The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson

The Coming of Democracy

The Coming of Democracy

Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson

Mark R. Cheathem

CUMBERLAND UNIVERSITY

LEBANON, TENNESSEE

© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2018

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cheathem, Mark Renfred, author.

Title: The coming of democracy : presidential campaigning in the age of Jackson / Mark R. Cheathem.

Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017046427| ISBN 9781421425979 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421425986 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421425993 (electronic) | ISBN 1421425971 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 142142598X (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 1421425998 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Presidents—United States—Election—1840. | Harrison, William Henry, 1773–1841. | United States—Politics and government—1837–1841. | Jackson, Andrew, 1767–1845—Influence.

Classification: LCC E390 .C47 2018 | DDC 973.5/8—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046427

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For Alli

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Competing Blueprints for Democracy

2 Exercising the Right of Freemen

3 A New Mode of Electioneering

4 We Must Always Have Party Distinctions

5 Drums and Fifes and Hickory Clubs

6 A Disastrous, Perhaps a Fatal Revolution

7 Freemen, Cheer the Hickory Tree

8 We Are in the Midst of a Revolution

9 A Movement of the People

10 He Will Be a Party President

11 Bring Out the Hurra Boys

12 Hard Cider, Coons, Log Cabins, and Big Balls

13 Doggerel Rhymes and Vulgar Pictures

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book was written during a period of transition at Cumberland University, which witnessed my undergraduate alma mater beginning to fulfill a potential unrealized since Cordell Hull’s days as a law student. I am grateful for the leadership that Board of Trust Chair Bob McDonald, President Paul Stumb, VPAA and Provost Bill McKee, and Dean Eric Cummings provided our institution during the past few years and for their support of my research.

In 2001, I had the opportunity to publish a piece expressing my appreciation for librarians and archivists, the unsung heroes of academia. At Cumberland University’s Vise Library, all the staff deserve thanks, but I want to single out Ashli Wells in particular. Every library has an invaluable staff member who goes above and beyond, and for Cumberland, that is Ashli. I also want to thank the staff at the American Antiquarian Society, the Library of Congress, the Richmond (Virginia) Library, the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester in New York, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, and the Virginia Historical Society.

I imposed on several people in asking them to read this book in part or in whole. As always, John Marszalek was my primary critic and cheerleader. If I had not seen his C-SPAN talk on the Eaton affair in 1998, the last two decades of my life would not have been as rich professionally or personally. Tom Hilpert is my toughest critic, but as long as he respects my knowledge of commas, I will keep subjecting myself to his edits. Miles Smith IV and Kenneth Owens read one of my earliest drafts of the book, and I think all three of us agreed then that the quality could only go up from there. Two of my students, Jennifer Allen Erickson and Josh Williams, kindly tolerated my request for feedback on another early draft. One of my former Mississippi State officemates, Tim Vanderburg, provided a primary source that I could not easily access, as did Andy Moore, whom I admire and respect more than he knows. John Belohlavek avoided being drafted into reading another manuscript this time, but I want to acknowledge here that I appreciate his professional generosity and personal interest in my career.

I began directing the Papers of Martin Van Buren during the review stage of this book. Co-editor James Bradley and the following students and volunteers who have contributed to the Van Buren Papers made it easier to tell the Little Magician’s side of the story: George Allyn, Daniel Barr, Bill Claydon, Jennifer Allen Erickson, David Gregory, Adrienne High, Ally Johnson, Zach Morgan, Christian Noland, Carrie Ordiway, Jordan Russ, Jazmine Smith, Sarah Tiger, Alyssa Walker, Josh Williams, and Kayelee Young.

My thanks to Bob Brugger for overseeing this project before his retirement from Johns Hopkins University Press and to Elizabeth Demers for shepherding it to publication. Lauren Straley was a pleasure to work with as the book went through the postreview process at Johns Hopkins. I am also grateful for the critiques of the anonymous reviewers and for the careful copyediting of Melanie Mallon.

Even though my family will not let me be as introverted as I want to be, I still love them. Amber, you are my rock and my laughter. Laney, you are my funny, sassy alter ego. David, you are my hockey star and buddy. Alli, you are talented in so many ways—art, creative media, sports—but even if you weren’t, I would still love you and your Munchkin face just as much.

