◆ Birth of the modern presidential campaign

No president since George Washington cast a longer shadow than Andrew Jackson. The democratic spirit of his administration continues to influence not only the presidency itself, but how Americans view the presidency. Yet, like Washington, Jackson possessed a personality so large that he made those who immediately followed look small by comparison.

Jackson’s Anointed

Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his Democracy in America (1835-1840) that Jackson had “constantly” increased his power, making the “federal government … strong in his hands.” But Tocqueville predicted, “it will pass to his successor enfeebled.”

The French political thinker penetrated to the paradoxical core of the Jackson presidency. In terms of doctrine and policy, it had introduced a concept of democracy that limited the scope of the federal government, but in Jackson’s own bold and grasping hands, the president became very powerful. Tocqueville saw that this power inhered at least as much in the personality of the particular president as it adhered to the office of the president. Jackson provided a model for what a strong president could do, but he did not necessarily endow the presidency itself with that strength.

Little Van

At 5 feet, 6 inches, Martin Van Buren wasn’t particularly short for the early 1800s, but coming after Andrew Jackson’s rawboned and imposing 6 feet, 1 inch, his modest height earned him the nickname “Little Van.” Active in New York State politics, a U.S. senator from New York (1821-1828), and briefly governor (1829), Van Buren was one of the architects of the Democratic Party and a proponent of the spoils system (see Chapter 8). He was an ardent supporter of Andrew Jackson and became an intimate member of the Kitchen Cabinet before he replaced Henry Clay as Jackson’s secretary of state in 1829. The president tapped him as his vice presidential running mate when he ran for a second term in 1832.

Donning Jackson’s Mantle

Jackson handpicked Van Buren as his successor and trusted him to carry on his policies. For his part, after he was elected, Van Buren vowed that he intended “to follow in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor,” and, to demonstrate that he was in earnest, retained Jackson’s final cabinet intact, but for a single member.

Tally

In 1828, Jackson (Democrat) earned 178 electoral votes (647,292 popular) against National Republican incumbent John Quincy Adams’s 83 (507,730 popular). Against National Republican candidate Henry Clay in 1832, Jackson took 219 electoral votes (687,502 popular) to Clay’s 49 (530,189 popular); 18 electoral votes went to other candidates. Van Buren, in 1836, won 170 electoral votes against Whig candidate William Henry Harrison’s 73 (three others also ran). Van Buren earned 762,678 popular votes versus 548,007 for Harrison.

The Big Panic

Van Buren inherited more than the spirit and philosophy of Jacksonian democracy. No sooner did he take office than the nation was swept by the Panic of 1837, the culmination of Jackson’s radically decentralized economic policy.

Of 850 banks chartered in the United States at the time, 343 closed their doors during the Panic of 1837, and another 62 partially failed. The system of state banks that Jackson had nurtured never fully recovered from this catastrophe.

Triumph of the Whigs

The Whigs clamored for more federal intervention in the economic crisis, and, in this call, they were even joined by a sizable number of Democrat defectors. Van Buren held firm, but the financial panic drove many conservative Democrats into an alliance with the Whigs, whose candidate, William Henry Harrison, triumphed over Van Buren by a wide margin when he ran for reelection in 1840.

Promises, Promises

The Whig platform had rested on a pledge to undo the Jacksonian aggrandizement of the presidency. The party promised that there would be no “King Andrew II” enthroned in the White House, and the executive branch would be generally reined in. Harrison made two specific pledges. The first was to return the veto to its “proper” function. Henceforth, the president would use it only against legislation he sincerely believed violated the Constitution. The second of Harrison’s promises was to limit his presidency to a single term.

Tally

Harrison claimed 234 electoral votes (1,275,017 popular) to Van Buren’s 60 (1,128,702 popular).

Harrison labeled as “preposterous” the Jacksonian assertion that a president was in a position to understand the people more clearly than their representatives in Congress. The Democrats responded by questioning whether Harrison truly believed this or was merely parroting what Whig Party leaders had told him to say. They pointed out that the party had failed to nominate their most distinguished and seasoned statesman and politician, Henry Clay, and had instead chosen Harrison, whom they lambasted as politically inexperienced, implying that he was a pliable party hack.

