During the late 1840s, the growing dispute over the future status of slavery in new states and territories continued to erode the strength of the Union. To prevent further decay, Congress, under the leadership of the Great Compromiser, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, and the Little Giant, Stephen Douglas of Illinois (who served an important role in assuming the reins of leadership toward the end of the process due to Clay’s failing health), promulgated a sequence of five bills that constituted the Compromise of 1850. Clay, in response to antislavery legislation proposed before the House of Representatives by Congressman James Tallmadge Jr. of New York, had been an instrumental actor in forging the Missouri Compromise of 1820, under which slavery was prohibited in the territories of the Louisiana Purchase above the latitude demarcation of 36°30′ N and thereby left alone below the line, with the exception of the state of Missouri (with a southern border defined at 36°30′ N), admitted as a slave state in conjunction with the admission of Maine as a free state. At this compromise, the Union was balanced between twelve free states and twelve slave states, and the future admission of states followed this balancing rule. Arkansas (slave) and Michigan (free) were admitted in 1836 and 1837, respectively, followed in 1845 by two slave states, Florida and Texas (the annexation of Texas precipitating the war with Mexico and the consequent Mexican Cession), and two free states, Iowa and Wisconsin, in 1846 and 1848. Thus the Missouri Compromise successfully choreographed the equilibrium sought by Clay in 1820, restricting slavery to the South without weakening the influence of southern states compared to the North, a balance that was particularly important to the composition and actions of the U.S. Senate.
However, as the Campaigns of 1844 and 1848 illustrate, with the annexation of Texas and the subsequent Mexican Cession, debates over the expansion of slavery were renewed, intensified, and sectionally polarized. Both Southern and Northern politicians saw in the new territories ample opportunity to strengthen their respective positions, and abolitionists and pro-slavery apologists—including the radicalized Fire Eaters, a militant but vocal minority of Southern pro-slavery extremists who were already calling for secession as early as 1850—grew increasingly more active. Abolitionist activists demanding immediate and unconditional abolition, such as William Lloyd Garrison, were more than happy to let the slaveholding states go if it meant a Union rid of the curse of slavery. Thus by the late 1840s, division and cross-sectional distrust were intensifying.
Under the new compromise, Congress agreed, by a vote of 150 to 56, to admit California as a free state and end the slave trade, but not slavery itself, in the District of Columbia. In return, Congress enacted legislation requiring citizens of free states to return escaped slaves to their Southern masters. Additionally, Texas forfeited land claims in the far West (in territory that is now included in eastern New Mexico, central and southeastern Colorado, and portions of Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Kansas) and agreed to its current borders; in return, the state of Texas received monies to pay off the debt it had accrued during its brief period of political independence. Finally, and more controversially, the compromise left it up to the citizens of the new territories (i.e., the New Mexico Territory and the Utah Territory) to resolve for themselves the free state/slave state issue (under the principle of “popular sovereignty”). The compromise temporarily defused the situation, allowing more moderate voices to tame secessionist sentiments. But animosities lingered, and tensions, while somewhat mollified, nonetheless continued to stew just below the surface.
Political allegiances were shifting. In the South, supporters of the compromise crossed party lines to establish the “Union” coalition, while opponents from both parties converged around “States’ Rights” candidates. In the North, the Free Soil Party remained an alternative home for opponents of slavery and, in particular, a refuge for disenchanted Whigs. By and large, the Free Soil Party displayed some influence in the North, most notably in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York; but for the most part, they were unable to build on the promise of the previous campaign, and thus their influence on the national stage remained marginal. Most Northerners seemed less willing to abandon their main party allegiances, and the efforts of the more fully committed abolitionists were undertaken well beyond the institutional parties. Nonetheless, the Whig Party was divided over slavery, with one faction, led by New York senator and former governor William Seward (the “Seward Whigs” or “free soil” Whigs—not to be confused with the independent Free Soil Party) and newspaperman Thurlow Weed, also of New York (a former anti-Mason who also had some political experience), becoming more influential in determining the course of the party’s presidential ambitions. Seward and Weed were less interested in Clay’s vision of the “American System,” which had defined the Whig Party since its inception, and more interested in promoting a “free soil” agenda within the Whig organization. In this way, the Whig Party might accomplish more effectively what the smaller and more issue-confined Free Soil Party was unable to do given its status as a minor party.