The Coming of Democracy

Introduction

On 29 May 1840, approximately 7,500 individuals gathered in Clarksville, Tennessee, to witness a parade celebrating presidential candidate William Henry Harrison. The Whig Party had chosen the War of 1812 hero and former territorial governor, US senator, and diplomat to challenge the incumbent president, Democrat Martin Van Buren. The Clarksville audience watched as 250 Harrison supporters disembarked from the steamboat Gallatin and began marching from the dock to the square, then on to the area prepared for the festivities. As bands played, parade members carried banners announcing their devotion to the Whig cause. One banner proclaimed, Harrison and Tyler—Vox populi, vox dei. This Latin phrase, translated the voice of the people is the voice of God, indicated their belief that the people’s choice of Harrison and his running mate, Virginian John Tyler, reflected providential will.¹

Floats were also part of the parade, and one proved especially memorable. It incorporated the Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign theme, introduced by Democrats as a way to criticize Harrison but adopted by the Whigs to indicate their candidate’s purported common-man lifestyle. The float consisted of a log cabin with several coon skins nailed about the door, and a live coon . . . playing upon the bark roof. The obligatory barrel of hard cider rested inside the cabin. Banners were tacked on either end of the building. One identified Harrison with another American military hero, George Washington; the other said, in part, Harrison and Reform. This last inscription gave a nod to both the Whigs’ support of various moral reform movements as well as Harrison’s desire to bring a different direction to the presidency. A testament to the latter came from the drummer leading the float, a former British prisoner of war captured by Harrison at the Battle of the Thames, the 1813 engagement on which the Whig candidate’s military fame primarily rested. The drummer reportedly testified on his former captor’s behalf: General Harrison saved him from one Monarchy [the British] and is about to save him from another [Van Buren].²

The Whigs had formed in 1834 during Jackson’s second administration but had been unsuccessful in their efforts to defeat Van Buren in the 1836 election. Four years later, their chances of replacing him with Harrison were good if they could find a way to convince the growing number of voters that their party held the nation’s future success in its hands.

Van Buren’s fall from grace came quickly once he ascended to the presidency in 1837. He had risen from his home state of New York to become the trusted confidant of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president. When Jackson took office in 1829, Van Buren served first as his secretary of state (1829–31), then as his vice president (1833–37). In 1836, the New Yorker won election as Jackson’s successor. His administration suffered, however, from the Panic of 1837, a series of economic downturns across the nation that began almost immediately after he took office and left him precariously perched to win a second term. He and the Democrats nevertheless were positioned to draw on the organized partisanship of the very two-party system that Van Buren had helped to rejuvenate over the past few years.

At stake in the 1840 presidential election was the future of this political party system. Democrats had formed their party identity during the 1828 campaign and early in Jackson’s first administration. They possessed a political ideology based on the Jeffersonian principles of limited government and the will of the people. A Van Buren victory in 1840 would further strengthen the Democrats and seemed likely to, if not scatter the Whigs, at least make them a permanent minority party for the near future. The Whigs, on the other hand, had initially organized as an anti-Jackson party, bringing together disparate individuals and factions who agreed on opposing Old Hickory but not necessarily much else. By 1840, the Whigs were the party of social morality and progressivism; that year’s presidential campaign offered the first legitimate opportunity for the Whigs to articulate a focused political agenda and to begin building a stable voting base led by their presidential choice. A Harrison victory would force the Democrats to reexamine their own political program and reconsider whether the principles embodied in Jackson’s administrations were enough to recapture the presidency in 1844.

Throughout the early republic and Jacksonian periods, both parties attempted to lure voters to their side by using cultural politics, or political activities that took place outside formal party organization and the act of voting. What sounded and looked like entertainment, things such as music, public events, and cartoons, held important political meaning in the first few decades of the United States’ existence. These appeals targeted the growing number of eligible voters, which increased dramatically following the 1824 presidential election, and engaged nonvoters, particularly women. The extraordinary voter participation rate (over 80 percent) in the 1840 presidential election indicated that both substantive issues and cultural politics involved Americans in the presidential selection process. Drawing parallels between the Jacksonian era and today is problematic because of the enormous changes that the nation and its politics have experienced. Nevertheless, the question of voter engagement is one that remains relevant in the age of round-the-clock news cycles and social media campaigns, and the maturation of cultural politics during the Jacksonian period is an important starting point for considering what drives twenty-first-century Americans’ interest in presidential politics.

Note to readers: In this book, I use early republic for the entire period between 1789 and 1840 and reserve the terms Jacksonian era or Jacksonian period for the years following the 1824 election through the 1840 election. I have also retained the original spelling, punctuation, and other idiosyncrasies of the period’s writing, in some cases using bracketed editorial insertions when necessary to help readers understand a quotation or when the insertions were included in the original.

