Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

If I have enabled my readers to estimate aright the vital importance attached by the people of the several States in the formation of the Constitution to the recognition of the rights and the reserved sovereignty of the States, they will not be surprised to learn that when Thomas Jefferson established the Democratic party upon this recognition as its fundamental principle he secured for the Democratic party such a profound and permanent hold upon the confidence and the affections of the American people as can never be shaken while the Union remains what it was meant to be. For forty years after his first Presidency, no combinations succeeded in wresting from the Democrats the control of the executive authority. The only apparent exception to this statement confirms it. In the Presidential election of 1824, the electoral ticket of General Jackson, the leading Democratic candidate, received a considerable majority of the votes of the people; but as there were four candidates in the field, and General Jackson did not secure a majority of the votes of all the electoral colleges, the choice of a President went, under the Constitution, into the lower House of Congress, in which the members vote for a President not individually as representing the people, but by delegations as representing the sovereign States. John Quincy Adams secured a majority of the delegations; but such was the popular indignation that in the next House of Representatives President Adams found himself confronted by an overwhelming opposition; and at the end of his term of office General Jackson was made President by a majority of more than two to one against him. Jackson was twice elected, and transmitted his power to his Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren of New York, in the election of 1836. Between the years 1840 and 1860 the predominance of the Democratic party was but twice disturbed. In 1840 the Democratic President Van Buren, being a candidate for re-election, was defeated after a very severe struggle by General Harrison, the candidate of a conglomerate party which, for lack of a better, had taken the name of the “Whig” party, and which represented in a general way the Anti-Democratic classes of the country, and more particularly the banking interests and the Protectionists, of whom more hereafter. The real and brilliant leader of this party, Henry Clay of Kentucky, had been deprived of the presidential nomination through the machinations of a nominating device unknown to the Constitution, called a “Presidential Convention;” and though the Whig candidate secured a great majority in the electoral colleges, thanks to the skill with which his managers played upon the financial distress of the country caused by a great business panic in 1837, yet when he unexpectedly died at the end of a single short month after his inauguration, the Vice-President elected with him and who succeeded him, Mr. Tyler of Virginia, originally a Democrat, was found to be opposed to the rechartering of a United States Bank; and a bill passed by both Houses for that purpose, which had been indeed the main purpose of the leading Whigs in promoting the election of Harrison and Tyler, was twice vetoed by him. This was the first lesson given to the American people of the potential importance of the Vice-Presidency in case of the death or disability of the President. Curiously enough, the same lesson, which has been repeated several times since, has, in every instance, with one exception, followed upon the election of a President by Anti-Democratic votes.

Henry Clay, who was enthusiastically nominated and supported by the “Whig” party for the Presidency at the close of President Tyler’s administration in 1844, was defeated by the Democratic nominee, Mr. Polk of Tennessee, under whom the annexation of the magnificent Republic of Texas to the United States was consummated, with its inevitable corollary of a war with Mexico, that republic refusing to acknowledge the right of the people of Texas to sever their connection with the Mexican States. This war led immediately to the cession by Mexico to the United States of New Mexico, California, and the Northern Pacific coast of the old Spanish dominions in North America, and ultimately to the settlement of the boundary lines on the Pacific between the dominions of Great Britain and the United States. At the close of President Polk’s administration, the “Whigs,” who had been disheartened and “demoralised” by the defeat of their “magnetic” leader, Henry Clay, in 1844, made a second effort to capture executive power. The occasion was offered to them by a schism in the Democratic party, which had begun on personal grounds when Ex-President Van Buren, who desired a renomination, was set aside in 1844 for Mr. Polk, and which was intensified on broader issues by the determination of many Northern Democrats not to permit the extension of slavery into the vast and splendid territories acquired under President Polk.

