Two days after the Senate rejected the Texas annexation treaty, John Tyler sent a message to the House of Representatives, asking that body to consider whether Texas should enter the union as a state. The House, the president argued, was just as competent to decide the question as the Senate, and though he preferred to act through treaty, that was not the only way Texas could be annexed to the United States. Cave Johnson had made the same argument as far back as May, before the Senate vote. Article IV, Section III of the Constitution empowered Congress—both chambers—to admit new states, by simple majority vote. Tyler also pointed out to lawmakers that Texas was an independent republic, freed from Mexico by its own exertions and “settled mostly by emigrants from the United States, who would bring back with them in the act of reassociation an unconquerable love of freedom and an ardent attachment to our free institutions.”
Along with the message, Tyler sent the House all the documents he had previously handed over to the Whig-controlled Senate, which had been selective in choosing which papers to make public—only those they believed would help them make the anti-annexation case to voters. Now the House made them all public, including the letter in which Andrew Jackson had voiced his support for immediate annexation. This was a public relations coup for Tyler, who knew that Old Hickory’s words still carried great weight.
In one stroke, the president had altered the terms of the debate, kept alive his faltering hopes for reelection, and annoyed the hell out of James K. Polk and his supporters, who hoped to ride the question of Texas annexation to victory in November. But mostly he had, once again, inflamed the wrath of Thomas Hart Benton.
After the Senate rejected the treaty, Benton introduced a bill calling for new negotiations with Texas, to include Mexico, and to set a boundary for Texas, a detail the annexation treaty had neglected to address. South Carolina’s George McDuffie assailed Benton’s legislation and suggested that the Missourian simply didn’t understand the realities of the world.
McDuffie, in a “violent and rancorous” harangue, charged that “the speech of the honorable senator is not less calculated to excite Mexico to make war against the United States, than to excite unfriendly feelings towards us in the government of Great Britain. He has exhausted his full magazine of epithets in portraying the faithless outrage which he alleges this government would perpetrate upon Mexico by the ratification of this treaty.” Echoing Tyler, McDuffie said Benton was missing the point entirely. The United States had every right to annex Texas if Texas chose to be annexed, and Mexico had nothing to say about it. Texas was a republic, its independence certain, earned by the blood of Texans and Americans alike, including a former member of Congress. And everybody knew it, except, apparently, Thomas Hart Benton. “The whole world regard the dominion of Mexico over Texas as irrevocably lost,” McDuffie told the Senate.
McDuffie also defended Tyler’s right to turn to the House. “I am utterly at a loss to conceive what view the senator from Missouri takes of the relations which exist between the President of the United States and the Senate,” McDuffie huffed. “The Senate has adjudged the case, and presented its decision; and upon this the honorable senator conceives himself entitled as representing the power and dignity of the Senate to stand up and say ‘I am sir Oracle; when I open my mouth let no dog bark.’ The President must be silent! The popular branch of the legislature must be silent!”
Benton replied immediately, and in kind, charging McDuffie with fomenting disunion. “The treaty was made, not to get Texas into the Union, but to get the South out of it,” Benton bellowed. He walked over to McDuffie and slammed his fist into the South Carolinian’s desk. Other lawmakers held their breaths, waiting to see if pistols would be drawn—every man in the chamber knew Benton’s history. But McDuffie didn’t flinch and Benton backed away to continue his speech, never missing a beat in his two-hour diatribe as McDuffie sat listening. “Nothing but bodily fear could have withheld the hand of McDuffie from a challenge,” observed John Quincy Adams.
Citing his authority as “the oldest advocate for the recovery of Texas,” Benton accused the “criminal politicians”—Calhoun and Tyler—“who prostituted the question of its recovery to their own base purposes, and delayed its success by degrading and disgracing it…. A western man, and coming from a State more than any other interested in the recovery of this country so unaccountably thrown away by the treaty of 1819, I must be allowed to feel indignant at seeing Atlantic politicians seizing upon it, and making it a sectional question, for the purposes of ambition and disunion.”
On the question of Tyler’s use of military force, Benton was apoplectic. By moving to the defense of Texas before it was part of the union, Benton asserted, Calhoun had in effect “annexed the United States to Texas, instead of annexing Texas to the United States.” Moving troops and ships into place in case of violence and in case the treaty was ratified was “a reversal of the power of the Senate, and a reading backwards of the Constitution,” boomed Benton. “It assumes Texas to be in the Union, and protected by our constitution from invasion or insurrection, like any part of the existing States or Territories; and to remain so till the Senate puts her out by rejecting the treaty!”
For all the thunder, there would be no lightning for the time being. Polk’s supporters feared Benton’s antics might widen the existing seams in the party. Andrew Jackson was ever more convinced his old friend’s brain had been addled by the Princeton explosion. Cave Johnson moaned that “I do not see any good that can arise from it.” Some Southern fire-eaters were threatening to hold a pro-Texas gathering in Nashville, forty-five miles from Polk’s home in Columbia. It was a notion that Polk warned “must not for a moment be entertained.” Pro-annexation resolutions were adopted at meetings in three South Carolina counties, and the word “disunion” was bandied about. But Polk and Johnson, with an assist from Jackson, were able to squelch that idea. Polk, at least, understood how important it was to keep Benton and his allies inside the tent. “It would be worse than madness to make war upon them,” Polk insisted. Instead, he assigned Johnson to organize a national—non-sectional—party gathering for the state capital on August 15, which “passed off admirably” in Polk’s estimation. Others called it a “monster gathering” that was a “glorious time.”
They might have been overly worried, at least so far as the potential for legislative mischief. In Washington, Tyler had launched a new debate on the Texas question just as Congress was preparing to adjourn, ending what Adams called “the first session of the most perverse and worthless Congress that ever disgraced this Confederacy.” Lawmakers would leave town to return to their states and districts for the coming election with no other action being taken on the issue, and the president’s fancy turned to other matters.
John Tyler’s first wife, Letitia Christian Tyler, suffered a stroke in 1838 and never really recovered. She died at age fifty-one on September 10, 1842. By early 1844, the fifty-four-year-old Tyler was courting Julia Gardiner, the daughter of David Gardiner, a prominent landowner and former state legislator in New York. She was thirty years his junior; her own mother was younger than Tyler. She was beautiful and vivacious, and her family could trace its American roots back to 1635, which also probably appealed to the patrician Tyler. When David Gardiner died in the explosion aboard the Princeton, Julia had fainted into the president’s arms. The trauma of the disaster seemed to have cemented their budding relationship, which had begun only a few months after Letitia Tyler’s death.
On June 26, the couple married in a secret ceremony in the Episcopal Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Tyler had insisted on keeping the public in the dark about the wedding. One man who did know about it was Robert Stockton, commander of the Princeton, who had accompanied Tyler on the trip from Washington to New York. Two days later, the Tylers were back in the capital hosting a reception in the White House.
Tyler was the first president to wed while in office. That fact, and the disparate ages of the couple, inspired considerable curiosity among the populace and no shortage of rude commentary about a president who was none too popular to begin with. Among the critics was Jessie Benton Frémont, who noted that Julia’s “dress and demeanor were much commented on by the elders who had seen other Presidents’ wives take their new state more easily.” John Quincy Adams called the couple “the laughing-stock of the city,” and referred to their marriage as a “revolting indecency.”
One of the victims of Tyler’s continuous feuding with Congress was the White House itself. The legislative branch had steadfastly refused to provide sufficient funding for the mansion’s upkeep, with the result that Julia Tyler moved into a new home that was not kept even in a “minimum state of cleanliness.” But the Tylers were a happy couple and seemed immune to the criticism. They left Washington in early July for a month-long beach honeymoon at Hampton Roads, near the president’s James River plantation. When they returned, they resumed the expected social life of a president and first lady, hosting White House soirees and serving as the center of the capital city’s social life. Julia hired a New York Herald correspondent to serve as a public relations person for her parties, “to sound Julia’s praises far and wide,” in the words of her sister. Tyler frowned on such practices, but indulged his new bride in her desire to win favor.
She seemed to be just as smitten. “Papa was the only handsome man (except the President) I have ever seen,” she commented. They were an affectionate couple, so much so that Julia drew rebukes from her mother and sister for too often touching the president while in public. Properly chastened, Julia promised to watch herself. “I very well know every eye is upon me, my dear mother, and I will behave accordingly,” she wrote.
Tyler’s love life was faring better than his political fortunes. While on his honeymoon, Mississippi senator Robert Walker visited, to perform the “most disagreeable duty” of asking Tyler to withdraw from the presidential contest in favor of Polk, so as not to split the pro-expansionist vote and hand the election to Clay. Others were delivering the same message without benefit of a personal audience. Writing in the Richmond Enquirer, Thomas Ritchie all but begged Tyler to get out of the race and thus “render our common victory and triumph certain and complete.” Democrats down the ticket were also growing worried about plans cooked up by Tyler supporters in the crucial states of Pennsylvania and New York to field a full ticket of congressional, state, and local candidates, which could sweep the Democrats from office all across the country.
