THIS POST WAS, FOR THE MOST PART, WRITTEN BEFORE THE HORRIFIC EVENTS OF SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2023, IN WHICH THE MURDEROUS HAMAS TERRORISTS HAD DELIBERATELY ATTACKED CIVILIAN SETTLEMENTS ON THE JEWISH HIGH HOLIDAY OF SIMHAT TORAH, MURDERING, RAPING AND KIDNAPPING CITIZENS OF ISRAEL, THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, GERMANY, FRANCE, THAILAND AND OTHER NATIONS. .
THIS ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, FULL OF GLORY, SHAME, CRUELTY, MERCY AND THE HUMAN DESIRE FOR FREEDOM AND THE ERADICATION OF EVIL, IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF THE FALLEN, THE HOPE OF LIBERATION OF THE CAPTIVES, AND THE FINAL VICTORY OF THOSE DOING BATTLE TO SAVE THE INNOCENT AND WIPE EVIL FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH.
GOD SAVE THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, THE STATE OF ISRAEL, THEIR ALLIES, CITIZENS AND ARMED FORCES.
Introduction: The Problem of Partisanship
EPIGRAPH
Darker- still darker! the whirlwinds bear
The dust of the plains to the middle air:
And hark to the crashing, long and loud,
Of the chariot of God in the thunder-cloud!
You may trace its path by the flashes that start
From the rapid wheels where'er they dart,
As the fire-bolts leap to the world below,
And flood the skies with a lurid glow.
William Cullen Bryant, The Hurricane
A: Partisanship in General
Partisanship comes in two forms, each unattractive in its own way to a patriot and a conservative.
The first is what the Framers had called faction - that is, a loyalty that displaces the one a good man owes to his country and his fellow citizens. Whatever the Party gains, the Country loses. And since the building blocks of the Country are the family, the neighborhood, the church, the school - while the Party's basic units are merely its clubs and convention - the Party Man becomes duller, obnoxious and less useful the further he goes down this path.
The second form Partisanship takes is the dedication of the Party to a particular version of the country. In this form, the Party, like a tumor, may exist in a benign form or a malignant one.
In its benign state, the Party is one of the many healthy social activities a citizen engages in - his speech at his partisan club is a mixture of Divine service, of amorous courtship, of a friendly conversation, an exaltation (or condemnation) of an art piece and a presentation to the Board. Thus, the Party, the organ through which politics, or the consultation regarding those things which are common to the entire Society, is the product and pinnacle of all the forces of Society as they exist within the breast of one man. This partisanship is not merely benign, but beneficial and even necessary.
However, in the malignant state of the second form of Partisanship, the partisan builds his home not on the solid rock of religion, family, aesthetics, friendship, business and all the other organic components of life, but on the shifting sands of politics.
Rather than having a worshipful, familiar, beautiful, friendly and businesslike attitude of Politics, he becomes a political friend, a party aesthete, a factional husband, an ideological parishioner and a comrade-partner. His God becomes a celestial apparatchik. He courts his lady, makes love to her, and rears their children according to the party line. He consults the augurs of his faction when creating or deciding the merits of paintings and poems. His friends all agree with him on the finest points of ideology, dissenters are ejected from his life. His business is run not to his own profit and that of society, but to further the aims of the Party. His entire world and all its components become one great party conference. The Country, if it falls to his hands, ceases to be what it actually is and becomes a funhouse version of itself.
All these forms and stages can exist in almost every party, upholding almost every ideology; personal disposition and virtue decide which one shall prevail in the heart of each of the Party's adherents and in its leadership. There is no escape, but for men of judgment and patriotism to foster the benign forms of Partisanship and excise the malignant ones.
B: Partisanship in America
America, being a federation of autonomous republics, each with its own traditions, history idiosyncrasies and capable of standing on its own, presents a further problem to the founding and continuous operation of political parties.
Additionally, the structure of the National government of America is constructed of three Constitutional bodies, the largest and most powerful of which is divided in twain, and each having a large “tail” created and maintained by their own acts - which we can call the statutory government.
This system does not only make partisanship challenging in practice, it does so by design.
Parties were traditionally considered semi-treasonous affairs in the Colonial and early Republican periods. Viewed (justly) as vast conspiracies to acquire, hold and use power, they were suspicious and contrary to the spirit of Anglo-American separation of powers.
Thus, an American political party is always in need to operate separately in each State and government body while maintaining some grand project that could unite its supporters around it and maintain its internal cohesion.
The traditional method is simple - while the party is on the outside, or merely establishing newfound power, to rail and attack the old statutory administrative structure. Since it is likely to be staffed with the men of the opposite party this is more than popular with the supporters of the Party - in fact, punishing the system might be the very cause around which the Paaty coalesced to begin with. Once the work of driving the Opposition out, by the repeated assault from the Constitutional Bodies whose support they require for their survival, the Party starts infusing its own men into the same positions.
Thus the Republican- Democratic Party started its way by attacking the Bank and Navy of the United States. It ended up refounding both bodies and confirming their role. Its successor, the Democratic Party, has started its way by destroying the Second Bank of the United States in the name of Jacksonian democracy. It ended up as a combination of well entrenched interest, only to be thrown out of power and defeated by the Republicans at the onset of the Civil War. Their refusal, however, to wither, die and transform into a new party as every party thrown out of power did before, would set the pattern of American Politics ever since - two parties which are both populist and establishmentarian, using one hand to threaten their opponents in office and the other to exercise and fortify their power in office.