It is far from being true, as I shall presently show, that the “Republican” party, so called, of our own times, which has just been defeated under Mr. Blaine, originated the political action in the United States which finally led to the extinction of slavery as an act of war by President Lincoln. The “Republican” party of our own times, deriving its origin from the “Federalists” of the last century, through the “Whigs” of 1840, has been recently and not unfairly described by Mr. John Bright as the “party of Protection and Monopoly.” This is so far true that it represents those tendencies to a plausible paternalism in government, and to a consolidation of the Federal power at the expense of Home Rule and State sovereignty, which found expression in Federalism at the beginning of our history; which threatened the secession of New England and the establishment of an “Eastern Empire” when Louisiana was purchased from France under President Jefferson; which waged the “war of the banks” against President Jackson; and which founded the “Whig” party of Henry Clay upon the doctrine that the Federal Government might lawfully and constitutionally levy taxes upon the consumers of imported goods for the express purpose of enhancing the profits of domestic manufacturers.

Governor Wright, a Democratic predecessor of Governor Cleveland in the executive chair of the “Empire State,” who had supported the renomination of Ex-President Van Buren in 1844, led, until his sudden and lamented death in 1847, the opposition of Northern sentiment, after the annexation of Texas, to any extension of slavery beyond the limits assigned to it by the famous “Missouri Compromise” of 1820. The Whig forerunners of Mr. Blaine were discreetly silent on the subject, and the question was thrown into the arena of political discussion and agitation by a Democratic Member of Congress from Pennsylvania, Mr. Wilmot, who, during the boundary negotiations with Mexico, introduced and moved the adoption of a “proviso,” that “no part of the territory to be acquired should be open to the introduction of slavery.”

This “proviso” was obviously unnecessary to the exclusion of slavery from any “part of the territory to be acquired,” for negro slavery had been long before abolished in New Mexico and in California under Mexican law; and the Democratic party of the United States had laid it down as a cardinal principle of Democratic policy, involved indeed, as many Democrats thought, in the principle of Home Rule, that there was “no power in Congress to legislate upon slavery in the Territories.” The introduction of the “proviso” therefore led, and could lead, solely to an immediately sterile, but eventually most dangerous, inflammation of the public mind on the question of the relations of slavery, as an institution already existing within the Union, to the politics of the country. The “proviso” was defeated in Congress; but the discussion had aroused the abolitionists of the North on the one hand, and the extreme pro-slavery men at the South on the other side, into loud and angry debate; and the opportunity of “forcing an issue” was seized by Mr. Calhoun of South Carolina, a man of the highest character and of keen intellect, who honestly believed that the South must be sooner or later driven in self-defence to withdraw from the Union, and who had brought his State and himself in 1832, on the question of the right of a State to “nullify” a Federal law, within striking distance of the executive authority wielded by the iron hand of President Jackson.

Mr. Calhoun introduced into the Senate, on the 19th of February, 1847, a series of resolutions denying the right of Congress to pass any law which would have the effect of preventing any citizen of a slave State from carrying slaves as his property into any territory. No vote was taken on these resolutions, but they served Mr. Calhoun’s purpose of awakening public sentiment at the South to the threatening attitude of the anti-slavery sentiment at the North.

The “Whigs,” with whom Mr. Lincoln then acted, profited adroitly by this excitement in both sections. They avoided the subject of slavery altogether, and nominated for the Presidency in 1848 General Taylor, a slaveholder of Louisiana, who had won a wide and well-deserved popularity as a military commander in the Mexican war, and a man of “moderate” views on all subjects. With him they associated Mr. Fillmore, a respectable citizen of New York. The friends of Ex-President Van Buren united in that State with the anti-slavery men in an independent nomination of Ex-President Van Buren and Mr. Charles Francis Adams, as the candidates of a new third party which took the name of the “Free Soil” party. This party declared that Congress had no right to interfere with slavery in the States in which it already existed; that it was the duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in the Territories; and that Congress had a constitutional right to abolish slavery in the Federal district of Columbia, which is the seat of the Federal Government. The result of all this was the election of Taylor and Fillmore, who received 163 votes in the electoral colleges against 127 cast for Cass and Butler, the Democratic candidates, and a popular plurality over those candidates of less than 150,000 in a total of somewhat less than 3,000,000 votes.

