by Larry Tagg
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In the run-up to the election of 1824, however, King Caucus collapsed. Property ownership had mushroomed as the population flooded into the land beyond the Appalachians, and as a result earlier restrictions on voting had become hard to enforce and were increasingly being thrown out. Tens of thousands of new white male voters, eager to be heard, blasted the old caucus system in angry resolutions and protests, and the Senate voted it out of existence. Without a new system of nominating candidates to take the place of the suddenly unfashionable caucuses, however, the ensuing 1824 election was the most chaotic in American history. Four candidates from the Democratic-Republican Party contended, none of whom could win an outright majority of electoral votes, and the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. John Quincy Adams won the election by backroom deal making, but the disgusted Andrew Jackson, who had gotten the most popular votes, was consumed for the next four years by the desire for revenge, convinced that the haughty, aristocratic Adams had thwarted the will of the people. The election was important for the history of American politics because of its chaos and the bitterness it caused. It pointed to the urgent want of some new machinery for selecting presidential nominees.
For the election of 1828, at least, no such machinery was needed. Two candidates rose into view by acclamation: President Adams would run again, and Jackson would seek his revenge. This time, the challenger had new help. Between 1824 and 1828 white manhood suffrage became the rule nationwide, and the number of voters tripled. “Old Hickory” clubs sprang up around the country. Speeches were spoken and parades were paraded in Jackson’s honor. The hero of New Orleans appeared irresistible to the new masses of voters as the democratic ideal made real, the homespun man of the people. Jackson was a man without any known political principles, but he didn’t need them. His military reputation and backwoods appeal were enough to vault him over Adams in 1828, and his election signaled America’s lurch into genuine popular democracy.
Triggered by universal white manhood suffrage, “Old Hickory’s” ascent as 7th President marked the emergence of a new prototype for the Chief Executive: a man born in humble circumstances, with experience on the frontier, boasting military exploits, without long apprenticeship in public life—a man whose stance on issues was fuzzy, but whose image was clear. His type would dominate American politics for the next thirty years and make possible the election of “The Railsplitter” in 1860. But Jackson’s legacy for Lincoln would be mixed. While it spelled the end of the aristocrat Presidents and paved the way for the humble Illinoisan, it would also begin a moral slide in American politics that would, by Lincoln’s time, undermine trust in the presidency and critically wound the public’s belief in his legitimacy.
Jackson encouraged low expectations for government. Its operations should be minimal, he insisted, “like the dews of heaven, unseen and unfelt.” He justified his policy as a Jeffersonian commitment to a strict constitutional interpretation—if the Constitution did not specifically grant a power, he would not exercise it. But Jackson also had a less lofty motive. He was a slave-owner, and since the Constitution granted no federal power over slavery, strict Constitutionalism made it easier to defend slave property. Alexis de Tocqueville, whose visit to America during Jackson’s term produced the monumental Democracy in America, observed that “General Jackson’s power is constantly increasing, but that of the president grows less. The federal government … will pass to his successor enfeebled.” Tocqueville’s prediction would be fulfilled. Jackson would be succeeded for thirty years by a string of mediocrities in the Oval Office who sustained his prejudices. They would be of two types: those who thought the President should be weak, and those who thought he should be weaker.
As Jackson was being lifted to the highest office on the power of his appeal to the masses, his handlers, led by Martin Van Buren, the greatest backroom schemer in American political history, sensed that a leader with the incandescence of Jackson could cast a light far beyond the end of his administration. But until now Jackson’s following—which called itself the Democratic Party—was little more than a huge personality cult. There was no guarantee it would not be torn apart by rivalries and factions as soon as he left office. To turn what amounted to a glorified Scottish clan into a well-knit political party that could survive the end of its hero’s term, Van Buren and the President’s men groped for some machinery for presidential nominations—the loophole in the election process, ignored by the Framers and absent since the collapse of King Caucus—with which they could control their infant Democratic Party after Jackson stepped down.
