The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of the Liberal Arts

“BREAKING OVER THE BOUNDARIES OF THE PARTY:” THE ROLE OF PARTY

NEWSPAPERS IN DEMOCRATIC FACTIONALISM IN THE ANTEBELLUM NORTH,

1845-1852

A Dissertation in

History

by

Matthew Isham

© 2010 Matthew Isham

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August 2010

The dissertation of Matthew Isham was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Mark E. Neely, Jr. McCabe-Greer Professor in the American Civil War Era Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee

Anthony E. Kaye Associate Professor of History

Matthew Restall Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History, Anthropology and Women‟s Studies

J. Ford Risley Associate Professor of Communications

Carol Reardon Director of Graduate Studies George Winfree Professor of American History

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School.

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ABSTRACT

In the first half of the nineteenth century partisan newspapers performed a crucial function in the creation and maintenance of the Democratic Party. Partisan newspapers sprang up rapidly throughout the country in large cities and small towns, coastal ports and western settlements. For many of their readers, these newspapers embodied the party itself. The papers introduced readers to the leaders of their parties, disseminated party principles and creeds, and informed them of the seemingly nefarious machinations of their foes in other parties. They provided a common set of political ideals and a common political language that linked like- minded residents of distant communities, otherwise unknown to each other, in a cohesive organization. In the North, the focus of this dissertation, these newspapers interpreted regional economic development and local political issues within the context of their partisan ideals, providing guidance to readers as they confronted the parochial issues of their community. Ironically, these same partisan newspapers also undermined their party‟s message and even sowed the seeds of dissent. Because partisan newspapers were independent businesses affiliated with a party, not operated by it, they retained a large degree of autonomy. Democratic leaders thus exerted imperfect and incomplete control of their most important tool for spreading the party message and communicating with voters. These papers often embodied the individual thoughts and opinions of their owner-editors as much as they represented the expressions of the party. These editors were inveterate boosters for their community, and they often bucked party principle when promoting the peculiar parochial needs of their community and customers. Though the party helped supply newspapers with much-needed customers, editors viewed their position as a public trust beholden to the needs and wants of their community, not party leaders. Editors altered the party creed and willfully inspired rebellious factions within the party in pursuit of growth and economic development for their communities, as well as increased social standing for themselves. These and similar actions weakened some voters‟ ideological attachment to the Democracy and contributed to the rise of new organizations, culminating with the Republican Party, that would supersede the Democratic Party in the North by the late 1850s.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………….. vi

INTRODUCTION: RECONSIDERING NORTHERN DEMOCRATS IN THE ANTEBELLUM PERIOD …………………………………………………………... 1 Sources and Method ……………………………………………………………... 4

CHAPTER 1: THE PARTY AND THE PRESS ….……………………………...…. 9 The Evolution of the American Press ...………………………………………... 14 Democrats and Whigs ...…………………………………………………….….. 33 Perceptions of the Partisan Press ...…………………………………………..… 38 Modernized Democracy in Maine ...…………………………………………… 42 Office-Seekers and Speculators in Upstate New York ...……..………………... 48 Independent Jacksonians on the Western Reserve ..…………………………… 54 Conclusion ...………………………………………………………………….... 60

CHAPTER 2: THE GO-AHEAD AGE ……………………………………………. 63 Expansion and Free Trade during the Polk Administration ……………………. 70 International Development and Provincial Anxiety in Maine …………………. 76 Equal Rights in the Western Reserve …………………………………………... 88 Violent Factionalism in Upstate New York …………………………………... 102 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………. 116

CHAPTER 3: THE MEXICAN WAR, THE WILMOT PROVISO, AND THE PROBLEM OF THE NORTHERN DOUGHFACE ……………………………... 119 Democratic Antislavery and Whig Abolitionism Clash on the Reserve ……… 125 Temperance and Corporate Rights in Maine …………………………………. 138 The Proviso Splits the New York Democracy ………………………………... 152 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………. 166

CHAPTER 4: THE HALF-HEARTED COMMITMENT TO FREE SOIL ……... 171 Democratic Unity in Maine …………………………………………………... 178 An Irreparable Breach in the New York Democracy? …………...…………… 196 Supporting Popular Sovereignty and the Proviso on the Western Reserve …... 213 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………. 227

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CHAPTER 5: COMPROMISE AND COLLAPSE ………………………………. 230 The Compromise of 1850 ……………………………………………...... 230 Temperance Splits the Maine Democracy ...... 236 Croswell‟s Decline Heals the New York Democracy ...... 247 Racism Consumes Western Reserve Democrats ...... 258 Conclusion ...... 265

CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………….... 268

Bibliography ...... 273

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Like every scholar who finishes a project of this magnitude, I had considerable assistance along the way. I first must thank the administration in the Department of History and Religious Studies itself for its forbearance as my project dragged on past the early deadlines I had set. Without their patience, I might not have been able to bring it to fruition. I had the wonderful good fortune to be a part of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center here at Penn State, which provided me both with needed research funding and numerous opportunities to broaden my scholarly experiences. I especially want to thank Center Director William Blair for the privilege of serving as his editorial assistant for the journal Civil War History. It was one of the most enriching experiences I have had in academia. Archival research for a dissertation can be a strange and dizzying experience. Thankfully, I had the help of many people in locating the materials I needed for my project. Eric Novotny, Penn State‟s Humanities Librarian, cheerfully answered all of my questions, no matter how ill- informed, and pointed me in fruitful directions as I searched for relevant materials. The staffs at the Fogler Special Collections Library at the University of Maine, the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives at Bowdoin College, and the Ohio Historical Society all were universally welcoming and helpful in navigating their unique facilities. When it came time to write, I was fortunate to have the assistance of several friends and colleagues in critiquing my work. Mike Smith, Mary Faulkner, Jan Logeman, Jana Byars, Robert Faber, Christine Reese, and Russell Spinney all provided incisive critiques and helpful suggestions. Rachel Moran, whom I met late in the dissertation process and who found my subject dreadfully boring, nevertheless listened to me blather on about it and provided selfless encouragement as I neared completion. These good friends (and many others at Penn State too numerous to mention) made graduate school a much more enjoyable experience than it otherwise might have been. Lastly, I must single out Mike Smith for special thanks in this regard. His support of my scholarship and his friendship are one of the highlights of my experiences here at Penn State. In addition to the helpful critiques of fellow graduate students I must thank the members of my committee, Tony Kaye, Matthew Restall, and Holloway Sparks for their guidance through vi

