Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (14 page)

25
.
CG
, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., 453–55. Clay's description of Calhoun is quoted in Nevins,
Ordeal
, I, 24.

Taylor seemed unlikely presidential timber. The handsome, imposing General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, a dedicated professional with a fondness for dress uniforms, and an articulate Whig, looked like a better choice if the anti-war party felt compelled to mend its image by nominating a military candidate. But Scott had the defects of his virtues. His critics considered him pompous. He had a penchant for writing foot-in-mouth public letters which made him vulnerable to ridicule. His nickname—Old Fuss and Feathers—conveys the nature of his political liabilities. And Taylor had the virtues of his defects, as the image conveyed by
his
sobriquet of Rough and Ready illustrates. Many voters in this new age of (white) manhood suffrage seemed to prefer their candidates rough-hewn. As a war hero Taylor claimed first priority on public affection. Although Scott had planned and led the campaign of 1847 that captured Mexico City, Taylor's victories of 1846 along the Rio Grande and his extraordinary triumph against odds of three to one at Buena Vista in February 1847 had made his reputation before Scott got started.

Buena Vista launched a Taylor bandwagon that proved unstoppable. Rough and Ready's main rival for the nomination (besides Scott) was Henry Clay. Urbane, witty, popular, the seventy-year-old Clay was Mr. Whig—a founder of the party and architect of its "American System" to promote economic growth by a protective tariff, a national bank, and federal aid to internal improvements. As a three-time loser in presidential contests, however, Clay carried the liabilities as well as assets of a long political career. Like a majority of his party he had opposed the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War.
²⁶
But the Whigs could not hope to win the election without carrying some states where annexation and the war had been popular. Taylor seemed to be the answer.

The general was also a godsend to southern Whigs, who faced an erosion of strength at home because of the persistent support of northern Whigs for the Wilmot Proviso. (Most northern Democrats had abandoned Wilmot's Proviso for Cass's formula of popular sovereignty.) Southern Whig leaders, especially Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky and Congressman Alexander Stephens of Georgia, maneuvered the Taylor boom into a southern movement. Taylor's ownership of Louisiana and Mississippi plantations with more than a hundred slaves seemed to assure his safety on the issue of most importance to southerners.

26
. In a sad irony, one of Clay's sons was killed at Buena Vista. Another prominent Whig and opponent of the Mexican adventure, Daniel Webster, also lost a son in the war.

"The truth is," declared Robert Toombs of Georgia, Clay "has sold himself body and soul to the Northern Anti-Slavery Whigs." Taylor, on the other hand, was a "Southern man, a slaveholder, a cotton planter" identified "from birth, association, and conviction . . . with the South."
²⁷
Southern delegates to the Whig convention provided the votes to deny Clay the nomination on the first ballot and then to award it to Taylor on the fourth.

Taylor's candidacy brought to a head a long-festering schism in northern Whiggery. "Of course, we cannot & will not under any circumstances support General Taylor," wrote Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. "We cannot support any body who is not known to be against the extension of Slavery." Sumner spoke for a faction of the party known as "Conscience Whigs." They challenged a more conservative group labeled "Cotton Whigs" because of the prominence of textile magnates in their ranks. The Cotton faction had opposed the Mexican War and favored the Wilmot Proviso. But their position on these issues seemed lukewarm, and in 1848 they wished to join hands with southern Whigs in behalf of Taylor and victory. Unable to sanction this alliance of "lords of the loom" with "lords of the lash," Conscience Whigs bolted the party. Their purpose, in Sumner's words, was no less than "a new crystallization of parties, in which there shall be one grand Northern party of Freedom."
²⁸

The time appeared ripe for such a movement. In New York the Van Buren faction of Democrats was ready for revolt. Dubbed "Barnburners" (after the legendary Dutch farmer who burned his barn to rid it of rats), this faction sent a separate delegation to the national Democratic convention. When the convention voted to seat both New York delegations, the Barnburners stomped out and held their own conclave to nominate Van Buren on a Wilmot Proviso platform. Antislavery Democrats and Whigs from other northern states cheered. The Barnburner

27
. Toombs to James Thomas, April 16, 1848, in Ulrich B. Phillips, ed.,
The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb
, Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1911, vol. 2 (Washington, 1913), 103–4;
New Orleans Bee
and
Charleston Mercury
quoted in Joseph G. Rayback,
Free Soil: The Election of 1848
(Lexington, Ky., 1970), 42, 43.

28
. Sumner to Salmon P. Chase, Feb. 7, 1848, Dec. 12, 1846, Chase Papers, Library of Congress. For the development of this split within the Whig party of Massachusetts, see Kinley J. Brauer,
Cotton versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843–1848
(Lexington, Ky., 1967).

convention provided the spark for an antislavery political blaze; the Liberty party offered itself as kindling.

Founded in 1839 by simon-pure abolitionists, the Liberty party had thus far managed to win only 3 percent of the northern votes for its presidential candidate, in 1844. Since that election, party leaders had been debating future strategy. A radical faction wanted to proclaim a new doctrine that the Constitution empowered the government to abolish slavery
in the states
. But a more pragmatic majority under the leadership of Salmon P. Chase wanted to move in the other direction—toward a coalition with antislavery Whigs and Democrats. An astute lawyer who had defended fugitive slaves, Chase combined religious conviction and humorlessness with unquenchable ambition and shrewd political insight. Although Liberty men must continue to proclaim the goal of ending slavery everywhere, said Chase, they could best take the first step toward that goal by joining with those who believed in keeping it out of the territories—whatever else they believed. If such a coalition gained enough leverage in Ohio to elect Chase to the U. S. Senate, so much the better. Chase planted feelers with Conscience Whigs and Barnburner Democrats in the spring of 1848. These ripened into a Free Soil convention in August, after the major-party nominations of Cass and Taylor had propelled antislavery men out of their old allegiances.

