Massachusetts & South Carolina In The Sectional Crisis, Interlude: The 1852 Election

 

 

Daniel Webster would turn 70 in January of 1852 and was suffering from digestive problems, gout and chronic inflammation of the throat and nose. He was in no condition to run for President, much less serve in that capacity. Nevertheless he was unable to resist the lure of the highest office in the land which he had been perpetually trying to win in some form since 1836.

And so on November 25h 1851, his friends and supporters congregated at Boston’s already historic Faneuil Hall to begin  his latest campaign. This time, however, he didn’t even have the support of Massachusetts Whigs as the most recent coalition of Democrats and Free Soilers had purged any Democrats who had voted against sending Charles Sumner to the Senate the previous year.

Instead his ‘Central Committee’ consisted of 19 prominent Massachusetts figures most notable Edward Everett. In an address prepared by Everett Webster claimed that he would run as the champion of unionism. “Belonging to the party of the Union, by whatever other name we may be called, we believe that the preservation of the Union is the greatest political object to be pursued.” It was a noble concept, but in order to succeed he would have to gain the nomination from the National Whig Party. That meant running against two prominent party figures: the incumbent Millard Fillmore and General Winfield Scott, who had attempted to receive the Presidential nomination multiple times under the Whig banner before.

To do so this time he turned to two of the most cunning political operatives in the Party, Senator William Seward of New York and his mentor political boss Thurlow Weed. Their hope was to use Scott as a kind of straw man in order to unite the fractured Whig Party and position Seward himself for the Presidency in 1856. The biggest issue was, of course, slavery and particularly the Fugitive Slave Act. If the Whigs endorsed it, the party would lose the North; if they didn’t they would lose the South. For men like Seward, their solution was to select a Southern candidate who was uncommitted to the Fugitive Slave Law and they believed Scott was their man.

Webster was in the position of having to run against the President who had named him Secretary of State. Doing so would make him look like an ingrate. But if Fillmore retained him while the two men competed for the nomination, he would look like a weakling. Fillmore was also trying to promote himself as a unionist: a Northern man with Southern principles.

All of this made Democratic prospects look sunny that year. The party had mostly avoided the intensity of the sectional tensions that had divided the Whigs. Because they were more committed to the 1850 compromise, southerners supported the Fugitive Slave Act while northers were placated the concept of popular sovereignty. And with the disasters the Whigs had faced in the last few years, they increasingly looked like a spent force. They had lost 29 seats in the House in the elections of 1850-1851 while the Democrats had gained 21, giving them a forty seat majority in that part of Congress and they maintained an 8 seat majority in the Senate. Furthermore the Democrats had several nationally known candidates to nominate: Lewis Cass of Michigan, the Democrats nominee for President in 1844, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, Polk’s former Secretary of State and Stephen Douglas of Illinois, only thirty-eight but already one of the most well-known political figures in the nation. The fact that he had managed to help get the Compromise of 1850 through the Senate when Clay’s initial omnibus motion had failed, did much to boost his standings.

Leading up to the conventions in June, it was clear shifts in the political landscape were imminent. In March Henry Clay told his followers that Fillmore was his favorite for the nomination for President. He would pass away on June 29^th of that year, shortly after the Whig Convention met.

Webster’s campaign was stagnant and matters worsened that May when the Secretary suffered severe injuries in a carriage accident. Scott continued to struggle with what to say about the Compromise and the advice from Seward to stay silent labeled him in some circles as cowardly and counterproductive.

For Douglas, he suffered a blow when a provocateur named George N. Sanders purchased the venerable Democratic Review magazine and used it solely to spray venom on all candidates save for Douglas. It was time for the ‘Old Fogies’ to get out of the way and let ‘Young America’ manage the national destiny. This led those ‘Fogies’ – Buchanan and Cass – to have their campaigns unleased a relentless counterattack, portraying Douglas as an upstart incapable of appreciating the talents of his elders. This led to many of them curtailing Douglas’s prospects for forming a coalition of support.

On June 1^st the Democrats met in Baltimore. Every state was in attendance – save South Carolina, who had traditionally not participated in conventions to avoid any obligation to abide by convention decisions. The convention’s first action was to approve the rules of procedure, including the traditional requirement that the winning candidate receive at least 2/3 of the delegates, This rule had been established by the Democratic convention in 1844, and was in place effectively to give the South veto power over any candidate though they would never have sufficient power to nominate a winner. This rule would be part of so many conflicts within the Democrats both before – and after – the Civil War.

It was clear from the start that it was going to be very difficult for any candidate to get two-thirds of the vote. 192 votes were required to get the nomination in 1852. Cass led on the first ballot with 116, Buchanan was next with 93. For eleven ballots Cass edged up, then began to decline. A deadlock seemed eminent.