my comprehensive exams and, along with Ford Risley, their encouragement of this project. Two other members of the Department of History bear special mention. Carol Reardon was an unfailing source of support throughout my tenure here, and I can honestly say I could not have completed the program without her help. My advisor, Mark Neely, was gracious and patient throughout the writing process and offered me thorough, exacting, and penetrating critiques at every step. As an advisor and mentor, I could not have asked more of him, and I am fortunate and proud to call myself his student. He sets a consistent example of rigorous, engaged scholarship that I can only hope to emulate. Without my family‟s support and guidance, I would not have developed the intellectual interests that led me to graduate studies in History. I am especially fortunate to have parents who were educators and instilled in me a love of learning and helped to stoke my intellectually curiosity. Finally, I want to thank Michelle Isham and our son, Owen. Michelle is a tremendously supportive and dear friend and an excellent mother. Owen reminds me on a daily basis that my most important and rewarding role in life is being his dad. He is a fisherman, musician, gymnast, martial artist, scientist, chef, and cereal designer. I realized not too long ago that if he can do all those things surely I could complete this dissertation.

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To Owen: you make me proud to be your dad.

Perhaps you‟ll actually want to read this someday.

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Introduction: Reconsidering Northern Democrats in the Antebellum Period

On February 19, 1850, the Portland, Maine Advertiser, a newspaper affiliated with the state‟s Whig Party, announced a new business arrangement at the paper. Owner and editor

William Edwards had brought on an unnamed partner as co-owner and co-editor of the journal.

Upon reading the announcement, Charles Holden, editor of the city‟s rival Democratic paper, the

Eastern Argus, expressed relief that Edwards had found a partner to help him keep the Advertiser afloat. Holden playfully tweaked Edwards, noting that, “barring his politics – which, we are sorry to say are excessively bad and getting no better very fast – he is a valuable and upright citizen and an intelligent man.”1 Holden‟s succinct comment tells us a little about the personal relationship between the two men, but it suggests even more about the relationship between partisan editors and their communities.

As residents of the same city and members of the small editorial fraternity, the two men knew each other well, and Edwards clearly had Holden‟s respect. Both men were partisan editors by profession, serving opposing parties while appealing to Portland‟s voters and vying for newspaper subscribers. Holden‟s lighthearted comment about his colleague‟s bad politics revealed the limits of their identification with party. Partisan editors relied heavily on fellow party members to subscribe to their newspapers, for without their patronage these small newspapers likely could not survive. However, these editors did not identify themselves solely by their party affiliation. Rather, they defined themselves chiefly by their editorial calling, as providers of important news for their larger community. While partisanship was serious business, editors consistently regarded the public trust as their paramount concern. Dependent on

1 Portland Eastern Argus, 20 February 1850; Portland Advertiser, 19 February 1850. 1

individual subscribers, advertisers, the patronage of party members, and correspondents from the community, these editors served several masters without feeling bound by any one of them.

Partisan newspapers were the most common and most frequently utilized medium to disseminate party opinion and principles and foster a coherent political persuasion among members. Editors themselves recognized the signal role that newspapers played in uniting individuals into a cohesive, politicized body. The editor of the Maine Washingtonian Journal and Temperance Herald recognized this peerless power of newspapers when he asserted, “other agencies may exert a temporary influence and give, now and then, a fresh and vigorous impulse; but it is the press that, like the heart, must send forth its constant, healthful, and invigorating pulsations, and keep the various parts of our organization in a condition for efficient action.”2

Indeed, the immediacy and ubiquity of the press gave it tremendous power in disseminating proper principles and mobilizing members of their organization. Yet, these presses also served a larger readership within a still larger community, and printers balanced their loyalty to party with their obligations to serve the interests of this wider body of readers.

Political parties were active organizations in the antebellum era, holding numerous conventions throughout the year at the local, county, and state level. These conventions adopted platforms that iterated the party‟s principles and assumed positions on an array of topical issues.

However, because of their necessarily brief existences, these conventions could not speak to every issue confronting every community throughout the North. Thus, it fell to partisan editors in far-flung communities to re-fashion their party‟s message and creed to better speak to the

2 Maine Washingtonian Journal and Temperance Herald, 9 November 1842. This paper had a unique history. Originally founded in Wiscasset in the state‟s midcoast region, the newspaper promoted the aims of the Washingtonians, a non-political total abstinence movement that sought to spread temperance through gentle persuasion and individual appeals. However, the addition of new business partners led to the journal being relocated to Portland in southern Maine, where it began to pursue temperance through explicitly political means and legislative reforms. 2

peculiar parochial needs of their customers. Through their aforementioned “constant, healthful, and invigorating pulsations,” party newspapers thus spoke to the voters more frequently and consistently than did party leaders themselves. This lent the party‟s core message a flexibility that better enabled it to capture the loyalty and votes of disparate groups of men in different neighborhoods and communities throughout the North. In a decentralized organization, these presses were the glue that kept the party together, and they did the yeoman work in translating

Democrats‟ party attachment into action and mobilizing them to vote.

However, the inherent individuality of these papers and the flexibility they imparted to the political messages they conveyed also held the power to undermine the party itself. The ad hoc creation of a palatable message for voters, sometimes seemingly through a process of trial and error, meant that a coherent party message could be elusive. Inconsistencies, even contradictions, in the principles espoused by these newspapers could weaken readers‟ ideological attachment to the party. Newspapers‟ independent streak and contrarian character inspired their readers to interpret the party‟s ideals and dictates in their own ways. Thus, this dissertation will seek to show how Democratic newspapers not only disseminated the principles and messages of the party, but also consistently challenged those principles and altered the meaning of those messages, ultimately propagating divisions within the party.

In addition to the ways in which partisan papers inadvertently undermined their party, many editors on occasion deliberately put their own ambitions ahead of their service to the party.

Many editors of partisan presses parlayed their work into positions of authority as ward leaders, committee members, or officeholders. However, they consistently pointed to their role as editors, a position that they regarded as the public trust, as their most important contribution to their larger community. In this role, they remained proudly independent entrepreneurs. They were 3

agents, not tools, of their party, and they openly flouted the dictates of party leaders, if they believed it to be in their or their readers‟ best interests. Still others, like Edwin Croswell, editor of the Albany Argus, unapologetically sought to usurp party authority, or inspired divisive factionalism in pursuit of promising business prospects. In this extreme example, party was merely a tool to serve one‟s personal ambitions.