CHAPTER 1

Competing Blueprints for Democracy

The 1840 presidential campaign drew on the long-standing American political culture that employed both formal and informal practices. Formal politics, such as political partisanship, elections, and voting, became more democratic during the early republic and Jacksonian periods, clearly affecting the execution and outcome of the 1840 campaign. At the same time, cultural politics played a significant role in generating interest in the contest. Even before the inception of the United States, cultural politics provided Americans unable to exert power through formal means the opportunity to participate in the political sphere. The growing intersection of formal and cultural politics during the decades of the early republic contributed to growing voter engagement in presidential contests and culminated in the Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign of 1840.

FORMAL POLITICS IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

The outline of formal politics in the early United States looks familiar to us today: presidential elections sometimes turning on disputed outcomes, members of Congress failing to get along, and American citizens complaining about the national government’s overexpansive power. Nevertheless, there are significant differences between the political world of then and now. Then, presidential voting often stretched over weeks and produced chief executives who typically used their constitutional authority cautiously. Congressional members were divided into two main ideological factions, the Federalists and the Republicans, who were also known as Democratic-Republicans or Jeffersonian Republicans. (Neither of today’s two major political parties—Democratic or Republican—exactly resembles the Republicans of the early republic.) States sometimes held more political power than the national government; for example, state legislatures, not voters, selected US senators. In many instances, those same legislatures also apportioned electoral votes without popular elections.

Three specific areas of formal politics are central to understanding the evolution of presidential politics during the early republic: political parties, presidential elections, and voter participation.

Political Parties

During George Washington’s presidency (1789–97), political factions developed in Congress that produced the first party system, pitting Federalists against Republicans. Led by Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, Federalists wanted a stronger central government, a vigorous national economy based on industry and urbanization, and a loose, or flexible, interpretation of the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison headed the Republican opposition. They advocated a more limited national government; an economy and a society grounded in the rural, agricultural perspective; and a strict, or limited, interpretation of the Constitution. In addition to these ideological differences, the two factions generally found support in different geographic regions: the Federalists in New England and the Republicans in the Old South and the emerging West. The mid-Atlantic states proved to be the most contested partisan ground.¹

During the first eight years of the nation’s existence, Federalists and Republicans fought political battles over several issues, including the national government’s role in the economy, the French Revolution that was engulfing Europe in warfare, and the United States’ relationship with foreign powers, specifically Great Britain and Spain, that held territory on the North American continent. By the time George Washington’s second term was drawing to a close, in the mid-1790s, the two sides were clearly defined political factions with different political philosophies about the best direction for the United States.²

These battles continued into the early nineteenth century, helping to draw lines of political demarcation between the two parties at all levels of government. Republicans gained the ascendancy in the 1800 presidential and congressional elections, which propelled them into national power for the next two decades. Although the minority national party, Federalists remained competitive at all levels of government and, at the local and state levels, even existed as the majority party in some areas. Following the War of 1812, Federalists began to decline at the national level, due in part to their public denouncement of President James Madison and congressional Republicans’ support of the war against Great Britain. The Federalists ran their last presidential candidate in 1816, but they persisted as a significant political power in some states well into the 1820s.³

Prior to the 1824 election, then, two parties—the Federalists and the Republicans—existed, but they lacked the coherent national organization and internal discipline that would emerge during the Jacksonian-era presidential elections. Following the 1824 election, the Federalists continued to fade, and the Republicans split into rival factions that offered competing blueprints for democracy.⁴

Presidential Elections

Selecting presidential candidates in the early republic was very different from the process used today. George Washington ran unopposed in the first two elections, but his decision not to run for a third term highlighted the need for a process to identify presidential candidates. What developed was the congressional caucus nomination. Unlike today, with a caucus/primary system that allows voters to determine presidential nominations, the congressional caucus system limited the decision to the US representatives and senators of the respective parties, who met and chose their preferred nominees.⁵

The congressional caucus may have been used in 1796, but the first conclusive evidence of its existence appeared four years later. In May 1800, Federalist congressmen convened and decided to support President John Adams and South Carolina’s Charles C. Pinckney without giving one a preference to the other. Republicans met that same month and unanimously agreed to support [Aaron] Burr for Vice-President, with Thomas Jefferson the presumptive presidential candidate. Over the next few elections, caucus nominations continued. By 1820, with the Federalist Party significantly weakened, this system appeared to be on its way out. About an attempted caucus meeting to select a vice-presidential nominee to run with incumbent president James Monroe, one Republican noted, Only forty six members, out of two hundred and thirty, attended the Caucus . . . the meeting resolved that it was inexpedient to make any nomination, & then adjourned.⁶

