The delegates came around quickly. He was no one’s first choice, but the following morning, on the ninth ballot, Polk was unanimously proclaimed the Democratic nominee for president in 1844, America’s first dark-horse presidential candidate. The Whig platform said nothing about Texas, but the Democratic platform called for “the re-occupation of Oregon and the re-annexation of Texas at the earliest practicable period.” Polk needed to appease the Van Burenites and to balance the ticket with a northerner. He offered the vice presidency to Van Buren’s closest supporter, New Yorker Silas Wright. But Wright turned him down, telling friends that he “did not propose to ride behind on the black pony [slavery] at the funeral of his slaughtered friend” Van Buren.26
Polk turned next to Pennsylvania senator George M. Dallas, who was even more of a political nonentity than himself. Dallas was roused from bed at three in the morning by a group of inebriated supporters who didn’t immediately blurt out the good news. Since Dallas had no idea he was a candidate for office, he answered the door in his slippers wholly believing that something horrible had happened to a loved one. But Dallas quickly warmed to the news and accepted the unexpected honor.27
Thanks to the wonders of Samuel Morse’s newly invented telegraph, Washington received nearly instantaneous notice of Polk’s nomination. But Young Hickory was so little known that listeners assumed the device had erred: “When the wonder working telegraph proclaimed the final nomination, it was heard by all the faithful with speechless amazement.” “Who is James K. Polk?” reporters wondered. Not everyone was rendered speechless. Jackson protégé Thomas Hart Benton cursed the “damned fools” in Baltimore when he heard of Polk’s promotion.28
Henry Clay was incredulous. “Are our Democratic friends serious?” he asked. This couldn’t possibly be right. “What principles has Mr. Polk ever developed or upheld to entitle him to a Nation’s confidence at the chief administrator in its affairs?” the National Intelligencer queried. “Recently weighed in the balance as Chief Magistrate of his own State, having been found wanting and discarded from its service, what probability is there that, with this known judgment against him at home, he can find favor with the People in other States who have no other knowledge of him than such as this?”29
Polk was “conspicuous for nothing but his blind, implicit and unhesitating submissiveness” to Andrew Jackson; he seemed to have no notable accomplishments. “As to Mr. Polk, what is he?” asked one critic. “A worthy enough, amiable enough person, individually, but, as a public man, utterly without abilities, without services, without reputation.” New Yorker Philip Hone marveled in his diary that the Democrats had chosen “General Jackson’s chief cook and bottle washer.” A Whig paper in Maryland, noting that “never before did such success follow upon so little effort,” hypothesized that “after this, any man may set up for the nomination of President … and the more humble his abilities and the more obscure his position, the more certain may he rely upon success.”30
The independent New York Herald agreed. “Of the nomination of Mr. Polk we hardly know how to speak seriously. A more ridiculous, contemptible and forlorn candidate, was never put forth by any party. He has neither the vigor, respectability nor the elements of any reputation, even half so much as Captain Tyler.… Mr. Polk is a sort of fourth or rather fortieth-rate lawyer and small politician in Tennessee, who by accident was once speaker of the House of Representatives. He was rejected even by his own state as governor—and now he comes forward as candidate of the great democracy of the United States.”31
The irregular nature of the convention proceedings led some observers to wonder if the Democrats were attempting political suicide. “Disabled, by a cunning and successful stratagem, from the support of Mr. Van Buren, whom they really preferred, to whom they owed the honor of a nomination, and to whom a decided majority actually gave their votes … the Convention appears … rather than break up in utter confusion, to have unanimously thrown away its vote, and let itself down on Mr. Polk.”32 The Democrats “must be Polking fun at us!” one Whig paper punned.33