The History of the Republican Party, from its beginning in the dissolution of the Whigs to the crushing embarrassment of Donald Trump’s ouster from the White House, is the perfect prism for this dynamic to be explored.
I: Sowing the Wind - the Aftermath of the Mexican War
A: The Victory and its Discontents
The 1846 war with Mexico ended in the greatest victory possible.
The enemies of the United States have been crushed and humiliated both on the battlefield and the negotiation table. The expansive Texas Republic was annexed in full to the United States and its territories divided peacefully between the new state of Texas and various Congressional territories. The principle was established that the Anglo-American settler conquers wherever he goes. Furthermore, the blessed, temperate, beautiful and bountiful land of California had joined as an equal state in the Union, opening endless possibilities. If Jefferson had dreamt of a window to the Pacific, California was a gigantic portico.
However, many American citizens - amongst them soldiers and officers of the Army of the United States - were filled with absolute disgust.
No lesser personality than future president Ulysses S. Grant would reminisce in the winter of his life with some trepidation, which is worth reading in full:
"With a soldier the flag is paramount," said the General.
"I know the struggle with my conscience during the Mexican War. I have never altogether forgiven myself for going into that. I had very strong opinions on the subject. I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign. I had taken an oath to serve eight years, unless sooner discharged, and I considered my supreme duty was to my flag.
I had a horror of the Mexican War, and I have always believed that it was on our part most unjust. The wickedness was not in the way our soldiers conducted it, but in the conduct of our government in declaring war. The troops behaved well in Mexico, and the government acted handsomely about the peace.
We had no claim on Mexico. Texas had no claim beyond the Nueces River, and yet we pushed on to the Rio Grande and crossed it. I am always ashamed of my country when I think of that invasion.
Once in Mexico, however, and the people, those who had property, were our friends. We could have held Mexico, and made it a permanent section of the Union with the consent of all classes whose consent was worth having. Overtures were made to Scott and Worth to remain in the country with their armies. The Mexicans are a good people. They live on little and work hard. They suffer from the influence of the Church, which, while I was in Mexico at least, was as bad as could be. The Mexicans were good soldiers, but badly commanded. The country is rich, and if the people could be assured a good government, they would prosper. See what we have made of Texas and California — empires. There are the same materials for new empires in Mexico. I have always had a deep interest in Mexico and her people, and have always wished them well.
I suppose the fact that I served there as a young man, and the impressions the country made upon my young mind, have a good deal to do with this. When I was in London, talking with Lord Beaconsfield, he spoke of Mexico. He said he wished to heaven we had taken the country, that England would not like anything better than to see the United States annex it. I suppose that will be the future of the country. Now that slavery is out of the way there could be no better future for Mexico than absorption in the United States. But it would have to come, as San Domingo tried to come, by the free will of the people. I would not fire a gun to annex territory. I consider it too great a privilege to belong to the United States for us to go around gunning for new territories. Then the question of annexation means the question of suffrage, and that becomes more and more serious every day with us. That is one of the grave problems of our future.”
Around the world with General Grant: a narrative of the visit of General U. S. Grant, ex-President of the United States, to various countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in 1877, 1878, 1879 : to which are added certain conversations with General Grant on questions connected with American politics and history (1879), by John Russell Young, p. 447-9
Grant continues along this vein for a while, but this section contains all the important parts of his view of the war - he and other soldiers did their moral duty fighting for the Flag to which they swore an oath. The wicked men in government, however, had abused their hard won victories and made unjust demands. The Mexicans were not bad, benighted or unworthy people and would have served the Union well were they allowed in - but annexation by force was wrong.
B: The Partisan Divide
It was not merely the cause of the war and the overbearing demands extracted from the Mexicans- outsized victories naturally lead to outsized demands - but also the conduct of the government - in particular of the party in power. As historian James M. McPherson puts it:
"The war was started by a Democratic president in the interest of territorial expansion opposed by the Whigs whose antiwar position helped them wrest control of the House in the congressional elections of 1846. Yet the two commanding generals in this victorious war were Whigs. Democratic President James K. Polk relieved Whig General Scott of command after Scott had ordered the court-martial of two Democratic generals who inspired newspaper articles claiming credit for American victories."
McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, PP. 3
In this excerpt we find an explanation to Grant’s (and others’) negative sentiment towards the war.
The United States has been riven by partisan conflict between the Whigs and the Democrats, and the Mexican War has been recast to the same role the Bank of the United States had played when the second party system had emerged in the 1820s. The Mexican War, in fact, had a strong constituency in the Federal Government and those of various states, in the Army and Navy, as well as in the electorate. Conversely, there were many with vested interest and ideological commitment against the war and for the minimization of its consequences.
The policy of the Whigs has always been the development of the lands already incorporated into the United States.
They wished to advance the settlement of marginal lands, improvement of underdeveloped ones (especially by encouraging the rise of manufacturing cities and trading ports) and Federal investment in better transportation and communication between the sprawling territories of the Nation. Their Indian policy followed directly from their economic one - to retard, break and scatter budding Native confederations that may lay rival claims to the land or threaten its borders. Their entire geopolitical wisdom lay in Hamilton’s theory that no two independent powers can coexist on the Continent in peace, which they saw as one of the most compelling reasons for the preservation of the Union at all costs. Their political interests therefore existed mainly outside of the government - bankers, manufacturers, railway men and prosperous middling farmers whose main concern was to bring their excess production to domestic markets.