It was within this potentially volatile context that the presidential campaign of 1852 commenced. The incumbent, President Millard Fillmore, who was elected as vice president in 1848 and had assumed office upon the death of President Zachary Taylor (now, after Virginia’s John Tyler, the second vice president to ascend to the presidency), stood as the logical candidate for nomination for a second, full term; but his level of commitment to a second, full term was low and marked by the kind of indifference characteristic of candidate Taylor in 1848. There were supporters for a Fillmore candidacy in 1852—indeed, they had persuaded him not to withdraw his name upon hearing the news that his secretary of state, Daniel Webster, had announced his intention to run—but they were counterbalanced by the Seward Whigs, whose leader disliked Fillmore and tilted against the incumbent’s nomination. This would have finished Fillmore had it not been for an endorsement from the party’s eminent statesman, Clay. His health growing progressively worse, the venerable senator threw his full support behind the president. With the Great Compromiser leading one faction and the “free soil” Whigs coalescing around Seward’s animosity toward Fillmore, the Whig Party began to splinter and drift apart.
As the Whig convention convened in Baltimore in June 1852, three serious candidates were under consideration: Fillmore, Webster, and General Winfield Scott. Seward and his allies backed Scott owing to his antislavery sentiments, and Southern “Union” Whigs preferred Fillmore, at least initially. Webster, in spite of his many talents, was the weakest of the three leading candidates. He was, however, still regarded as a viable alternative—the only viable alternative—candidate for the two leading factions behind Fillmore and Scott, and this fact kept his name in the pool. At one point during the convention balloting, Fillmore supporters offered to back Webster against Scott if Webster could bring at least 41 more votes to the table. Webster was unable to muster more than 32 on any given ballot, and thus the offered votes, and the nomination, remained out of reach. Fillmore managed 133 votes on the first ballot but was short of the 146 needed to gain the nomination. Scott was close with 131, Webster’s total a meager 29 by comparison. Most of Fillmore’s support in the initial balloting was from the South, with only 18 votes cast for him from Northern delegates. So began a seemingly endless sequence of ballots far exceeding even the deadlocked Democratic convention of 1844, with Fillmore and Scott, the two front-runners, unable to reach the needed majority through a tedious 52 ballots. Finally, Scott managed 159 votes on the 53rd ballot to 112 for President Fillmore and 21 for Webster. Fillmore’s strength in the South was sustained, where he continued to dominate, winning all but 17 southern delegates; Scott, by contrast, won all but 11 delegates from states north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The secretary of the navy, William A. Graham of North Carolina (both a former governor and a former senator from the Tar Heel State), was unanimously nominated for vice president on the first ballot.
Rumors were floated about that Scott’s victory was finally secured due to a secret “bargain” with Southern voters in which Scott—contradicting his antislavery attitudes—finally agreed to a party platform demanding strict enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law; but while somewhat plausible given the frustrations of the convention, evidence for a prior bargain is thin. Scott did, however, publicly endorse the platform in its entirety once it was in place, a fact that alienated the antislavery wing of the Whig Party. Scott was in a bind: on the one hand, the antislavery faction that had initially been attracted to him now harbored second thoughts, given his recent embrace of a platform that compromised with pro-slavery elements; and on the other hand, the Southern wing of the party was suspicious that Scott was a vassal of Seward and the “free soil” Whigs. But in reality, many of the “free soil” Whigs were through with Scott after his unqualified endorsement of the platform, and they bolted to the Free Soil Party in support of its nominee, Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire, and his running mate, Indiana congressman George Washington Julian. For his part, President Fillmore, after having been rejected by his own party, nonetheless encouraged all Whigs to now rally behind their new nominee, General Scott. Webster, however, was less cooperative, suggesting to some of his close supporters that they might prefer to vote for the Democratic candidate. As events would have it, Webster himself would not live to see the outcome of the general campaign, as he would pass away just days before the general election, having suffered a mortal head injury, the result of a fall from his horse.