Sources and Method

This dissertation examines the function of Democratic newspapers in the North in order to ascertain their complex role in shaping party thought. I read various Democratic (and several

Whig) papers from various regions of the North for nearly every day of the 5 years this dissertation covers in depth, in order to grasp long-term trends and attitudes that informed the political discourse in these papers. We would be sorely remiss if we dismissed the importance of these papers, not only to the contemporary political historian, but also to the voters of the antebellum North. Harold Adams Innis and Marshal McLuhan, founding members of the

Toronto School of communication theory long ago argued that a society‟s culture perhaps could be apprehended best by studying its dominant modes of communication. Indeed, that is what this study proposes to do. Our understanding of the antebellum political parties is too often constrained by our reluctance to examine closely the media that bound party and voter in a discursive web.

I chose three different regions in which to examine Democratic newspapers, based on their differing states of incorporation into a national market system whose development seemed to accelerate dramatically during the Polk Administration. I chose Democratic papers, because they represented Polk‟s own party and seemingly stood to gain the most from the success of his 4

programs. I chose the regions based on their relation to the emerging national market system, because boosterism was one of the chief factors that antebellum papers shared and which distinguished them from one another. Indeed, many editors believed that the noblest purpose of their journals was to promote the economic (and concomitant moral) development of their community in competition both with nearby neighbors and distant strangers. The regions I chose to examine the impact of boosterism on partisan journalism in this period are upstate New York,

Maine, and the Western Reserve of Ohio, along Lake Erie.

New York had pioneered large-scale internal improvements with the construction of the

Erie Canal between 1817 and its opening in 1825.3 The canal had immediate effects on the state and the city of New York. It reoriented the commercial economy of the former and transformed the latter into the United States‟ largest and wealthiest metropolis, its premier commercial entrepot. Maine dominated the building of oceangoing vessels in the antebellum period, and its shipping industry was heavily invested in transatlantic commerce. Yet, the state lacked the transportation links to the interior that had enriched New York, which frustratingly constrained

Maine‟s commerce. Concerned leaders of the Pine Tree State thus sought to establish a railroad link to Montreal to tap the commerce coursing through the Great Lakes to that city. Unlike

Maine, the Western Reserve of Ohio lay in close proximity to a lushly productive agricultural hinterland. Hugging the southern coast of Lake Erie, the Western Reserve needed only to develop sufficient transportation improvements to link that hinterland with the Lakes trade and the Atlantic Seaboard. Political efforts to conceive of and create the necessary internal

3 Construction on the canal continued until 1832. From 1834 to 1862 near constant construction occurred on the canal to extend it, widen it, and improve the locks that controlled the flow of water through the canal. 5

improvements to augment their share of national and international commerce therefore form the backdrop of this dissertation.

While I read a number of different newspapers, I relied on a handful of urban,

Democratic newspapers, journals that were invested both in propagating Democratic principles and values and promoting internal improvements and commercial development in their communities and region. These papers, the Eastern Argus of Portland, the Cleveland Plain

Dealer, and New York‟s Albany Argus, Rochester Republican and Rome Sentinel thus appear frequently in this work. In reading long runs of these papers, I sought to uncover how local commercial interests and political issues intersected with national debates over free trade, and the place of slavery in an expanding nation. Through this research I intend to illustrate the intersection of these issues and show how Democratic newspapers‟ handling of them weakened party attachment in the 1850s.

Massive continental expansion and the return of commercial prosperity in the 1840s after the devastating Panic of 1837 had a profound impact on the Democratic Party in this period. The explosive debate over slavery‟s advance into the new territories sharply divided Democrats.

Historians largely have characterized that debate as a contest between two distinct groups in the party. On the one hand were radical Democrats, largely of the producing class, who were committed to a truly egalitarian ethos of equal rights for all. On the other hand were more conservative, commercially-minded Democrats, elitists who preferred the discipline and order provided by the slave system and were more concerned in sowing the seeds of industrial capitalism in the North and West.4 This debate has been distilled down to a contest between so-

4 For the delineation of the egalitarian and conservative Democrat, see, respectively, Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 6

called “true” Democrats and “doughfaces” (northern men with southern principles), who sacrificed the interests of their own section in order to maintain peace within the party and order within the slave society. However, this explanation focuses too narrowly on national political trends and oversimplifies the many related issues that shaped this debate.

When we read Democratic newspapers in depth over a long period of time, especially in some of the smaller commercial communities of the North, we see another valence to this conflict. Both national and local issues affected these papers‟ unique conceptions of the partisan creed. Moreover, newspapers interpreted the burgeoning slavery debate within the context of myriad other challenges and needs facing their communities and customers. To more fully understand the collision of party ideals and principles with these emerging issues, we must look beyond the philosophical musings and periodic, authoritarian pronouncements of party elites.

Rather we must focus more consistently on those organs that dispensed news through a partisan lens to their loyal readers and followers several hundred times a year.

It was the reorganization of political parties in the 1850s, particularly in the North, that ultimately contributed to southern secession and enabled the coming of the Civil War. Historians long have pointed to reform movements and the journals that supported them for effecting this reorganization of parties. Thomas Leonard has argued, “it was reporting that achieved national circulation outside the control of canny party operatives that made the political system less stable” and prevented compromise on divisive issues that led to Civil War.5 He pinpointed political reporting that had escaped the control or censorship of party leaders to explain the breakdown of political parties that led to war. This dissertation argues that party leaders never

2004); and Leonard Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2000). 5 Thomas Leonard, The Power of the Press: the Birth of American Political Reporting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986): 92. 7

had that control over the press to begin with, and it was the subtle undermining of the party‟s message at the local level, not just the national, that doomed the existing party system before the

Civil War.

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Chapter 1: The Party and the Press in the Antebellum North

The editor-printers of partisan newspapers performed numerous, essential services for their parties. They inculcated the party creed in loyal followers, rallied them to the standard, and turned them out at the polls with their dramatic and insistent campaign exhortations. Moreover, many also performed the yeoman work of printing the ballots that party members cast at the polls and providing precinct captains and ward bosses with voter lists to aid them in mobilizing the electorate. In light of this service, Charles Holden, editor of the Eastern Argus of Portland,

Maine, the state‟s largest-circulating Democratic daily, unabashedly claimed that the newspaper editor was every bit as important to his party as the politician. Of course, the partisan editor did not perform his functions out of mere fealty to his party. He expected to be rewarded with printing jobs, patronage, and prestige.