Once presidential candidates were chosen, voter involvement in electing them varied. The Constitution gave state legislatures latitude in determining the assignment of electoral votes. In some cases, state legislatures cast votes without any voter input; in other cases, popular votes determined which candidate received a state’s electoral votes. The timing of election dates also affected voter participation in the process. In 1792, Congress designated that elections should be held within thirty-four days preceding the first Wednesday in December of the election year. (Not until 1845 would the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November become the standardized presidential election day with which Americans today are familiar.) This variance in election dates allowed some states to vote earlier than others. The results of these earlier states usually appeared in newspapers before the final polling day, undoubtedly influencing the decisions of individuals living in states with later voting dates.⁷

Voter Participation

One measure of formal political engagement during the early republic was the voter participation rate, which was largely influenced by eligibility requirements. In 1790, the year of the first census, ten of the original thirteen states required voters to own property in order to cast their ballots. That number totaled nine in 1820, with the ten new states that had entered the Union after 1790 generally not introducing a property-owning requirement for suffrage. Conversely, between 1790 and 1820, states began adding racial exclusions to restrict voting access for African Americans. In the first census, only three states (Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia) limited voting to whites; thirty years later, fourteen of the twenty-three states specifically disallowed African American suffrage. Women were disenfranchised to an even greater extent. New Jersey was the only state in the early republic to allow women to vote; its property-owning women held that right from 1776 until the legislature took it away in 1807.⁸

For these reasons, voter participation in presidential elections was limited. In 1796, the first competitive presidential election took place between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The existing popular vote totals cast in that election numbered approximately 47,000. Four years later, the same two candidates competed in a hotly contested and acrimonious campaign, but they drew only about 67,000 votes from 2.16 million free white males. The next two elections (1804 and 1808) were less competitive, with Jefferson defeating South Carolina’s Charles C. Pinckney by a 162–14 electoral vote in 1804, and James Madison winning over Pinckney 122–47 in 1808. Nevertheless, the popular votes in each election increased: from 143,000 in 1804 to 191,000 in 1808. In 1812, Madison won a second term in a close contest. He defeated New Yorker DeWitt Clinton 128 to 89 in electoral votes, with only 12,000 popular votes separating the two candidates. The 1812 election also saw an increase in total popular votes, with 269,000 cast. In 1816 and 1820, Federalists put forward little opposition to James Monroe, who secured the presidency for Jeffersonian Republicans for eight more years. As a result, the popular vote total dropped to just over 100,000 in each election, while the number of free white males rose to about 4 million by 1820.⁹

While these data are incomplete, they reveal three features of early republic elections. First, American citizens did not look at presidents as the answer to the nation’s problems in the same way that they do today. Therefore, choosing a chief executive was not necessarily regarded as a political priority. Second, the number of eligible voters who participated in presidential elections was low throughout the first three decades of the early republic. This anemic voter participation rate proceeded in part from suffrage restrictions, but also from the lack of strong political parties coordinating national campaigns. Third, cultural politics at the national level did not necessarily produce larger voter turnouts during these elections. For example, the 1800 campaign was one of the dirtiest presidential contests in US political history, yet it failed to elicit much enthusiasm at the polls. Subsequent elections also generated little organized turnout. As Thomas Jefferson noted to Albert Gallatin in 1817, I have been charmed to see that a presidential election now produces scarcely any agitation. On mr Madison’s election there was little, on Monroe’s all but none.¹⁰

Despite the low participation rates in presidential elections, early republic voters undeniably were politically engaged at the local and state levels. Prior to 1800, voter participation rates in most states ranged between 30 and 50 percent of adult white males. Voter engagement began to increase in the late 1790s as transatlantic issues, particularly the British-French rivalry, began directly influencing US domestic politics and driving increasing partisanship at all levels of government. This shift continued in the early nineteenth century. Between 1800 and 1820, peak voter turnout in most states matched or exceeded that of the 1828–40 presidential elections, usually hailed as the period when democratic political engagement began to flourish. In most cases, substantive issues of concern at the local and state levels, not suffrage reform or national politics, led to increasingly heightened partisan organization. This more structured political system spurred eligible voters to turn out at polling places to make their voices heard, a crucial lesson for Jacksonian-era presidential campaigns that was enhanced by the period’s cultural politics.¹¹

