More Conventions

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.

A Smoking Club

The smokers in this caricature of 1793 are: (from left to right) Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth (1757-1844), speaker of the House of Commons; William Pitt (1759-1806), Tory Prime Minister; Charles James Fox (1749-1806), leader of the Whig party; Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville (1742-1811), secretary of state; Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), dramatist and Whig orator. That the protagonists are blowing smoke into each others’ faces which is indicative of their hostility in debate. The caricature was published twelve days after France had declared war on Britain—a war that would last, with an interlude for the Treaty of Amiens, until 1815.

Music and Respectability in Antebellum Electoral Politics

Using the famously musical presidential election of 1840 as a centerpiece, this chapter traces how the American Whig Party drew from evangelical religion and reform to cast their campaign music as a respectable and refining influence over an otherwise unruly process of popular democracy. Indeed, for Whigs, the use of campaign songs was less about attracting voters to the polls than it was about reining in the dangers attendant to those who had already shown their willingness to participate. Accordingly, when Democrats criticized Whig campaign singing they were not criticizing the idea of music in elections so much as they were highlighting the supposed hypocrisy of a party whose use of campaign songs betrayed, as Democrats saw it, a preference for improving the people rather than submitting to their will.

The Upper South

The failure to gain the states of the Upper South when they held their secession elections in February 1861 was a major setback for the cause of secession. The seven states of the original Confederacy needed the manufacturing and white manpower of the Upper South, either to convince the North of the futility of military coercion or to be competitive should war break out. Both for its prestige and size, Virginia was the pivotal state that had to be won. As an institution, slavery was stagnant or declining across most of the Upper South, and levels of slave ownership and slaves in the population were roughly half of those in the Lower South. Secessionist appeals for the immediate need to leave the Union to protect slavery failed to gain any majority support. The conservative Whig Party was still very competitive and warned that the cotton Confederacy would push for free trade and the African slave trade, both of which would undermine the more diversified economies in the Upper South. Its leaders rallied non-slaveholders under the banner of conditional Unionism, a commitment to remain in the Union so long as concessions on slavery were granted and the North refrained from any military action against the states that had seceded. Aware of their distinctly minority status and the vulnerability of their slaves given the proximity of the free-labor Northern states, most of the slaveholders in the border slave states clung to the Union as the safest defender of their slave property.

Wooing, 1840–1844

Chapter 4 examines the crucial four-year period from the rise of the Whig Party to national power in 1840 to the dissolution of the bachelor’s mess of Buchanan and King in 1844. During this period of intense partisanship, the friendship of Buchanan and King grew increasingly intimate. First in 1840 and again in 1844, each man aspired for his party’s presidential and vice presidential nominations, respectively. The struggle occasioned a great deal of personal gossip from their political enemies, including Sarah Childress Polk, wife of future president James Polk. In April 1844, King’s appointment as the American minister to France ended his mess with Buchanan. Nevertheless, the separation brought on a regular, if one-sided correspondence. The chapter devotes special attention to the surviving letters from this critical period of their relationship, including an especially revealing post from Buchanan in which he complains of his failure to woo new members to join him in his solitary congressional mess. Ultimately, Buchanan’s failure to attract new messmates paralleled the earlier failed efforts to obtain the Democratic presidential and vice presidential nominations in 1840 and 1844.

Resurgence of Nativism: 1850–55

This chapter begins with how the Compromise of 1850, temporarily, calmed ethnic, anti-foreign prejudice, and sectional tension in Louisiana. Yet, nativism remained close to the surface. Nativism returned as the National Whig party fell apart and foreign immigration increased. The chapter discusses a new native-American party rising to replace the old Whig party, the American or Know Nothing party. The chapter covers how many Whigs found a new political home in this party. Violence characterized the elections in the state, particularly, in New Orleans. However the chapter notes how the large number of Catholics in the state, who often became members of the Know Nothings, put the state party at odds with the national organization.

The Know Nothings in Louisiana

This book examines the Know Nothing party in Louisiana. In the early 1850s, the Whig party disintegrated. Several third party movements appeared in the country. Know Nothings seemed to have a strong chance of replacing the Whig party and by 1854 the Know Nothings appeared throughout the United States. This book examines Louisiana because one feature of the Know Nothings, or American party as it was sometimes called, was its anti-foreign and anti-Catholic prejudice. Louisiana, particularly, South Louisiana had a large Roman Catholic population. The book seeks to address whether this feature hurt the party. The book also examines how northern Know Nothings, many of whom were anti-slavery, affected the party’s success in the South. Additionally, early studies of the Know Nothing party in Louisiana argue the party was made up of old Whigs and that traditionally, the party was seen as consisting of older, large slaveholding planters or town businessmen and lawyers connected to the slave-holding interests. This book concludes that Know Nothingism was unique in Louisiana; who actually were Know Nothings does not meet the traditional historical view for the state and the book concludes that the anti-Roman Catholic feature did not preclude South Louisiana slave-holding Catholics from belonging to the party. Louisiana Know Nothings did have difficulty because of the anti-Catholic feature, but it did not prevent Catholics from belonging. Northern Know Nothings’ abolitionism did cause problems for Louisiana Know Nothings, but the election outcomes in the 1850s demonstrated that Union and conservatism was strong in the state.

‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’:1 political prints of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis – the revision of a republican mode

This chapter examines political prints that responded to the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1679–82). It compares the political prints of the “Tory” Sir Roger L’Estrange, Licenser to the Press, with that of the “Whig” Stephen College, a “Protestant Joiner”. College was executed for his political cartoon, “A Ra-ree Show”, in 1682. This chapter uses these satirical engravings in order to contextualize the so-called “Tory Reaction” of 1681. It argues that one of the reasons why the Tories were so successful, by most accounts, in their efforts to discredit the Whigs has to do with the concept of loyalism. As the Whig agenda became increasingly tied to republican and non-conformist aims, their connection to loyalism began to dissolve. This made the Whigs vulnerable to challenges to their beliefs and practices both from without (by Tories) and from within (by the mainline elements from inside the Whig party itself).