When Zachary Taylor won the presidency on the Whig ticket in 1848, Holden‟s rival,

Phineas Barnes, a veteran Whig politician and editor of the Portland Advertiser, eagerly anticipated an Administration appointment in return for having campaigned for the president- elect. Yet, Barnes was bitterly disappointed in the spring of 1849 when Taylor excluded him from the patronage he dispensed in Maine. Had Holden been a mere party tool, we might expect him to have gloated at his rival‟s acute embarrassment, but instead he was surprisingly sympathetic. While Barnes obviously felt Taylor‟s slight more acutely, Holden similarly resented the disregard Taylor had shown to Barnes specifically and the editorial profession generally. In the pages of the Argus Holden solemnly lamented, “If any class of men have [sic] peculiar claims to official honors, it is the editorial fraternity. No movement can succeed without them. In political machinery they constitute the main wheels – yet, when victory is attained, they are 9

thrust aside like drift wood.”1 The editorial profession, especially in small or middling-sized cities, truly was a closely-knit fraternity, and its members‟ fellow feeling extended beyond the bounds of their divergent party affiliations.

Holden‟s complaint that editors were unceremoniously tossed aside once a campaign was won was more imagined than real. In his study of the role of newspapers in American “civic life,” Michael Schudson has noted that approximately 10% of President Andrew Jackson‟s appointments requiring Senate approval were filled by editors of partisan presses.2 Moreover,

Holden and many of his editorial colleagues in the North served their party and government in numerous other positions, particularly as party officers, officials in local government, state legislators, and congressmen. Holden himself was a chairman of his county‟s Democratic Central

Committee, which controlled the party convention process and thereby greatly influenced the selection of candidates and platforms for local canvasses. Barnes served multiple terms as a state representative. Between these positions of authority and the potential reward of patronage, it is clear that editing a partisan press was far from a thankless task. Rather, it consistently proved quite remunerative both in money and status.3 Clearly, these editors were instrumental in shaping

1 Portland Eastern Argus, 22 March 1849; Portland Advertiser, 21 March 1849. The grandson and biographer of Hannibal Hamlin, who was then a Democratic senator from Maine, intimated that the decided opposition of Maine‟s antislavery Whigs to Taylor‟s presidency pushed him to confide in Hamlin when allotting patronage in the state. See Charles E. Hamlin, The Life and Times of Hannibal Hamlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Riverside Press, 1899): 200-201. 2 Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: The Free Press, 1998): 121. 3 For example, during his long tenure as the state printer for New York, Edwin Croswell, editor of the Democratic Albany Argus, earned between $15,000 and $25,000 annually. Croswell himself claimed that after deducting the costs of printing the state‟s official documents and sharing the remaining profits equally with his two partners, each man pocketed less than $3,000 per year. Richard H. Manning, Herald of the Albany Regency: Edwin Croswell and the “Albany Argus,” 1823-1854 (PhD. Dissertation, Miami University, 1983): 141-142. See also Gerald Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992): 21. 10

the leadership, as well as the message, of their parties. Their power at the local and state level often was substantial and far-reaching.

However, Holden‟s lament did illustrate a signal problem that confronted the antebellum partisan editor. He was neither purely of the party, nor purely independent of it. Rather, editors were driven by dual, and sometimes competing, imperatives. First, they served the party by disseminating partisan principles and creeds to the loyal voters and exhorting them to do their duty by faithfully voting in every election. In an era where federal, state, and local canvasses occurred as much as four times annually, this represented a significant commitment of time and energy on the part of the editor, as well as the voter. Second, editors were entrepreneurs who sought to build a large base of customers for their newspapers, both within their immediate community and beyond its environs. Party leaders expected party members to subscribe to the official newspaper in their community, and those subscriptions presumably formed a stable customer base. Still, editors sought to expand the reach of their tribunes beyond that narrow core, both to increase their own profits, but also to augment their influence on the larger community.

Newspaper editors therefore served two constituencies and two masters. They managed the channels of communication between party leaders and voters, publishing important party messages and informing voters of their party‟s electoral tickets and platforms. Yet, they also served their own entrepreneurial interests and attempted to broaden the reach of their newspapers, compiling eclectic material to appeal to a broad range of reading tastes. These editors often repeatedly and somewhat embarrassedly claimed that their papers were not “mere” party journals. In fact, they were right. Often, these presses were not party journals at all, but at most were independent establishments associated with, but not bound to, party.

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Ultimately, partisan newspapers retained a significant degree of individuality, their editorials reflecting the personal views of their editors as they attempted to connect with their different constituencies. As such, many partisan newspapers tended to reflect the personality of their editors more consistently than they reflected the character of the parties they represented.

Yet, they still proudly proclaimed their party attachment. To reconcile their staunch independence with their partisan loyalty, they often called for “no proscription,” meaning no adoption of party creeds that would ostracize those who largely held to fundamental Democratic principles in the main. “No proscription” was a meager mantra meant to excuse the intra-party factionalism created by editors‟ self-serving actions. This created a significant problem for political parties themselves. These newspapers had built and unified the national parties themselves, but the fierce independence of partisan editors consistently thwarted and undermined organizational unity by distorting the parties‟ principles and creed to serve parochial needs.

In serving their broader community, editors promoted the commercial interests and aspirations of their community (often in direct competition with neighboring communities) and region. They consistently published advertisements and railroad and shipping schedules and other guides to commercial activity to attract the interest of the businessmen of their communities. Until the advent of eight-page newspapers in the late nineteenth century (most antebellum newspapers were four pages), the front page of most newspapers was devoted almost exclusively to such advertisements and commercial items.4 Editors also filled their columns with trivia, short stories, travelogues and other bits of general interest designed to entertain, educate

4 Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690 to 1940 (New York: Macmillan, 1941): 299. Editors usually deferred to advertisers when it came to the size and design of their advertisements. James Gordon Bennett, founder and editor of the New York Herald, proved an exception. He standardized the size and agate type of all advertisements in his popular paper. Douglas Fermer described Bennett‟s practice as “commercial democracy.” See Fermer, James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald: A Study of Editorial Opinion in the Civil War Era, 1854-1867 (New York: St. Martin‟s Press, 1986): 26. 12

and provide moral instruction to a broad spectrum of readers. This last purpose was an important one and encapsulated how editors viewed themselves. In their own minds, they were not blind, partisan ideologues, nor were they simply self-interested entrepreneurs. Rather, they believed that they held an important public trust and that they possessed a broad, moral authority in their community, not just in their party.

