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| This article first appeared in issue twelve of Buttons and Ballots, in September 1997. |
By the election season of 1992 ( which seemed to last forever,) the United States seemed to be peeking over the top of a tall hill to glimpse its fortune. Behind the nation lay the trials of the Cold War and the triumph of Desert Storm. Ahead lay the uncertain road of economic transformation and budgetary reform. The candidates, George Bush and Bill Clinton, ran campaigns that lacked issues, and seemed to generate little enthusiasm. Both candidates counted on the more extreme ends of their parties to support their candidacies, while their campaigns focused on the center of the American electorate. In the end, the choice for many Americans seemed to boil down to a choice between personalities and generations. Bush, a World War II hero of strong character, and a veteran of long service to his country in many capacities was pitted against Clinton, a respected governor of the Baby Boom generation, with at least a hint of tarnished integrity. In the end, voters passed the torch of leadership from John Kennedy's generation, to the next, a choice that was reaffirmed in the 1996 election.
The America of 1852 very much resembled the America of 1992. It was a time when the nation stood at important economic and political crossroads. Two years earlier the nation passed a great crisis over slavery. The five separate bills that formed the Compromise of 1850 brought a temporary respite from the national debate over our "peculiar institution." However, political compromise did not lessen the whirlwind of the Industrial Revolution. Textile mills and factories dotted the pastoral, riverside communities of the Northeast. Increasingly, the flood of immigrants from Ireland and Germany joined the industrial labor force. American inventions such as McCormick's reaper, Deere's steel plow, and Whitney's cotton gin transformed agriculture from subsistence to profitable enterprise. The rest of the country was land mad:
The turbid political and economic waters were accompanied by vast changes in transportation and communication that sewed the nation's parts together, and projected it on to the world economic stage. The canal and road-building of the first forty years of the 19th century gave way to the development of railroads and the telegraph. Manufactures, foodstuffs, and cotton were quickly moved from the American interior to ports on the Atlantic, where they were shipped to markets in Europe and Asia.
The nation's two most important political parties were also subjected to the strain of change. Andrew Jackson's party, the Democrats, lost in 1840 and 1848. In 1848 the party was beaten by Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War, and Whig nominee for president. The Democratic candidate, Senator Lewis Cass, a red-wigged jowly old pol from Michigan alienated many within his own party. (Horace Greeley called him "that pot-bellied, mutton-headed cucumber Cass.") Both parties suffered defections to the Free Soil Party.
By 1851 potential Democratic candidates were vying for their party's nomination. James Buchanan, William Marcy, and the venerable Cass each represented the interests of different sections of the country. Another contender, Stephen Douglas, represented the Young America movement which advocated a system of internal improvements and an aggressive foreign policy. Andrew Johnson, however, thought Douglas a shameless opportunist who if elected would "disembowel the treasury, disgrace the country and damn the party to all eternity that brought (him) into power." To win the election, the Democrats needed to nominate a candidate that could be supported by all elements of the party, or a repeat of 1848 was certain. The search began for a little-known party regular as President Polk was in 1844. The quest for a dark horse was on.
On June 1-4, the Democratic Party met in Baltimore to nominate a their candidate for president. Balloting began on the third day, with 197 of the 288 (two-thirds) approved voting delegates required to nominate. Ballot after ballot was cast, with Cass, Marcy, Buchanan and Douglas each showing a measure of strength, but none with enough to gain the required two-thirds. As the futility progressed, journalist Edmund Burke promoted the virtues of New Hampshire congressman Franklin Pierce. As deadlock continued it became more and more evident that the front-runners could not unify the party and on the forty-ninth ballot Franklin Pierce was chosen by 282 of the delegates.
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In 1852 Pierce was forty-eight years of age. The Hillsborough, New Hampshire lawyer made his reputation as a leader of his party in his home state. In 1832 he was elected to the first of two terms to the U.S. House of Representatives, before moving on to the Senate. His work in Congress showed him a total party loyalist. Pierce supported the gag rule and territorial expansion, while opposing internal improvements. Pierce went to Mexico as a Brigadier-General of volunteers. His service there was earnest, if not distinguished. Franklin Pierce made a dashing candidate, neat and dashingly handsome compared to his Democratic rivals, he seemed every inch the leader. Today we would say that he was weak on the issues—the vision thing—his only interest was the success of the party. Pierce avoided taking positions which would divide the Democrats. If Pierce had a weakness it was rumor of an alcoholic past, which the candidate seemed to have overcome.