The Democratic Party faced similar divisions. Union Democrats and states’ rights Democrats competed for allegiance in the South, with a “free soil” faction, consisting of New York Barnburners and antislavery elements in New England and Ohio, emerging among Democrats in the North. Notably, these “free soil” Democrats included former president Martin Van Buren of New York and Pennsylvania’s David Wilmot, author of the controversial Wilmot Proviso. Hunker Democrats (prominent in New York) continued to avoid the slavery problem and focused instead on what had now become less controversial issues, namely banks and internal improvements; although some members of the Hunker faction, notably New York’s William L. Marcy (former senator and governor as well as secretary of war under President Polk), did seek reconciliation with antislavery Barnburners. Thus the party needed a candidate that would appeal to an increasingly fragmented and divisive rank and file. Initially, the party’s nominee from the previous election, General Lewis Cass, appeared to be the best solution. As one of Michigan’s more prominent politicians, his true base was in the Midwest; but Hunkers and Southern Unionists also supported him, which provided him with a disciplined base but provoked resistance from Barnburners, Southern states’ rights Democrats, and other, less conservatively minded factions. However, Cass was seventy years old and not as active in pursuit of the nomination as his followers were on his behalf; thus his early advantage as front-runner proved evanescent. Even in the West, his candidacy was vulnerable, for a younger and more dynamic person, the promising Stephen Douglas, was on the ascent in the Midwest and rapidly gaining a national reputation. Some Cass supporters looked elsewhere and found a promising alternative in Marcy, who had gained respect from within the Barnburners in spite of his Hunker associations.
More significantly, Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan, who had previously been under consideration at the party’s conventions in 1844 and 1848, was now in his best position yet to finally make a serious play for the nomination. A conservative Democrat like Cass, he was equally experienced in public life and perhaps, at least at this time in their respective careers, even better connected. His support of the Compromise of 1850 and his criticism of the Wilmot Proviso made him appealing in the South but won him enemies closer to his home base. His following was more numerous than his critics, but the latter were vocal and strident in their enmity toward him. Hence Buchanan, while credentialed and connected, was not at the time the obvious solution. Joining the contest was another veteran of previous attempts to win the Democratic nomination, New Hampshire’s Levi Woodbury. Woodbury was neutral on the issue of slavery and thus would not arouse any distrust from the more polarized cohorts, and he seemed to many at the time a less divisive figure than either Cass or Buchanan. In 1851, a year out from the general election, Woodbury seemed to be in the best position; however, he passed away in September 1851, leaving the field to Cass, Buchanan, and Marcy, whose popularity began to eclipse Cass’s as the New Year approached. A much younger and considerably more energetic Douglas began to draw more serious attention in the West, but his initial appeal was damaged by his aggressive personality, controversial ownership of a number of slaves who came to him through marriage (weakening his appeal in the North), and his youth. At age thirty-eight, he lacked the air of experience that was wanted in a president, particularly given the gravity of the issues at hand. As youthful as he was, Douglas was already a force in the party, but he was not yet ready for the national stage.
Additionally, Samuel Houston, formerly a president of the Republic of Texas and at that time senator from the state of Texas, began to draw interest as a potential national candidate in the mold of Jackson, Harrison, and Taylor. In the latter weeks of 1851, some Democratic leaders found him an appealing alternative to Cass (for whom he had campaigned in 1848), with Andrew Johnson of Tennessee even going so far as to confidently remark that Houston was the emerging front-runner. Houston appeared to be an active candidate, as he had become a popular speaker at public events in the North and had even been inducted into the Tammany Society in New York. And yet, in spite of his high visibility as a popular and busy orator bearing an interesting personal biography, Houston did little to formally promote his candidacy, and interest from the party establishment soon declined. Moreover, like Douglas, he drew some animosity from certain quarters, in spite of his evident qualities. Even though Texas was considered a southern state, his support in the South was diluted by those who regarded him to be more of a nationalist than a sectionalist. It became clear by early 1852 that Houston would not draw the cross-sectional support he would need to carry forward Jackson’s legacy. With Woodbury’s untimely demise and no single candidate captivating the party on the national level, the Democrats were in flux.
