The Fire Bell in the Night
Opening Missouri to statehood brought on yet another—but up to that point, the most important—of many clashes over slavery that ended in secession and war. Proponents of slavery had started to develop the first “overtly distinct southern constitutional thought” that crafted a logical, but constitutionally flawed, defense of individual states’ rights to protect slavery.34 Once again, it was Jefferson who influenced both the advance of liberty and the expansion of slavery simultaneously, for it was in the southern regions of the Louisiana Purchase territory—Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri—that slavery’s future lay.
Difficulties over the admission of Missouri began in late 1819, when Missouri applied to Congress for statehood. At the time, there were eleven slave states (Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) and eleven free states (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois). Population differences produced a disparity in House seats, where, even with the three-fifths ratio working in favor of the South, slave states only counted 81 votes to 105 held by free states. Moreover, free-state population had already started to grow substantially faster than that of the slave states. Missouri’s statehood threatened to shift the balance of power in the Senate in the short term, but in the long term it would likely set a precedent for the entire Louisiana Purchase territory.
Anticipating that eventuality, and that since Louisiana had already become a state in 1812, the South would try to further open Louisiana Purchase lands to slavery, Congressman James Tallmadge of New York introduced an amendment to the statehood legislation that would have prevented further introduction of slaves into Missouri. A firestorm erupted. Senator Rufus King of New York claimed the Constitution empowered Congress to prohibit slavery in Missouri and to make prohibition a prerequisite for admission to the Union. As a quick reference, his could be labeled the congressional authority view, which was quickly countered by Senator William Pinkney of Maryland, who articulated what might be called the compact view, wherein he asserted that the United States was a collection of equal sovereignties and Congress lacked the constitutional authority over those sovereignties.
Indeed, the Constitution said nothing about territories, much less slavery in the territories, and left it to statute law to provide guidance. That was the case with the Northwest Ordinance. But since the Louisiana Purchase was not a part of the United States in 1787, the Northwest Ordinance made no provision for slavery west of the Mississippi, necessitating some new measure. No sooner had the opposing positions been laid out than the territory of Maine petitioned Congress for its admission to the Union as well, allowing for not only sectional balance, but also providing a resolution combining the Maine and Missouri applications. A further compromise prohibited slavery north of the 36-degree, 30-minute line. There were also more insidious clauses that prohibited free black migration in the territory and guaranteed that masters could take their slaves into free states, which reaffirmed the state definitions of citizenship in the latter case and denied certain citizenship protections to free blacks in the former.35 Packaging the entire group of bills together, so that the Senate and House would have to vote on the entirety of the measure, preventing antislave northerners from peeling off distasteful sections, was the brainchild of Henry Clay of Kentucky. More than any other person, Clay directed the passage of the compromise, and staked his claim to the title later given him, the Great Compromiser. Some, perhaps including Clay, thought that with passage of the Missouri Compromise, the question of slavery had been effectively dealt with. Others, however, including Martin Van Buren of New York, concluded just the opposite: it set in motion a dynamic that he was convinced would end only in disunion or war. Van Buren consequently devised a solution to this eventuality. His brilliant, but flawed, plan rested on certain assumptions that we must examine.
Southern prospects for perpetuating slavery depended on maintaining a grip on the levers of power at the federal level. But the South had already lost the House of Representatives. Southerners could count on the votes of enough border states to ensure that no abolition bill could be passed, but little else. Power in the Senate, meanwhile, had started to shift, and with each new state receiving two senators, it would only take a few more states from the northern section of the Louisiana Purchase to tilt the balance forever against the South in the upper chamber. That meant forcing a balance in the admission of all new states. Finally, the South had to hold on to the presidency. This did not seem difficult, for it seemed highly likely that the South could continue to ensure the election of presidents who would support the legality (if not the morality) of slavery. But the courts troubled slave owners, especially when it came to retrieving runaways, which was nearly impossible. The best strategy for controlling the courts was to control the appointment of the judges, through a proslavery president and Senate.
Still, the ability of the nonslave states to outvote the South and its border allies would only grow. Anyone politically astute could foresee a time in the not-distant future when not only would both houses of Congress have northern/ antislave majorities, but the South would also lack the electoral clout to guarantee a proslavery president. On top of these troublesome realities lay moral traps that the territories represented. Bluntly, if slavery was evil in the territories, was it not equally evil in the Carolinas? And if it was morally acceptable for Mississippi, why not Minnesota?
These issues combined with the election of 1824 to lead to the creation of the modern two-party system and the founding of the Democratic Party. The father of the modern Democratic Party, without question, was Martin Van Buren, who had come from the Bucktail faction of the Republican Party. As the son of a tavern owner from Kinderhook, New York, Van Buren resented the aristocratic landowning families and found enough other like-minded politicians to control the New York State Constitutional Convention in 1821, enacting universal manhood suffrage. On a small scale, suffrage reflected the strategy Van Buren intended to see throughout the nation—an uprising against the privileged classes and a radical democratization of the political process. He learned to employ newspapers as no other political figure had, linking journalists’ success to the fortunes of the party. Above all, Van Buren perceived the necessity of discipline and organization, which he viewed as beneficial to the masses he sought to organize. With his allies in the printing businesses, Van Buren’s party covered the state with handbills, posters, editorials, and even ballots.