The War in Mexico went against the policy and political strategy of the Whigs.
It had brought to the Union large territories that were extremely underdeveloped - some ill-suited even to industrial agriculture. These lands were populated by many Native tribes, and, worse of all, had recently acquired independence by rebellion against the Mexican union. Texas seemed not only like a bad investment and a drain on the Republic’s military, financial and human resources for years to come - and might at the end catalyze the rapture of the Union.
The Democratic Party had achieved its apotheosis not in the election of Andrew Jackson but in his presidency.
In particular, the Indian removal act, in which President Jackson had executed an act of Congress, prompted by an illegal action taken by the State of Georgia against a Federal treaty with the Cherokee Nation, and the subsequent Trail of Tears against the protestations of the Supreme Court, had set in stone a few pillars of Democratic Party policy.
First, which is often talked about, was the unwavering standing by the interests of settlers, especially against those of Indians, in and out of treaty relationship with the United States. If the Whigs (co-heirs to the Republican-Democratic legacy) had re-interpreted the Jeffersonian ideal of the Yeomen Republic as the building up and expansion if a well-educated middle class through growth of the economy as a whole, the Democrats decided the best way to achieve this dream would be by a simple transfer of farmland to those willing to settle it - even if such land was within Indian territory.
Second, by making the Federal Government acquiesce to the illegal action of the State of Georgia, the Planter Class, which controlled the South's politics, saw a carte blanche of support for the Southern version of western expansion- which not merely increased the size and scope of the slave economy, but reduced the pressures at home created by Slavery- such as the increasing amounts of disgruntled unemployed whites.
Further, Jackson, for all his demagogic bustle and bravado, was a typical Southwestern planter - he grew wealthy on cotton raised by slaves to be shipped overseas in his extensive Hermitage plantation in Tennessee. His interests and commitment lay with the preservation and expansion of Slavery within the Union. Indeed one can speculate that his solid stance in the nullification crisis (and his sonorous threat “if John Calhoun shall attempt to separate his state from my country, I will separate his head from his shoulders”) had less to do with the integrity of the national Union and more with that of the slave power within the American system, that would have weakened considerably by the departure of two slave-state senators and thirteen representatives, always willing to advance the interests of slavers in the Federal Government. Further, Planters such as Jackson had a unique interest in the expansion of Slavery by settlement and the creation of additional slave-states: the more expansive the territory in which Slavery was legal and the primary form of labor, the greater the value of the slaves already at hand. Virginia, for instance, and other Eastern states in which labor was not harsh enough to kill slaves before they managed to have their children born to bondage, had made a tidy sum in the domestic slave trade to the western colonies of the South, where conditions were often nothing less than murderous.
That is not to say that Democrats were universally pro-slavery or that their policy can be reduced to this position. But their party interest, the image they painstakingly painted to their constituents and their policy pre assumptions - all led them to favor the course of war against Mexico.
C: The Mexican Revolution of 1833 and the Rolling Revolution
Future president Grant would later frame the Mexican War as a continuation of the Texan Revolution and the push for the expansion of Slavery, both of which he, like many other Whigs, viewed in an extremely negative light. The cause the United States pursued, however, was more complicated.
We must not forget that not only Texas had entered the Union as a result of the Mexican War, but California as well - which started its own Revolution the year before the Mexican War commenced. The Black Bear Flag Rebellion was merely the last stage of it.
The American population of California was relatively small, but Californios of both Mexican and American origins had their own reasons to look to the United States Government as their new protector. They were clearly dissatisfied with the Mexican style of governance - which had treated California as a backwater province of the Capital.
California and Texas were not alone to revolt against the central Mexican government - Yucatan had declared its independence in 1841 and retained it until after the War and the creation of the United States of Mexico, which it had joined willingly.
The catalyst to all these regional revolutions was not a new found spirit of radicalism and revolt but restorationist rage at the abuses of a revolution from above.
In 1833, General Antonio (de Padua María Severino López de) Santa Anna (y Pérez de Lebrón) an aristocrat that had no tolerance for the democratic Federalist Republic established in 1824, had led a coup against the legitimate government of his country, declared himself president (he had learned from the fate Agustin I of the unwisdom of declaring himself emperor).
Santa Anna, most importantly for the Yucatecos, the Californios and Texicans, had dismissed the national Congress and the elected State Legislatures, replacing the former with his own chosen council and the latter with appointed governors. Thus were the provinces deprived of representation, and the power of the Capital was reasserted as in the Viceregal era - and manned mostly by aristocrats, often merely of the first or second generation to be born in the New World - as close to the restoration of the Peninsulares regime possible in an independent Mexico.
There is therefore nothing unique about the dissatisfaction the northern provinces felt towards the Santa Anna regime, as well as that of Yucatan.
They have always been distant, and used to take care of their own affairs. For 11 years they have grown accustomed to having their own assemblies recognized and respected by the national constitution and to be represented in the Capital. The Texan American impresarios contributed an additional sense of grievance of the breach of the very deal under which the Mexican Government had invited them to develop its marginal lands, and a longer memory of a representative government. Nevertheless, mostly Hispanic California and Yucatan rebelled as well - the importance of the American population was not in encouraging the revolution, but in putting it on a specific path to success- namely, looking to the American People and their government for support and association. Yucatan, which had rebelled on its own terms and resources, had eventually reunited with Mexico, but only after the fall of Santa Anna, in a desperate cry from assistance in the Caste War which had erupted in 1847.