Of course, editors were not above invoking the public trust to defend questionable efforts to entertain readers in an effort to attract more customers. For example, when news of the lurid murder of Helen Jewett spread through New York City in April 1836, police allowed James

Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, a private viewing of Jewett‟s body in the room where she had been slain. According to Bennett, in giving him special access to the crime scene, the police guard solemnly acknowledged that the editor was “on the public duty.”5 Bennett‟s peculiar sense of public duty revealed itself in sensational articles in which he sexualized

Jewett‟s battered corpse in a naked attempt to titillate his readers. The Herald was not a partisan press, but Bennett‟s partisan colleagues shared their comrade‟s sanctimonious invocation of

5 Quoted in Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett (New York: Vintage Books, 1998): 16. The Herald was a “penny press.” These presses, which were not affiliated with political parties, printed newspapers on four, small, cheap, foldable pages, unlike the large blanket sheets on which many partisan newspapers were printed. The latter sheets could be as much as two by three feet, often printed on cotton rag. The use of large sheets had been made possible by the advent of cylinder presses, which rolled paper over a bed of type. Blanket sheets also followed the fad of English newspapers that published on larger sheets to limit their costs under England‟s per-page tax on newspapers. See Mott, American Journalism: 294. Penny presses‟ small sheets made them portable and easier to read while walking along busy sidewalks or in cramped spaces: ideal for a bustling city. Moreover, as their name implied, they cost one cent per issue, compared to three to six cents for most partisan dailies. On the innovations of the penny press, see Schudson, The Good Citizen: 119-121. Mott insisted that the penny presses redefined “news” in response to the more vulgar interests of a broadened reading public. Mott, American Journalism: 243. Cohen unconvincingly argued that penny presses revolutionized “news” by emphasizing sensational stories of gruesome crimes, thus pioneering a literary pornography of violence. However, long before the penny presses, newspapers had reported unusual crimes in salacious detail. For example, see Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 170-171. Mitchell Stephens also has argued that sensationalism was an integral aspect of news even before the advent of the written word. See Stephens, A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite (New York: Viking, 1988): 2. 13

public duty. Also like Bennett, their sensibilities were firmly rooted in the commercial print world where sensationalism, not politics, sold the most papers.

The multivalent character of newspapers, as both party tribunes and commercial journals, had its roots in the long history of the press in the American colonies and, subsequently, the independent United States. To understand how the partisan press developed along these dual tracks and how editors came to balance the imperatives to serve a relatively homogeneous party on the one hand and a diverse readership on the other hand, we must familiarize ourselves with the broad outlines of the historical development of the press as a whole. Scholars in the field of

Communications and Journalism generally have been much more deeply interested in the role and functions of the press in building political parties and political culture than have political historians themselves. Closely examining the functions of newspapers and the processes of their distribution, these scholars have reconstructed the unique role that editors and their individual journals have played in both the partisan and popular press in antebellum American history.

The Evolution of the American Press

The earliest editors, in fact, were not journalists but artisan printers who subsisted on various printing jobs and supplemented their incomes with small newspapers. In his sweeping history of American journalism, Frank Luther Mott astutely suggested that the colonial editor “is to be thought of chiefly as an entrepreneur,” for he typically was a printer, publisher, or bookseller. Still other editors were petty merchants who used their newspapers almost exclusively to advertise a wide array of goods for sale. These pioneering editors did not yet lay claim to the public trust, as Bennett and others of his ilk would do decades later. Indeed, Mott pinpointed the Revolution as the period in which public esteem for editors began to rise. The 14

relatively united opposition of newspapers to the Stamp Act (which would have cut into their profits significantly) was credited with helping to bring about its repeal. Newspapers‟ increasing association with the Patriot cause bequeathed them a new kind of social authority and political power that eventually would lead to the emergence of the party press in the Early Republic.6 It also would establish a new relationship between the press and its readers. As they embraced the proliferation of partisan newspapers, readers came to expect these papers serve a more noble and selfless purpose than mere commercial gain or partisan success.

Despite the newfound authority emanating from newspapers in the Revolutionary period, the main characteristic of these journals might have been their consistent commercial boosterism.

Many penurious editors of early newspapers boldly gambled on the potential growth of the communities in which they founded their tribunes. Indeed, fledgling newspapers relied heavily on such growth for their own stability and success. As Schudson described it, “entrepreneurs began newspapers in hundreds of small towns in America not because a population demanded them but because the existence of the paper might attract a population.” Editors then employed boosterism to appeal to their readers‟ latent community pride and to solicit investors in their community‟s commercial enterprises. Those investments, early editors hoped, would redound to their own benefit, as their papers served the information needs of a burgeoning market community.7

Boosterism would remain a constant theme in newspapers, even as the press began to serve partisan aims and also started to take on characteristics of a standardized profession. Even

6 Mott, American Journalism: 47, 107, 108. John Nerone quaintly noted that Revolutionary Era newspapers were “modeled as a kind of town meeting.” Nerone, Violence Against the Press: Policing the Press in U.S. History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994): 15. 7 Schudson, The Good Citizen: 124. For a succinct overview of early presses, see Leonard, The Power of the Press: 17, 54. 15

when newspapers began to adopt partisan affiliations in the late 1820s, the demands of party did not supplant these journals‟ other aims. Instead, partisan papers became both party and community boosters. All the while, newspaper editors, most of whom had learned the trade by working their way from apprentice to journeyman to proprietor, proudly identified themselves as editorial professionals as much as they identified themselves as partisan loyalists.

After American independence, three factors converged to create a vast network of newspapers (many of them avowedly partisan) that blanketed the country from the largest cities to the smallest towns and fed a nation of voracious readers. First, the Post Office sharply discounted postal rates for newspaper subscriptions, encouraging the broadcast distribution of papers in search of far-flung audiences. Second, postal laws extended the franking privilege to editors (allowing them to share newspapers transported through the mails free of charge), which enabled editors to subscribe to numerous other newspapers and clip content for their own pages.8

Third, political parties quickly perceived that these newly subsidized newspapers were perhaps the best medium for building their parties into truly national organizations, and they further subsidized these papers themselves in an effort to spread their message.