The New York Herald predicted that “the singular result of all these laughable doings of the democracy in Baltimore, will be the election of Henry Clay, by a larger majority than ever was received by Jackson or Harrison.” Clay’s path to the presidency was open. “With Polk and Tyler in the field to divide the democracy, who, were they rolled into one person, would hardly make a man, Mr. Clay must get the State of New York with perfect ease.” The results would surely be the same in Pennsylvania and Virginia. The big states would easily fall into Clay’s lap.34
Gleeful Whigs, in agreement that “this nomination may be considered as the dying gasp, the last breath of life, of the ‘Democratic’ party,” were jubilant. It would hardly be a race at all. “Since our opponents have thought proper to put a nag upon the course which has neither speed nor bottom …, why, the western charger may take it easy, and gallop or walk over the course at his leisure.”35
So confident was one group of Clay’s supporters that they commissioned an enormous suite of solid rosewood bedroom furniture for his use in the White House. They spared no expense in either materials or craftsmanship. The thirteen-foot bed, topped with a crimson cover and state pillows, cost more than a modest house, and was accompanied by six chairs, a dressing table, armoire, two marble-topped washstands, and a standing mirror. It was furniture fit for a prince, built on a princely scale. It would never fit into a normal home.36
Clay was just as sanguine. “We must beat them with ease if we do one half our duty,” he wrote happily on June 7. The following day the Senate rejected Tyler’s Texas treaty, with thirty-five senators opposed and sixteen in favor. Just as in Baltimore, the Democrats were divided, while the Whigs stood nearly unanimous against annexation and in favor of Henry Clay. As spring turned to summer, the future seemed clear. “The presidential election may be said to be decided as soon as it opens … Mr. Clay will have only to walk over the course.”37
3
The Upset
NO POLITICIAN COULD devote as many evenings to poker and whiskey as had Henry Clay and expect a decorous presidential campaign. Washington was a tight community, and even those who had no personal memory of Clay wagering a hotel in a game of cards, or gleefully smashing $120 worth of crystal glasses and decanters at the close of a particularly wild party back in the 1820s, knew his reputation for “fun and frolic” full well. His friends rightly protested that the Sage of Ashland had mellowed in his old age. Harriet Martineau, a thirty-six-year-old British social critic renowned on both sides of the Atlantic for her astute observations, asserted in 1838 that Clay’s “moderation is now his most striking characteristic; obtained, no doubt, at the cost of prodigious self-denial on his own part.” She marveled at his “truly noble mastery” of his passions.1
That mastery went only so far. Clay still liked to drink, and that fact alone was enough to raise questions about his self-control among the many religious Americans who had sworn off intoxicating beverages in the previous decade. And Clay had a reputation to contend with. Stories circulated, not all of them false, that when drunk Clay would lose his temper, slip into self-pity, and display a range of behaviors that were decidedly unmanly and unbecoming in a statesman of his stature. The stresses of presidential campaigns brought out his worst. Not long before the 1840 convention Clay had famously declared, “I would rather be right than be president,” but when told that the war hero Harrison had been chosen as the Whig nominee over himself, he reportedly vented his rage in a drunken tirade that astounded observers. Screaming, cursing, shaking his fists, Clay proclaimed that “my friends are not worth the powder and shot it would take to kill them!”2
Four years later, no expense was spared in the attempt to kill Clay’s candidacy. Polk’s supporters lingered over Clay’s heroic gambling, creative profanity, and drinking binges, and they greatly exaggerated his duels and Sabbath breaking. Democratic processions carried banners inscribed “No Gambler” and “No D
uellist.” One particularly creative pamphlet demonstrated how Clay had supposedly violated every one of the Ten Commandments.
