteract antislavery settlers. The two sides quickly populated the territory and established two separate and competing governments, one slave and one free. The rivalry soon turned bloody as the two groups armed supporters and created militias. Within a year, two hundred were dead.
Douglas’s hope that popular sovereignty would solve the controversy surrounding slavery had backfired. “Bleeding Kansas” returned the issue to Congress, and the violence in Kansas had only increased the stakes. Opinion in D.C. diverged along predictable lines, with pro-slavery members advocating for the recognition of the pro-slavery government, and anti-slavery members doing the same for the free government.
The tumult in Kansas led to scorching debates in the Capitol that boiled over in the spring of 1856 when Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Charles Sumner of Massachusetts at his Senate desk after Sumner had insulted Brooks’ uncle, Senator Andrew Butler, by insinuating that Butler had a slave as a mistress. The assault left Sumner incapacitated, a martyr to the cause of abolition, while southerners treated Brooks as a hero for defending southern honor. These violent events set the backdrop for the election of 1856. Disunion and civil war seemed more likely than ever.
The tensions over Kansas caused the fragile coalition of northern and southern Whigs to finally break. The fallout of the Whigs’ implosion produced new party alignments that would reshape the nation’s political culture.
Two new parties, the American Party and the Republican Party, formed to fill the void left by the now-defunct Whig Party. Both parties embraced elements of the Whig Party, whose organization may have been obsolete but whose principles continued to draw support.
The American Party, also known as the Know-Nothings, was the closest reincarnation of the Whigs, since the few and scattered remnants of the old party endorsed its candidate, former President Millard Fillmore. When the American Party first began to form in the 1840s, its exact purpose was something of a mystery. When asked about what the group stood for, members of the party claimed to “know nothing,” hence the nickname for the party.
As the organization gained power, it began to develop a more public platform. While the party took no clear stand on slavery because it encompassed both anti-slavery and pro-slavery factions, party members united in their opposition to immigration, especially from Catholic regions of Europe. The party wanted to place limits on immigrants by restricting office-holding and stiffening naturalization policies. Finally, the party’s opposition to Catholic groups with reputations for heavy drinking meant that the party also possessed an assertive Protestantism and advocated temperance.
Support for the party crossed geographic boundaries, but it was strongest in urban areas, in areas that permitted slavery but did not have large slave populations, and in border regions between free and slave states. Its constituents were often young, aspiring artisans and clerks who saw immigration as a threat to their economic prospects and worried that immigration threatened the cultural fabric of the nation.
Though the American Party formed first, the Republican Party adopted a more durable ideology that directly confronted the Democratic Party. The party espoused a free labor and free soil philosophy. Supporters believed that slavery was an antiquated institution that had no place in a modern society. They also held that the institution denigrated the master class by breeding sloth, unnecessary luxury, and inefficiency. The Republican Party argued that work, whether as an artisan or a farmer or an aspiring clerk, liberated individuals because it placed individuals in charge of their own destinies. Slavery was antithetical to their idea of freedom for white as well as black Americans.
Spurred by these beliefs and prompted by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which seemed to extend the life of slavery, the Republican Party’s 1856 platform was the first to address slavery directly by arguing that Congress was obligated to bar slavery from any new territory. They also endorsed long-held Whig economic positions, such as federal funding of internal improvements that facilitated commerce and the connection of markets. They nominated a prominent Californian, John Fremont, to be their first standard-bearer and offered a chant of “Free soil, free speech, Fremont” to rally support for their party.
(Buchanan and Fremont campaign ads videos on Page 2)