D: The Peace of Hidalgo-Guadalupe and its Consequences
The treaty ending the war was signed on the American side by Gen. Winfield Scott, a giant of American military and diplomatic might and stability - a victorious general that was bringing the enemies of the United States to their knees since the War of 1812- yet have never attempted, nor could dream of attempting, to cease the National Executive except by the Constitutionally prescribed means- a free and fair elections.
On the Mexican side signed not Santa Anna, but the (relatively) newly minted President Manuel de la Peña y Peña (right).
Formerly the President of the Supreme Court of Mexico, he was called to power in the hasty decree of resignation issued by Santa Anna. The disgraced tyrant did not mean to create a true successor - his intent was entirely to draw the attention of the approaching Army of the United States from his person by hanging the presidential insignia on Peña’s neck as a target board while he escapes for safety - only to reemerge, as he did before, and take power back from the pliant hands of a puppet - or so he thought.
In fact the new President had the rarest trait in a politician: A true allegiance to the Constitution of his country. Peña had refused to convene the triumvirate demanded by the Santa Anna decree as unconstitutional, had re-convened the Mexican Congress, urged the governments of the various states to stay loyal to the Central government, and took a serious of humane and constructive actions to reestablish peace, seeking to prevent a protracted and bloody guerilla conflict.
The peace seemed, from the American side, harsh. Mexico had given up its claims to Texas and California, together with all the land between them. But as a matter of fact it was not the concessions the Mexican Government had made to the United States - of lands that were out of its gasp either way - but the actual results of the conflict which stung most bitterly. The war had destroyed the centralized regime that Santa Anna had created almost with the first shot, but he kept clinging to power to its last stage. The allegiance between the central and provincial governments was made brittle by the 1833 revolution - but the war made the situation worse. The government in the Capital, which held down power over the populace since the 1500s, was now bereft of soldiers, gold or will to continue. The new Mexican government would have to find a way to invest the entire People with a sense of unity and share in the Mexican State - a task which would not be complete even by the turn of the next century.
But, as future president Grant would observe, this war did great harm to the victors - if Texas may secede from Mexico, why shouldn’t it secede from the United States? It inflamed the minds of young officers with dreams of great conquests and expansion at the expense of the former provinces of the Spanish Empire - specifically those who wished to expand the domain of Slavery.
II: The Taylor - Fillmore Ticket
Introduction: The Triumphal Arch of Zachary Taylor
The Democratic party had lost the elections of 1848, in a modest margin - 137,936 votes, or 4.8% of votes cast, represented the Whigs’ victory, which was actually brought to them by the 163 electoral votes of fifteen states cast in favor of Whig Zachary Taylor - against 127 votes cast by the chosen electors of the other 15 states of the Union in favor of Democrat Lewis Cass.
The contest was strange. The Whigs, usually a moderately antislavery party, were represented by one of the largest slavers in the Union - Taylor owned multiple plantations in several states, his Louisiana Cypress Grove was the largest and least profitable one. Meanwhile, the Democrats were represented by a Lewis Cass of Michigan, a free state.
Cass was something of a darling of Midwesterners, due to his tenure as the territorial secretary of Michigan and his stringent pro-Indian removal positions - justified by racial prejudice, these positions also aligned well with the interests of land-hungry settlers that flocked to the region. His position of Slavery - termed “popular sovereignty” and which amounted to the revocation of the antislavery provision of the Northwest ordinance - could only please the South. It's a testament to Taylor’s reputation as a conquering hero (as well as a slave owner) that the Southern vote was split - with six Southern states voting for the Whig candidate, and seven for the Democrat.
Whiggish, Anti Slavery New England went almost as a block (with the exception of Maine and Vermont) for Taylor, as did the commercial and industrial hubs of New York and Pennsylvania.
“A victory” the old maxim goes, “is a victory” but Taylor’s victory was ominous in its composition. The Midwestern States - the rising future center of American electoral gravity, which the Whigs had won at least in part in every election since that of William Henry harrison - was turning away from the generally Antislavery, Internal-Improving Whigs, and supported the Indian-Removing, Slavery-Expanding ticket of the Democrats. Taylor won New England votes due to his Antislavery positions, large portions of the Deep South for his position as a Planter and Slave Owner, and the rest for his role in the victory over Mexico. Winfield Scott would not have been a better candidate at that time, but worse - more adamant in his views against Slavery, he would have lost the Southern support Taylor brought in, without bringing in any additional votes from his military reputation. No Democrat could have won the abolitionist Northern block - but that seems to be the extent of the electoral usefulness of the Cause to the Whig Party.
As long as Democrats stuck to their trick of nominating a Northerner - who could not be tarred as a slaver - who was also an ideological sympathizer to Southern interests and Slavery, to maximize the Southern vote. Meanwhile the Whigs were stuck having to appoint a Southerner- almost invariably a slave-owner himself - to placate the tender feelings of drovers of human chattel - which made their antislavery appeal ring hollow in the plane-speaking Midwestern assemblies.
Thus, the elections of 1848 can be construed as the personal triumphal progress of Gen. Taylor, rather than a grand political coup of the Whig Party. The Whigs, as an organization, were losing their voice and mind and required to borrow those of popular “War Chiefs”, whom they once disdained. Meanwhile the Democrats had found ways to bolster their partisan identity and were proficient in running candidates loyal (and subservient) to the interests represented in the Party, manipulating the diverse sensibilities and interests of the Country to achieve their partisan goals.