Tyler knew the impossibility of his situation, but wasn’t going to get out of the way without receiving something in return. Tyler’s forces were, for the most part, nominal Whigs who had become Democrats of convenience because he had found them government jobs. Tyler wanted assurances that his hirelings would be welcomed back into the Democratic fold “as brethren and equals”—in other words, if Polk won, they’d get to keep their jobs. It seemed a small enough request to Walker, who urged Polk to write a private letter to Tyler offering some assurances along these lines. Walker also thought it might be a good idea if Polk could prevail upon Jackson to write a letter saying nice things about Tyler, an idea Jackson—invoking the supposed “corrupt bargain” between Clay and Adams in 1824—summarily rejected. Polk was also reluctant to get personally involved in any kind of deal.
Tyler also wanted the Democratic newspapers to ease up on their criticism of him, arguing that they had been so unrelenting that even were he to withdraw, his friends might not flock to the Democratic banner. On this count Jackson was more obliging. He wrote to his old friend Francis Blair, asking that the Washington Globe go easy on Tyler. The cantankerous Blair had run the newspaper since 1830, when Jackson asked him to move from Kentucky to Washington to edit the Jacksonian house organ, and the editor was not likely to deny any wish to his patron. “Support the cause of Polk and Dallas and let Tyler alone,” Jackson told Blair. So it was done, and other Democratic papers fell into line. Jackson was also willing to write to former allies in the Tyler administration, who could let it be known to the incumbent that Jackson thought it would serve Tyler better in public opinion and history if he exited gracefully.
Jackson was an infinitely more skilled politician than Tyler, who probably knew that he had no broad constituency but, like politicians of all epochs, hated to let go. The Westfield News Letter, a Whig newspaper in western Massachusetts, used Millerism to make the political point that was obvious to all but Tyler: “one delusion worse than Millerism: that of thinking of John Tyler as a great public benefactor.”
Having squeezed all he thought he could out of the Democrats, and realizing the hopelessness of his political position, Tyler prepared to announce his withdrawal. But he did not go quietly. First he wrote to Jackson to let him know that he was taking himself out of the race. Two days later, on August 20, his official withdrawal letter was published in the Madisonian, addressed “To My Friends throughout the Union.” It was plaintive with a touch of resentment, highlighted by regrets about what Tyler termed others’ bitterness toward him and their “most unrelenting spirit of opposition.” He defended his administration’s record and appealed to the Democrats-cum-Whigs to return to their party, protect the currency, increase trade, block the bank, and ensure the success of the expansionist agenda. “Eight years ago we recognized Texas as independent,” he wrote, still beating the annexation drum, “and surely our right to negotiate with her implied no worse faith than in 1827, to negotiate with Mexico for Texas, without consulting Spain.” Tyler could at least take pride in this signal accomplishment: Democrats had adopted Texas as their own; it was now at the center of the political discussion and it would stay there for the remainder of the campaign.
Joseph Smith’s presidential campaign was in full swing by summer. Missionary/campaigners had been sent out to every state, with some of the highest church leaders converging on Boston at the end of June for a state convention that would elect delegates to send to Baltimore in July, the only such state gathering beyond Nauvoo.
As was the case at virtually every stop, the campaigners first held church services. In this instance, the religious sessions ran over the last two days of June, with half the members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in attendance, including Brigham Young. On July 1, they got down to political business. The convention site was the Melodeon, an ornate theater and onetime mechanics institute that was a popular venue for lectures, concerts, and conferences in downtown Boston. Young was selected as presiding officer, and other speakers included Orson Hyde, Orson Pratt, and Lyman Wight. “The convention was addressed with much animation and zeal,” reported Wilford Woodruff, another of the Twelve Apostles in attendance. Local newspapers provided full coverage.
Not all the zeal displayed was on the part of Smith supporters. “A large number of rowdies” crowded the hall, including Abby Folsom, an abolitionist and women’s rights activist already gaining a reputation for disrupting political meetings by insisting on the right of women to speak. And speak she did, interrupting an evening oration by Young. She was soon joined by a young man who began yelling insulting remarks at the church leader, egged on by a number of those seated around him. When several saints attempted to shout them down, the protesters yelled even louder, leading to physical attempts to restore order. When that failed, someone dashed out to fetch the police. Boston’s finest responded quickly, but the mob assaulted the officers as they attempted to establish order and get the troublemakers out of the hall. After considerable struggle and some bloodletting, the galleries were cleared and the convention resumed. “This proves that the voice of the people rules,” Young declared ruefully. “That is, the voice of the rabble.” He had no idea how right he was.
The convention nominated Smith for president and elected two delegates—Heber C. Kimball and S. B. Wallace—to attend the Baltimore convention. But there would be no national convention. Joseph Smith was already dead.
The campaign contingent first read rumors of Smith’s murder on July 9. “Sometimes the Mormons are all killed; sometimes they are half killed, and sometimes the blood is knee deep in Nauvoo,” Young wrote in a letter to Elder Willard Richards, Smith’s secretary back in Nauvoo. “Sometimes old Joe, as they call him is taken by the mob and carried to Missouri, sometimes he is gone to Washington, sometimes he has runaway, given up to the authorities, etc. etc. One might suppose him to be a sectarian God, without body, parts or passions—his center everywhere and his circumference no where.”
The delegates lingered in various cities in New England for another week, hoping that the rumors proved false, until letters arrived confirming the prophet’s death. Young, who had been in Peterborough, New Hampshire, arrived back in Boston on July 17. The next day, the grief-stricken Young, Kimball, Hyde, Pratt, and Woodruff made plans to return to Nauvoo.
Joseph Smith, along with his brother Hyrum, had been murdered by a mob while being held in jail in Carthage, the seat of Hancock County, about a day’s ride from Nauvoo. According to the lawyerly historians of the murder case, the killings were “not a spontaneous, impulsive act by a few personal enemies of the Mormon leaders, but a deliberate political assassination, committed or condoned by some of the leading citizens in Hancock County.”
As had happened in New York, Ohio, and Missouri, religiopolitical violence stalked the Mormons in Illinois. The pot had been boiling almost from the day of the saints’ arrival. But from the moment Smith had escaped Missouri’s attempt at extradition in 1843, according to Illinois governor Thomas Ford, a union of Whigs and Democrats, acting not on religious or even economic grounds but from political motives, “determined upon driving Mormons out of the State; and everything connected with the Mormons became political.”
For Mormon critics, Smith’s creation in March 1844 of a legislative/executive body known as the Council of Fifty simply confirmed what they already suspected: that the prophet was building the governing framework of a theocracy. While Smith—a presidential candidate whose brother was running for the state legislature—was a participant in American democracy and demanded that American institutions protect his people’s rights, in Nauvoo he had been building a base of power that was anything but democratic. The accumulated authority of the head of the church, the mayor of the city, presiding judge of the local court, and commander of the Nauvoo Legion inspired legitimate consternation among the locals. Their response was anything but legitimate.
The mob had many fathers, but its main mouthpiece was Thomas Sharp, anti-Mormon editor of the Warsaw Signal in the town neighboring Nauvoo. Sharp had spent three years agitating against Smith, raising reasonable questions about the reach of Smith’s civil powers but damning his own cause by resorting again and again to calls for violence. By the spring of 1844, Sharp had been joined in an unholy alliance that united anti-Mormon locals and dissenters from within the church who were voicing many of the same concerns about Smith. Their criticisms were not rooted in the same core belief. The locals hated Smith and the Mormons. The dissidents believed not that he was evil, but that he was a fallen prophet, and they hoped to redeem their church from the theocratic polygamists who they believed were destroying it.
They started by demanding that the church-friendly Nauvoo Charter be repealed. In this they had firm allies among the locals, who feared more than anything the growing political power of Smith and his followers. Then two locals tried to have Smith arrested for failing to respond to a civil lawsuit. The Nauvoo court (of which he was chief judge) released him on a writ of habeas corpus. Sharp cried that “Joe Smith is above the law.”
Turning to the county courts, Smith’s foes won an indictment against him for perjury and adultery. Smith wanted the case to be tried immediately. That would not have served the agitators’ purposes, and the case was held over. While Smith was arguing his case at the county courthouse in Carthage, Sharp leveled another not-so-veiled threat: “We would not be surprised to hear of his death by violent means in a short time.”
The final act began on Friday, June 7, when the church dissenters published the first—and, as it turned out, only—issue of the Nauvoo Expositor, a newspaper that included seven stories aimed both at locals and potential dissidents. One essay, designed to inflame non-Mormons, accused Smith of preaching and practicing polygamy. Another piece, with a tone more in sorrow than in anger, “sought a reformation in the church.” A thousand copies were printed and distributed throughout Nauvoo and the surrounding area. The most overtly political article took dead aim at Smith’s presidential candidacy, telling Mormons they were “voting for a man who contends all governments are to be put down and the one established upon its ruins.”