CHAPTER 2

Exercising the Right of Freemen

Outside the formal political process in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an informal political culture existed that both gave voice to those possessing less political power and laid the foundation for the energetic presidential contests that took place between 1824 and 1840. Cultural politics included several organizational and popular electioneering characteristics usually associated with the emergence of Jacksonian democracy, including auxiliary organizations; material, print, and visual culture; political music; public correspondence, events, and speeches; and women’s activity. In fact, many of these forms and practices existed prior to the Revolutionary War, which speaks to their long-term existence in American politics. Nevertheless, the presidential campaigns of 1824, 1828, 1832, 1836, and 1840 witnessed the increasing importance of these types of cultural politics.¹

PUBLIC EVENTS AND SPEECHES

Public events and speechmaking took several forms during the revolutionary and early republic periods, providing Americans with opportunities to express their political views. These events and addresses sometimes allowed them to participate in a form of electioneering; at other times, they afforded Americans the chance to convey their discontent. Nevertheless, by bringing citizens directly into contact with political figures and ideas, public events and speeches increased their interest and investment in the nation’s political culture.²

During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, public events, usually centered on food and drink, made it possible for candidates and voters to make and hear political statements. Picnics and barbecues provided one such opportunity. For example, an 1803 barbecue in Maryland was advertised as one for republican citizens, who joined together to eat and drink in honor of the Jeffersonians and to condemn Treason and Apostacy—Benedict Arnold and John Adams. These gatherings could also unite political opponents, as one 1812 barbecue in Charles Town, Virginia, did. The greatest harmony prevailed at this event, which witnessed toasts made in support of the military effort against Britain and an honorable and speedy termination of the war, as well as the hope that Republican and Federalists always meet in friendship—their interests are the same. Elite men also used the promise of smoked meat and strong drink to attract men of a lower rank to these gatherings, hoping to solidify their loyalty for upcoming elections, and alcohol and gambling often accompanied visits to polling places on election day.³

While local politicians might be able to participate in these public events, presidential candidates in the early republic were supposed to remain Mute Tribunes, unlike today, when they are expected to be public and accessible to voters. Once elected, however, presidents saw the benefit of making public appearances or even undertaking tours to engender support for their agendas and parties. For example, George Washington made two tours—one in New England in 1789, the other in the South in 1791—that elicited significant enthusiasm among those who participated. In Alexandria, Virginia, one newspaper recounted the happiness of the Company at the president’s attendance at the town’s Fourth of July celebration. Washington’s extraordinary talents and virtues had contributed to the attainment of that blessing which they were now assembled to commemorate. Him, therefore, they could not but contemplate, in some sort, as the Father of the Feast.⁴

Almost twenty-five years later, during the Era of Good Feelings, President James Monroe undertook his own tour of New England in the summer of 1817 to establish a climate of nonpartisanship. Federalists in the region coordinated a series of public ceremonies and events to work out the stain of the Hartford Convention and their other rebellions, according to Federalist senator Jeremiah Mason of New Hampshire. While in Massachusetts, Monroe met with former president John Adams and other Federalists, as well as many Republicans. The Fourth of July coincided with Monroe’s visit, offering a chance for the president to emphasize partisan unity. In one address, he confidently proclaimed, Believing that there is not a section of our Union, nor a citizen, who is not interested in the success of our government, I indulge a strong hope that they will all unite in future in the measures necessary to secure it. House Speaker Henry Clay was skeptical about Monroe’s bipartisan gestures: If indeed they [Federalists] are real converts to the true faith, and their convertion is attributable to the tour of Mr. Monroe, he merits the honors of a political Saint.⁵

One of the main functions of public celebrations was to make political statements, which could be incorporated in long speeches or short toasts. In 1778, David Ramsay spoke at length about his belief in the United States’ providential political course: Our sun of political happiness is already risen, and hath lifted his head over the mountain illuminating our hemisphere with liberty, light, and polished life. Our Independence will redeem one quarter of the globe from tyranny and oppression, and consecrate it the chosen Seat of Truth, Justice, Freedom, Learning, and Religion. Following the writing of the Constitution, its opponents used toasts to express their disapproval. Pennsylvanians celebrated the Fourth of July in 1788 by pronouncing, May America remain forever free from tyranny, anarchy, and consolidation, while in Rhode Island, they proclaimed, May the sons of freedom in America never submit to a despotic government. A French observer noted that "Americans derive as much satisfaction [from making toasts], as a Frenchman would in recounting the number of his love intrigues."⁶

PUBLIC CORRESPONDENCE

Public correspondence between citizens and presidents represented another way in which political expressions occurred outside the constraints of organized campaigning. Some individuals or groups wrote addresses, letters, or petitions to presidents or