A: The Warp and the Weft - Whiggery and And Antislavery in the Antebellum Era
To us, who were born into a world in which Slavery is abolished everywhere de jure and practiced de facto only by criminal enterprises and states, we find it hard to believe that the abolition, or at least limitation, of a legally sanctioned slavery enforced and regulated by government authority, have not been the central problem of American politics.
The answer, just like the nature of the fallen race of Man, is simple, brutal and ugly: As long as Slavery existed in some distant part of the country, it was merely as inconvenient spur in the side of Northern consciousness - an important issue, no doubt, but only one of many issues - and not the most pressing one.
Each of the major parties had an ideological bent which largely comprised a complete view of the nature of Humanity and a Free Government.
For the Whigs, the important factor was the improvement - both material and spiritual - of the Citizenry and its conditions. The Whig coalition was the one generally more opposed to slavery, indeed, and it had a large abolitionist faction within it - but it was more than that. It was also the Capitalist party, that is, the one urging the employment of capital for development instead of acquisition of more land and labor (by conquest, expansion of slavery and immigration), which they viewed as shortcuts that would merely leave the country wealthy, but undeveloped. They were also the party of Temperance, education and of evangelical Christianity - urging the improvement of the human mind as a condition for that of the Country, and as necessary for its continuing freedom from foreign domination and domestic oligarchy.
For the Democrats, the important factor is that the People be deferred to as they are- warts and all. That their interests- or what the majority viewed as their own interests - and moral judgment be accepted, pursued, implemented and executed by their public servants. The Democrats viewed themselves as the Party of the Common Man - not in the sense of a party led by common men, but that accepts the Common Man as he is. They have made no moral demands to him, urged no reformation in his manners, ethics or conditions - and were willing to merely give him what he wanted - a chance to improve his personal lot through distribution of newly acquired land.
And yet, Slavery, and the opposition to it, had occupied a special place in American politics. It was such a flagrant violation of the declared principles the American Body Politic was bound by, such a slap in the face of everything the country assumed to stand for - and yet the fortunes of the richest, most powerful men in the Nation were bound to it. To explain the very existence of such a monstrous tumor in the still-maturing body of the adolescent Republic, only three options, short of giving up the patient for dead, were open to the Guardians of the American commonweal: a promise for future appointment with the surgeon, a false diagnosis of the tumor as benign, or an equally false prognosis that it would wither and die on its own.
Therefore, the future of Slavery was not another policy question amongst many - nor was it the center of a whole ideology in its own right. It was the most important question of the day - and yet it was just one question. It was the weft thread snaking its way between all the many and diverse warp threads of antebellum politics.
B: Anti Slavery vs. Abolition
We must not confuse the cause of Antislavery in general and that of Abolitionism, a particular wing of it.
Anti Slavery was the idea that, on very general terms, Slavery was a bad institution. It didn’t matter a great deal why - the reasons diverged between morality, economy (slave labor is, famously, the least efficient and minimizes activity and dynamism in the marketplace) to the practical and even racial and defensive (the South was always gripped in the twin terrors of a slave revolt similar to that of Tahiti, and obsessed over the idea of racial purity, which the inevitable rise in the number of people of mixed heritage threatened).
Americans who adhered to this very wide range of creeds generally opposed the expansion of Slavery into new territories and would like to see various policies taken to diminish the amount of slaves in the United States - be it through gradual emancipation (a course that was taken even in some Northern states, such as New York and New Jersey), “Colonization”, that is, the purchase of slaves to be freed into an African colony (such as the British experiment in Sierra Leone and the American one in Liberia). But the same Americans would be wary of immediate emancipation - indeed many owned considerable slave-farmed plantations.
The capital of the South was sunk in two classes of assets - slaves and land. The land has been locked in the hands of the Planter class, and slaves would have been an asset transferable only within the bounds of the slave state - which tied their value directly to the extent of human bondage. Declaring all new lands to the West free would not only block the movement of the only mobile capital asset Southerners possessed - it would nearly freeze the value of said asset, making slaves’ use as collateral increasingly limited in the growing national economy.
However, each new slave state would not only be a scene of human misery and an additional blight on the country’s honor, reputation and constitutional logic. It would also tilt the balance of the entire country in the favor of the slave-holding oligarchy - that extremely narrow circle that already yielded the labor of most bondsmen in America.
We should therefore view the battle over the Wilmot Proviso not only over the principle of human freedom - albeit it definitely animated the debate; but also over the character and nature of the country. Would it be an extractive Republic of great lords - gradually but steadily pushing the lower classes of the citizenry to isolation, ignorance, dependency and drudgery- or a middle-class country, were vast amount of dignified people of independent means and decent education can cooperate over great distances and participate in intelligent trade and politics.
C: Long-Planned Euphoria - the Taylor Candidacy
One such American was Gen. Zachary Taylor - the incoming president and head of the Whig Party, who was sworn into office in March, 1849.
Taylor was courted by both parties during the late Polk presidency, since his reputation would have come handy to each party - the Whigs wished to reiterate that while they opposed the war in principle, it had been won by Whiggish generals - just as the Democrats wish to own the conflict as a Democratic enterprise.