The appearance of the Expositor threw the civil machinery of Nauvoo into action. At a city council meeting the next day, Smith charged that the paper was “calculated to destroy the peace of the city.” He would, he declared in the spirit of Henry II bemoaning that troublesome priest Becket, “rather die tomorrow and have the thing smashed, than live and have it go on.”
Debate resumed on Monday. One councilman suggested a fine for each dishonest article—the dishonesty to be decided by Smith and the council—but Smith was determined to be rid of the troublesome newspaper. At 6:30 PM the council passed an ordinance declaring the Expositor a public nuisance. By eight o’clock, the press that had printed it was smashed to bits by loyal Mormons.
Sharp and other newspaper editors went berserk. Echoing Missouri’s Lillburn Boggs, the Warsaw Signal declared its readiness “to exterminate, utterly exterminate, the wicked and abominable Mormon leaders,” and called for an attack on Nauvoo. Smith was charged with inciting to riot, but again won a writ of habeas corpus from the Nauvoo court when county law enforcement officials came to arrest him.
Smith’s critics saw this as proof of their contention that justice could never be done within the legal system of Nauvoo. So they ramped up their extralegal preparations, raising money to buy guns and ammunition and sending out recruiting notices for armed men to mount an attack on the saintly stronghold. Smith saw this as proof of his contention that his people were threatened by mobocracy, and he declared martial law.
The clear declaration by both sides that they were ready to resort to armed conflict brought the governor into the picture. Thomas Ford had been something of a friend to the saints and, as much as any non-Mormon politician could, he enjoyed the trust of Joseph Smith. Ford told Smith he should surrender himself to civil authorities in Carthage to answer for the destruction of the Expositor press. Smith, citing the inflammatory writing of Sharp and others, responded that his life would be forfeit if he set foot in Carthage. So, instead of turning himself in, Smith, with brother Hyrum in tow, fled the jurisdiction. The brothers crossed the Mississippi River into Iowa. They would present themselves for arrest, Smith wrote to Ford, if he would “disperse the mob, and secure to us our constitutional privileges, that our lives may not be endangered when on trial.”
Fleeing like a thief in the night did not add to the luster of Smith’s reputation, even among the most faithful, and he took to heart the criticism he was hearing secondhand. Just a day after they left, it was Hyrum who told his brother, the prophet, that “we had better go back and die like men.” On June 23 they returned across the river; the next day they traveled to Carthage, “as a lamb to the slaughter.”
They were first held in the same hotel where Governor Ford was staying. But a mob began gathering quickly once word spread that the Smiths were holed up in the Hamilton House, and the Carthage Greys, the local militia that was supposed to be responsible for security, had not yet fully mustered. The Greys were also not fully reliable—many of the unit’s officers and men were among the most vociferous critics of the Mormon leaders. Ford knew this, but after the Smiths were taken into custody and transferred to the Carthage jail, he nevertheless sent the Greys to protect the jail from the encroaching mob.
In court that day, the Smiths made bail on the inciting to riot charge, only to be immediately rearrested on charges of treason, resulting from the declaration of martial law in Nauvoo. Ford refused to intervene on their behalf, and they were ordered held without bail until June 29 pending the arrival of a witness, Mormon dissenter Francis Higbee.
They would not live to see June 29. Hancock County militia troops from hostile Warsaw were already marching toward Nauvoo with the intent to spark an incident that would justify an invasion. Ford got wind of this and ordered a halt, sending a messenger to the marchers to disband. Most did. But a few hundred did an about-face and began marching back toward Carthage at midday on June 27.
In the little two-story jail, Smith wrote a letter to his wife, Emma, in which he told her that they were being well treated and tried to reassure her that there was no immediate threat to their lives. “There is no danger of any extermination order,” he wrote. “Should there be a mutiny among the troops (which we do not anticipate, excitement is abating) a part will remain loyal and stand for the defense of the state and our rights.” It’s not at all clear why Smith thought this, or if he really did. Perhaps he retained a latent faith in Ford, or maybe it was just his native optimism bubbling to the surface, or a simple desire to reassure his wife. At any rate, in this case Joseph Smith proved not to be a prophet, and he might not have believed his own words anyway. When visitors were allowed in to see the Smiths, they were able to get a Colt revolver and a single-shot pistol into Joseph’s pockets. He passed the single-shot on to Hyrum, who took it reluctantly. “I hate to use such things or see them used,” Hyrum told his brother.
“So do I,” Joseph said, “but we may have to defend ourselves.” He knew that only seven men from the Carthage Greys were stationed outside the jail as a first line of defense.
At about four in the afternoon, a large mob was sighted making its way toward the jail. The rest of the Carthage Greys were in formation on the far corner of the village square, about as far away from the jail as they could be and still be in town. When they got word that the mob was approaching, officers ordered the men to prepare to march. But the men responded slowly, and the officers did nothing to hurry them along. One man, Tom Marsh, shouted that they should get a move on and to hell with the formation. “Come on you cowards,” he yelled at his fellows, “those boys will all be killed.” But Marsh was referring to the seven Greys standing guard, not the Smiths. Without waiting for any of the others to join him, Marsh started at a sprint toward the jail. Most of the mob was already there, their faces smudged with dirt to hide their identities.
In a scene that would be replayed within days in Philadelphia, the reluctant militia unit fired directly into the onrushing mob. No one was hit, and the angry throng quickly overwhelmed the defenders. Inside, the Smiths were upstairs with visitors Willard Richards and John Taylor, having earlier refused a suggestion by the jailer that they remove to the cell for their own protection. Now they heard gunshots outside. Richards rushed to the window and saw the mob encircling the jail. He shouted back to the Smiths, who were poised to shoot. Richards and Taylor used their bodies to bar the door as they heard the loud clomping of men running up the wooden stairs. As they braced themselves against the door, a hail of gunfire blasted through it. Miraculously neither Richards nor Taylor was hit, but Hyrum was shot in the face.
“I am a dead man,” Hyrum said, turning to Joseph, and was then hit in rapid succession by three more shots.
“Oh, my dear brother Hyrum,” Joseph wailed. Then, with an unsaintly wrath, he charged to the door, opened it enough to reach his hand out, and fired the Colt into the stairwell. One man made it to the door and Joseph punched him in the face. Behind him, Taylor tried to leap out of the window but was felled by several shots. The wounded men’s blood drenched the floor, and gunshots spattered more across the walls and windows.
Joseph dropped his empty gun and made for the window. As he stepped over Taylor he was hit by two shots from the doorway and one from outside. “Oh Lord, my God,” he screamed, and tumbled through the window, landing with a thud on the ground. Some witnesses said Smith’s body was not further harmed. Others said a militia officer ordered four men to raise Smith up so he could be shot again, and that after they fired, Smith fell forward, dead.
The violence in Illinois was over. More was about to erupt in Pennsylvania.
As the summer’s events unfolded, Whigs were increasingly uneasy. The high spirits of spring, when the Democrats had shunted aside Van Buren and nominated Polk, were giving way to anxiety as Tyler removed himself and support for expansion seemed solid. Some Whigs saw an opportunity to bounce back through a potential alliance with nativists, who were successfully organizing in the northeast in the wake of the May riots in Philadelphia.
As was so often the case during the 1844 campaign, Clay tried to split the difference. He told nativists that their motivations were sound, but could produce positive results only “if conducted with discretion and prudence.” Mostly, though, as with Texas, he simply wished the issue would go away. He felt confident that the Whig program, by itself, was enough to win the election, especially against a nonentity such as Polk. Let us not, he told a Philadelphia nativist who had inquired about his views on immigration, “throw any new issues into the Presidential canvas.” It was the same answer he had given in April on Texas. Let’s talk about what I want to talk about, he was telling voters, instead of what you want to talk about.
Back in the Midwest, Abraham Lincoln, who had idolized and campaigned for Clay, also tried to find a middle ground. At a June 12 public meeting in Springfield, Illinois, he came out in favor of residence in the country for some period of time before citizenship—though he wouldn’t specify how much time—while arguing that Whigs should not endeavor to make naturalization “less convenient, less cheap, or less expeditious.”
Former New York governor William Seward saw nothing but trouble in the issue. His state was home to tens of thousands of recent Catholic immigrants, and he predicted disaster if the Whigs aligned publicly with nativist parties. But he was equally sure that no one was listening to him on this issue, having “asserted my opinions concerning the Philadelphia riots in a way that will for long put me out of favor with a portion of my countrymen.”
Following the May riots, a grand jury had convened to hear evidence against a number of those involved in the violence. On June 17, the jury’s final report was published. It vindicated the nativist American Republican Party, whose members included two in the jury pool. There were no Irish names on the jury list.