Then a group of Buchanan delegates began to spread their votes among lesser candidates as a way of blocking Cass and Douglas, hoping their man might rise when it became clear those two couldn’t win. It backfired. One of those candidates was New Hampshire Senator Franklin Pierce who slowly began an upward trajectory. On the 46^th ballot, he jumped from 29 votes to 41, then to 49, then 55. On the 49^th ballot, there was a stampede to Pierce who received all but five votes. William Rufus Devane King was nominated for vice president, despite his ailing health. (Indeed he would die in Cuba two months before the inauguration.)

The platform swore complete loyalty to the 1850 compromise and denied Congress had any authority to interfere in state matters beyond what was spelled out in the Constitution. It made it very clear the party would resist further agitation on the question of slavery in any form.

Pierce at 48 was to date the youngest man ever nominated for President by any political party. He’d had a meteoric rise in New Hampshire politics – four years in the state legislature, four in the house and five in the Senate all before he even turned 38. He was essentially a Jacksonian, believing in low tariffs, hard money, a limited federal government, territorial expansion. Despite his being raised in New England he had a severe dislike for abolitionists  who put emancipation before social stability and insisted that those who disagreed with them were morally unfit. (In the case of men like Garrison, he wasn’t stretching the point too much.) He believed if the abolitionists backed off, the rabble rousers in the South would calm down. He was considered a ‘Doughface’ – a Northern man with Southern principles. Generally the South applauded this selection with Rhett’s Charleston Mercury saying that Pierce belonged to that ‘respectable portion of the Democratic Party that never made terms with the Free Soilers’ and was in all respects as good a man for the South as any of those he superseded.” Naturally The Observer reprinted those words as a warning as to what to expect if Pierce became President.

On June 16^th the Whigs gathered in Baltimore, with more or less the same party platform as the Democrats, a victory for moderates hoping to avoid a Southern rebellion. Unlike the Democrats the Whigs opted for a majority outcome, in this case requiring 149 votes. On the first ballot, Fillmore received 133 votes, Scott, 131 and Webster 29. This sentiment essentially held over three days and 52 ballots. Scott took most of the West and the North, Fillmore held the South, Webster was limited to New England.

Clearly if Fillmore and Webster could combine their support, they could overcome Scott. Webster’s refused to release his delegates. On the 53^rd ballot a number of Pennsylvania delegates broke for Scott, giving him the nomination. Northern Whigs generally applauded Scott’s selection believing he was at heart a Free Soiler. “We accept the candidate, but we spit on the platform.” The South held nothing of it.

Those Massachusetts Free Soilers and Conscience Whigs took a perverse satisfaction at the humiliation of Webster. “WE have dirked him” Henry Wilson proclaimed and Garrison seemed to take a special satisfaction in Webster’s political demise. He would retire to Mansfield and die less than four months later, the last of the great triumvirate and the end of an era.

What was clear during the political tumult in 1852 was that the Compromise of 1850 was holding. The abolitionists and secessionists would carp and the moral sensibilities driving antislavery forces were gaining currency. But the majority of Americans cared little for either groups of feelings. They wanted calm and tranquility, which meant accepting the Compromise and subduing the slavery issue. This was true within both parties. The antislavery Whigs might loathe the party platform but were powerless to change it. The recent actions of the South had showed that they were opposed to disunion. And neither major candidate had any real disposition to alter the status quo.

This left the Free Soil Party as the only party that might argue otherwise. That August they held a convention in Pittsburgh that sent antislavery men from every free state but California and also from slave states Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky. The party’s platform denied that the federal government had any constitutional right to involve itself with slavery in any way and denounced the 1850 compromise as ‘inconsistent with all the principles of democracy’. It called for the repeal of the hated Fugitive Slave act and a line in the platform stated that ‘slavery is assign against God, and a crime against man, the enormity of which no law nor usage can sanction or mitigate, and that Christianity, humanity and patriotism alike demand its abolition.” Senator John Hale of New Hampshire, who had been fighting slavery his whole career, became their nominee for President.

The election was a landslide victory for Franklin Pierce and an absolute humiliation for the Whigs. Pierce won 51 percent of the vote to Scott’s 44 percent and just five percent for Hale. Pierce carried 27 states and 254 electoral votes, losing just Vermont, Massachusetts, Kentucky and Tennessee. The Democrats gained 30 seats in the House while the Whigs. There were a lot of changes in both parties. Hale would lose his seat in the Senate to Democrat Charles Atherton. More troubling was the fact that the Whigs only won three of the 12 gubernatorial races that year, giving them only the control of 5 governorships in 31 states. The Whig Pary had suffered what its only newspapers considered a Waterloo defeat ‘that had left the Whig banner in the dust.”

Democrats believed the election proved that the policies of the Whigs had been repudiated. Daniel Webster passed away a week before the election when the signs of the electoral landslide were becoming clear: “The Whig party,” he said not long before his passing, “as a National party, will exist only in history.”

At the end of 1852, it seemed that Franklin Pierce had a mandate for unity and that the question over slavery might not have political power behind it at all. The tenuous peace between the North and South, between union and disunion, seemed to be preserved.

In the next article I will deal with how Stephen Douglas would help shatter that peace, how the political situation in America transformed in the aftermath and how Massachusetts and South Carolina played their roles on either side.