Taylor, however, have been long a devout Whig - no lesser personage than Thurlow Weed, a New York newspaper editor and prominent Whig politician (and future founder of the Republican Party - was sent out on a special steamer to verify that fact (a necessity in those days, when party registration was a private matter, especially as Taylor had strategically refused to divulged his politics - as early as 1846. Crittenden of Kentucky would give him advice; after the Legislative elections of 1846, a group of mostly Southern Whig young representatives had formed what was officially “the Taylor Club” but was colloquially known as The Young Indians - for their enthusiasm and determination to defy the Party’s eastern worthies and deny Clay, Scott and Webster the nomination - this club is quite remarkable for containing within its rolls both Alexander H. Stephens (known for his infamous future Cornerstone Speech) and Abraham Lincoln (known for more salutary orations).
We can see that while the Taylor campaign had the air of a spontaneous triumphal march of a conquering hero, it was planned long in advance. A party long in power, which had concluded a successful conflict, the first since the War of 1812, is not unseated by Euphoria - nor can the longtime leader of the opposition party be, once more, removed from his place at the top of the ticket without overwhelming force and machinery. A grand coalition of the young file and rank of the Whigs and some of their old gray heads had prevailed against the Clay faction.
D: Interlude: The Battle over the Wilmot Proviso
As the early canvassing into the possibility of a Taylor presidency by Weed suggests, American politicians predicted a victory over Mexico from the beginning of the War.
The War was expected to be a victory from the start, and mere three months into the war, Representative David Wilmot, a “Barnburner” (that is, anti slavery) Democratic from Pennsylvania, had proposed a proviso to the war budget, banning slavery in any lands annexed at the conclusion of the war. The proviso had exploded the sectional division over the fate of Slavery, which had been sedated by Henry Clay’s Missouri Compromise of 1820, and which Whig policy had been to keep as a side question.
Twenty six years are more than a lifetime in politics - they are practically an eternity. Both parties were technically younger than the Missouri compromise - the Democratic Party by eight years, the Whigs by thirteen
The Compromise was extremely useful to both parties. It cleared away the most burning moral question that animated Americans most violently and drew their attention to questions of internal improvements, tariffs, settling of territories already annexed to the United States (or that could be easily acquired from the Natives). These questions were not only deemed “more practical” since they gave Northerners and Southerners common projects - they also carried with them greater potential of wielding power - which is, as we have noted, the raison d’etre of all political parties.
The Proviso threatened all of it. The official transcript from Congress’ archives read thus:
“Provided that as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico, by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the monies therein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in any part of said territory except for crime whereof the party shall be first duly convicted.”
The battle raged on throughout the war - ultimately failed by a Senate vote in early 1847 to approve a war budget without it. This vote was in its composition - Party Spirit was destroyed in favor of sectional (i.e. regional) identity - but only on the Whig side - Southern Whigs voted with their fellow Southerners on the Democratic side and against their Whig colleagues of the North - but the Northern Democrats voted with their Southern co-partisans. It was clear that the Democratic Party was the stronger, more solid structure.
The nomination of Zachary Taylor was an attempt to reunite the Northern and Southern Whigs, using the duality of the candidate as an anti-slavery-slave-holder, an anti-Mexican- War-conquering-general.
Attached to the candidacy of Taylor was the figure of Millard Fillmore, an old Whig (joined the party in 1832) from Buffalo, New York. Former head of the Congressional Ways and Means Committee and the New York State Comptroller, Fillmore was considered to be representative of the economic priorities of Whig policy. As a staunch pro-tariff man, he was considered the quintessential figure to emphasize Whig identity - while Taylor was to be the heroic figure, whose partisan leanings were sufficiently ambiguous to unify the country around his acts of valor
It is therefore ironic that it would fall to Taylor to perform an ideological stance, which Fillmore would reverse, to the destruction of the country and Whig party.
III: Fall of the Whigs
A: The Compromise of 1850 and its Challenges
The victory in the Mexican War, following the failure of the Wilmot Proviso, forced Congress to reconsider the issue of Slavery in the new territories.
The immediate issue was the territory of California- it had rebelled independently, in anticipation of joining the Union, and had sufficient population for admittance as a state. Taylor recommended that the Black Bear Republic be brought in as a free state - as it did. The issue that rose from that is that a considerable part of the new state was South of the Missouri Compromise line. While there were many pro-slavery American Southerners and Mexican Californios in Southern California, the majority was already in the hands of voters of Northern extraction and anti-slavery ideological bent. There was no will to separate the Republic into two states (one free, one enslaved) and the idea that a state can have slavery in one part of its territory but not the other was too absurd to consider.
To compensate for this, three measures were passed:
The territories of New Mexico and Utah were separated from both Texas and California. It was agreed that both these territories could either be free or enslaved, depending upon a popular vote (whose time and manner could be manipulated).
Texas was already a State, and it had already enshrined slavery.
Most importantly - a new Federal Fugitive Slave Law was passed, which mandated the Federal Government participate in the capture of escaped slaves in the North and criminalize any sort of assistance to them.
The last measure has been extremely offensive to Northerners.
It is arguable that the United States Constitution had empowered the Federal Government to engage in the capture of slaves in free states and their return to their masters, by virtue of declaring:
“No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”
(United States Constitution, IV:2:3)
If a “person held to service or labor” cannot be made free by entering the jurisdiction of a free state, it follows, logic dictates, that the responsibility to enforce his return to the person to whom the service or labor is due falls to either the receiving state, the state under whose laws he is held to such service or labor, or to the Federal Government.
If the responsibility is held by the enslaving state, it would have granted slave states the privilege and pretext to invade the jurisdictions of the free states - to conduct extensive slave catching operations, to make arrests and even abrogate the right to due process where the status of the captive is in dispute.