Log Cabin and Hard Cider: Inventing the Presidential Campaign

Harrison had actually held a good many elected and appointed posts, and if he seemed politically inexperienced, the reason was the way the Whig Party chose to present him. The campaign of 1840 was the first major political campaign in the history of the presidency. Like virtually all of the campaigns that followed at least through the first two thirds of the twentieth century, the contest between Harrison and Van Buren employed songs, symbols, and slogans, including perhaps the most famous campaign slogan in American history: “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” This excursion into trippingly alliterative verse exploited Harrison’s nickname, “Tippecanoe,” a reference to the former general’s 1811 victory over the forces of the celebrated and much-feared Shawnee war leader Tecumseh at Tippecanoe Creek (present-day Battle Ground), Indiana. The Tyler of “Tyler Too” was vice presidential running mate John Tyler of Virginia.

While the slogan is memorable, even more significant was the central symbol of the campaign, the log cabin, which denoted Harrison’s connection with the western frontier. The log cabin symbol set an enduring precedent used in a number of subsequent presidential campaigns, most notably that of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. In Lincoln’s case, however, the log cabin was accurately emblematic of the candidate’s humble birth and upbringing, which had in fact taken place in a log cabin in the Kentucky backwoods. Harrison had been born and raised in prosperity and comfort on a Virginia plantation.

What They Said

I pledge myself before Heaven and earth, if elected... to lay down at the end of the term faithfully that high trust at the feet of the people! —William Henry Harrison, campaign speech, Dayton, Ohio, September 10, 1840

A member of the Democratic “party press” (see Chapter 8) lambasted candidate Harrison’s log cabin pretensions by predicting that, given “a barrel of hard cider and … a pension of $2,000,” Tippecanoe would “sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin by the side of a … fire and study moral philosophy.” Harrison’s Whig promoters appropriated this intended barb and proudly labeled their man with it, pronouncing him the “log cabin and hard-cider candidate.” It was the first instance of what modern political strategists would call “branding” a candidate.

Ironically enough, the precedent-setting campaign for the Whig candidate, in which the complexities of issues and political philosophies were smothered in jingles, slogans, emblems, and other hoopla, was born of a Jacksonian vision of America. That is, this “modern” political campaign was designed to appeal to the common man, the very figure Jackson had helped to enfranchise and to elevate. It was an appeal virtually every other presidential candidate that came after the campaign of 1840 would emulate, up to and including “Joe the Plumber” in the McCain-Palin campaign of 2008.

The Death of a President

Tippecanoe was not destined to long relish his victory over Little Van. He delivered on March 4, 1841, the longest inaugural address in presidential history, clocking in at an hour and 40 minutes, addressing his audience in an icy rain and without the benefit of an overcoat. He caught a cold, which was apparently made worse some days later when he was drenched in a downpour while taking a walk. His illness developed into pneumonia, his condition rapidly deteriorated, and, a half hour after midnight on April 4, 1841, just one month after taking the oath, William Henry Harrison became the first American president to die in office.

Setting a Precedent for Secession

The president’s death raised a question apparently no one had anticipated. As mentioned in Chapter 3, Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution specifies that on the removal or death of the president, his “powers and duties … shall devolve on the Vice-President.” The document does not stipulate that the vice president becomes the president, so that it is unclear if the vice president assumes the full status of president or merely fills in for him (and if the latter is the case, for how long?).

John Tyler did not wait for Congress to finish scratching its collective head. He immediately took the oath of office and then promised to faithfully complete Harrison’s entire term.

There were objections in Congress, but they did not stick, and an enduring precedent of succession was established, which would not be codified as law until ratification of the Twenty-fifth Amendment in 1967.

John Tyler Redeems the Presidency

While Congress finally accepted the legality of Tyler’s presidency, he never fully overcame the stigma of having been an “accidental president,” especially in view of his differences with his own party. A former Democrat, Tyler, unlike Harrison, was not a fully compliant Whig. His inclusion on the ticket was a classic example of “ticket balancing” (see Chapter 3), intended to placate the wing of the Whig Party that embraced the Democrats’ position on states’ rights. Party leaders never intended for him to become president and never dreamed that he would.

def•i•ni•tion

Strictly speaking, states’ rights are those powers the Constitution does not assign to the federal government and which, therefore, devolve upon the states. In the evolution of American politics, especially leading up to the Civil War, the phrase came to describe a political philosophy that limits federal powers to those actually enumerated in the Constitution and gives every other power to the states, which thereby enjoy considerable autonomy from the national government.