But the “Whig” triumph was short-lived. The gold discoveries in California gave such a sudden and tremendous impetus to the settlement of the new Pacific empire of the Union as “forced the hand” of the new Administration; and General Taylor dying in July 1849, while Congress and the country were hotly contending over the social and political organization of that new empire, his successor, Mr. Fillmore, with Daniel Webster as his Secretary of State, threw the weight of the Administration against the anti-slavery agitation and in favor of what were called the “Compromise Measures” of 1850. These measures admitted California without extending to the Pacific the boundary line between free and slave territory fixed by the “Missouri Compromise” of 1820, and left slavery untouched in the Federal district. Of course such a compromise neither quieted the alarms of the slaveholding South nor satisfied the aggressive abolitionists of the North. But the country accepted it, and at the next Presidential election, in 1852, the Democratic candidate, General Pierce of New Hampshire, was elected by an overwhelming majority, carrying four of the New England States, the great Middle States of New York and Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois at the West, all the Southern States, excepting Kentucky and Tennessee, and the new State on the Pacific, California. He received 254 electoral votes against 42 thrown for his Whig antagonist, General Scott, who had led the armies of the Union to their crowning victories in Mexico, and who had been a conspicuous military personage in the United States ever since the second war of 1812 with Great Britain.

There could scarcely have been a more decisive proof than this election gave that the Democratic party of the United States is really the permanent and enduring “party of the people,” without distinction of sections; for the tremendous victory won by General Pierce was distinctly due to the general, though, as it proved, the mistaken, impression of the masses of the people, that the irritating question of slavery in its Federal relations had been taken out of the arena of politics by the “Compromise Measures” of 1850. This was so clear that the opponents of the Democratic party, representing the shattered elements of the Whig party and the friends, as Mr. Bright would say, of “Protection and Monopoly,” changed front suddenly and concentrated all their efforts on a revival and extension of the anti-slavery agitation, as being the only program which offered them a hope of breaking down again, even for a time, the ascendency of Democratic principles. In this effort they were naturally seconded not only by the Northern abolitionists, but by the extreme partisans of slavery at the South. The value of slave property had been enormously increased by the sudden development of trade and manufactures all over the world, and especially in Great Britain and the United States, which resulted from the gold discoveries in California and Australia, and from the adoption, first in the United States under a great Democratic Secretary of the Treasury, Robert J. Walker, in 1846, of a liberal tariff, and then, in Great Britain, of what is not perhaps with perfect accuracy called the “Free Trade” policy of Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden. One might almost say that the cotton manufacturers of Lancashire and New England fell into a conspiracy to delude the slaveholders of the South into those dreams of a vast slaveholding empire surrounding the Gulf of Mexico, which began, at the period of which I now write, to shake the foundations of the Union by fascinating the minds of grasping and ambitious men in that part of the United States.