A rival clique, the Anti-Masons, supplied the answer when they met in Baltimore in 1831 for the nation’s first national party convention. This boisterous, banner-waving gang got national attention for their one-issue splinter group. It had the look of a democratic gathering of the people, delivering a party nominee in public. Van Buren and the rest of Jackson’s handlers envied the high profile delivered on the cheap by the convention, and saw quickly how a few state bosses could manipulate such a gathering. They followed suit with their own Democratic Party convention in Baltimore in 1832 for the purpose of naming Van Buren as Jackson’s running mate, which they rigged by pushing through rules which locked out insurgents.
Over the years, such rigging would become so commonplace in national party conventions that political patriarch John C. Calhoun later published a letter that declared conventions an undemocratic travesty: “I … contributed to put [the Congressional Caucus] down. … Far, however, was it from my intention in aiding to put that down, to substitute in its place what I regard as a hundred times more objectionable in every point of view.” Americans grew to share Calhoun’s disgust at the cynicism of party conventions, since Americans continued to be denied any influence in the nomination—a denial made doubly bitter by the pretense that the party bosses’ nominees were “the choice of the people.”
“That national conventions have already fallen into discredit with the people, there needs no ghost from the grave to reveal,” the New York Tribune declared in 1854. The consistently poor quality of the presidential candidates that the conventions delivered—lowered by wires, deus ex machina style, onto the national stage—deepened voters’ discontent. Their disillusionment would ultimately threaten to tear the nation apart in 1860, when, at the peak of the slavery crisis, the Republican Party bosses presided over a convention where nine states were not represented at all, and which produced a candidate almost unknown outside of his home state: Abraham Lincoln.
It was in the 1836 election that the new party system bared its muscles for the first time. Democratic Party hacks demonstrated that a small group could nominate a man at a convention and give him the aura of popular strength. They held a national convention to shout, parade, and wave banners over the orchestrated nomination of Martin Van Buren, their short, bald, bewhiskered, behind-the-scenes wheeler-dealer. He went on to win the presidential election that year over a fatally divided opposition. He was the first President elected by the party system, and, not coincidentally, the first President with little popular following. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln would fit much the same pattern, winning the election with less than 40% of the vote, at the worst possible time for the nation.
Old Hickory had become president by campaigning on his personal popularity rather than his policies. This emphasis on “the man, not the measures” was so potent with the new, unsophisticated masses of voters that the Democrats received the ultimate flattery in the form of a new party—the Whigs—who by 1840 had molded themselves in the Democrats’ mirror image: that is, created primarily to beat Democrats, not to champion any particular set of ideas. Both parties wooed the teeming voters of an unphilosophical, optimistic, and unapologetically materialistic nation by running candidates who played down issues, who tried to be all things to all men, who avoided making enemies by refusing to be wedded to firm sets of principles. Such candidates possessed that most valuable of mid-nineteenth-century politi
cal assets: “availability.” The crucial defect of this policy was that the men who made good candidates were rarely men who would make good presidents. This flaw did not go unnoticed by the people. They became increasingly cynical about the ability of the parties to nominate able men, particularly as they watched the nation drift, year after critical year, in the vacuum of leadership caused by the succession of mediocrities who found themselves president after Jackson. In 1860, there was no reason to believe that Lincoln would be any better. Indeed, he appeared to be the worst of the lot.
In 1840, after four years of Van Buren, the Democrats, discredited by a deep economic depression and high unemployment and crippled by Van Buren’s lack of luster, faced almost certain defeat. The Whigs, now well organized by bosses of their own, had the luxury of knowing that whoever they nominated would probably win the presidency. At their party’s first national convention, in 1839, Whig bosses ignored the one towering figure in the party, Henry Clay, whom most Whig voters wanted, and railroaded the nomination of the more pliable William Henry Harrison, a doddering general with one victory over the Indians in the Battle of Tippecanoe almost thirty years earlier.
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The choice of Harrison reflected another cynical tendency in the era of rising parties: when victory was sure, the party bosses engineered the nomination of weak men, since they were easier to manipulate than great leaders with ideas of their own.
