More Conventions

2021 ◽  
pp. 171-180
Author(s):  
Spencer W. McBride
Keyword(s):  
Whig Party ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Martin Van Buren ◽  
Henry Clay

This chapter follows the events of the contested Democratic nominating convention of 1844 in Baltimore, Maryland. Martin Van Buren entered the convention as the favorite but faced stiff competition from Lewis Cass. After several ballots, a third candidate rose above Van Buren and Cass: James K. Polk. Polk was eventually nominated to run on the Democratic ticket against the Whig candidate, Henry Clay. This chapter also considers the small convention held by supporters of President John Tyler, who had been expelled from the Whig Party two years earlier. Meanwhile, in Nauvoo, the Mormons had a nominating convention of their own and formally nominated Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon to be an independent ticket for the presidency.

K

Virtual Words ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathon Keats
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Politics ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Andrew Jackson ◽  
Whig Party ◽  
Martin Van Buren ◽  
Major General

There’s an apocryphal story, still in circulation, that the word OK was made up by President Andrew Jackson. According to the tale, Jackson used the letters when he was a major general in the War of 1812, marking his approval on papers with initials abbreviating the words oll korrect . “The Gen. was never good at spelling,” the Boston Atlas dryly concluded, recounting the story in August 1840. By that time Old Hickory, as Jackson was known, had served his eight years as president, and his successor, Martin Van Buren, was running for a second term. A native of Kinderhook, New York, Van Buren appealed to the Jacksonian vote with the nickname Old Kinderhook, using the initials O. K. as a political slogan. His Whig Party rivals sought, successfully, to turn his populist appeal into a liability by calling attention to Jackson’s alleged semiliteracy. By a sort of logical doggerel endemic in American politics, Old Kinderhook’s slogan became a symbol of his ignorance. The true origin of OK , as the American lexicographer Allen Walker Read skillfully uncovered in 1963, was much closer to the Atlas’s editorial offices. The letters did stand for oll korrect, but the spelling was no accident. The coinage almost certainly came from the waggish editor of the Boston Morning Post , Charles Gordon Greene, who was at the center of what Read characterizes as “a remarkable vogue of using abbreviations” beginning in the year 1838. The Morning Post was full of them, generally used with a touch of irony, as in the mock dignity of O.F.M. (our first men), or a fit of whimsy, as in the pure zaniness of G.T. (gone to Texas). It was only a matter of months before the fad turned to creative misspelling, a source of humor then as it was in Mark Twain’s time. There was N.C. (nuff said) and N.Y. (no yuse), as well as O.W. (oll wright). The first known appearance of OK followed that pattern.

Henry Clay and the Whig Party

1937 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 399
Author(s):  
Theodore Calvin Pease ◽  
George R. Poage
Keyword(s):  
Whig Party ◽  
Henry Clay

Henry Clay and the Whig Party.

1937 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 224
Author(s):  
George L. Sioussat ◽  
George Rawlings Poage
Keyword(s):  
Whig Party ◽  
Henry Clay

A Lesson in Political Negotiations

2021 ◽  
pp. 7-22
Author(s):  
Spencer W. McBride
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Political Support ◽  
The Political ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Important Lesson ◽  
White House ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Martin Van Buren ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

In this chapter Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and Elias Higbee travel from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., to petition the federal government for reparations for their lost property in Missouri. The chapter summarizes the history of the Mormons and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including the violent persecution of Joseph Smith and his followers by mobs in Missouri, and their ultimate expulsion from the state under threat of state-sanctioned extermination. Smith and Higbee meet with President Martin Van Buren at the White House and request his assistance with their petition to Congress. Van Buren declines to assist the Latter-day Saints, losing the political support of the group. Joseph Smith learns an important lesson about political negotiations in Washington, D.C.

Presidential Hopefuls

2021 ◽  
pp. 75-88
Author(s):  
Spencer W. McBride
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Martin Van Buren ◽  
Henry Clay

This chapter considers Joseph Smith’s attempts to get the men believed to be the likeliest candidates for president to commit to helping the Latter-day Saints gain their long-sought redress for their lost property in Missouri and to protect their civil rights to prevent a repeat of the Missouri conflict in Illinois. Accordingly, Smith writes to five potential candidates: John C. Calhoun, Lewis Cass, Henry Clay, Richard Mentor Johnson, and Martin Van Buren. Only Calhoun, Cass, and Clay respond. None of the three men commit to help the Mormons. Smith is frustrated by these responses and determines that there is no candidate for the presidency who will ensure the protection of the Mormons’ rights as American citizens. Accordingly, church leaders determine that they should support Smith as an independent candidate for president.

Evangelicals, Whigs and the Election of William Henry Harrison

1983 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Carwardine
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Whig Party ◽  
Economic Distress ◽  
Martin Van Buren ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
Panic Of 1837

Few American presidential elections have engaged the passions of contemporaries or exercised the imaginations of later generations more than the ‘log cabin’ campaign of 1840. By their parades, slogans, symbols and songs party managers deliberately played down questions of public policy likely to divide their ranks, reasoned discussion was overwhelmed by an organized torrent of feeling, and the carefully cultivated images of candidates obscured the reality of their outlooks. Unscrupulous propagandists, especially of the Whig party, undoubtedly manipulated the emotions of the electorate. The excitement carried a massive 80·2 per cent of voters to the polls, a huge increase in turnout over previous presidential elections and a level of participation exceeded in no subsequent campaign. William Henry Harrison was indeed, as Philip Hone put it, ‘sung into the Presidency’Yet style alone did not create the passion. The economic distress consequent upon the Panic of 1837 allowed the Whigs to act as a focus for those who blamed the Democrats for the hard times and who looked for a more vigorous stimulus to capitalist development than Martin Van Buren was likely to provide.

Esotericism and the “Coded Word” in Mormonism

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
Clyde Forsberg Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Popular Religion ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
Divine Inspiration ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
New Religion

In the history of American popular religion, the Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, have undergone a series of paradigmatic shifts in order to join the Christian mainstream, abandoning such controversial core doctrines and institutions as polygamy and the political kingdom of God. Mormon historians have played an important role in this metamorphosis, employing a version (if not perversion) of the Church-Sect Dichotomy to change the past in order to control the future, arguing, in effect, that founder Joseph Smith Jr’s erstwhile magical beliefs and practices gave way to a more “mature” and bible-based self-understanding which is then said to best describe the religion that he founded in 1830. However, an “esoteric approach” as Faivre and Hanegraaff understand the term has much to offer the study of Mormonism as an old, new religion and the basis for a more even methodological playing field and new interpretation of Mormonism as equally magical (Masonic) and biblical (Evangelical) despite appearances. This article will focus on early Mormonism’s fascination with and employment of ciphers, or “the coded word,” essential to such foundation texts as the Book of Mormon and “Book of Abraham,” as well as the somewhat contradictory, albeit colonial understanding of African character and destiny in these two hermetic works of divine inspiration and social commentary in the Latter-day Saint canonical tradition.

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