Van Buren’s plan also took into account the liberalization of voting requirements in the states. By 1820 most states had abandoned property requirements for voting, greatly increasing the electorate, and, contrary to expectations, voter participation fell.36 In fact, when property restrictions were in place, voter participation was the highest in American history—more than 70 percent participation in Mississippi (1823) and Missouri (1820); more than 80 percent in Delaware(1804) and New Hampshire (1814); and an incredible 97 percent of those eligible voting in 1819.37
The key to getting out the vote in the new, larger but less vested electorate was a hotly contested election, especially where parties were most evenly balanced. There occurred the “highest voter turnout [with] spectacular increases in Maine, New Hampshire, the Middle States, Kentucky, and Ohio.”38 Or, put another way, good old-fashioned “partisanship,” of the type Madison had extolled, energized the electorate.
Van Buren absorbed the impact of these changes. He relished confrontation. Known as the Little Magician or the Red Fox of Kinderhook, Van Buren organized a group of party leaders in New York, referred to as the Albany Regency, to direct a national campaign.39 Whereas some scholars make it appear that Van Buren only formed the new party in reaction to what he saw as John Quincy Adams’s outright theft of the 1824 election, he had in fact already put the machinery in motion for much different reasons. For one thing, he disliked what today would b
e called a new tone in Washington—Monroe’s willingness to appoint former Federalists to government positions, or a practice called the Monroe heresy.40 The New Yorker wanted conflict—and wanted it hot—as a means to exclude the hated Federalists from power. The election of 1824 at best provided a stimulant for the core ideas for future action already formed in Van Buren’s brain.
Thus he saw the Missouri Compromise as a threat and, at the same time, an opportunity. Intuitively, Van Buren recognized that the immorality of slavery, and the South’s intransigence on it, would lead to secession and possibly a war. His solution was to somehow prevent the issue from even being discussed in the political context, an objective he sought to attain through the creation of a new political party dedicated to no other principle than holding power.
When the Jefferonians killed off the Federalist Party, they lost their identity: “As the party of the whole nation [the Republican Party] ceased to be responsive to any particular elements in its constituency, it ceased to be responsive to the South.”41
As he would later outline in an 1827 letter to Virginian Thomas Ritchie, Van Buren argued that “political combinations between the inhabitants of the different states are unavoidable & the most natural & beneficial to the country is that between the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North.”42 This alliance, soon called the Richmond-Albany axis, joined the free-soil Van Buren with the old Richmond Junto, which included Ritchie, editor of the Enquirer, and other southern leaders, including William Crawford of Georgia. Without a national party system, he contended, “the clamour against the Southern Influence and African Slavery” would increase.43 But on the other hand, if Van Buren successfully managed to align with southern interests, how could his party avoid the charge of being proslavery in campaigns? The answer, he concluded, rested in excluding slavery from the national debate in entirety. If, through party success and discipline, he could impose a type of moratorium on all discussion of slavery issues, the South, and the nation, would be safe. Thus appeared the Jacksonian Democratic Party, or simply, the Democrats. Van Buren’s vision for maintaining national unity evolved from the notion that money corrupts—a point that Andrew Jackson himself would make repeatedly, and which Jefferson endorsed—and therefore the “majority was strongest where it was purest, least subject to the corrupting power of money,” which was the South.44 Ironically, it was exactly the “corrupting power of money” that Van Buren intended to harness in order to enforce discipline. The growing size of the federal government, especially in some departments like the Post Office, provided an ever-larger pool of government jobs with which to reward supporters. At the state level, too, governments were growing. Van Buren realized that when federal, state, local, and party jobs were combined, they provided a significant source of compensation for the most loyal party leaders. Certainly not everyone would receive a government—or party—job. But a hierarchy was established from precinct to ward to district to state to the national level through which effective partisans were promoted; then, when they had attained a statewide level of success, they were converted into federal or state employees.
This structure relied on an American tradition, the spoils system, in which the winner of the election replaced all the government bureaucrats with his own supporters; hence, To the victor belong the spoils. It was also called patronage. However one defined it, the bottom line was jobs and money. Van Buren hitched his star to a practice that at its root viewed men as base and without principle. If people could be silenced on the issue of slavery by a promise of a job, what kind of integrity did they have? Yet that was precisely Van Buren’s strategy—to buy off votes (in a roundabout way) with jobs for the noble purpose of saving the nation from a civil war.
