Part
2: The Fluidity of Political Parties in
First
Half of the 19th Century
And
How It Led To The Successors Of
Webster
and Calhoun In Their Respective States
During the first
half of the 19th century political parties were rarely stable and
came to rise and fall so that individual elected officials lasted longer than
the parties they could be elected under. To use the most pertinent example Daniel
Webster of Massachusetts and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina would serve three
different political parties during their nearly forty years in politics.
Calhoun would start
his career as Democratic-Republican in 1812 and would serve as Vice President to
both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson under that party. Upon resigning to
run for Senate the first time in 1828, he took on the party label ‘Nullifier’ a
third party that argue for the kind of government he served in South Carolina.
Finally in 1838 he officially joined the Democratic Party.
Webster by
contrast would begin his career as a Federalist, a party already in decline
when he joined it when first elected to Congress in 1812. In 1825 he joined the
National Republican Party which he would build with Henry Clay. And when it
collapsed in 1833 like Clay he would help form the Whig Party which he would
represent in the Senate.
But even before the
Compromise of 1850 was being formed in Congress Webster’s position in the
latter was becoming more tenuous. The Whig Party was beginning to divide
between the so-called Cotton Whigs and Conscience Whigs, which were divided on
how to deal with slavery. The Cotton Whigs, which were in the South and much of
the North were uncomfortable with the North’s antislavery stands and who wanted
to maintain the lucrative flow of southern cotton to the Massachusetts textile
factory. The Conscience Whigs viewed slavery as a civic evil and considered its
eradication a moral imperative. Webster was a Cotton Whig in a region of the
country that was increasingly becoming the Conscience Whigs – or was abandoned
the party in favor of the Free Soil Party starting in 1848. Even before his speech
in favor of the Compromise of 1850, men in his own state were dismissing
Webster as ‘the relic of a bygone era.
Calhoun himself
was having trouble with his own sphere of influence. In December of 1848 he had
called a meeting of Southern senators and Congressmen in Washington with the
aim of producing an address to the people of the South, outlining the dire
threat of Northern encroachment, arguing for the idea of an independent
Southern nation. Calhoun’s influence didn’t have much weight: of the 121
members of Calhoun’s region, just 48 signed on.
The Compromise of
1850 looked like it was headed for disaster after its initial formation.
President Zachary Taylor had little use for it and might have wanted a
conflict. But when he suddenly sickened and died in July of 1850, his vice president
Millard Fillmore ascended to the White House. On board with Clay’s version of
the compromise his political views improved the prospect of passage.
While this was
going on Robert Winthrop, a Massachusetts congressman and a Cotton Whig like
Webster, was approached by one of his colleagues from the Massachusetts delegation
Joseph Grinnell, a friend of the new president. Fillmore had just fired Taylor’s
entire cabinet and paralyzed with indecision, was deciding on who the appoint
to fill the post of Secretary of State. He was considering either Winthrop or
Webster, who had previously held the post under William Henry Harrison and John
Tyler. Winthrop extolled his colleagues virtues with an eye on Webster’s seat
in the Senate. Webster moved upwards and Winthrop was appointed to fill out the
remainder of Webster’s unexpired term.
Winthrop was only
forty-one in 1850 but had already established himself as one of the major
figures in Massachusetts politics. Descended from the legendary Winthrop family
which dated back to 1630, he had been first elected to Massachusetts House of
Representatives at 26, the House at 31 and Speaker at the age of 38. However in
the battle for the Speaker in 1849, he had ended up losing the Howell Cobb in a
struggle that had symbolized the divisiveness in the nation. Even then his
standoffish behavior made him seem above politics to his colleagues.
Winthrop knew he
was going to face challenges if he wanted to hold his Senate seat for another
six year term. Part of it was due to his connection to Webster, toxic
politically in Massachusetts and with hostility between the division in his own
party and the Free Soilers. His support for the Compromise of 1850 – especially
the Fugitive Slave Act – made him suspect the Whig Party in Massachusetts might
crumble very soon. Already there was a division between loyalty to one’s party
and principles – which Winthrop followed – and loyalty to the moral fervor of
the cause of anti-slavery. Winthrop suspected he would ended up on the losing
side.
By this point a
new political force was developing in Massachusetts: the Young Whigs. Mostly
from established upper-crust families, who begrudged the rise of ‘new money’ –
mostly from the industrial factories that powered the Cotton Whigs – and the
political power that came with it. To them, the central issue was the moral
issue of slavery. Charles Francis Adams was one of those early Young Whigs, and
like his father before him, developed a dislike for ‘the distressing vulgarities
of politics’. Eventually he ran for the legislature and served in both the
state House and state Senate between 1841 and 1846. When Cotton Whig friend denounced
Garrison in terms they found jarring, he would join the anti-slavery side and
run as vice president for the newly formed Free Soil Party. (As was stated in
the previous article that loyalty was not returned by Garrison in his
publication.)