If the responsibility lies with the host state, it would have burdened the free states with the duty to enforce laws not their own - further, laws which they have abjured, abolished, rejected, and that, as we have seen elsewhere, would be considered “foreign to their entire system of government”.
If the responsibility is reserved to the Federal Government, it would mean that the only laws enforced by the Federal Government are those of Slave States.
Thus all such laws were pernicious, skewed in the direction of the Slave States, and loathsome to almost all Northerners. There was already a Fugitive Slave law, passed in 1793 - but this law did not place the responsibility for the capture of slaves with any government - it merely empowered the slave-holder to go forth and apprehend the slave, while penalizing any person directly hindering him ( a term which could be interpreted in a very restrictive manner) in the sum of $500.00. This law, as the Supreme Court had found, could not compel or prohibit any action by free states, but only from the Federal Government in the collection of said fines.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 truly transformed the relationship between Northerners and Southern Slavery.
Slavery was no more merely an evil institution existing in a distant and benighted part of the country. It was, to a large degree here in a palpable sense - it dictated which travelers could or could not host in their houses, which of the needy they could and could not feed and clothe - and in the North, where puritanical Christianity had become increasingly abolitionist and reinvigorated, this was a terrible spiritual burden.
It offended their moral sensibilities and their sense of State-autonomy - their states had rejected slavery, denounced it and abolished it, and now they would have to watch as Federal agents went to comb through their states, their homes, their churches and places of business - all to locate and capture men and women escaping from this hated institution (let us not forget that the Federal Government made little to no arrests at that period, as there were very few Federal crimes on the books).
But, to the satisfaction of Henry Clay, who had devised both the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and this new 1850 Compromise, it achieved its goals - it had balanced a free state against a slave state, added no new slave-state senators to the political process (Texas senators sat in the chamber since 1846), and thus allowed for the question to be delayed until the raw emotions from the War and the Wilmot Proviso fight subside. It would also give the new Whig administration time to govern a national coalition, headed by a Southerner supported by Northern votes, thus actively fostering good-will between the sections. This would not only allow for what the Whigs had always thought of as the serious business of government to supersede again the ideological and moral question of Slavery - it would also heal the divisions within the Whig party.
For this strategy to work, it was essential that Taylor fulfills his role as a Southerner president with Northern sympathy - that he is retained as a unifying figure of a national, rather than a “sectional” character. It was also essential that he blocks any attempt by one side to gain an advantage over the other - that he would allow no further legislation which would undermine the balance achieved by the compromises of 1820 and 1850.
B: The Last Hoorah
For years, the Senate was dominated by three great personalities: Henry Clay (“the Great Compromiser”), Daniel Webster (“The Union’s Stay and Massachusetts' Pride”) and John C. Calhoun. Of the three, the first two were Whigs - Calhoun was, at the moment, a Democrat - but he spent the heady decade of 1828 to 1839 in his own Nullifier party and, outside of his constituency of South Carolina, was considered a political malcontent.
The original version of the Compromise of 1850 was proposed by Henry Clay in January 1850. Apart from the measures discussed above, it also included a ban on the Slave Trade within the Federal district of Washington (that trafficking offended Northerners and antislavery Americans in a very particular way, as we have seen in the debate over the Missouri Compromise). It faced opposition by President Taylor - who wanted New Mexico (which had been carved out of western Texas) to be admitted as a free state - by Calhoun - who had transformed from a S. Carolinian particularist to a Southern Sectionalist - hated anything that skewed the balance of power against Slavery (or even limited it skewing towards the slave power). Daniel Webster was the only Northerner, and he eventually came to support Clay’s compromise - but not without reservations. In his Senate floor Speech from March 7th, 1850, he proclaimed:
“Mr. President, - I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American, and a member of the Senate of the United States. It is fortunate that there is a Senate of the United States; a body not yet moved from its propriety, not lost to a just sense of its own dignity and its own high responsibilities, and a body to which the country looks, with confidence, for wise, moderate, patriotic, and healing counsels.
It is not to be denied that we live in the midst of strong agitations, and are surrounded by very considerable dangers to our institutions and our government. The imprisoned winds are let loose. The East, the North, and the stormy South combine to throw the whole sea into commotion, to toss its billows to the skies, and disclose its profoundest depths.
I do not affect to regard myself, Mr. President, as holding, or as fit to hold, the helm in this combat with the political elements; but I have a duty to perform, and I mean to perform it with fidelity, not without a sense of existing dangers, but not without hope.
I have a part to act, not for my own security or safety, for I am looking out for no fragment upon which to float away from the wreck, if wreck there must be, but for the good of the whole, and the preservation of all; and there is that which will keep me to my duty during this struggle, whether the sun and the stars shall appear, or shall not appear for many days. I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union.
Webster then proceeds to frame the Slavery debate as a religious dispute. He lambasts abolitionist societies as failures, and alludes that they defraud their "good hearted and honest supporters'' while hardening the pro-slavery sentiment in the South. The crux of his argument, however, regards not the grievances of both sides (albeit, he emphasizes the North's failure to fulfill its supposed Constitutional duty to return fugitive slaves), is National unity and identity:
Not only is peaceful secession impossible; it is not desirable. Webster introduces himself as an American citizen - shall I become a local man, a separatist? He asks emphatically. He has no interest in his own piece of debris from the wreck of the Union, he says, his only interest is to save the whole. For the sake of the whole he rhetorically accepts the absurd claim that slaves are being treated with kindness, that the North is indeed in the wrong in sheltering escaped slaves. He even agrees that grievances have been committed on both sides.