Woodbury had been the favored son of New England, and many among the political leadership in that region, eager to see another New Englander in the White House (John Adams and John Quincy Adams having been at that point the only two from that part of the country), sought a replacement. They turned to Franklin Pierce, the forty-seven-year-old former senator from New Hampshire who had served as a colonel and brigadier general in the Mexican-American War, suffering a leg wound at the Battle of Contreras. Because of Pierce’s comparative youth, he was initially considered as a candidate for the vice presidency; but as the weeks progressed and a strong front-runner for the top of the ticket failed to materialize, Pierce came into view as a possible contender for the presidency. Pierce himself declined consideration, but he quietly kept his name available to the delegates if the convention needed him as a last resort.
From its very commencement, the convention was divided and deadlocked, and the stage was arranged for a repeat of 1844—the emergence of a dark horse. Cass led on the first eight ballots, at one with as many as 119 votes, followed by Buchanan peaking at 95, Webster winning as much as 34, Marcy holding just over two dozen, and Houston and Joseph Lane of Oregon (former general and acting governor) each winning a handful of votes. On the tenth ballot, Cass began to noticeably decline while Webster rose to gain, at one point, as much as 80 votes. Buchanan was making the most progress, boosting his numbers to 104 by the twenty-second ballot, but it was still far below the 197 needed to win the two-thirds required majority. That was Buchanan’s high mark; Douglas continued to charge forward as Buchanan now faded. At one point, Douglas won 92 votes; this provoked alarm among his enemies, who turned back to Cass, restoring him to the front-runner position with 123 votes, a turn of events that now raised the hackles of Cass’s enemies. The convention began to experience wild swings in voting, some votes being cast in loyal support of a candidate, others simply to oppose a candidate they disliked. At one point, Marcy’s support shot upward, and he found himself taking the lead with 97 votes on the forty-fifth ballot, increasing to 98 two ballots later and holding a slim lead for four ballots.
With no end in sight, Pierce’s supporters began the drumbeat for their man. His name was first offered on the thirty-fifth ballot, immediately winning 15 votes, but he did not gather as much support as he had hoped, holding steady at 29 votes from the thirty-seventh ballot forward. But on the forty-sixth ballot, more delegates began to turn their interest toward him, so that by the forty-eighth ballot, he had gained solid support not only in his native New England, but also in Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, and even Pennsylvania, cracking into Buchanan’s home delegation. Marcy still led after the forty-eighth with 89 votes, Cass having slipped back to 72 and Pierce rising to 55. North Carolina and Georgia fell in behind Pierce on the forty-ninth ballot, thus demonstrating Pierce’s appeal deeper into the South. North Carolina’s delegate, James C. Dobbin, then stepped forward to deliver an impassioned and persuasive speech on Pierce’s behalf, a moment that became a turning point for the Pierce effort. Delegations were thrown into confusion, previous allegiances were dissolved, and with New York’s declaration for Pierce, the remainder of the state delegations mounted the bandwagon. All support for Marcy vanished, and delegates behind Buchanan abandoned their candidate. Announcing the results of the forty-ninth ballot, convention chair John Wesley Davis reported, “Cass 2, Douglas 2, [William O.] Butler 1, Houston 1, Franklin Pierce (God bless him) 282 votes.” In just two ballots, the convention selected Alabama senator William Rufus King for the second spot on the ticket, following the long-established custom of providing the ticket sectional balance.
