Massachusetts, South Carolina & The Sectional Crisis, Interlude 2: The 1856 Election

 

 

Under normal circumstances President Pierce should have been allowed to run for reelection. The era he was part of were the opposite of normal circumstances. Considering his general ineptitude of which the events in Kansas had been the final straw for many, it became clear to both the Southern and Northern wings of the Democratic party that if he were to be renominated the Democrats would lose the White House.

Stephen Douglas, whose ambitions for the White House had played an indirect role in so much of the chaos of the last four years, thought that he had an opening. He intended to operate quietly and unobtrusively, hoping to bridge the gap between those who had favored the Kansas-Nebraska legislation and those who had opposed it. Considering how closely identified he was with it; it wasn’t going to be easy to earn the two-thirds majority to earn the nomination.

The third major contender for the nomination wasn’t even in America before the Convention started, having spent the Pierce administration as ambassador to Great Britain. While this should have been an impediment, it was also one of his biggest strengths – because he had been out of the United States during the entire chaos that had followed, he couldn’t bare the stain of it that most Democrats did.

James Buchanan’s resume certainly had the makings of Presidential timber at first glance. He had represented Lancaster, Pennsylvania for ten years in Congress, had been ambassador to Russia, has spent a decade representing Pennsylvania in the Senate, had served as Polk’s Secretary of State, and now as ambassador to Britain. He was considered a powerful intellect by supporters.

Those were his virtues. His flaws were just as clear. A lifelong bachelor, accentuated with a certain effeminacy, Andrew Jackson would hint in the euphemisms at the time that he was a closeted homosexual. He spent years as a close friend and roommate of Senator William King, which stirred whispers in some quarters. (There is still no definitive evidence by historians to answer the question of Buchanan’s sexuality one way or the other.) The bigger problem was that he frequently was inconsistent in his policies, something that Polk would make clear during his tenure as Secretary of State. Polk believe that his behavior was dwelt to his driving ambition to become President himself one day, and as he had been considered a contender ever since 1844 for that role, it was a valid concern.

Now as he considered his options two months before the Democratic convention began, the American political system was in flux. The Whig Party, the second major party in American politics for the past two decades, was essentially dead, so the question was where they would end up voting that November.

Some would certainly coalesce around the new Republican Party which had coalesced around a provocative principle: Congress had every right to outlaw in slavery in the territories and should do so, while leaving in the institution untouched where it existed. Many Republican leaders believed that if confined to its southern base, slavery would eventually die out, a concept that former anti-slavery Whigs like  Charles Francis Adams, found enticing enough to get back into politics and would serve as a delegate to the Republican Convention.

Certain southern and conservative Northern Whigs were gravitating to the Know-Nothing Party, which had been a force in Massachusetts just two years earlier. The party had already held a nominating convention in Philadelphia that February to nominate former President Millard Filmore as its standard bearer. Their goal was to serve as a new unionist party, which was both opposed to Catholic immigration and the agitation of abolitionists.

Meanwhile the Democrats, while theoretically posed to win the Presidency again in 1856, were now facing the same kind of sectional divide that had doomed the Whigs. They had spent much of their existence adjudicating the issue of slavery in  a way to keep the South as part of their base. By 1856, however, northerners were finding this more and more unacceptable and anti-slavery Democrats were beginning to move to the new Republican Party.

In late May large numbers of boats from Kentucky and Ohio towns began arriving in Cincinnati via the Ohio River in preparation for the start of the Democratic convention, scheduled to begin on June 2. For the first time in its history, a delegation from South Carolina was present, against the wishes of diehard secessionists like Barnwell Rhett.

The party platform was decided with relative ease. The Democrats declared that the Kansas-Nebraska Act embodied the ‘only sound and safe solution of the ‘slavery question’. It made clear preserving the union was paramount and that the only way to do so was through popular sovereignty. To make their point clear on the issue the platform stated in all capital letters: “NON-INTERFERENCE BY CONGRESS WITH SLAVERY IN STATE OR TERRITORY, OR IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.”

Then the balloting started: Buchanan narrowly led Pierce on the first ballot with 135 ½ votes to Pierce’s 122 ½. Douglas trailed with 33. Fourteen ballots took place before the day ended: Buchanan finished with 152 1/2 ,  Pierce was next with 75 and Douglas had 63.

When balloted resumed the following morning, the Pierce men broke for Buchanan but Douglas was at 118. Deadlock seemed certain until Douglas’s floor manager produced a letter from the candidate, announcing he was withdrawing from the race in the name of ‘harmony for the party. The convention exploded out of enthusiasm both for the outcome and Douglas’s magnanimity. Buchanan was nominated unanimously on the next ballot. The Democrats then chose John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as his Vice President. Breckinridge was only 35, the youngest man to ever be nominated for (or hold) the Vice Presidency.

Buchanan was clearly very much a Pierce time candidate: a northern man with southern sympathies. The same would not be seen of the Republican convention that met in Philadelphia just two weeks later. While four of the border states – Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky – all sent delegations to the first Republican convention, none of the eleven states further south were present. There was no significant presence in those states and no immediate prospect of having any. However, the convention welcomed delegations from the territories of Kansas, Nebraska and Minnesota with boisterous enthusiasm.