The riots were a result of the “efforts of a portion of the community to exclude the Bible from the Public schools,” the jury found, an insidious plot that “in some measure gave rise to the formation of a new party, which called and held … meetings in the district of Kensington.” Those meetings were “the peaceful exercise of the sacred rights and privileges guaranteed to every citizen by the constitution and laws of our state and country.” These peaceable meetings, the jury ruled, were violently disrupted “by bands of irresponsible men, some of whom resided in this country only a short period.” Catholics protested the nonsensical conclusions of the grand jury, but there was little recourse for them.
Having been given a pass by the grand jury, the American Republican Party planned a major parade and rally for the Fourth of July in Philadelphia. Sheriff Morton McMichael feared the worst. “In the present excited state of popular feeling,” he wrote to other local authorities on June 28, “it is possible that some accidental cause may produce disturbance on the approaching Anniversary of our National Independence.” He called on the police and militia to be ready, but also suggested that “it is desirable that the citizens themselves should be prepared to assist the constituted authorities, in any efforts they may be called upon to make, in maintaining the supremacy of the law,” having apparently learned nothing about the actions of mobs during the May riots. He asked each alderman to assign additional policemen to each ward. Major General Robert Patterson, commander of the Pennsylvania militia, who like McMichael had suffered criticism for being late on the scene at the May riots, also put his troops on alert for the holiday.
As it turned out, the parade went off without a hitch and no violence broke out. And what a parade it was. Five thousand people participated and ten thousand watched. But while so many Philadelphians enjoyed the summer festival, others were prepping for war. After the violence that had destroyed the Catholic churches of St. Michael’s and St. Augustine’s, William Dunn, brother of the pastor at St. Philip de Neri’s church, had been given permission by the governor to form a company of militia to defend church property. The troops were kept busy drilling on July 3, then took the holiday off to enjoy the parade with the rest of the city. On the fifth, a wagonload of muskets arrived at the church from the state arsenal to replace the broomsticks Dunn’s band of Catholic militia had been using for drill. Rejecting the notion that secrecy was needed, Dunn and his men unloaded the guns in broad daylight, in front of plenty of passersby, not all of whom were friendly. Word of the delivery quickly spread around town: the Catholics were arming themselves and turning St. Philip’s into a fortress.
Early the next day, McMichael was again sending out warnings. “Information has been conveyed to me, that there is some reason to apprehend a disturbance of the public peace this afternoon and evening,” the sheriff wrote on July 6, requesting again that local authorities, the citizens, and the militia prepare for trouble in the working-class Southwark neighborhood on the city’s southern edge.
Nativists responded by organizing, and that evening a thousand people were gathered in front of St. Philip’s. Dunn had every right to the state-supplied weapons, having received the governor’s go-ahead to form a defense unit. But he took the sheriff into the church, then confessed that they had more guns hidden away than those that had arrived the day before.
McMichael, desperate to avoid a confrontation, decided to split the difference.
“I have … been into the Church, and have taken possession of all the arms we were able to find,” McMichael fibbed to the masses. He had taken the July 5 guns, but left behind the ones Dunn had procured earlier. “A number of your own citizens, selected by your own Aldermen, are here to prevent any more arms from being taken in, as well as to protect the Church from injury. I therefore beg of you all, as good citizens, to disperse, and retire to your homes. Further measures will be taken tomorrow to allay the excitement and to preserve the peace.” He then ostentatiously handed the twenty or so new guns over to the deputies he had posted at the church entrances, and used ramrods to show that they were unloaded.
His demonstration did not settle the crowd of nativists and his pleas to disperse went unheeded. So seventeen men were chosen to enter St. Philip’s and search further. By now it was midnight. The men left the darkness of the close, crowded street for the cooler, candlelit confines of the church. Dunn was waiting for them, pistols strapped to both hips, but he fired no shots. The searchers spread out, opening doors, peeking under pews, pushing through dusty closets, looking for a cache of arms. Eventually they found the guns, along with “several armed individuals” who were quickly shorn of their weapons. McMichael got Patterson to send over a unit of City Guards, who cleared the street without further incident. It had been a close call, but Friday ended without violence.
On Saturday, Philadelphia would not be so lucky. By the middle of the morning, a crowd of a thousand or so had again assembled in the streets surrounding the church, facing a line of well-armed militia. This tense standoff persisted until mid-afternoon, when General George Cadwalader, commander of the City Division of the First Brigade of the Pennsylvania Militia, arrived, reminded the throng of nativists that the governor had given the church officials permission to arm themselves, and ordered the mob to disperse. When they didn’t, a red-faced Cadwalader stormed off. A few minutes later, McMichael arrived along with 150 “deputized” citizens, armed with clubs, but no guns. The deputies formed a line across Queen Street and began marching and swinging, driving the crowd up the street and away from the front of the church. Once the thoroughfare was emptied, McMichael posted guards at each intersection to keep the rabble out. Soon after, more militia arrived. It appeared St. Philip’s was now impregnable.
But Cadwalader went a step further and began breaking up clusters of people who had gathered together outside the restricted area. Then he brought in artillery, three small cannons, posting the guns at strategic points along the barricades. And he introduced the first visible small arms of the encounter, placing men with bayonets at Second and Third Streets, on either side of St. Philip’s.
Sight of the cannon and the guns caused a rumble in the crowd. They began jeering the troops, then throwing rocks. McMichael’s posse arrested several, which naturally brought on more jeers and more rock throwing. Soldiers were hit; some were injured. Cadwalader stepped in front of his troops. If the rock throwing didn’t cease immediately, he shouted, he would open fire. People began moving out of the middle of the street, looking for a place to flee or something to hide behind. The rock throwing slowed, but didn’t stop. Cadwalader shouted the order to take aim, by platoon (which would slow the pace somewhat by requiring one group of soldiers to wait until the first group had fired).
Simultaneously with the order to aim, but before the order to fire had been given, Charles Naylor, a former Whig member of Congress who was serving in the sheriff’s posse, raced in front of the guns, risking his own life, shouting “My God, don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” and telling Cadwalader that he would have to kill him first if he wanted to kill anybody else. Naylor, a lawyer, had no military training at this point. (Later, during the Mexican War, he raised his own company of volunteers and served as captain.)
Unimpressed with the show of valor, Cadwalader ordered Naylor arrested for inciting mutiny. Someone pointed out to the commander that Naylor was a member of the posse. “All the more important to make an example of him!” shouted Cadwalader in response. Naylor was hauled away. The nativists, sensing that they had narrowly escaped a massacre, scattered.
That seemed to be the end of it. No more mobs gathered that evening in the neighborhood, and officials felt secure enough by Sunday morning, July 7, to send the sheriff’s posse home. Cadwalader left two militia units in place to guard the church. But the authorities had been too optimistic. By late morning, a crowd of about two thousand had reassembled, this time with a fresh cause: release Naylor, they demanded. If he were not freed, they would do what was necessary to free him themselves.
After some back-and-forth, the head of the Markle Rifles, one of the two militia units left to safeguard the church (the other was the aptly named Hibernia Greens) agreed to release Naylor, a wise tactical retreat considering how outnumbered his men were. Naylor soon appeared from inside the church, where he had been held, and exhorted the cheering masses “to do as he intended to do, to retire to their homes.”
About half of them did. But hundreds remained, and they were becoming unruly. Some boys had brought a four-pounder cannon up from a ship docked in the Delaware and positioned it in a vacant lot behind the church. It wasn’t clear if any of them knew how to use it, and they had no solid shot. But they filled it with nails, scrap iron, broken glass, even hard walnut shells, “every kind of missile that chance and haste could furnish.” When they fired at the rear windows of the church they missed, but knocked a few bricks off the corner of the building and gave a start to everyone in the street.
Things were quickly getting out of hand. Neither Cadwalader nor Patterson sent any help to the two militia units, now surrounded by a mob. Instead, representatives of the American Republican Party showed up, urging calm. They had been exonerated by the grand jury, but the court of public opinion had not been so forgiving. Lewis Levin climbed atop the cannon and proposed what sounded like a compromise: the militia would depart if the crowd stopped attacking the church. American Republican Party members would protect the church, he promised. While Levin was talking, a gang had made a run at the church on the other side, smashing in one of the doors. The militia commander ordered his troops to fire, and the marauding gang backed off, but no militiamen fired, and one yelled “Don’t shoot!”
True to Levin’s word, some party members interposed themselves between the mob and the church. The crowd again demanded that the Hibernia Rifles, a Catholic militia unit, be sent away, to be escorted by the Markle Rifles. Sensing that it was his only option, the unit commander, Captain Colahan, acquiesced. But getting away was not that simple. As they marched down the street, locals threw rocks and bricks at them, and the Irish unit first broke into a trot, then, at Colahan’s order, stopped, loaded, and fired.
Instead of scaring away the assault, the firing enraged the mob, which rushed the militia. One soldier was caught and beaten to death. Still, the American Republicans stood by their promise to guard the church—no easy task. And eventually, at about four in the afternoon, some “ruffians and sailors”—the description was made by militia colonel Charles J. Jack, the man who had inspired a similar group to march on Kensington in May—used a battering ram to knock a hole in the concrete wall in front of the church. Hundreds of “ruffians” poured in. They stole some articles from the church, but the American Republicans quickly recovered them. A few small fires were started, but again party members were there to douse them. After a couple hours of relatively harmless hooliganism, they were able to clear the church of troublemakers. Again, it appeared, serious violence had been averted.