During this period
a prominent Massachusetts figure arose who while he subscribed to The
Liberator was never part of Garrison’s circle. Indeed he eschewed what he
considered the ‘vindictive, bitter and unchristian tone’ of Garrison’s paper.
Charles Sumner
was born in 1811, one of 9 children in a household where the parents were
solemn and without warmth to any of their family. He taught himself to read
Latin and entered the legal profession but while talkative he was austere and
humorless. Frequently melancholy, he quickly became an activism for social
causes – prison reform, education, international peace and the evils of
slavery. He would form what would be an almost religious like faith in mankind’s
capacity to improve itself. He would embrace a gaudy idealism expressed in a
tone of zealotry – railing against patriotism in speeches on the 4th
of July, calling for the end of warfare throughout the world, pressing for
antislavery agitation beyond what most established figures considered prudent. Worse,
he became a ‘master of invective’, directing at opponents such venom and
cruelty that many Bostonians recoiled in shock and shunned him socially.
Winthrop quickly
became a target of his wrath, first with his vote authorizing the war in Mexico
that terminated a decades long friendship. Quickly it became clear his persona
was self-assured, self-absorbed – and completely lacking in self-awareness. He
would charge ahead with little regard for the feelings of others or the impact
it would have on him. If he were to lose friends as a result, he would simply
make new friends.
He resisted the urge
to go into electoral politics until 1848 when he challenged Winthrop in
Congress as a Free Soil candidate. He would lose to him badly and his successor
two years later, but the losses only whetted his appetite.
This
self-destruction among the Whigs made it clear that the Massachusetts party was
in deep trouble. The Whigs has been using New England for their body of strength
since its inception and now with the fractures, the Democrats saw an opening.
Unable to stand on their own with the power they had, they aligned with the
Free Soilers who held the balance of power.
The major leader
of the party in that state was Henry Wilson, president of the Massachusetts
Senate. He had hoped to lead his fledgling party to bootstrap itself to prominence
until Adams and his allies objected on the alliance out of a consideration for ‘power
rather than hallowed principle’. This emergence was forcing Whigs into
three-way races that had diminished their prospects for winning elections. The
fall elections cost the Whigs the majority in the statehouse and put the
Democrats and Free-Soilers into a new majority.
The Democrats
wanted to control the state and wanted to put Democrats in all the major
legislative positions, governor, lieutenant governor, House Speaker etc. The
Free Soilers were concerned with the slavery issue and only wanted Webster’s
seat in the Senate. They would choose Charles Sumner, a decision that shocked
Democrats and Cotton whigs.
When the legislative
balloting began in January, Sumner scored a 60.53 percent majority on the sixth
ballot in the Senate. The House would prove more troublesome as Caleb Cushing,
a Whig-turned-Democrat who loathed Sumner, pulled together a coalition of
nearly thirty Democrats who wouldn’t vote for Sumner under any circumstances.
It would take 26 ballots before on April 23rd two Whigs switched
from Winthrop to Sumner giving him 193 votes to Winthrop’s 166 – just enough
for a majority. The win was the official political death-knell for the power of
Daniel Webster in his home state, something he would acknowledge. After a disastrous
run for the governorship later that year Winthrop’s political career was over
and Massachusetts was about to enter a new era in politics.
When Barnwell
Rhett ascended to John C. Calhoun’s Senate seat, he had attained what he
thought was his life’s ambition. He attended to assail no one and was warned to
avoid the most troublesome southern unionists: Henry Clay, still vital at 74
and Mississippi’s Henry S. Foote.
He handled
himself during the second session of Congress set to end in March, staying
clear of both men and behaving cordially with Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis the
South’s key spokesman – who Rhett considered too accommodating. Then in February
24 he rosed for his first extended address during debate of the Fugitive Slave
Act. Entered into the Compromise to mollify the South Rhett challenged the law
as being an overreach of federal power.
“The government
has it not in its power to enforce this law,” he proclaimed. “I believe by the
actions of the States, and the Staes alone, the rights of the South can be
maintained and enforced.” This position confused many Southerners, who had
welcomed the act as favoring their region. But for Rhett, the principle of
state sovereignty superseded all others. “I protest this usurpation…It is fatal
to the rights of the south.”
Clay observed
this and calmly rose. He chided Rhett for going on at length about the
Constitution’s delegated powers as if his elder colleagues didn’t already
understand this fundamental element of the American.
The difficulty with
the Senator and his school on delegated powers (is) if all others do not concur
with them they are consolidationists, Federalists, Whigs, precipitating the
country into ruin.