The Free Soil convention at Buffalo resembled nothing so much as a camp meeting. Fifteen thousand fervent "delegates" thronged into the sweltering city. Gathered under a huge canopy erected in the park, they cheered endless oratory damning the slave power while an executive committee of 465 met in the church to do the real work. This committee accomplished something of a miracle by fusing factions from three parties that held clashing opinions on banking, tariffs, and other economic issues. These questions, the staples of American politics for two decades, must give way to a more important one, said veteran Whig Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio: "Our political conflicts must be in future between slavery and freedom."
²⁹
The committee created its new fusion party by nominating a Barnburner for president and a Conscience Whig for vice president on a Liberty platform drafted mainly by Chase. The "mass convention" in the park roared its approval of the committee's work.

Acceptance of Martin Van Buren as presidential nominee was not

29
. Maizlish,
Triumph of Sectionalism
, 89.

easy for Liberty men and Conscience Whigs. As a proslavery Jacksonian, the Little Magician had earned the apparent undying enmity of abolitionists and Whigs in the 1830s. But a new age dawned in 1848. Van Buren now endorsed exclusion of slavery from the territories and abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. His Barnburner backers proclaimed bondage "a great moral, social, and political evil—a relic of barbarism which must necessarily be swept away in the progress of Christian civilization." Speaking to fellow Whigs, Sumner said that "it is not for the Van Buren of 1838 that we are to vote, but the Van Buren of
to-day
."
³⁰
With Charles Francis Adams as vice-presidential nominee, the ticket strengthened its Conscience image. Charles Francis inherited the antislavery mantle from his father John Quincy, who had died earlier in the year. Joshua Leavitt, a founder of the Liberty party and a co-worker with John Quincy Adams against the congressional gag rule on antislavery petitions, brought tears to many eyes at the Buffalo convention with an emotional speech recounting the courage of pioneer abolitionists. Leavitt then offered his blessing to the new Free Soil coalition. "The Liberty Party is not dead," he declaimed, "but
translated
." Vowing to "fight on, and fight ever" for "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men," the delegates returned home to battle for the Lord.
³¹

Free Soilers made slavery the campaign's central issue. Both major parties had to abandon their strategy of ignoring the question. Instead, they tried to win support in each section by obfuscating it. Democrats circulated different campaign biographies of Cass in North and South. In the North they emphasized popular sovereignty as the best way to keep slavery out of the territories. In the South Democrats cited Cass's pledge to veto the Wilmot Proviso and pointed with pride to the party's success (over Whig opposition) in acquiring territory into which slavery
might
expand.

Having no platform to explain and a candidate with no political record to defend, Whigs had an easier time appearing to be all things to

30
. Both quotations from Rayback,
Free Soil
, 211, 247.

31
. This account of the Free Soil convention is drawn from Rayback, 201–30; Morrison,
Democratic Politics and Sectionalism
, 145–55; Frederick J. Blue,
The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics
1848–1854 (Urbana, 1973); Brauer,
Cotton vs. Conscience
, 229–45; Sewell,
Ballots for Freedom
, 142–58; and John Mayfield,
Rehearsal for Republicanism: Free Soil and the Politics of Antislavery
(Port Washington, N.Y., 1980), 111–19.

all men. In the North they pointed to Taylor's pledge
not
to veto whatever Congress decided to do about slavery in the territories. Those antislavery Whigs who supported Taylor in the belief that he would take their side—William H. Seward and Abraham Lincoln, for example—turned out to be right. Southerners should have paid more attention to a speech by Seward at Cleveland. Affable, artful, sagacious, an instinctive politician but also a principled opponent of slavery, Seward would soon emerge as one of Taylor's main advisers. "Freedom and slavery are two antagonistic elements of society," he told a Cleveland audience. "Slavery can be limited to its present bounds"; eventually "it
can
and
must
be abolished."
³²
But in the South, Taylor's repute as the hero of Buena Vista and his status as a large slaveholder dazzled many eyes. "We prefer Old Zack with his sugar and cotton plantations and four hundred negroes," proclaimed the
Richmond Whig
. "Will the people of [the South] vote for a Southern President or a Northern one?" asked a Georgia newspaper.
³³

Most of them voted for a southern one. Taylor carried eight of the fifteen slave states with a majority of 52 percent. He also carried seven of fifteen free states, though the Whig popular vote in the North dropped to 46 percent because of Free-Soil inroads. But while they won 14 percent of the northern vote and supplanted Democrats as the second party in Vermont, Massachusetts, and New York, the Free Soilers did not carry a single state. Nor did they affect the election's outcome: though Van Buren carried enough Democratic votes in New York to give the state to Taylor, Free Soilers neutralized this effect by attracting enough Whig voters in Ohio to put that state in Cass's column. Despite stresses produced by the slavery issue, the centripetal forces of party overcame the centrifugal forces of section.
³⁴

Nevertheless, those stresses had wrenched the system almost to the breaking point. Free Soilers hoping to realign American politics into a struggle between freedom and slavery professed satisfaction with the election. "The public mind has been stirred on the subject of slavery to depths never reached before," wrote Sumner. "The late election," agreed one of his confreres, "is only the Bunker Hill of the moral & political