Three weeks after Pierce's nomination, the Whigs met in the same city. With President Taylor's sudden death, the presidency passed to Millard Fillmore, a loyal Whig, who fulfilled his term by signing the bills included in the Compromise of 1850, measures which his predecessor opposed. Fillmore, however, was not even the leader of his party. That honor belonged to Henry Clay, Whig nonpareil, five times an unsuccessful candidate for president. By 1852 Clay, and long-time rival Daniel Webster were both in bad health and unlikely candidates for the office that eluded them so many times. The President went into the convention with General Winfield Scott as his chief rival. Southern Whigs were suspicious of Scott's commitment to the various measures of the Compromise of 1850, which was incorporated into the Whig platform. They believed he was the tool of abolitionist, William Seward. After one ballot Fillmore received 133 votes, Scott 131, and the venerable Webster 29, with a simple majority required for nomination. Fillmore so deeply opposed Scott that he offered to swing Webster his support if his forces could find an additional 41 votes needed for the majority. On the fifty-third ballot, Scott was able to reassure enough of the Southern delegates to end the contest. A few days after Scott's nomination, Henry Clay the architect of his party, and in many ways his country's savior, was dead.
Winfield Scott, a Virginian, was sixty-six years old. Trained as a lawyer, Scott left that profession to make a name for himself in the military. Scott's performance in the War of 1812 was one of the few American bright spots during that conflict. He was among those who replaced the Revolutionary War generation and set about professionalizing the army. He ended flogging and other cruel punishments. He mediated the border dispute with Canada in 1838. When war broke out with Mexico in 1846, Winfield Scott was General-in-Chief of the U.S. Army. Scott was a towering physical figure at six feet four inches, accompanied by substantial girth. He was a vain man who adopted the most ornate military dress and maintained an arrogance and pomposity. A Whig, with unconcealed political aspirations, he immediately conflicted with shrewd Democratic President James K. Polk. As a reminder to the general of who was boss, Polk kept Scott in Washington, leaving Zachary Taylor to reap the early glories of war. Despite going on to lead a brilliant campaign in the valley of Mexico that caused the Duke of Wellington to state that Scott was the greatest living soldier, the Whigs fixed their fortunes on Taylor which paid off. Cynically seeking to duplicate the success of nominating a successful soldier, the Whigs put forward the "Conqueror of Mexico" to follow up Old Rough and Ready's victory in 1848.
Campaigning in the 1850's, however, took on a totally different style than we are used to seeing. Candidates didn't speak on their own behalf, and allowed others to do so in newspapers and campaign biographies. No less a literary figure than Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote one of three Pierce biographies. Newspapers, often the organs of the respective political parties, christened Pierce "Young Hickory of the Granite Hills," to demonstrate his lineage from Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party. Lacking issues to provide real debate, the campaign rapidly dissolved into nasty, malicious mud-slinging. Pierce was attacked on his mediocre war record, "the hero of many a well-fought battle." The Whigs claimed that Pierce was anti-Catholic, an abolitionist, and one who did nothing in Congress. Democrats asserted that Scott was anti-Catholic, hostile to foreigners, pompous and argumentative (the latter not without truth.) They derisively called him "Old Fuss and Feathers." Both parties remained devoted to a campaign about nothing that would offend none of the electorate.
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Pierce had the good sense to stay above the character assassination and remained quiet. Scott scheduled a tour, allegedly to visit military hospitals. Unfortunately the wounded included his campaign, when to answer his critics he transparently extolled a "rich Irish brogue," and "a sweet German accent." That wonderful observer of events, George Templeton Strong, wrote in his diary:
In the end Scott could not hold on to elements of his own party. Southern Whigs split from the party, suspecting him of Free-Soil sentiments. Anti-slavery adherents questioned the Whigs' platform which compromised the slavery question and bolted. The Democrats' factions remained with their party. The handwriting was on the wall.
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The campaign became one of the dullest on record. As the voting approached observers recorded that there was little activity to suggest a presidential election was nigh. In fact the big news of the fall seemed to be the announcement on October 26th, that Daniel Webster was dead. When the nation went to the polls 1,601,474 voted for Pierce to 1,386,578 for Scott. It was an electoral landslide, 254 to 42. The Whig party died with Clay and Webster. General Scott's political career was over, though he would retain his place as the pre-eminent soldier of the Republic into the Civil War.
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President Pierce devoted his administration to party loyalty at all costs. He was quite unprepared to deal with the national crisis provoked by Stephen Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Act and the re-emergence of the national bloodletting over slavery. Support for Pierce's Democrats was eroded by the emergence of a nativist backlash against immigration. The formation of the Know-Nothing Party, and the phoenix of the Republican Party, rising from the ashes of the Whigs represented further challenges to a successful Pierce re-election. Pierce was unable to control the forces that rent his party or his country, and in 1856 the Democrats chose James Buchanan, now really old, to replace Young Hickory of the Granite Hills. Buchanan was no more prepared to confront the series of crises that preceded Lincoln's election in 1860 and the great national tragedy that ensued. In dodging the important issues that faced the nation Pierce and his successor only insured that the Democratic party would be out of power for the next fifty years.
For Further Reading: This election does not seem to have attracted a wealth of attention from historians of the ante-bellum era. However an interesting recent account occurs in the Larry Gara's The Presidency of Franklin Pierce (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.) Page Smith provides an interesting and humorous account of this slow-moving affair in his People's History of the United States, The Nation Comes of Age: A People's History of the Ante-Bellum Years, (New York: McGraw-Hill Books, 1981.)