Although Tyler pledged to serve out Harrison’s term, he made no promise to carry out what he knew—or surmised—would have been Harrison’s policies. He intended to create his own administration, and that meant governing more like a moderate Democrat than a Whig. Like Jackson, he opposed the federalizing efforts of the Whigs and vetoed one Whig bill after another. When he vetoed legislation that would have established a new national bank, Whig partisans burned him in effigy across the country, and for the first time on record, a United States president received threats of assassination. Tyler’s own cabinet rebelled. All except Secretary of State Daniel Webster simultaneously resigned.

For all intents and purposes, Congress declared war on the president. In a bid to force Tyler’s resignation, Henry Clay cooked up a scheme whereby the Senate would withhold consenting to any new cabinet nominees. This surely would have crippled the presidency, perhaps goading Tyler into stepping down, but the plot came to nothing. In 1843, however, after Tyler vetoed the high tariff essential to the implementation of the Clay’s American System (a program of federally funded internal improvements, such as roads and canals), the House of Representatives convened a committee chaired by Representative—and former president—John Quincy Adams to make recommendations on an impeachment resolution. The Adams committee concluded that Tyler had in fact misused the veto, and an impeachment resolution was voted on—the first in U.S. history. When it failed to pass, an intensely frustrated Henry Clay suggested that Congress vote on a constitutional amendment to permit a presidential veto to be overridden by a simple majority vote rather than the constitutionally mandated two thirds majority.

Tyler responded to the attempted impeachment by claiming that he represented “the executive authority of the people,” and it was in the name of the people that he protested attacks by Congress on the “undoubted constitutional power” of the chief executive’s office.

Tyler took some satisfaction when the Whigs were handed a sharp defeat in the midterm elections of 1842, but, understandably, the Whig Party declined to nominate him as its presidential candidate two years later. Nevertheless, he had kept the Jacksonian presidency alive despite Whig attempts to kill it.

Behold a Dark Horse

The death of William Henry Harrison and the political apostasy of John Tyler wrecked the Whig scheme to roll back the Jacksonian concept of the presidency. Conversely, Tyler’s “accidental” quasi-Jacksonian presidency improved the prospects for electing a Democrat in 1844, and the party was prepared to give Martin Van Buren the nod—again.

But history intervened—again.

In 1836 Texas fought its way to independence from Mexico, proclaimed itself a republic, and sought annexation to the United States. This raised the grim specter of upsetting the congressional balance of members from slave states versus members from free states—for Texas would surely petition for admission to the Union as a slave state—and for years, therefore, presidents and Congress put off the annexation issue. In 1844, fearful that England or France or both were getting too chummy with the Republic of Texas, Tyler directed his secretary of state, John C. Calhoun, to conclude an annexation treaty. Texas was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, shortly before the nominating conventions of both the Democrats and the Whigs. Suddenly, potential candidates were forced to declare their position with regard to annexation.

The front-running Whig nominee, Henry Clay, did not hesitate to proclaim his opposition to annexation, and the Whig Party, which was populated mostly by northerners, had no objection to this position. When Martin Van Buren also announced his opposition, however, the powerful southern bloc of the Democratic Party moved to scuttle his candidacy. A nomination deadlock ensued and was not broken until James K. Polk, governor of Tennessee, was tapped as an acceptable compromise candidate between North and South.

def•i•ni•tion

A dark horse candidate is one who suddenly emerges from obscurity to prominence. The phrase was borrowed from the world of horse racing, in which a “dark horse” was a contender unknown to bettors and handicappers and there difficult to give odds on.

He was the first dark horse candidate in American presidential history. An obscure figure who had not been considered before the convention, Polk came up from behind on the convention’s ninth ballot. After that, his nomination caught fire, and the party lined up behind him.

Polk proved to be a strong candidate who presented himself as a Jacksonian Democrat even as he deftly preempted what the Whigs thought of as their ultimate anti-Jackson weapon: the candidate’s promise to rein in the presidency by pledging to leave office after a single term. Polk the Democrat made that very pledge.