The lengths to which Webster went to appease the South seem strange, even revolting to us - until we remember he was pleading for the life of the Nation, with whom his identification was deep and heartfelt. That he was willing to allow the suffering of slavery to continue and increase - but he saw the Southern Democrats, in particular John C. Calhoun - as holding a knife to America’s throat - and he was negotiating with these terrorists .
The Clay compromise had failed.
On July 9th, 1850, Major General Zachary Taylor, veteran of every American war since the War of 1812, President of the United States and leader of the Whig Party, had died from a mysterious ailment - the official diagnosis of gastric infection brought about by copious amounts of tainted milk and cherries, but wild accusations of poisoning were thrown against such diverse parties as Pro-Slavery Southerners and Catholics (unfortunately, the Whig party had a distinct anti-Catholic bent). In either case, the lynchpin of the Whig strategy for the reunification of the Nation and their party was gone.
Millard Fillmore - mediocre, brooding, plodding, methodical Fillmore, whose ideals and practices in government were purely economic - stepped, by the mandate of the Constitution, into the gap.
Collaborating with Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas, Fillmore saw the final form of the compromise was passed piecemeal through Congress: New Mexico and Utah were declared “popular sovereignty” territories (that is, Slavery was allowed - until voted out in the future). A Mormon governor was appointed to Utah and Mormon possession of lands in the territory was recognized. The Latter Day Saints were engaged, at the time, in an internal dispute over the compatibility of Slavery with their faith - and Filmore’s choice of Young, a firm believer in “The Curse of Ham”, as opposed to, let’s say, Orson Pratt, a firm opponent Slavery. Young would lead Utah not only to full recognition of Slavery, but also to a month-long insurrectionary war against the United States Government in 1857. The ban on the Slave Trade in Washington DC was gone - but its counterbalance, the Fugitive Slave Law, remained and passed.
Henry Clay would die in December of the next year. Webster would follow him on October 24, 1852. They would live to see only the fracturing and annihilation of their beloved Party - a direct result of their attempts to reason, compromise and negotiate with the like of Calhoun (who died within 21 days of Webster’s Seventh of March Speech) and his successors to Southern bigotry, bullying and blackmail.
C: The Tombs of the Whigs
The Northern, “Conscience’” Whigs, as well as their “Barnburner” Democrat compatriots had had enough by the end of the Fillmore administration.
The disgust with his policy, which was clearly favoring the South - not out of policy, but simply out of paralyzing fear of their repeated threats of national rapture - drove even his old mentor and patron, Thurlow Weed of New York away.
We will discuss the actions of this group later, but now let us contemplate the legacy of the two great political minds of American Whiggery: Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.
The party can be said to have been the brainchild of Henry Clay. He had spent his entire adult life as a legislator - he had no other career to speak of, and was a fervent political thinker rather than a lawyer - despite his professional training as such. He had raised the party in opposition to his arch-nemesis - Andrew Jackson and the ideas he had brought to politics. His goal was ever not only the political union of the United States - which he shared with his old opponent - but to bind the states closer together with improvement and easing of economic and cultural exchange.
Daniel Webster came to the party out of a lawyer’s fame - and he fought a lawyer’s struggle against a legal monstrosity - the Nullification theory of John C. Calhoun.
We must not be deceived by his polite “Honorable Gentleman of South Carolina” address to Calhoun on the Senate floor - he saw him as a legal devil that would have led America to oblivion - not only through the moral hell of Slavery, but through plain dissolution. His was a more desperate, urgent and pleading struggle - for while Clay fought to strengthen a Union which Jackson weakened and loosened, Webster struggled for the Country’s very life.
Both men and the party they shared were first and foremost American Nationalists - their first priority was the creation and improvement of an American Nation. Whatever moral causes they abandoned and compromised, they did in the name of saving America - their Country, which they saw as the last hope for free government in the World - and that included the abolition of slavery.
For what hope would the cause of abolition, worthy as it was, possessed if the Free States and the Slave States dissolved their ties? The slave states would be free to maintain slavery till the end of the world - indeed, to the very ends of the earth, taking over larger and larger portions of the collapsing remnants and breakaway republics of the old Spanish Empire. Only by maintaining the Union, they hoped, can the free state force slavery to limit itself within set boundaries. But moral compromises tend to lead one further and further from one’s original goal, until one find himself robbed of anything of worth - bereft of life, inert, incapable to raise more than a faint protest against the final results of one’s own deal making and halfway measures.
Both Clay and Webster would be remembered fondly by Unionists in the decades to come. Abraham Lincoln would describe Clay as his beau idea of a Statesman and Webster would be immortalized in Stephen V. Bennet’s short story The Devil and Mr. Webster, in which he is portrayed as the quintessential New England juristic ideal - erudite, passionate, cool and witty, a staunch Unionist and an opponent of Slavery to boot. The cause of this is that in the fullness of the 1860s, the cause of Union and that of Abolition had become one - through a great political vehicle which had reforged not only the meaning of the American identity - but the very idea of America - not as a nation amongst the nations, but as a unique being with a soul and a mind of its own.
Let us turn away from the venerable dead, let us bury the old Whigs in their marble memorials - and let us advance upon our subject - the rise of the Republican party.
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