Nor were the accusations limited to Clay’s supposed debauchery. Southerners accused him of befriending abolitionists, while abolitionists pointed to Clay’s slave owning to drum up support for a new third-party political organization, the Liberty Party, which directly attacked slavery and the mainstream parties that sustained it. Jackson renewed his old claims that Clay had cheated him out of the presidency in 1824 by making a “corrupt bargain” with John Quincy Adams. The character assaults were unrelenting, but Clay played it cool. “I laugh at the streights to which our opponents have been driven. They are to be pitied.” He was used to scurrilous attacks; they did nothing to shake his confidence.3
Whigs would have slandered their opponent just as violently had they found anything to impugn. But Young Hickory’s general obscurity masked a long career of aggressively wholesome habits. He had been happily married to the same woman for twenty years, and “his private life … has ever been upright and pure.” Polk didn’t gamble, drink, or fight duels. Although he professed no religion, he kept the Sabbath holy anyhow, a fact attributed to the “auspicious domestic influence” of his wife, “his guardian angel amid the perils and darkness of the way.” Sarah Polk’s insistence that her husband attend church with her each Sunday was well known. If he was “engaged in the company of men who, either from indifference or carelessness, forgot the Sabbath and its universal obligation,” Sarah would enter the room “shawled and bonneted” and “ask her husband and his friends to go with her to church, saying that she did not wish to go alone.” Indifferent men quickly came to realize that you didn’t talk politics with James Polk on a Sunday unless you were willing to spend several hours in a Presbyterian church afterward.4
Sarah ensured that James conformed to her standards of religious observance, but he actually had stricter “ideas of propriety” than she did, and privately admonished her for not conforming to his “delicate conception of the fitness of things.” If she ventured to make a joke about another person, he rebuked her: “Sarah, I wish you would not say that. I understand you, but others might not, and a wrong impression might be made.” It was customary in the 1840s to view women as the keepers of moral virtue in society, but in this case Sarah attributed her own moral standards to the “strict” moral “school” run by her husband.5
His work ethic was just as faultless. Polk’s campaign biography noted that “his course at college was marked by the same assiduity and studious application which have since characterized him.… [I]t is said that he never missed a recitation nor omitted the punctilious performance of any duty.” Nor did he ever miss a vote in Congress, where he “always performed more than a full share of” his work. Since his youth, Democrats claimed, James K. Polk displayed a love of labor and degree of focus that clearly distinguished him from his Whig opponent. Polk’s supporters noted that “habits of close application at college are apt to be despised by those who pride themselves on brilliancy of mind, as if they were incompatible.” But this widespread disdain of hard work was “a melancholy mistake.” What was “genius,” they asked, other than hard work?6
Polk’s virtues were many, but they didn’t necessarily make for exciting verse. “Let us poke him in the chair say what they may, for in principles and honesty he excels Henry Clay,” wrote the poet laureate at the University of Vermont.
For morals and sobriety his character is upright,
Nor in quarrels or wrangles does he ever delight;
In gambling and dueling he never engages,
And a war with his colleagues he never wages.7
Truth be told, Young Hickory was somewhat boring: a grind, perhaps, and very liable to charges of being a Jackson sycophant, but personally above reproach. The only dirt the Whigs could dig up was about Polk’s iconoclastic father, who, they claimed, had been a Tory in the Revolution. But it was a feeble attack, and of little impact.
What Clay’s supporters didn’t quite realize was that a boring sycophant didn’t make it to the top of the ticket without being exceptionally canny. Polk ran a very good campaign. One of his first moves was unifying his fractured party by promising to serve only one term in office. His rivals for the nomination had only to look forward four years for their own chance.
He also enlisted Old Hickory in the fight. The general was more than happy to resume his decades-old battle against his nemesis Henry Clay, whom he had long believed to be a “reckless demagogue, ambitious and regardless of truth when it comes in the way of his ambition.” And although he was so weak as to be “scarcely able to wield my pen or to see what I write,” he promised Sarah Polk that “I will put you in the White House you can so adorn if it costs me my life!” Jackson’s greatest service was convincing John Tyler, recently returned from a lengthy honeymoon in New York, that it was time for him to retire. On August 20, Tyler formally withdrew from the presidential race and endorsed Polk. The Whigs could no longer count on the pro-annexation vote being split between two candidates. Polk also did an excellent job convincing immigrants, particularly Catholics, that the Whigs were xenophobic nativists, and that if awarded the presidency, Henry Clay would take away their schools, churches, and political rights, withhold the blessings of citizenship, and ensure that few of their brethren would ever join them in the United States.8
Until the end of the summer, Clay ran his 1844 campaign as if domestic issues were all that mattered. Politically, he offered his countrymen the same compelling program of industrialization, modernization, and market growth that his Whigs had successfully used to outmaneuver the Democrats in previous years. For Clay, annexation was a diversion, and war for Texas senseless. Why should the nation risk lives for land when its fate centered on tariffs and trade? Henry Clay promised to stabilize the banking system, institute a tariff for revenue, and support manufacturing. He would ensure governmental economy. He campaigned on the promise that technological progress and economic development would result not merely in riches for a few but a rising tide for all. He was the Whig candidate. What Whig voters wanted and expected from government was not territorial expansion but the construction of a nice macadam road to get them from their village to the city.