Popular cynicism skyrocketed once Harrison and Van Buren squared off against each other. The election of 1840, fabled for its superficiality, dirty tricks, and silliness, heralded a new age of elections as vulgar circuses, and ushered in the arrival of the Founding Fathers’ worst nightmares. For the first time, vast sums of campaign money were raised and spent. Backing Harrison, a candidate with no ideas of his own, the Whigs decided to beguile the voters by substituting slogans, songs, and rallies for substance. When a Democratic newspaper sneered that the sixty-eight-year-old general would probably rather be back in his log cabin drinking hard cider, it was a godsend. The colorless Harrison now had an image that reminded the voters of Jackson’s winning formula—a military hero with humble origins. Replicas of log cabins with coonskin caps nailed to the door appeared in town squares nationwide. At Whig rallies the kegs of spiked cider came out, and in the drunken romp that invariably ensued, songbooks were passed around and the revelers filled the night with the popular song:
Tippecanoe and Tyler too
Tippecanoe and Tyler too
And with them we’ll beat little Van, Van, Van
Oh! Van is a used up man.
Harrison’s victory at the polls vindicated the new approach to campaigning, where ideas and issues were not allowed to spoil the fun. Thoughtful citizens were repulsed, realizing that the entire arena of political discourse had been cheapened. When in 1860 a pile of wooden rails purportedly “split by the young Abe Lincoln himself” was dumped on the Illinois convention floor, Lincoln would gain an image which lent luster to his humble origins and give him a handy nickname—“The Railsplitter”—but he would lose credibility with a nation whose voters were looking for a man sober enough to calm a national hysteria, and thoughtful enough to find a way to turn aside a coming catastrophe.
But how could one expect a sober candidate when the whole nation was drunk with politics? As early as 1835 de Tocqueville had told the world, “the political activity which pervades the United States must be seen in order to be understood. No sooner do you set foot upon American ground, than you are stunned by a kind of tumult … almost the only pleasure which an American knows is to take a part in the government, and to discuss its measures.” Other Europeans were similarly startled, even disgusted, at the sight of the American political free-for-all. Frances Trollope, writing in 1832, was appalled at the “election fever” she saw “constantly raging through the land.” “It engrosses every conversation,” she sniffed, “it irritates every temper, it substitutes party spirit for personal esteem; and, in fact, vitiates the whole system of society.” Charles Dickens witnessed the same spectacle a decade later, and despaired, “I yet hope to hear of there being some other national amusement in the United States, besides newspaper politics.” Every week, he saw “some new most paltry exhibition of that narrow-minded and injurious Party Spirit … sickening and blighting everything of wholesome life within its reach.”
To account for the superheated atmosphere that ignited the explosion of partisan bitterness toward Lincoln, one must realize, paradoxically, how painfully boring life in America was in the mid-nineteenth century. Politics in the Age of Jackson was a brilliant, violent poison cultured in the featureless medium of drab American lives lived without ceremony in a landscape of mud and timber. The American Revolution had put an end to all the ancient pagan and religious festivals of the Old World, along with their color, pomp, and pageantry. Only one American vestige survived—the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The religious holidays Americans observed were subdued occasions for prayer—even Christmas was only starting to shed the old Puritan ban on celebration. Also gone were the royal birthdays, the marriage celebrations for the nobility, and the historical festivals of Europe. Instead, America had one lone national holiday, the Fourth of July. Spectator sports, besides the occasional horse race or boxing match, were not yet thought of. Charles Dickens, touring in 1842, noted how lifeless American cities were compared to London: “How quiet the streets are. Are there no itinerant bands, no wind or stringed instruments? No, not one. By day there are no Punches, Fantoccini, dancing dogs, jugglers, conjurers, orchestrinas, or even barrel-organs.” Dickens saw Americans too busy making money to have fun. “Healthful amusements, cheerful means of recreation, and wholesome fancies, must fade before the stern utilitarian joys of trade. … It would be well, if there were greater encouragement to lightness of heart and gaiety, and a wider cultivation of what is beautiful, without being eminently and directly useful,” he sighed. As a remedy to the boredom of this dingy, cheerless world, there rose in America an unprecedented political delirium.