Clay lumped him in with Free Soil Senator Salmon Chase saying that they held
opposite opinions on nearly everything but joined together “in expressing the
opinion that there is no power in Congress of the United States to pass the
fugitive slave law, and that Washington, and that all of us from the commencement
of the government down to this time, have been wrong.”
It was a devastating
putdown. In South Carolina an amused James Hammond noted that Southern politicians
were threatening secession if the fugitive slave measure were repealed and here
was Rhett implicitly urged it as a representative of South Carolina. Rhett
cared little for consistency and waited five days for an opportunity to speak
again. But Congress adjourned before he could get a chance. Rhett was determined
to use the Compromise as a measure to argue for secession. In South Carolina
Rhett went out of his way to argue for a secessionist movement to secede on its
own.
However in the
months that followed, opposition was growing within the state. Rhett crisscrossed
his home state urging for a statewide vote in order to endorse it, issuing dire
warnings about South Carolina’s fate at the hands of abolitionists if it didn’t
extricate itself from the Union. He ignored the fears of those such as his
fellow Senator Andrew Pickens Butler that a federal blockade would shut off
trade as ‘humbug’ “By our secession,” he declared, “the union is dissolved by
our mere non-action.
The movement
failed. Across the state cooperationist candidates captured 25,045 votes to
17,010 for secessionist candidates. The cooperationists elected their men in
six of the states seven Congressional districts and 25 of the 44 assembly
districts. The result was a humiliation for Rhett in his home state. And when
he returned to the Senate in December he came under fire from Henry Foote, once
a Southern firebrand but now a defender of the 1850 compromise. Introducing a
resolution in support, he suddenly launched into a bitter denunciation of Rhett
as a hater of the Union and a possible traitor. When Pickens Butler tried to
defend him, saying this was an attack on South Carolina, Foote countered that he
had high gratification to South Carolina who had successfully opposed Rhett and
his secessionist allies. “I felt that real people of South Carolina had come
nobly to the rescue of the honor of the state in the contest lately in progress
between them and certain demagogues.”
Rhett sought to
defend himself by scoffing at Foote’s epithets – while also embracing them. “I
am a secessionist – I am a disunionist.” As long as South Carolina was part of
the Union “I am bound, as I am sworn, to support the Constitution…but in my
opinion, the compact of the Constitution is violated – the Union of the Constitution
is dissolved.”
The exchange went
on for three days and by the time it was over it was clear that Foote had
revealed just how far he had ventured beyond conventional discourse and to his
own political zone. He was a marked man in the Senate. When he left for the
Christmas holidays Alabama’s Jeremiah Clemens made a bizarre attack saying that
northerners Charles Sumner, William Seward and Salmon had responded to Rhett’s
speech with applause and encouragement.
Rhett was urged
to ignore it when he went back to Washington but instead attacked Clemens with
such venom that the Alabama Senator suggested perhaps a duel should settle
this. And when the South Carolina legislature met in April of 1851 to determine
a course of action, there was no consensus. Rhett was not even allowed to address
the convention.
The day the
convention adjourned Rhett resigned from the Senate. “In consequence of the
proceedings of the convention which has just ended, I deem myself no longer a
proper representative of the position and policy of the people of South
Carolina with respect to the aggression of the general government. “ Not even
his home state was willing to come around to his way of thinking on the crisis
over slavery. South Carolina had much of his zealotry but they weren’t prepared
to follow him into the unknown of immediate and independent secession. Rhett
had lost both his constituency and his political standing. This would lead to
the permanent assent of the senior senator: Andrew Pickens Butler.
Andrew Pickens
Butler was a big man with a friendly demeanor and a hearty laugh. He was known
for his good-natured ridicule that he couldn’t take in kind. He was praised for
his common-sense and being high minded and honorable. His father had been a
general in the Revolutionary War and he grew up knowing his grandfather and
uncle had died in the war of independence. He had been elected to the state
House when in his 20s. He spent nine years in the state Senate and had
participated in the battle for nullification with Calhoun. He had moved on to
the bench and moved to the Senate in 1846. He moved on to the Senate that year.
Quickly he became chairman of the Judiciary Committee, with jurisdiction over
many slavery issues and issued considerable sway over debates on the subject.
He was just as opposed to the Compromise of 1850, only endorsing the Fugitive
Slave Act. He was blunt in his rhetoric but no where near as fiery as Rhett.
As a result in
years to come Butler would have increasing power of the South’s interest in the
next decade. Yet oddly enough when Charles Sumner came to the Senate, despite
being opposites on both political and social appearance the two men would
initially be cordial. That would not last long into the tumultuous decade that
would follow.
In the next article
I will deal with how both states played a role in the 1852 election and how the
conflict over slavery that the Compromise
of 1850 seemed to have put at bay and how it flared back into life not long
after.
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