As a consequence of the postal policy, editors expanded their operations, not necessarily to reach untapped reading markets, but to create new markets. They flooded surrounding communities with their papers and even withstood high delinquency rates among their subscribers. Lengthy arrearages were common in the newspaper business for a variety of

8 The sharp discounting of transporting newspapers through the mail was offset by high postages rates on personal letters. See Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995). John credits the Postal Service with creating a communications revolution by using its own rapid growth in the nineteenth century as a conduit for news. On the subsidization of newspaper distribution, see John, Spreading the News: 3-5, 38. John notes that in 1840 the postal service transported 2.9 million letters and 39 million newspapers, and in 1832 newspapers accounted for only 15% of postal revenues, while accounting for a whopping 95% of the weight of all postal freights. 16

reasons, including home delivery of unsolicited newspapers, customers‟ difficulty in traveling to the newspaper offices (or the offices of subscription agents) to render payment, or customers‟ simple pecuniary inability to pay periodic charges timely. Editors were able to endure such arrearages in large part because of the partial subsidization of those papers. Also, optimistic editors fervently believed that they could turn delinquent customers into responsible, paying customers.

In Thomas Leonard‟s opinion, such editors were little more than “force feeders,” laboring to create a market where little demand existed. Yet, other scholars have argued that there was a method to this madness. For instance, Mott noted that the proliferation of newspapers was integral to western settlement:

Pioneer towns all wanted and secured newspapers for both promotional and political reasons. In the first place they wanted them as „boosters,‟ and the pioneers sent these sheets, filled with propaganda for the new country, back to the East, where they were effective in keeping up the flow of emigration.9

Much as their forebears had done in the post-Revolutionary period, antebellum printers quickly established newspapers in such fledgling towns in hopes of attracting both settlers and commercial investment to their community. Astute political parties soon adopted this rapidly expanding newspaper technology and liberally used the franking privilege to broadcast their messages to voters.

The highly competitive presidential election of 1824 was the signal event that caused politicians to appropriate newspaper technology for partisan purposes. When President James

Monroe declined to anoint a potential successor, a surfeit of Jeffersonians jockeyed for the office. Several decades ago, Richard McCormick astutely noted that antebellum political parties

9 Mott, American Journalism: 282. Thomas C. Leonard, News for All: America‟s Coming of Age with the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 43. 17

coalesced to support these numerous aspirants to the White House. They built networks of supporters from their home states outward, creating the first truly national campaign organizations. Newspapers proved integral to developing those networks, giving supporters their marching orders, and introducing presidential candidates to populations hitherto unfamiliar with them.10 While partisanship and factionalism had existed in the press since the colonial period, this era saw the birth of a new relationship between the press and politics. These papers eventually galvanized campaign organizations into long-lived parties. McCormick identified the result as the Second American Party System, which was defined by competition between

Democrats and Whigs throughout most of the antebellum era. The proliferation of papers pledged to a particular party and subsidized, at least in part, by political patronage and party member subscriptions came to dominate the press. The fledgling Whigs and Democrats had first taken shape as loose coalitions of disparate factions, and party newspapers provided the flesh and sinew for these skeletal bodies, transforming them into relatively unified organizations.

The emergence of party newspapers revolutionized the newspaper business. Without party patronage, the number of newspapers in the United States could not have sextupled as it did in the early nineteenth century.11 Among non-partisan newspaper, only the large, urban dailies typically boasted sufficient daily circulation to turn a profit. Thus, the munificence of the parties and the subscriptions of their members were absolutely vital to sustaining much more

10 Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966): 20-25, 355. On the role of newspapers in this process, see Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992): 16-19. 11 The combination of the Post Office‟s subsidization of newspaper distribution and the patronage of political parties aided the remarkable proliferation of newspaper establishments from approximately 200 in 1801 to about 1,200 by 1835. See Mott, American Journalism: 167. 18

modest papers in small communities throughout the country, keeping afloat innumerable enterprises staffed by only one or a few men.

With surprising speed these partisan newspapers became the most common medium by which politicians communicated with voters, eventually rendering obsolete the infrequent, mass- produced circulars which politicians hitherto had printed to inform their constituents of their activities at the state or federal capitol. Innovations in printing presses furthered this transformation. The advent of cylinder presses that could roll continuous sheets of paper over a stationary tray of type greatly increased output and supplanted the old, cumbersome flatbed presses. The larger presses required significant capital investment (especially when they were outfitted with steam power) and as many as six people to feed the sheets onto the rollers, meaning that only the largest urban newspapers could afford them. However, smaller versions of these presses, which could be operated by one or two pressmen, soon became common operating equipment in many smaller newspapers by the 1840s.12

With the convergence of these political and technological innovations, newspapers became the nervous system of their parties, not only carrying messages from the leadership to the masses, but also tailoring those messages to the perceived needs and interests of their communities. Aside from interpreting news for their readers with the appropriate partisan viewpoint, newspapers kept their readers abreast of the activities of their local, county, and state coordinating committees and party conventions from the local to the national levels. When candidates were nominated for office, partisan papers printed the slate of nominees just below

12 Mott, American Journalism: 294. Flatbed presses were slow because each sheet had to be loaded and unloaded for printing. Hoe and Company introduced the earliest cylinder presses in the United States in the 1820s. These were hand-cranked, just like flatbed presses, but allowed significantly greater production due to the rolling cylinder. In the 1830s, Hoe and Company‟s double cylinder press could print both sides of a newspaper simultaneously, and by the 1840s, steam power was employed to mechanize these presses. See Carole Humphrey, The Press of the Young Republic, 1783-1833 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996): 134. 19

their masthead each day for weeks to ensure readers would be thoroughly familiar with “their” candidates. When election-day neared, newspapers‟ tone and content predictably changed. These tribunes repeatedly exhorted their readers to do their “duty” by voting. Dire headlines in large, bold font declared that success at the polls was imperative not merely for the success of the party, but for its very survival and perhaps that of the community and nation as well. With such dramatic flourishes, newspapers sought to forge voters into a dedicated, unified phalanx of loyal partisans.13

To that end, the political news in such papers gave party members a vernacular language that enabled them, rhetorically, to establish a sense of community with fellow partisans.