The more ideologically fixed wings of the Democratic Party, utterly dissatisfied, formally split from the Democratic Party, the states’ rights wing forming the Southern Rights Party, which nominated Georgia’s George M. Troup for president and John A. Quitman for vice president. The Union Democrats, unaware of the fate that awaited him, nominated Webster along with Charles Jenkins of Georgia. In the end, these factions had little effect on the election itself, but their withdrawal drew attention from disaffected party members seeking alternatives and served as a forewarning of further, still deeper divisions soon to come.
After two long and politically overheated conventions, the general campaign was less dramatic but not without its curious moments. Even though Pierce played a prominent role in the Mexican-American War, he was far less widely known than Scott, a disadvantage that the Pierce campaign tried hard to correct by engaging Nathaniel Hawthorne, a friend of Pierce from his college days, to write a campaign biography for the Democratic candidate. Scott’s name was better known, and his campaign was less likely to seek out this avenue, perhaps to his detriment. The two campaigns also extensively utilized the press, and partisan papers devoted considerable ink to articles and editorials detailing their candidates’ qualities and the platforms they were running on. The Democrats assembled local clubs, generally known as “Granite Clubs” (after “Granite State,” the nickname for Pierce’s home state of New Hampshire), to organize events and promote their candidate. The Hickory Pole, made famous by the legendary Andrew Jackson campaigns of the 1820s and 1830s in celebration of Old Hickory, were trotted out and posted in honor of “the Young Hickory of Granite Hills,” General Pierce. “Young Hickory” was also a nickname previously associated with President Polk; thus the Hickory Pole symbolized the heroic lineage from Jackson through Polk and now to Pierce, implying that Pierce and Jackson were war heroes cut from the same bolt. To tighten the connection to Polk, the pugnacious slogan “We Polked ’em in ’44, we’ll Pierce ’em in ’52” was circulated with considerable bravado. Mass meetings were held, notably in New York (one such meeting sponsored by Tammany Hall), Pennsylvania, and Hillsborough, New Hampshire, the birthplace of Pierce and the site of an enormous barbecue thrown to promote the cause of Pierce and the party. At the Tammany Hall event, both Douglas and Cass, the latter particularly impassioned, delivered speeches to promote Pierce and denounce “whiggism.”
Both campaigns resorted to the obligatory slurs. Pierce was accused of cowardice for having fainted at one point during pitched combat in the war, and he was often mocked by Whigs as being the “Fainting General”; Democrats defended Pierce by informing the public that the wound that he had suffered at Contreras caused so much pain that he passed out during a subsequent battle. As a counterattack, the Democrats dusted off the “Old Fuss and Feathers” sobriquet aimed at Scott during his unsuccessful 1844 campaign for the nomination, an insult that depicted Scott as a vainglorious, conceited, self-trumpeting, parading, and arrogant fop, and one that held some credibility among friends and foes alike. One editorial referred to Scott as the general with a “breastplate on his rear,” an obvious slur against his virtues as a soldier. Whig supporters of Scott countered with a slogan, reminiscent of George Washington, honoring Scott as a candidate: “First in War, First in Peace.” The Whigs further accused Pierce of being virtually inactive while in Congress, in the pocket of foreign interests, and anti-Catholic, the latter charge quite contrary to his record. Democrats returned the mud, accusing Scott of anti-Catholicism as well; they mocked his inadequacies as a speaker, labeled him an inept leader, and warned voters of his prickly personality. Buchanan, stumping in behalf of Pierce at a large Democratic rally in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, vigorously stressed Scott’s disagreeable, conflictive personality. “General Scott,” Buchanan reported, “has quarreled with General Wilkinson—he has quarreled with General Gaines—has quarreled with General Jackson—he has quarreled with DeWitt Clinton—he has quarreled with the administration of John Quincy Adams—he has quarreled with the people of Florida to such a degree that General Jackson was obliged to reluctantly recall him from the command of the army in the Seminole War—has quarreled with General Worth . . . he has quarreled with General Pillow—he has quarreled with the gallant and lamented Duncan—and unless reports speak falsely, he has quarreled with General Taylor.” The operative word here is “quarrel,” attempting to cause voters to doubt Scott’s ability to effectively govern, let alone inspire, a nation that needed a leader capable of overcoming divisions, not adding to them.