Then Cadwalader arrived. Trailed by militia and armed sheriff’s deputies, he ordered the American Republicans out of the church. He would take over security, he told them. The party members who had kept the peace had little choice but to accede to his demand. Here, “the affair had reached its turning point—from riot to civil war,” said a contemporary account.
Cadwalader decided to clear the street and ordered a Captain Hill to charge the crowd outside the church. Some in the crowd pleaded with the soldiers, to no avail. “I have received my orders and I will certainly obey them,” Hill informed the protesters. “Obey and be damned!” came the shouted reply. Someone grabbed Hill’s sword and pulled him to the ground. Cadwalader ordered the militia to prime their muskets. It was a repeat of the previous encounter, only Naylor wasn’t there to calm things down. If these people didn’t disperse immediately, Cadwalader warned an alderman, he would order his men to fire. City Guard Lieutenant Thomas Dougherty made the same threat. And in a flash, both did, at almost the exact same moment. Several people were hit—two would die. A few armed nativists began firing back sporadically, and units were sent into surrounding houses to disarm whoever was doing the shooting.
Many of the party members fled, reassembling in a meeting hall a few blocks away to discuss their options. Some, though, headed for the docks to get more firepower. They wheeled two artillery pieces back to the church, where about fifty people were gathered, and began firing. They knocked out the nearby street lights, then fired into the mass of militia, killing two troops from Germantown. The unit had artillery, too, and fired back, wounding three of the nativists. An artillery duel had broken out on the streets of Philadelphia. People screamed and scattered. The nativists moved their guns—their muffled wheels hard to hear above the din—keeping the militia guessing as to their whereabouts. They used scrap for ammunition, whatever they could find—rocks, glass, nails. Cannon and musket fire continued for hours; dozens of people were injured and two more were killed.
Cadwalader eventually sent for cavalry help. The horsemen arrived about midnight and couldn’t see much of anything. So they waited patiently for a gun to be fired. When one was, they charged the flash, only to be tripped up by a rope the nativists had strung across the street in front of the gun. But the nativists couldn’t get off another shot, and when the troopers remounted, they quickly captured the gun, scattered the gunners, and killed a couple of the resisters. By 2 AM, all the guns, large and small, had fallen silent. Twelve people were dead, four dozen wounded.
Within days, two thousand soldiers were patrolling the streets. Normalcy, of a kind, returned. There was no more talk, for now, about Bibles in the schools. The Whig press was quick to blame “a few drunken rowdies” and to acquit both nativists and the militia. “Cadwalader may have been hasty and mistaken,” wrote one reporter, “but the mob had no business there, and ought to have dispersed long before any blood was shed.” The Democratic press gave the American Republicans grudging credit for their defense of the church, while excoriating the nativist rabble-rousers more generally. “The sooner they are shot down, the better it will be for the peace, safety and honor of the community,” was one writer’s opinion.
Among those arrested was Lewis Levin, charged with using his Daily Sun to incite to riot and treason. He was held in jail only briefly, and never went to trial. Instead, Levin was elected to Congress, an indication that there was political hay to be made in courting the nativist vote, at least in some quarters. “The deplorable tumults in Philadelphia, are likely to work in our favor, in political results,” predicted Richard Rush, who had served as attorney general under James Madison and minister to Great Britain under James Monroe; he had run for vice president with John Quincy Adams in 1828, then defected to the Democrats. “The Whigs are rather in danger of being caught in a snare they had themselves set.” Just so, as Henry Clay would learn to his regret.
Almost six weeks after the assassination of Joseph Smith, the community of Nauvoo was still in turmoil. Half the church leadership that had served under Smith—the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—had been out on the campaign trail and had still not returned. The rudderless crew was looking for someone to step forward and take the helm. Many feared the movement that Smith had built could not survive his death. There were also concerns that the locals, having shed Mormon blood, might develop a taste for it.
Into the vacuum stepped Sidney Rigdon. He seemed like a logical choice. One of the early fathers of the church, he had been at Smith’s side as long as anyone. Smith had chosen him to be his running mate in the presidential contest. Rigdon was a marvelous preacher, a rare combination of spellbinding speaker and learned intellectual. He, too, had been out of town for weeks, since the middle of June. He had gone to campaign in Pittsburgh, where he arrived one day after Smith’s murder. It took another week for an edition of the Nauvoo Neighbor to find its way into his hands, confirming the vague rumors that he, like Young and the others, had begun to hear.
At first, Rigdon wanted all the Apostles to gather in Pittsburgh, where he and another of the Twelve, John Page, had been campaigning and preaching. But a letter soon arrived from Young urging that all return to Nauvoo as fast as possible. There, they could “sit down together and hold a council on the very ground where sleeps the ashes of our deceased friends.” Acknowledging that this was the proper course, or at least that he was outnumbered, Rigdon packed his bags and hurried back to Nauvoo.
With a 575-mile head start, Rigdon got there before Young. He arrived August 3, and on hand to greet him were four of the Quorum of Twelve: John Taylor and Willard Richards, who had been wounded at Carthage, and Orson Pratt’s brother, Parley, and George A. Smith, who had been campaigning nearby when they heard news of the murder and had rushed home immediately. Ignoring the fact that he had hoped to stay in Pittsburgh and bring the Twelve to him, Rigdon told them that he had a revelation telling him to come home, and that it had been delivered in the voice of Joseph Smith. Rigdon had begun making his play to succeed the martyred prophet.
Pratt organized a meeting of the five men for the next day, a Sunday, at Taylor’s home. Still recovering from the gunshot wounds he had suffered in Carthage, Taylor had difficulty getting around. But when the four met at Taylor’s bedside on August 4, Rigdon was a no-show. After waiting a bit—Rigdon had after all traveled hundreds of miles over the past several days; perhaps he was overtired from the journey—Pratt went looking for him.
He found Rigdon on a street corner, talking with a man Pratt didn’t know. When Pratt urged Rigdon to come along to the meeting at Taylor’s house, Rigdon demurred, continuing a meandering conversation that sounded rather pointless to Pratt. Finally Rigdon was ready. “Well, well! Brother Pratt,” he said, “I must go with you now without delay.” But delay he did. Passing a gathering of saints headed for worship, Rigdon felt the spirit move in him and told Pratt he had to preach to the throng that was congregating on an open meeting ground atop the hill east of where the Nauvoo temple was being built.
Word spread quickly and Rigdon’s reputation as a preacher drew thousands to the spot. They also knew he had been out campaigning and were eager to hear any news from the outside world about the murder of Smith. On that count Rigdon disappointed. His message was not about the dead prophet, but the next prophet. Rigdon described a vision that had been delivered to him in his Pittsburgh boarding room, and told the crowd he “was the identical man that the ancient Prophets had sung about, wrote and rejoiced over, and that he was sent to do the identical work that had been the theme of all the Prophets in every preceding generation.” Shouting to the assembled mass, he announced that he would now be the “guardian” of the church, the successor to Joseph Smith.
There is no record of how the crowd responded, but it is fair to assume it was with a mixture of hopefulness and anxiety. They wanted certainty and security and felt neither. A quick settlement of the question of succession, many believed, would be best for the church and the saints. But not everyone was convinced it should be Rigdon. Within days, Wilford Woodruff, another of the Twelve, would call Rigdon’s revelation a “second-class vision.” Others shared his doubt. So when Rigdon called for a general meeting of the saints, to be held August 8, four days hence, he was hoping to bypass the leadership and appeal directly to the people—and, not incidentally, settle the question before Young and the others returned to bolster Pratt, Richards, and those who were counseling patience.
On Tuesday the sixth, Rigdon preached to a smaller congregation than the one that had gathered on Sunday, warning the flock about the possibility of a mob descending on the leaderless citizens. It was not a subtle approach, but it struck a nerve considering the recent violence and the history of persecution many of those in attendance had endured. But his window was closing.
Just a few hours after the sermon, Brigham Young, Willard Woodruff, and three other apostles came chugging down the Mississippi aboard the steamboat St. Croix, the final 120-mile leg of an arduous 1,200-mile journey by train, boat, and wagon across New York and the upper Midwest. “When we landed in the City,” Woodruff wrote in his diary, “there was a deep gloom [that] seemed to rest over the City of Nauvoo which we never experi[en]ced before.” The people, he noted, “felt like a sheep without a shepherd.” The gloom was real, but the assertion that the saints had no shepherd was not. They had two who aspired to the post, and one would have to go.