Moreover, newspapers‟ repetition of resonant political phrases and terms bequeathed to readers a set of shibboleths that not only united them with like-minded party members, but also quickly identified them in distinct opposition to their opponents. For instance, antebellum Democrats revealed their political faith in their veneration of “small producers” and their implacable opposition to “non-producers” and “monopolies.” Likewise, Whigs revealed their faith in their promotion of “protection” for “American industry” and in their confident invocation of “moral philosophy” as a means to shape a “harmonious” society.14

13 Most political historians of this period see the proliferation of partisan newspapers and high voter turnout as evidence of committed and consistent political engagement on the part of the vast majority of men of voting age. However, Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin instead have interpreted such efforts to rally voters to the polls as evidence of widespread political ambivalence among the masses. Only repeated, dramatic exhortations, spectacle (parades and rallies), and peer pressure dragged reluctant voters to the ballot box. See Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Mark Neely has since challenged this interpretation. He has examined how antebellum Americans incorporated politics into their home life through the purchase of numerous political ephemera, ultimately concluding that politics did not suffuse individual identities so completely as Silbey has contended. See Neely, The Boundaries of Political Culture in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 14 For example, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1945): 306-321; and Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979): 23-42. 20

Whether in friendly conversation or heated debate, such vernacular terms were ready- made rhetorical weapons. In fact, most political news deliberately was written with just such a dramatic flair, characterizing political conflict as being akin to combat (and with increasing frequency by the 1840s, involving actual combat itself). Partisan papers infused their cause with a sense of moral righteousness and cast their opponents in the role of nefarious conspirators against the public good. Armed with both information and misinformation from their partisan press, loyalists trumpeted the justice of their cause and railed against the “wickedness” of their

“unscrupulous” opponents. The synergistic effect of competition between parties and commercial competition among presses, combined to reproduce partisan conflict as a

Manichaean struggle between good and evil.15

Benedict Anderson pointed to newspapers and other mass-produced print material as vital technologies in the creation and inculcation of nationalism among discrete polities. Such material enabled individuals to feel that they belonged to an “imagined community,” as he described it, a community defined by shared values, principles, and self-identification, transmitted through the printed word. However, for antebellum newspaper readers, this was no imagined community, but rather a real and immediate one. David Paul Nord succinctly argued that “communities are built, maintained, and wrecked in communication,” and newspapers were integral in building, maintaining and, at times, crippling communities, both physical and ideological. The ubiquity of

15 Richard Hofstadter labeled this technique “the paranoid style,” by which partisans saw and portrayed themselves as vigilant defenders of the people‟s liberties against the conspiratorial predations of their corrupt and power-hungry opponents. He argued that this allegory of political conflict actually revealed an abiding consensus in American politics. Fundamental party differences were lacking, he claimed, so they had to be invented. See Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1965). David Brion Davis disputed the artifice of the paranoid style as described by Hofstadter. Instead, he saw it as a genuine reaction to the social dislocations caused by population growth, geographic expansion, demographic change and economic modernization. See Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969). It is important to keep in mind the function of the paranoid style as a rhetorical tool, too. It was deliberately (though not necessarily cynically) employed to inspire loyal partisans to the polls and give meaning to the bonds that united them as Democrats, Whigs, Liberty men, Free Soilers and the like. 21

partisan newspapers meant that they were the lifeblood both of their towns and of the far-flung political communities which they nurtured. These newspapers were aimed primarily, if not exclusively, at male readers, and those readers did not simply take the paper in their own private abode and read alone. In the home, patriarchs typically read “suitable” portions of the newspaper aloud to their families. Just as common, men typically read papers aloud in public spaces, such as post offices, taverns, inns, general stores, outside of court houses, and at the marketplace.

There, newspapers drew men together in fraternal rituals of conviviality and competition in interpreting the news.16

In News For All, Thomas Leonard argued that discussing the news with other men in public spaces meant “that the audience considered itself more important than the story” itself.17

Readers did not passively receive news, but instead used the news as a tool to negotiate the peculiarly masculine domain of partisan politics. Newspaper stories fueled a kind of genial, rhetorical combat among men, in which they attempted to best one another and establish themselves in the masculine hierarchy. Those who read the paper aloud to others invested themselves with interpretive authority in that company and thus felt no compunction in judging not only the value of the news itself but of the newspaper medium. Indeed, Glen Altschuler and

Stuart Blumin have suggested that the electorate was both savvy and coolly detached from the histrionics of the partisan media. Nor were partisan editors oblivious to this attitude. The authors concluded that, “editors knew they were on safer ground when they wrote pieces boosting the

16 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso Books, 1983). David Paul Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001): 2. Nord has had a long career examining the role and impact of (mostly late nineteenth century) newspapers in what he terms “public communities,” communities shaped by the “linking of community values of interdependence, sentiment, and sympathy with formal, public institutions.” See Nord, Communities of Journalism: 2. 17 Leonard, News For All: 12. 22

local community in a nonpartisan fashion and when they piously objected to the insertion of party into institutions and events that ought to remain „above‟ politics.”18

Blumin and Altschuler further maintained that partisan editors typically were deeply conflicted over their choice of career. Consistently critical of myopic and zealous “party hacks,” these editors failed to see that they themselves were the very hacks who so offended their sensibilities. Instead, most editors saw themselves as literary men, only temporarily laboring in politics out of embarrassing necessity. Editors‟ criticism of politics was part of “an ongoing and never entirely successful attempt to reconcile political activism with the desire to become or remain socially respectable, in a society in which this was becoming more difficult to do.”19 Yet, the editors in this study had no such pretensions, nor did they seem to evince the conflicted feelings that the author describes. Rather, these editors perceived themselves as independent businessmen whose political persuasions shaped their public service.

Newspapermen‟s paradoxical criticism of politics did not necessarily represent conflicted feelings toward the institution. Rather, such criticism represented acceptance of politics as a formative institution in American life, one that embodied both praiseworthy and disreputable elements. Altschuler and Blumin argued that editors‟ criticism of their own political behavior also was a response to popular detachment from the over-heated spectacle of political campaigns and the uncivil rhetorical combat that attended them. Yet, the self-critical tone of partisan newspapers instead suggests critical engagement with, not detachment from, the unique function of partisan politics in the antebellum United States.