Introducing the Fiscal Presidency

Polk gained his party’s nomination through compromise, and he won election in part through his willingness to gain power by pledging a term limit to his power. Once in the White House, he took a similar compromise approach in his project of reinstating the chief executive’s office to something approaching the scope Andrew Jackson had claimed for it. Instead of asserting presidential authority by fighting other branches of government, as Jackson had, Polk concentrated most intently on taking complete and detailed control of the executive branch. He oversaw and directed all of the executive departments closely, but, most of all, he took charge of the Department of the Treasury.

Tally

Polk took 170 electoral votes to Clay’s 105. He polled 1,337,243 popular votes against 1,299,068 for Clay.

Prior to Polk, the secretary of the treasury had assumed considerable autonomy, thanks to the Treasury Act of 1789, by which Congress tasked the treasury secretary with creating annual estimates of government expenditures and reporting these to Congress. The act did not require the treasury secretary to formulate a federal budget, nor did it give the president the authority to require a budget or direct the creation of one. But neither the Treasury Act nor the Constitution barred the president from formulating, directing, requiring, or managing a budget, and so Polk seized upon this lack of prohibition to carve out a new key function for the chief executive: directing the government’s fiscal policy.

The president’s role in formulating the budget for the executive departments and providing direction for the creation of the federal budget as a whole is taken for granted today as one of the chief executive’s basic duties. Yet none of Polk’s nineteenth-century successors—except for Lincoln, who, like Polk, was a wartime president—followed his example. Little wonder, considering the storm of Whig protest that greeted Polk’s approach to fiscal policy.

What They Said

I prefer to supervise the whole operations of Government myself rather than entrust the public business to subordinates and this makes my duties very great. —James K. Polk, 1847

In his last message to Congress, shortly before leaving office, Polk amplified the doctrine that both Jackson and Tyler had promulgated. He asserted that, through the Constitution, the people of the United States had enjoined the president as well as Congress to execute their will. He went a step further for the presidency, however, asserting that whereas each member of Congress represents only a portion of the American people, the president represents the whole of the American people.

Commander in Chief

Another reason that Polk was able to assert executive authority without provoking a bitter battle with Congress was that the people and the government naturally tend to rally around a president in war time. The U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845 provoked Mexico to declare war on the United States. Although a significant minority, mainly New Englanders, condemned the war as imperialist (it was, they said, a barely disguised pretext for robbing Mexico of territory) and immoral (because it would bring into the Union at least one slave state—perhaps more), most Americans enthusiastically embraced the conflict.

In the War of 1812, James Madison, who lacked military understanding and leadership skills and whose commitment to the war was half-hearted at best, had set a very poor example of the president as commander in chief. Polk delivered the first positive example. He was not a military man, but he worked well with them. He also formulated an overall strategy and a clear set of war aims and ably administered the nation’s military resources in war. He personally chose all high-ranking commanding officers, and he coordinated his actions closely with his secretaries of war and the Navy. Most of all, he was unafraid to assert and maintain his complete and final authority over all aspects of the war.

Underappreciated

James K. Polk did what the Panic of 1837 made it impossible for Martin Van Buren to do. He affirmed and sustained the Jacksonian “strong” presidency. Even more important is that he managed to do this without as much of the disruptive and destructive drama the pugnacious Jackson brought to the White House. Polk provided an example of a strong presidency rather than an overbearing president. The authority that he claimed was claimed for the office, and not for himself personally. For this reason, some historians—and at least one president, Harry S. Truman—have judged Polk and “underappreciated” chief executive.

If James K. Polk did not bring the Jacksonian presidency blazing back to its full contentious glory, he revived it as a lingering twilight that continues to linger to this day.

The Least You Need to Know

◆ Jackson’s presidency created a very difficult legacy for those who followed because he put the executive branch in perpetual conflict with the other two branches.

◆ The 1840 contest between Democratic incumbent Martin Van Buren and Whig challenger William Henry Harrison (“Tippecanoe”) was the first “modern” presidential campaign.

◆ Harrison’s sudden death just one month after he took office exposed the vagueness of the Constitution’s rules of vice presidential succession to the presidency.

◆ Democrat James K. Polk, the first “dark horse” candidate, did much to reestablish the Jacksonian presidency and also established two demanding precedents: the president as a true commander in chief and the president as “budgeter” in chief.