In February, 1853, before the inauguration of President Pierce, a Democratic Senator, Mr. Douglas, of Illinois, who had been an unsuccessful candidate for the Presidential nomination in the preceding year, took the occasion presented by a bill for organizing a new Western Territory, Nebraska (which included the two now existing States of Nebraska and of Kansas), to propose a repeal of the old “Missouri Compromise,” to which I have more than once alluded. By this measure – a “Federalist,” not a Democratic measure – adopted in 1820, it was provided that slavery should never be carried into any Territory north of the fixed line of 36° 30´ north latitude. I have already mentioned that Congress refused to extend this line to the Pacific during the discussions which attended the admission of California in 1850; and I am sure that no one who knew Senator Douglas will differ from me now, when I say that he undoubtedly hoped by urging the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which was voted by Congress the 25th of May, 1854, to get the whole question whether slavery should or should not be introduced into new Territories, and so into the new States of the Union, relegated from the domain of Congressional action into that of “popular sovereignty.” It was not the purpose either of the small minority at the South who desired disunion as the first step towards the founding of a “semi-tropical empire,” or of the more considerable minority at the North who preferred the risk of disunion to the toleration of slavery under the American flag, that this question should be taken out of the domain of Congressional action, and the expectations of Senator Douglas were disappointed. The repeal of the “Missouri Compromise” simply turned Kansas into a battle-ground. It led rapidly up to a succession of armed conflicts within that Territory between organised bands of Northern and of Southern “emigrants,” which set fire to the popular passions in both sections of the country, “swamped” the attempt of a section of the now disbanding “Whig” party to capture power by organising the prejudices of race and of religion into a secret political order of “Native Americans” or “Know-nothings,” and gave vitality and success to the more serious and sustained efforts of a much larger section of the “Whigs,” who devoted themselves to founding a new party which should combine the permanent objects “of Protection and Monopoly” with the temporary and immediate object of restricting slavery within the limits of the then existing slave States. Thanks to this section of the “Whigs,” the modern “Republican Party” was formed in 1854, which, after precipitating the country into civil war by the election of President Lincoln (against whom it revolted, as I shall show, when he had carried through to victory the terrible task it imposed upon him), after retarding the pacification of the Union for years by its policy of military “reconstruction” at the South, and after inflicting upon the taxpayers of the United States burdens undreamed of by the original “Whigs” in their most extravagant days of “paternalism,” has now finally come to the ground under the candidacy of two of its most thoroughly representative leaders, Mr. Blaine and General Logan.

The chief spirit of the new “Republican” party was Ex-Governor Seward, the leader of the Whigs of New York, a consummate politician, “honest himself,” as one of his special friends said of him, “but indifferent to honesty in others,” who labored with uncommon skill and adroitness for six years to build the new organisation up into Presidential proportions, only to experience the common fate of such party leaders in the United States, and to find himself set aside by his own Republican Convention of 1860, at Chicago, in favor of the then relatively obscure Western candidate Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois.

The old name “Republican” used by the party of Jefferson was taken by the new party for the express purpose of dissimulating, as far as might be, its “Whig” parentage, and of thus recommending it to the widespread and growing anti-slavery element among the Democrats of the North and West. The Whig origin and tendencies of the new party, however, clearly appeared in the demand made in its first platform of 1856 for “appropriations by Congress for the improvement of rivers and harbors.” It selected as its first Presidential candidate in 1856 Colonel John C. Fremont of California, an officer of the army who had married the daughter of an eminent Democratic senator, Mr. Benton of Missouri, and who had acquired a kind of romantic popular prestige as “the Pathfinder of the Rocky Mountains” by an expedition across the continent. With him was associated as Vice-Presidential candidate a man of more political weight and force, Mr. Dayton, a Whig leader, of New Jersey, who afterwards rendered the country distinguished services as Minister to France under President Lincoln. Mr. Buchanan of Pennsylvania was nominated by the Democrats to succeed President Pierce in 1856. In the “platform” then adopted the Democratic party met the “Protectionist” tendency of the new “Republican” organisation by declaring “that justice and sound policy forbid the Federal Government to foster one branch of industry to the detriment of another;” denounced the attempt of the Whig “Know-Nothings” to organise a crusade against Catholics and citizens of alien birth; and in the matter of slavery reaffirmed “the compromise of 1850,” and committed itself to “the determined conservation of the Union and the non-interference of Congress with slavery in the territories or the district of Columbia.”

The new “Republican party” in its “platform” of 1856, let me here observe, raised no question touching slavery where slavery then existed, but pronounced it to be “both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery;” this latter attack on the Mormons being a bid for votes at the West and an appeal to the religious prejudices of the East.