Given the realities of Scott’s unfortunate pomposity and argumentative demeanor, Whigs could not muster a credible defense, but they returned volley in another way, gladly taking advantage of old rumors about Pierce’s heavy drinking, thus retorting that Pierce was indeed a hero after all, a “hero of many a well-fought bottle.” It is a sad fact that such personal attacks are lobbed in most campaigns; in this one, they served not only as a dig against one’s opponent, but also as an unsubtle way to evade the critical issues of the day, so urgent and volatile that one wrong suggestion from a candidate or campaign surrogate could wreck a candidate’s chances overnight.
Additionally, both campaigns were sensitive to the growing importance of immigrant groups as a potentially decisive factor within the electorate, especially if the election would be close. Hence both Democrats and Whigs sought to win what today would be called the “immigrant vote.” New citizens originally from Sweden, Ireland, and Germany, among others, were courted. Platforms and candidate biographies were written in Swedish and German, and immigrant populations were targeted for the stump. Not surprisingly, both parties took the low road in this regard, accusing the opposition of anti-immigrant prejudices, an accusation that actually hurt General Scott, as there was some evidence, at least through association, that he had at one time harbored nativist attitudes. This focus on immigrants helps to explain the mutual accusations of anti-Catholicism, for many new immigrants were Catholic, particularly in the Irish immigrant community, but also among some Germans (some of whom were Catholics, some Protestant).
In the nineteenth century, the actual candidates for president typically did not actively campaign. The usual practice was to leave the canvassing and oration to surrogates or local champions. In 1852, Pierce, although reputed to have been an effective speaker, followed this precedent, only making the customary rare appearance. Scott, on the other hand, broke from this practice, as it became evident to him that the Whig campaign might be in trouble, and he was thus needed to play a more active part. To address potential trouble among immigrant audiences, he sought them out and did his best to flatter them, hoping to allay their concerns about his nativist past. But Scott’s style of speaking, irascibility, and public awkwardness militated against his efforts to remake his image. Meanwhile, coolly, Pierce bided his time and allowed his campaigners and biographers—Hawthorne among them—to burnish his image for him.
In November, the degree to which the Whigs had been weakened by intraparty fragmentation and defection and the clumsily arrogant efforts of their candidate became fully known. Pierce, who just months before was a comparative unknown, defeated Scott with ease. Pierce won just over 1,606,000 popular votes to Scott’s total of approximately 1,387,000, with Hale, the Free Soil candidate, taking around 156,000, or just under 5 percent (less than half of the percentage of the popular vote won by former president Van Buren for the Free Soilers in 1844), with approximately 11,500 casting votes for splinter candidates (Webster, who had passed away two weeks before the election, still received around 5,000 votes from Georgia Whigs who were called “finality men” for their belief that the Compromise of 1850 was the final word on slavery, such was the enthusiasm in the fringes of the Whig Party for any candidate other than Scott). These figures gave Pierce a significant popular victory, just under 51 percent to Scott’s 44 percent (rounded up), a seven-percentage-point gap between the two. Interestingly, Pierce would be the last Democrat to win over 50 percent of the popular vote and the White House until Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932. (Samuel Tilden won a popular majority in 1876 but not the election.) As is usually the case, the real landslide was in the Electoral College, where Pierce, winning all but four states, won 254 to 42 (or 85% to 15%). Scott took only Kentucky, Tennessee, Vermont, and Massachusetts (where Hale experienced his biggest showing, earning 22%). Pierce’s victory reestablished Democratic supremacy throughout the government and exposed the weakness of the waning Whigs. And the Whig Party’s demise was indeed imminent, as this would be the last election in which the Whigs would participate as a major party. Replacing the Whigs, a new party would form as the crisis over slavery magnified even further, sharply reconfiguring the political landscape and, as a result of the oncoming national strife, dramatically ascending to dominate presidential politics in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
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