Ten members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles were now present in Nauvoo, including the president, Young. They met twice—in the morning and early afternoon—at Taylor’s house. No one kept a record or wrote in any detail later about the proceedings. But subsequent events would indicate that the group reached a consensus that Young was the man to lead the church and that Rigdon needed to be stopped before momentum carried the saints with him. Part of the meeting was also likely spent in simply bringing those who had been absent up to speed on the fast-moving events of the summer. In any case, when the second conclave ended, Young, acting in his capacity as president of the Twelve, called a broader meeting to be held later that day that would include the Apostles, the leadership of the Nauvoo Stake (a group of congregations), and the priesthood. The larger group could not be accommodated at Taylor’s home, so the venue was set for the not-quite-finished Seventies Hall, a red-brick building named after the missionaries who had carried the Mormon gospel to the Gentiles.
It was about 4 PM when the meeting came to order. The Seventies Hall was usable, but the detritus of construction could still be seen lying around, and there was a scent of fresh brick and mortar to accompany the August humidity. Rigdon spoke first, at the invitation of Young. He declared himself “a spokesman for Joseph Smith,” and wanted nothing more than to see that the foundation laid by the prophet did not crumble from the lack of being “governed in a proper manner.”
Young responded that he had little interest in who led the church—it could be Shaker founder Ann Lee for all he cared—“but one thing I must know, and that is what God says about it.” And God, Young asserted, spoke through him, as president of the Twelve. “I have the keys and the means of obtaining the mind of God on the subject.” Rigdon was basing his claim on an appeal to the authority of Joseph Smith, which he said ran through him. Young was appealing to a higher power.
On the eighth, the assembly Rigdon had called for before the return of Young was held as scheduled, at 10 AM. Five thousand people turned out. The morning was so breezy that Rigdon abandoned the stand erected for the purpose, which was downwind from the crowd, and climbed atop a wagon at the other end of the field so he could be better heard. The saints, seated on the ground or on small benches, obligingly turned around to face into the wind.
Rigdon, perhaps sensing that the tide was running against him, was not his usual mellifluous self. He spoke for an hour and a half, a rambling discourse on the life of Jesus, Queen Victoria, and several other topics that seemed to have little bearing on the question at hand. It was so bad that Young, a hard judge of men, would later say that he felt sorry for the saints who had endured Rigdon’s meanderings.
He certainly felt no sympathy for Rigdon. As he was closing, Rigdon began to call for a vote on the question of who should lead the church. Dramatically, Young, whom most of those in the crowd hadn’t seen for months, leapt up onto the makeshift stand. “I will manage this voting for Elder Rigdon,” Young said. “He does not preside here. This child will manage this flock for a season.”
Many of those in attendance would later swear that when Young spoke they heard the sound of Joseph Smith’s voice. “As soon as he spoke I jumped upon my feet, for in every possible degree it was Joseph’s voice, and his person, in look, attitude, dress, and appearance,” one witness said. “I knew in a moment the spirit and mantle of Joseph was upon him.” Another said “it seemed in the eyes of the people as though it was the very person of Joseph which stood before them.” Wilford Woodruff would later say, “If I had not seen him with my own eyes, there is no one that could have convinced me that it was not Joseph Smith.”
Young himself never made any claim of transubstantiation. The beleaguered saints, yearning for a lost prophet and disappointed in Rigdon’s utterances, needed to believe. Young’s dynamic presence afforded them the opportunity.
After a break, the meeting reconvened and Young dominated it. He spoke for two hours, but summed up the message in two sentences. “You cannot appoint a prophet,” he reminded the saints, “but if you let the Twelve remain and act in their place, the keys of the kingdom are with them and they can manage the affairs of the church and direct all things aright.” Left unsaid was the fact that, as president of the Twelve, while they were directing things aright, he would be directing them. And then he put it to the people. “Do you want Brother Rigdon to stand forward as your leader, your guide, your spokesman?” he asked. Rigdon, who had been silent up to this point, chimed in, asking Young to seek a vote not on him, but on the Twelve. “Does the church want, and is it their only desire to sustain the Twelve as the First Presidency of this people? All those in favor, raise your right arm.” And so they did, virtually unanimously. “If there are any of the contrary mind, every man and every woman who does not want the Twelve to preside, lift up your hands in like manner.” No hands went up.
“The church,” Young confided to his diary that night, “was of one hart and one mind.”
Henry Clay had shown during his Southern sojourn in the spring that he was, like Young, an effective campaigner and a man ahead of his time in relating personally to voters. But even Clay was restricted by the etiquette of the day during the electioneering season. Instead of pleading for votes from the stump, he retired to Ashland, his Lexington estate, to correspond, greet visitors, and direct his operatives.
Polk did the same, setting up shop at home in Columbia, Tennessee. And he established the parameters of the debate by taking two of the Whigs’ favorite issues off the table right at the outset. As he prepared to write a letter of acceptance of the party’s nomination, Polk was buffeted by advice on the question of whether he should declare himself a one-term president. Aaron V. Brown, a former Tennessee congressman and advisor to Polk, pushed him to make such a pronouncement. “In your acceptance, you must some way or other express yourself in favor of the one-term system,” Brown wrote to Polk. “This is important. I might say all important and you will know exactly how it will be highly useful. I need not say who and how many of our friends expect it.”
Brown was not concerned with neutralizing Whig complaints about executive authority. He was referring to potential Democratic presidential candidates in 1848—Cass, Benton, Woodbury, Wright, Buchanan, even Calhoun—“our friends” who would be much more likely to enthusiastically support Polk if they knew a space would be open for them in four years.
Polk was hearing arguments on both sides of the question, but the alacrity with which he made his announcement indicated that he had probably already made up his mind. Writing on June 12, he told his party and the electorate “that if the nomination made by the convention shall be confirmed by the people and result in my election, I shall enter upon the discharge of the high and solemn duties of the office, with the settled purpose of not being a candidate for re-election.” In one sentence, Polk enlisted the aid of every senior Democrat in the campaign and squelched the usual Whig complaints about “King Andrew” and the Democrats’ abuses of executive power.
Polk took only a few more sentences to deal with another crucial issue: the tariff. As a Southerner, Polk had long supported a revenue-only tariff—levies high enough to pay the costs of a limited government but not so high as to afford any special protection for domestic industry, which was mostly found in the North. Now, as a national candidate in need of votes in New York and Pennsylvania, Polk made an adjustment in his rhetoric and emphasis, if not entirely in his position. If a revenue tariff turned out to provide some protection without that being its sole intent, then that was agreeable to Polk: “making revenue the object, protection the incident,” as Andrew Jackson Donelson, namesake and nephew of the former president, put it. The details would be settled when the president and Congress came together to set the rates. Mississippi senator Robert Walker urged Polk to “go as far as your principles will permit for incidental protection,” and that is exactly what Polk did. Writing to Democrat John K. Kane of Pennsylvania, Polk borrowed Walker’s words and promised “discriminating duties as would produce the amount of revenue needed, and at the same time afford reasonable incidental protection to our home industry.”
Whigs howled about Democratic duplicity. Clay prodded his allies to punch back on the tariff, but their responses were largely ineffective. Polk had taken another step toward securing Northern Democrats behind his candidacy. He had already made a small accommodation in the language of the Democratic platform that hedged ever so slightly on Texas, with its commitment to “the reoccupation of Oregon and the reannexation of Texas, at the earliest practicable period.”
As Democrats campaigned around the country, though, they found plenty of support for bringing Texas into the union, even in places where conventional wisdom suggested it was not a popular position. During Senate debate on the annexation treaty, petitions poured into Congress from all over. While many from the North opposed the treaty, not all did. On May 30, sectionalism was set aside for a brief moment when a pair of pro-annexation petitions from the Northeast were presented, one from Middleton, Connecticut, and another that was “very well written, from German adopted citizens of New York, in favor of the annexation of Texas.” Silas Wright, while professing support and warm regards for Polk, warned that the machinations of the Calhoun “clique” had created a situation in which “our Union was never so much in danger as at this moment.” But his seemed to be a minority opinion.
The British lent a hand to the expansionist cause when they sent the sloop-of-war Modesta up the Columbia River in July to anchor off Fort Vancouver, a pointless show of force in the Oregon country that stoked the ire even of non-expansionists and gave Clay just one more thing to worry about.
For their part, Northern Whigs employed the emotional issue of war, warning mothers and fathers that annexation of Texas meant their sons would be sent off to fight against Mexico to defend the slave power. In the South, they tended to ignore the issue. “Clays letter has had no influence on Southern whigs,” Cave Johnson reported to Polk. At a giant June rally in Memphis, Texas never came up. In July in Lexington, speakers took the Clay position—that Texas was a distraction from the real issues of the campaign.
But Southern Whigs were not as opposed to annexation as Clay and some others believed. The foremost historian of the Whig party, Michael F. Holt, argues that Clay got the wrong impression during his spring trip across the South because he spent all of his time with upper-class Whigs, Southerners who had the most to gain from the national Whig economic program and the most to lose if Texas joined the union and siphoned off slaves and markets. Working-class Southerners wanted Texas because of the opportunity it afforded them, which was not readily available in their hierarchical home states.