In the Age of Jackson, politics was the national pastime. In hotel lobbies, in bars, saloons, and taverns, on trains and steamboats, on street corners— wherever men gathered—they talked politics. Politics—with its fireworks, barbeques, torchlight parades with gaudy uniforms and floats, banners and badges, posters and prints, campaign songs, and delight in hours and hours of oratory—provided more than entertainment. It had the excitement and the emotion of battle. Every man belonged to a party and felt a part of the “team.” He voted for his party’s candidate, even if he had taken no part in selecting him. And the politicking was continuous. The election calendar of that day was so fragmented and irregular, and so crowded—with three distinct spheres of activity: national, state, and local—that there was almost always an election going on somewhere, and the constant campaigning kept public emotions at a boil.
This was the golden age of American oratory. The spoken word educated and entertained the way radio, movies, and television would do a century later. Huge audiences would stand in the open air all afternoon to listen to a good stump speaker. Any man who expected a career in politics had to be able to deliver an address lasting from two to four hours, with pauses for crowds that cheered and yelled back, “Hit him again!” when he attacked his opponent. The all-male, hollering, half-sport-half-battle political style of the age was done best by political clubs crowded with “wild boys,” gangs who frequently translated their enthusiasm into bloody melees at the polls. The result was a brutal and brutalizing brand of politics. In the years leading up to Lincoln’s election, riots and battles were common at voting stations in New Orleans, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and New York.
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This political delirium was stoked by a wildcat press, which was devoured by an American public as captivated by the printed as by the spoken word. In the Age of Jackson a forest of newspapers sprang up across the country, wherever a man felt like printing his version of the truth and could afford a press.
By 1860, there were three thousand newspapers (twice as many as there are today) to distract, titillate, and inform a population of 30 million Americans. The teeming presses did not elevate the tone of the national discourse; they degraded it even further, turning out a weekly blizzard of sheets that were, on the whole, crude and scandalous. “The New York publications,” wrote social observer George Combe, “are composed of the plunder of European novels and magazines; of reports of sermons by popular preachers; of stories, horrors, and mysteries; of police reports, in which crime and misery are concocted into melo-dramas now exciting sympathy, now laughter; with a large sprinkling of news and politics … they may be regarded as representing to some extent the general mind; and certainly they are not calculated to convey a very high opinion of it.”
Dickens was less generous. He referred to the American press as a “monster of depravity,” and despaired that, “While the newspaper press of America is in, or near, its present abject state, high moral improvement in that country is hopeless.” He warned that “while that Press has its evil eye in every house and its black hand in every appointment in the state, from a president to a postman; while, with ribald slander for its only stock in trade, it is the standard literature of an enormous class, who must find their reading in a newspaper, or they will not read at all; so long must its odium be upon the country’s head, and so long must the evil it works, be plainly visible in the Republic.” In his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens satirized American newspapers by naming them the Sewer, the Stabber, the Peeper, and the Rowdy Journal.
No one expected newspapers to be fair or balanced in their political reports. The owner of a newspaper was many times its editor also, something like a present-day radio station owner doubling as its partisan talk show host. The country’s editors were almost all in the pocket of a political party, and they hectored their readers into increasingly segregated, increasingly hostile political camps. The cost of doing business pushed the presses into bed with the parties. With the advent of the telegraph, the readers expected fresh news, but getting it was expensive. Since so many copies were mailed to distant subscribers, mailing costs were another financial drain. Squeezed by soaring costs, editors found a marketing strategy in appealing to a select audience—either Democrats, Whigs, merchants, or, later, Republicans. A newspaper’s readers, in that unsophisticated day, looked to it for guidance on what a loyal party man should stand for and how he should vote, since they seldom read anything else.