In turn, the spoils system inordinately relied on a fiercely partisan (and often nasty) press to churn out reasons to vote for the appropriate candidate and to besmirch the record and integrity of the opponent. All the papers were wholly owned subsidiaries of the political parties, and usually carried the party name in the masthead, for example, Arkansas Democrat. Such partisan papers had existed in the age of the Federalists, who benefited from Noah Webster’s The Minerva, and Jefferson’s counterpart, Freneau’s National Gazette. But they were much smaller operations, and certainly not coordinated in a nationwide network of propaganda as Van Buren envisioned. Under the new partisan press, all pretense of objective news vanished. One editor wrote that he saw it as irresponsible to be objective, and any paper which pretended to be fair simply was not doing its job. Readers understood that the papers did not pretend to be unbiased, and therefore they took what they found with an appropriate amount of skepticism.
There was another dynamic at work in the machinery that Van Buren set up, one that he likely had not thought through, especially given his free-soil predilections. Preserving a slave South free from northern interference not only demanded politicians who would (in exchange for patronage) loyally submit to a party gag order, but also required the party elect as president a man who would not use the power of the federal government to infringe on slavery. The successful candidate, for all practical purposes, had to be a “Northern man of Southern principles,” or “Southerners who were predominantly Westerners in the public eye.”45 As long as the territorial issues were managed, and as long as the White House remained in “safe” hands with a sympathetic northerner, or a westerner with sufficient southern dispositions, the South could rest easy.
Unwittingly, though, Van Buren and other early founders of the new Democratic Party had already sown the seeds of disaster for their cause. Keeping the issue of slavery bottled up demanded that the federal government stay out of southern affairs. That, in turn, required a relatively small and unobtrusive Congress, a pliant bureaucracy, and a docile chief executive. These requirements fell by the wayside almost immediately, if not inevitably. Certainly the man that Van Buren ultimately helped put in the White House, Andrew Jackson, was anything but docile. But even if Jackson had not been the aggressive president he was, Van Buren’s spoils system put in place a doomsday device that guaranteed that the new Jacksonian Democrats would have to deal with the slavery issues sooner rather than later.
With each new federal patronage job added, the bureaucracy, and the power of Washington, grew proportionately. Competition was sure to come from a rival party, which would also promise jobs. To get elected, politicians increasingly had to promise more jobs than their opponents, proportionately expanding the scope and power of the federal government. The last thing Van Buren and the Democrats wanted was a large, powerful central government that could fall into the hands of an antislave party, but the process they created to stifle debate on slavery ensured just that. By the 1850s, all it would take to set off a crisis was the election of the wrong man—a northerner of northern principles, someone like Abraham Lincoln.
Other changes accelerated the trend toward mass national parties. Conventions had already come into vogue for securing passage of favored bills—to marshal the support of “the people” and “the common man.” Conventions “satisfied the great political touchstone of Jacksonian democracy—popular sovereignty.”46 Reflecting the democratic impulses that swept the nation, the nominating convention helped bury King Caucus. It was the election of 1824, however, that killed the king.
Corrupt Bargains?
A precedent of some degree had been set in American politics from the beginning when, aside from Vice President Adams, the strongest contender to succeed a president was the secretary of state. Jefferson, Washington’s secretary of state, followed Adams; Madison, who was Jefferson’s secretary of state, followed Jefferson; Monroe, Madison’s secretary of state, followed Madison; and John Quincy Adams, Monroe’s secretary of state, now intended to keep the string intact. Advantages accompanied the position: it had notoriety and, when the man holding the job was competent, a certain publicity for leadership traits whenever important treaties were negotiated. It was one of the few jobs that offered foreign policy exp
erience outside of the presidency itself. Nevertheless, Adams’s personal limitations made the election of 1824 the most closely and bitterly fought in the life of the young Republic.
John Quincy Adams, the former president’s son, had benefited from his family name, but it also saddled him with the unpleasant association of his father’s Anglophilia, the general aroma of distrust that had hung over the first Adams administration, and, above all, the perception of favoritism and special privilege that had become aspersions in the new age of the common man. Adams suffered from chronic depression (he had two brothers and a son die of alcoholism), whereas his self-righteousness reminded far too many of his father’s piousness. Unafraid of hard work, Adams disdained “politiking” and refused to play the spoils system. Like Clay, he was an avowed nationalist whose concepts for internal unity harkened back to—indeed, far surpassed—the old Federalist programs. But in 1808, to remain politically viable, Adams abandoned the Federalists and became a Republican.
To some extent, Adams was overqualified to be president. Even the slanted Jackson biographer Robert Remini agreed that “unquestionably, Adams was the best qualified” for the job, unless, he added, “political astuteness” counted.47 Having served as the U.S. minister to Russia and having helped draft the Treaty of Ghent, Adams had excellent foreign policy skills. Intelligent, well educated, and fiercely antislave (he later defended the Amistad rebels), Adams nevertheless (like his father) elicited little personal loyalty and generated only the smallest spark of political excitement. Worse, he seemed unable (or unwilling) to address his faults. “I am a man of reserved, cold, austere and forbidding manners,” he wrote, and indeed, he was called by his political adversaries “a gloomy misanthrope”—character defects that he admitted he lacked the “pliability” to reform.48
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