Beyond the substantive issues of the campaign, the parties slashed at each other in highly personal attacks that would make many a modern political consultant blush.
One widely circulated abolitionist handbill accused Clay of being a “notorious Sabbath-breaker, Profane Swearer, Gambler, Common Drunkard, Perjurer, Duellist, Thief, Robber, Adulterer, Man-stealer, Slave-holder, and Murderer.” Another charged that the history of Clay’s “debaucheries and midnight revelries in Washington is too shocking, too disgusting to appear in public print.” Some of that was true, of course, which helped make the charges stick and made it tougher for Whigs to respond. Even John Quincy Adams had reflected that “in politics, as in private life, Clay is essentially a gamester.” Democrats were not above using the legislative process to make a similar point. One lawmaker proposed including a prohibition on wine purchases in an appropriations bill for the White House should Clay take up residence.
At the same time, Whig newspapers accused Polk of being a duelist, while others attacked from the opposite extreme, calling him a coward for supposedly dodging a challenge. An abolitionist newspaper in New York accused Polk of using a branding iron to mark his slaves, an utter falsehood but one that played on Northern voters’ knowledge that Polk was a slaveholder. Unfortunately for Whigs battling for votes in New York with the Liberty Party, it also helped remind the same voters that Clay was, too.
Clay had to deal with charges—again, true—that he was not affiliated with any organized religion. Apparently his selection of the saintly Theodore Frelinghuysen as his running mate had not provided as much insulation against such attacks as he had hoped, so Clay felt duty bound to respond. Acknowledging that he was “not a member of any Christian Church,” he nevertheless possessed “a profound sense of the inappreciable value of our Religion.” Frelinghuysen spent some time during the campaign trying—in effect—to bring Clay to Jesus. Shortly after their nomination, the running mate had written to the party leader that “our names have been brought together, here, by the voice of our fellow men. My prayer for you and my own soul shall be fervent, that, through the rich grace of our Saviour, they may be found written in the Book of Life of the Lamb that was slain for our sins.”
While Clay was defending himself against charges of irreligion, Frelinghuysen came under attack for being “much too mixed up with these Bible societies.” Again, the charge was true, and one Frelinghuysen likely embraced as praise rather than criticism. But the swipe at Frelinghuysen had a deeper meaning. As mayor of Newark, New Jersey, in the late 1830s, Frelinghuysen was on the receiving end of the early rush of Irish and German Catholic immigration. As the new arrivals spilled out of a crowded New York City and into his jurisdiction, the mayor had at first petitioned authorities in New York and New Jersey to do more to deal with the influx. When they didn’t, he suggested making the masters of the vessels that carried the immigrants financially liable for their charges. That certainly would have alleviated the economic distress caused by the arrival of thousands of penniless immigrants on Newark’s streets. But it also would have brought the carrying trade to a screeching halt—no ship master would run such a financial risk—and immigration would have ground to a halt.
Catholic and Democratic politicians in the Northeast remembered Frelinghuysen’s stand. Frelinghuysen never uttered an anti-Catholic sentiment. But he was associated with people who did, and he sensed that his prominent position as a leader in the Benevolent Empire could encourage unscrupulous opponents to imply a sympathy of views that did not exist. “I have never spoken but in decided condemnation of the mob scenes of violence and blood in Philadelphia,” he said, and cloaked himself in the protection of “the principles of our Constitution, which allow full freedom of conscience and so forbid all religious [discrimination].”
Nevertheless, some Catholic associations were highly critical of Frelinghuysen, particularly his leadership roles in the American Bible Society and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, in which, they alleged, he was “countenancing the slanders of a gross set of Presbyterian bigots…. Can he be ignorant of the plots and machinations of the fanatics against our government? We think this sufficient to alarm every friend of civil and religious liberty.” Frelinghuysen’s defenders said the Catholics had it backward. “We never supposed it possible that the intolerant spirit of Romanism would have openly arrayed itself in this republican country in opposition to a candidate for office on the ground of his advocacy of the universal spread of the Scriptures and his active and pious efforts for the advancement of the religion of the Redeemer throughout the world.”
Clay tried to address the situation by appealing to a higher power—in this case the Catholic prelate of New York, Bishop John Hughes. He enlisted former congressman John Lee of Maryland to inquire of Hughes whether Democrats were actively trying to organize Catholics against Whig candidates. Hughes was moderately reassuring, telling Lee to relay to Clay that he clearly saw the difference between the esteemed Henry Clay and “the sentiments & conduct of the intolerant Whigs.” But Hughes’s recognition that there were indeed intolerant Whigs afoot could not be reassuring to Clay, nor could the archbishop’s assessment that “his brethren would be divided on the Presidential vote.” And, unknown to Hughes, at the same moment Clay was seeking his support, the candidate was writing a letter—not intended for publication—in which he backed the changes in immigration law favored by the nativists.
The twin issues of immigration and abolition continued to hound the Whigs. Liberty Party candidate James G. Birney was highly critical of Clay, much more so than of Polk, on the assumption that it was antislavery Whig voters who were persuadable while Democrats were lost to his cause. Birney personally wrote a pamphlet, “Headlands in the Life of Henry Clay,” that detailed Clay’s lifetime of support for slavery, despite the Kentuckian’s frequent rhetorical flourishes against the practice.
Birney brought a controversy on himself by agreeing to run for the Michigan legislature as a Democrat. Whigs pounced, making the argument that Birney was nothing more than a tool of the Democracy designed not to win elections or even promote the antislavery cause, but simply to deprive the Whigs of their just deserts. “No man has labored so hard or effectively to secure the electoral vote of Michigan to Mr. Polk,” the New York Tribune accused Birney. “It was right therefore that he should receive from them this mark of their confidence and gratitude.” Complaints from the Whig press were effective in stirring up indignation against the Liberty Party, but Birney’s action was more naïveté than corrupt bargain. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier, a party member, called it “more than a crime—it was a blunder.” Later in the campaign, a forged letter imputing just such anti-Clay motives to Birney and in which he supposedly promised not to agitate on slavery was circulated. The fraud was quickly exposed, but considering Birney’s known animus toward Clay, some people might have believed it.
Adams saw a correlation between the two movements, which should have been working for a Whig victory instead of against it. “The Native Americans are falling into the blunders of the abolition societies,” he wrote. “They have an excellent cause, which they will ruin by mismanagement.”
But the most damaging broadsides against Clay were the work not of lying Democrats or radical abolitionists, but of Clay’s own overactive pen and muddled thinking about Texas. If his Raleigh Letter was a self-inflicted wound that festered, his attempts to clarify it were bad medicine applied to the sore.
On July 1, the Tuscaloosa Monitor in Alabama printed a letter from Clay—who was now clearly worried about Southern reaction to the Raleigh Letter—in which he wrote that “Personally I could have no objection to the annexation of Texas, but I certainly would be unwilling to see the existing Union dissolved or seriously jeoparded for the sake of acquiring Texas.” To a deep thinker like Clay, this was a mere clarification, an expounding on a point that he believed had been clearly addressed before but that some might need more fully explained to them. It may well have been little more than a change in tone or emphasis, but the effect was to confuse voters who had heard clearly less than two months earlier that Clay was opposed to Texas annexation. As Clay now explained it, he could support annexation if not for those disunionists—centered in South Carolina—who were using the annexation issue to plot the South’s separation.
This First Alabama Letter, as it came to be known, did not serve the purpose that Clay had hoped it would. It annoyed Southerners, who resented being cast as disunionists for supporting an expansion of the union and who saw in Clay’s criticism a sop to abolitionists. Worse, it confirmed for anti-slavery Northerners every doubt they had ever harbored about Henry Clay. When push came to shove, he was against them, not with them.
Having tried to assuage both sides and doing the opposite, a lesser man might have backed away. Not Clay. After penning two letters on Texas that satisfied almost no one, he then sat down and proceeded to write a third, also sent to an Alabama paper. Feeling sanguine about holding onto anti-annexation Northerners whom he felt sure would not defect to Polk in any case, he addressed this Second Alabama Letter—written July 27 and published in the Tuscumbia North Alabamian on August 16—to the concerns of Southern supporters of annexation. Certainly, Clay explained, his position on Texas was a matter of not wanting a war with Mexico, and had nothing to do with trying to please those pesky abolitionists. Slavery, he was sure, was going to disappear eventually, so Northerners had no standing to argue against the acquisition of Texas, “which will exist as long as the globe remains, on account of a temporary institution” like slavery.
Clay, who consistently during 1844 violated the first law of politics—talk about what the voters want to talk about, not what you want to talk about—was now violating the first law of holes: when you’re in one, stop digging. The Second Alabama Letter reverberated across the North. In New York, Whig fixer Thurlow Weed judged that “things look blue.” His ally William Seward said he “met that letter” on every campaign trip and that it “jeopards, perhaps loses this state.” Seward was a cynic who claimed to have no convictions beyond his own ambition, which was considerable. Abolitionists mistrusted him because he would not abandon the Whigs, and pro-slavery men despised him. But he was an effective campaigner and had an instinctive feel for the state’s voters. If he was worried, Clay needed to be worried, too.