A third remnant of the old “Whigs,” meeting in Baltimore in September 1856, appealed to the country to beware of “geographical parties,” adopted the nomination made by the Whig “Know-Nothings” of Ex-President Fillmore, and asserted that in Kansas “civil war” was “raging,” and that the Union was “in peril.” The contest was conducted by the Republicans at the North very much on the lines on which the first Whig victory of 1840 had been won – by the organisation, that is, of “Pathfinder Clubs” and processions, with brass bands, bonfires, and all the paraphernalia of “politics by picnic,” and a large popular vote was cast for the Republican candidate. But Mr. Buchanan, nevertheless had a majority of nearly 500,000 votes over Colonel Fremont at the polls in a total vote of about three millions, and he was elected President by 174 votes in the Electoral College, eight votes being cast by Maryland for Mr. Fillmore, and 114 votes being cast for Colonel Fremont, if the five votes of Wisconsin were properly included in that number – a very grave question as to that point being raised by the undisputed fact that the electoral votes of Wisconsin, which, under an obviously wise precept of the Constitution, ought to have been cast on the same day with the electoral votes of all the other States of the Union (December 3, 1856), were not cast until the next day (December 4) because the electors were prevented by a snowstorm from reaching the capital of the State in season to comply with the behest of the organic law.

Events moved rapidly after the election of President Buchanan. In spite of a great financial panic in 1857, the commerce of the United States, under the salutary régime established by Democratic Secretaries of the Treasury, advanced beyond all former precedent. The net imports of the United States increased from 298,261,364 dollars in 1856, the year of Mr. Buchanan’s election, to 335,233,232 dollars in 1860, the last year of his administration, and the exports from 310,586,330 dollars in 1856 to 373,189,274 dollars in 1860. The sea going tonnage of the Union ran up to that of Great Britain;4 and never had the country been so prosperous as during this period of Democratic ascendancy and relative fiscal freedom.

But while the managers of the new sectional Republican party worked night and day to develop and consolidate their voting power at the North and West, and availed themselves skilfully of every exciting incident in the history of the day to fan the passions of the people into flame, a sharp conflict was raging within the Democratic ranks between the Administration and the followers of Senator Douglas, which the leaders of the disunion movement at the South carefully and skilfully fomented, and which culminated in an open secession from the Democratic National Convention at Charleston in April 1860.

The Convention was adjourned to meet at Baltimore in June. There a second secession of Southern delegates occurred, followed by the nomination for the Presidency of Senator Douglas. A few days later the seceders, meeting in a Convention of their own, nominated Vice-President Breckenridge of Kentucky. In the meantime on the 9th of May a convention of “moderate men” of all shades of opinion had assembled in Baltimore, and nominated two eminent members of the disbanded Whig party, Mr. Bell of Tennessee and Mr. Edward Everett of Massachusetts, for the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency; while the now confident Republicans, gathered in Convention at Chicago on the 16th of May, had selected not Ex-Governor Seward of New York, but Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, as their candidate.

Of course, with such a prospect of success before them as the Democratic disorganisation offered, the managers of this Convention of the Republicans adroitly threw all questions but the “burning questions” of the hour as far as possible into the background of their operations. But while they declared themselves in favor of the preservation of “the Federal Constitution, the rights of the States, and the union of the States,” they did not forget to record their desire for such an “adjustment” of the “duties on imports” as “should encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country,” under which rather vague phraseology lay concealed the purpose of organising a new tariff for protection – a purpose which was carried into effect by the Republicans at Washington as soon as the subsequent secession from Congress of the Southern members made it practicable.

With the first election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, and his inauguration in March, 1861, we come upon a sudden and complete “solution of continuity” in the political history of the United States. Of the total popular vote of the country, amounting to 4,680,193, thrown on the 4th of November, 1860, Mr. Lincoln received but 1,866,452, being thus left in a popular minority of no fewer than two million, two hundred and thirteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty-one votes! It is impossible in the face of these figures to doubt that if the tremendous issue of peace and war between the two great sections of the Union, which really lay hidden in the ballot-boxes of the Union on that November day, had been never so dimly perceived by the American people, the verdict of the nation would have made an end that day of the new “Republican,” party. But neither Mr. Lincoln himself, nor Mr. Seward, nor any considerable number of the Republican voters of the North and the West believed, or could be made to believe, in the reality of this issue. It came upon them all and upon the country at last, after all the agitation and all the warnings of years, like “a thief in the night,” and coming upon the country it suspended for four long and dismal years the normal action of the constitution, and the normal development therefore of public opinion through the channels of constitutional politics.