The biggest names in the party were some of the most towering anti-slavery men in the country: Salmon Chase and Joshua Giddings from Ohio, Henry Wilson from Massachusetts, William Seward from New York and David Wilmot of Pennsylvania. The platform was agreed upon in ten minutes. It declared the party to be ‘opposed to the repeal of the Missouri compromise’ and the present administration ‘to the extension of slavery into free territory’ and in favor of Kansas being admitted into the free states. Seward and Chase bowed out of the race early, which left two major contenders. On the first ballot, the party almost unanimously voted for John C. Fremont, currently the Senator from California.

Fremont was a national celebrity as being the ‘Pathfinder’ of the American West, the westward explorer who had crossed the territory and founded the Bear Flag Republic which became California. He was married to Jessie Benton, the daughter of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, a brilliant writer and promoter in her own right. Constrained by the limits of 19^th century society she did everything she could to promote her husband’s legend and then his political cause. During his brief tenure as Senator, he had burnished his identity as a  staunch opponent of slavery, voting for the abolition of the D.C. slave trade and against legislation providing for harsh sentences against those convicted of encouraging or aiding slave escapes. And only 43, he fit in with the dynamism of the Republican Party and stood as a vibrant contrast to the much older men running against him for the Presidency.

Not long after fusion began to form for both major candidates. The North American Party (made up of Northern Know-Nothings) would essentially merge with Fremont and the Republicans. In September what was left of the Whigs gathered in Baltimore to endorse Filmore’s candidacy.

Almost from the start Southerners and many Northern Democrats decried the new fusion Republican party, derisively calling its members ‘black Republicans’. Northern newspapers argued the new Party was a cover for fomenting anti-southern hostility for votes. Southern newspapers called it a purely sectional party.

The campaign was divided on sectional lines: Buchanan vs. Filmore in the South and Buchanan versus Fremont in the North. In 1856 149 electoral votes were required to win the Presidency. The North controlled 176 electoral votes. Theoretically Fremont could win the Presidency with no Southern votes, which was in fact the reality. Buchanan by contrast would have to sweep the South and get all 120 electoral votes. He would also have to pick up any number of free states. Even if he pulled that off any Filmore success in cutting into his total in the South could either ensure his defeat or send the election to the House.

Both parties turned their attention on Pennsylvania, Buchanan’s home state with 27 electoral votes in play. Democrats spent half a million dollars (in 1856 money) on that state with the South playing a heavy presence. Lancaster staged a rally that drew 50,000 persons, including every national Democrat and the sons of both Clay and Webster.

Buchanan himself didn’t campaign (for a candidate to stump for himself was considered unseemly both then and during the 19^th century in general) he privately expressed fears for the nation. All other issues became trifling ‘when compared with the grand and appalling issue of union or disunion’. He feared if Fremont won, disunion would be immediate and inevitable.

Indeed the rhetoric on both sides took that very turn. What’s is little known is how many prominent Republicans and their supporters almost seemed to be hoping for that outcome. House Speaker Banks said he was ‘willing to let the Union slide.’ Seward expressed hopes for events ‘bringing the parties of the country into an aggressive war over slavery. Giddings when further, calling for a ‘servile insurrection’, with the black man waging  ‘a war of extermination against his master.” It wasn’t clear if such talk, which was incendiary and frightening to many Southerners, would drive Northern voters to Buchanan to preserve the Union as a result or if the Democrats abysmal performance in Kansas would drive alienated members to the Republicans.

When the votes were counted, Buchanan emerged the winner with 174 electoral votes to Freemont’s 114 and Fillmore’s 8 (Maryland). Buchanan carried 45 percent of the popular vote to Fremont’s 33 percent and Filmore’s 22 percent. Buchanan had won by carrying every slave state but Maryland, as well as Pennsylvania, Illinois, California, Indiana and New Jersey.

Buchanan’s statement after his victory was both smug and slightly delusional. He told his friends that his central aim as President was to ‘arrest…the agitation of the slavery question in the north and to destroy sectional parties.” This was going to be difficult considering that the Republicans had gotten 1.3 million votes in a single section of the country.

 It would be another full year before the Congressional results were known. The Democrats would gain 51 seats in the House, taking back the majority. The Republicans would double their delegation in Congress to 90 seats while the Know Nothings would lose 14. The Senate was harder to measure. The Democrats would eventually lose 3 seats while the Republicans would gain 7.

But the Republicans had derived a different lesson: their sectional power, well-established now and still growing, might actually be sufficient soon to win the Presidency without a single Southern state. One Pennsylvanian would write Seward to say the Republicans might have lost an election but gained a section of the nation. This represented the intriguing paradox of a ‘victorious defeat.

Some even thought that their win might have been possible had not made a mistake with their choice for Vice President. In the first informal ballot for the race, their had been two major contenders New Jersey Senator William Dayton and a former Illinois Congressman named Abraham Lincoln. Dayton ended up earning the nomination. The hope had been that Dayton’s ties to the mid-Atlantic region and Drayton was a known presence while Lincoln was still basically unknown even in much of Illinois.

The plan failed. Though the Democrats carried New Jersey they would lose Pennsylvania and considering the Republicans had lost Illinois (despite the defeated candidate making 50 speeches up and down his home state for Fremont) some considered that they had made the wrong choice for Vice President.

Lincoln was dealing with his own plans, to challenge Stephen Douglas for the Senate in 1858. By that point both Douglas and the nation would be dealing with a far more fiery crisis.

In the next article I will deal with the first year of the Buchanan administration and how his naïve hopes that the slavery issue would be resolved by the courts was just another stepping stone on the already bloody path to the disunion.