One person inspired by Clay’s platform was an ambitious former state legislator in Illinois. The thirty-five-year-old lawyer Abraham Lincoln was a Whig on the rise. Lincoln had grown up worshipping Clay from afar. As a backwoods boy in Kentucky he had read Clay’s biography over and over, as if memorizing the facts of the politician’s life would allow him to emulate it. Although by 1844 he’d still never actually heard the man speak, he’d read and studied almost every important speech Clay had delivered. Clay, Lincoln said, was “my beau ideal of a statesman,” and it was the older man’s sweeping vision of economic progress that had first convinced him to become a Whig.9
While the politician from Illinois had no illusions that he was in his hero’s league, he identified with him nonetheless. After all, both were self-made men, attorneys from western states; both had a political realist’s bent, and both held the conviction that economic growth should be America’s priority. Lincoln had no fears of a powerful central government, for he believed, along with other Whigs, that the purpose of government was “to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all or can not, so well do, for themselves.”10 The fact that Clay was a slaveholder didn’t bother Lincoln at all. In fact, the young Whig seemed generally unconcerned about slavery, viewing agitation to end it primarily as a nuisance that split his party. Illinois, and America, needed what the Whigs had to offer—good roads and bridges and access to credit—so that poor young men of promise, men such as himself, could overcome the humblest of circumstances and make a name for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln grew up poor—poor in a way that other self-proclaimed “common men” such as Clay and Polk could not dream of. With little formal education, he made his own way t
o the small town of New Salem, Illinois, in 1831, where his lively wit, physical strength (he was a superb wrestler), kindness, and striking intelligence won him friends and supporters. Less than a year after arriving, war broke out against the Sac and Fox Indians when they attempted to reclaim lands in Illinois that had been ceded to the United States in a treaty of dubious legitimacy. Just as war against the Creeks propelled a generation of Democrats in the Southwest to prominence, the Black Hawk War, as it was known, became a springboard for political advancement for young men on the Illinois frontier. Abraham Lincoln was elected captain of a volunteer militia unit in the conflict. In his three months in uniform, he never saw combat, which may have been just as well, since his company was woefully unprepared: when the men were mustered into service, thirty of them lacked firearms.
He may not have fired a shot, but Captain Lincoln witnessed shocking atrocities by Indian combatants that shaped his views of the rules of war, and proved an unexpected early test of his military leadership and character. Arriving at the scene of a recent massacre along the Fox River, Lincoln and his men gazed upon “scalps of old women & children.” According to a volunteer in Lincoln’s company, “The Indians Scalped an old Grand Mother—Scalped her—hung her scalp on a ram rod—that it might be seen & aggravate the whites—They cut one woman open—hung a child that they had murdered in the womans belly that they had gutted—strong men wept at this—cold hearted men Cried.” Whether or not Lincoln was one of the “strong men” who wept, he refused to respond in kind, even when the passions of his men made restraint difficult. Several under his command testified that when an “old Indian” named Jack appeared in camp bearing a letter of support from Lewis Cass, the volunteers rushed at him. “We have come out to fight the Indians and by God we intend to do so,” they told their captain. But Lincoln defended Jack, warning the volunteers, “Men this must not be done—he must not be shot and killed by us.” Some in the unit considered Captain Lincoln “cowardly” for saving Jack’s life. But he stood by his unpopular decision and refused to bow to the passions of the mob.11
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