After Clay’s bungled attempt to extricate himself from a Texas prison of his own making, the campaign season took more twists, some of which buoyed Whiggish spirits and one that boded ill for the party.
Whigs won control of the Louisiana state legislature in July, along with one of two congressional seats being contested. They also won the governorship and state legislative elections in North Carolina the following month, along with making healthy gains in the Missouri and Kentucky state legislatures. Whigs believed these local victories were good omens as they looked ahead to November.
But, after demurring for most of the summer, Silas Wright finally consented to becoming the Democratic candidate for governor of New York. Having rejected the party’s overtures to join the national ticket as the vice presidential candidate, Wright expressed a strong desire to remain in the Senate. He had earlier declined Tyler’s offer to move to the US Supreme Court after Van Buren had turned down a similar proposal from the president. The Senate had its problems, but the thought of dealing with the acrimony and internecine fighting in Albany between the Hunkers, the Whig-light faction that favored internal improvements, and Van Buren’s orthodox-Jacksonian Barnburners was nearly enough to sour Wright, a true statesman, on the idea of politics altogether.
But former governor William Marcy told Polk that New York was in danger of being lost to the Whigs because of a weak statewide ticket. Polk and Wright liked each other personally, and Wright was quick to assure the candidate that his refusal to join the ticket as vice president was in no way a reflection on his feelings for Polk. For his part, Polk desperately wanted Wright to run for governor to help secure the state for the Democrats, but respected Wright enough not to push, all the while hoping the soft-sell would be more effective. “It will be most unfortunate, if the domestic difficulties in the state shall have the effect to weaken our cause, as I think there is some reason to fear they may,” Polk told Andrew Jackson. “It is a matter however in which neither I, nor my friends, out of the state, can interfere.”
A man of duty, Wright eventually saw where his lay, and in the first week of September the Democratic state convention nominated him for governor, displacing the incumbent, William C. Bouck, a longtime party operative and canal commissioner who had lost a race for governor in 1840 before winning the seat in 1842. “The selection of Silas Wright … is received with the liveliest exhibitions of joy by the people,” a friendly newspaper reported. Wright’s foes understood the reaction. “He is the hardest man for us to beat,” one New York Whig said of Wright. “He gives them that which they lacked—strength and union.” Wright’s candidacy, the growing anti-Whig sentiment among urban Catholic immigrants, and Clay’s Alabama letters had dramatically altered the landscape in the Empire State, just two months before voters would go to the polls.
The presidential campaign was of little consequence to William Miller. Disappointed but not deterred after Christ failed to appear as predicted in March, Miller spent much of the next few months resting at home in Low Hampton, although he did put in an appearance at the Annual Conference of Adventists in Boston during the last week of May. There he confessed his error about the exact timing, but reiterated his belief “in the speedy coming of our Saviour.”
His faith in the message as strong as ever, Miller began making plans for a trip across upstate New York and into the Ohio Valley for later in the summer.
With his son, George, and Himes in tow, Miller left Low Hampton on July 21, headed west. The first stop was Rochester, the beating heart of the burned-over district. He preached several times in a meadow in the nearby village of Scottsville, where he “was listened to with unusual interest.” From there the three moved on to Lockport and Buffalo, crossed into Canada and preached in Toronto. Then Miller moved on to Cleveland, and a hundred or so supporters from Akron came up on a canal boat to hear him speak. Afterward, he and Himes traveled back to Akron with them on the boat, with Miller delivering a water-borne sermon that led to a festive spirit of hymn-singing and prayer. Time was running out, they were all certain, so they made the most of whatever opportunity presented itself for fellowship.
They moved southwest across Ohio, making quick stops in small towns along the way. Reaching Cincinnati on August 19, Miller attracted four thousand listeners to his first appearance, and spent a week preaching in the Queen City. The group had planned to push on, but Miller was growing weary and they heard reports of flooding further to the west. So, reversing course, they started back up the Ohio River by steamship, giving Miller a chance to recharge his batteries. He was recovered enough to give five lectures in McConnelsville, then take another boat down the Muskingum to its confluence with the Ohio at the town of Marietta, perched on bluffs above the river.
On the thirty-five-mile journey back to the Ohio, Miller encountered three dozen Methodist ministers traveling together to a conference in Marietta. Certain that they were going to confront him once they learned he was aboard, Miller retired to a quiet spot to read. Soon enough, a nattily clad man of the cloth approached, then walked past, then returned, and repeated this charade several more times. Finally he stopped and asked, “Is your name Miller?”
Without looking up from his book, Miller replied, “Yes.”
“The one who had prophesied the end of the world?”
“I do not prophesy,” Miller retorted, then told the minister that he was most likely the man he was looking for.
“I do not believe we can know when the world is to end,” the Methodist challenged Miller.
Miller didn’t reply, so the minister continued. “God has not revealed the time,” he said.
At this Miller sat up a little, looked at the man, and told him that he could “prove by the Bible that God had revealed it.” Let me ask you a few questions about the Bible, Miller suggested, and I will show you.
Intrigued, the minister begged leave to retrieve his Bible. When he returned, he had not only the good book, but about twenty of his comrades, for moral and intellectual support. Beginning in the plodding, plain way he had begun thousands of sermons, Miller asked the Methodist to read the first three verses of the twelfth chapter of Daniel.
And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which stand-eth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.
And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.
“Is the resurrection brought to view in those verses?” Miller asked.
The minister stood silent for some time, then replied that he was not sure that was the case.
Well, then, Miller asked, what did the verses mean? When the minister responded that he chose not to answer, Miller said, “Oh, very well, we have nothing more to say together; for I did not agree to convince you, if you would not answer a few questions.”
At that, an elderly minister who had taken a seat on one of the capstans asked his fellow Methodist why he would not answer Miller’s question. When the obstinate man still refused to answer, the elderly man turned to Miller. “It does refer to the resurrection,” he said.
“Well, father,” Miller said, “I perceive you are an honest man. I will, if you please, ask you a few questions.”
The first minister piped in. “Don’t answer. He will make a Millerite of you.”
But the older minister was unafraid, and he and Miller bantered back and forth for some time, in each instance agreeing on the interpretation of the scripture they were considering. At one point the Methodist exclaimed that “I never saw this in this light before.” After an hour of Q&A, several others confessed that they had never considered Millerism to be as logical as Miller had just presented it to be.
Miller had seen the effect before. When you’re portrayed as a lunatic but then present as a sane, rational person, the surprise in the face of listeners can be easily understood. Still, it must have been reassuring to Miller that even in the wake of the spring disappointment, some at least were still willing to listen.
As Miller and Himes were reviving the spirits of the faithful in Ohio and helping skeptics see things in a new light, the movement was being pulled in another direction in New Hampshire. At a camp meeting in Exeter, not far from where the first Adventist camp meeting had taken place just a few years before, a listless congregation was listening to speaker after speaker with little enthusiasm. Then Samuel Snow rose and began preaching the message he had first revealed back in February, a new interpretation of Daniel’s prophecy that called into question not Miller’s thesis, but his timekeeping. March had not been the end of the process, Snow told a now attentive crowd. Christ did not come then, he explained—as he had in his February 22 article in the Midnight Cry, before the spring disappointment—because the twenty-three hundred day/year prophecy ended not in 1843, but in 1844. The Lord would return, Snow assured the flock, on the tenth day of the seventh month of the Jewish calendar, the Day of Atonement. In 1844, that was October 22. Snow’s vision moved the camp meeting to a “crusading zeal” and reinvigorated the Millerite movement, pushing it beyond the grasp of Miller and Himes.
“When that meeting closed, the granite hills of New Hampshire were ringing with the mighty cry, ‘Behold the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him,’ ” remembered Joseph Bates. “As the loaded wagons, stages, and railroad cars rolled away through the different states, cities, and villages of New England, the cry was still resounding, ‘Behold the bridegroom cometh!’ Christ, our blessed Lord, is coming on the tenth day of the seventh month! Get ready! Get ready!” Now, the man who had founded the movement and the man who had spread its message across the country would have to decide whether they would bask in the light or be left behind in the darkness.
The masses were quick to answer the call once again. On September 4, the same day Silas Wright was nominated for governor, a New York Customs House officer tendered his resignation. His concern, though, was related not to the political year, but to eternity. It was time, said the official, to get his worldly house in order, because the end was nigh. “Dear Sir,” the Millerite wrote to his boss, “Inclosed is my warrant which I resign into your hands…. And may the Lord, by his spirit, convince you of the truth, and prepare you to meet him with yours, in the hopes of a better inheritance.”
Two weeks later, Miller was in New York City, almost home from his journey to the west. He spoke in earnest about his mistakes, but assured all listeners that Christ was indeed coming. He had more invitations to speak, but once again feeling worn out by his travels, he demurred and headed for Low Hampton.