18 Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic: 108. 19 Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic: 110. 23

Contemporary observers recorded this engagement, as well. The German-trained

American painter Richard Caton Woodville treated the partisan press in two popular, yet markedly different paintings. War News from Mexico, executed in 1848, was arguably his most famous work. Tens of thousands of lithographs made from engravings of the painting sold steadily throughout the 1850s.20 The porch of the aptly named American Hotel frames the scene, where several men gather around a single individual excitedly recounting the latest news from the scenes of battle. The newspaper itself occupies the center of the scene and draws the viewer‟s attention with its vibrant, white color. The reader holds the paper with his elbows thrust outward, physically warding off the men crowded closely around him and asserting his privileged station as purveyor of this news. The marginal positioning of an older woman and a black man and his daughter highlight white male privilege both in this space and in the consumption of news. The woman is “trapped” indoors (the men are blocking the doorway to the hotel) and must lean out of a nearby window to try to hear the news. The black man and his daughter, who is clothed in a tattered, ragged dress, are literally off-stage as there is no room on the porch for them. Indeed, the white men on the porch seem oblivious to their presence. In the pyramidal arrangement of the human subjects, the black man and child are relegated to the margins of the foreground, literally and figuratively placed below the white men who occupy the center of the scene and tower over them. Still, though the adult white men are the more privileged consumers of this newspaper, the news itself reaches across divisions of “race” and sex, being absorbed by men, women and

African-Americans alike.

20 Richard Caton Woodville: An Early American Genre Painter (Washington, D.C.: The Corcoran Art Gallery, 1967). 24

Many historians have noted Woodville‟s clever invocation of the looming conflict over slavery and black Americans‟ unsettled place within an expanding nation. The American Hotel itself is an unsubtle symbol not only of Americans‟ martial patriotism, but of their hierarchical, racially divided society. Though the white subjects ignore the black man and child, the presence of the latter figures persist, presaging the inescapable conflict over the extension of slavery into the West, occasioned by the Mexican War itself. Yet, comparatively less attention has been given to what the painting says about news itself. The white subjects evince an array of reactions, from excitement (the man in the background, waving his hat, his mouth contorted in a “whoop” of exultation) to only mild interest (the man to the left of the reader, inclining his head slightly toward the reader while gazing impassively into space). Most of the subjects appear keenly interested in the news, directing their gaze or craning their necks toward the reader. The tendency of news to wholly absorb its audience‟s attention is perhaps best represented by the man at the extreme left of the group. Having just lit a cigar, he is about to drop his match into the water barrel next to the porch, but he is focused intently on the reader and unaware that the match might miss the barrel and land among the weeds next to the porch. The potential of a literal conflagration in this scene, one that would threaten to destroy the American Hotel, symbolizes the threat that the war and expansion of slavery posed to national unity (Woodville painted this subject during heated congressional debates over the Wilmot Proviso, a proposal to keep any territories gained in the war free of slavery).

That same threat of conflagration can be read another way, one that is not exclusive of its commentary on the crippling, sectional debate over slavery. The unwitting smoker‟s carelessness with his match is caused by his fixation with the newspaper, neatly evoking the partisan press‟ penchant for stirring up heated, divisive conflict in the reading public. Though many antebellum 25

Americans deplored the incendiary tactics of the partisan press, the paper necessarily remained at the center of their social interaction, as Woodville reveals here. In this image, it informs them of distant political and military events, and shapes their intimate interactions within their small community. Indeed, the newspaper knits together a diverse group of people, not just in terms of sex and ethnicity, but also geography. The American Hotel is also the location of the town‟s post office, suggesting that those who have gathered to hear the news are a collection of townspeople and visiting travelers. The common thread that unites them is the partisan newspaper at the center of the painting and of their discussion.

Figure 1: Richard Caton Woodville, Mexican War News, 1848, Crystal Bridges Museum21

21 Image from the website, Forever Free, at http://foreverfreeproject.org/ve1b.htm. 26

Politics in an Oyster House, also executed in 1848 by Woodville, is a less dynamic, more formally composed painting. In it, a young man and an older gentleman share a private booth in an oyster house. A drape that could be pulled across the entrance of the booth to provide total privacy (at least in regard to sight) is instead pulled back to reveal the tableau, framed by the intimate dimensions of the booth itself. The younger man holds a broadsheet newspaper to the side and is leaning toward his companion, excitedly gesticulating apparently while discussing a political point of some import. The older man seems weary of the conversation, his mouth drawn tightly into a straight line and his gaze directed away from his companion, engaging the viewer.

Yet, he also appears to have his hand to his ear, as if to better hear his interlocutor. In his other hand he casually holds a pair of glasses, presumably used for reading, and he perhaps is waiting to employ them in perusing his friend‟s paper. Thus, he seems to exhibit a strained engagement in this political conversation, rather than simple, cool detachment. Here, Woodville suggests a generational difference in political engagement (something that Altschuler and Blumin did not examine), intimating that politics primarily excited the passions of callow youth, while wizened and wiser older men largely resisted its palpitating charms. Indeed, the young man‟s dress evokes the style of the b‟hoy subculture. B‟hoys were young, urban sporting men who frequented oyster houses, saloons and the theater and also enjoyed gambling, blood sports and politics. B‟hoys‟ predilection for dangerous pursuits and sporting excess made them a vaguely threatening subculture to many Americans, and thus their association with politics would give many contemporaries pause.22

22 For a descriptive analysis of the b‟hoy subculture in New York‟s Bowery neighborhood, see Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: the 19th Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World‟s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Plume, 2001): 178-182. 27

If active political engagement represented a discrete stage of a man‟s social maturation, in Woodville‟s estimation, then it was necessarily a stage which most American men passed through at some point in their lives. From that perspective, the criticism of overcharged political theater and its participants that captivated Altschuler and Blumin might also have been a gendered critique of politics itself. Those who dismissed party hacks and maligned the garish theatrics of electoral campaigns perhaps found both to be boyish and unmanly.23 Still, we can read Woodville‟s painting not as a mature man‟s rejection of politics, but as a mature man‟s critique of untempered, youthful enthusiasm for politics. After all, the older gentleman is still engaged in the conversation, if not animated by it.

Altschuler and Blumin have correctly pointed out that, unlike the young man in this painting, many antebellum Americans loathed and rejected overheated political spectacle and felt themselves detached from it. Yet, many more Americans, including partisan editors themselves, appeared to maintain a critical engagement with partisan politics. Indeed, that is what

Woodville‟s paintings suggest. It is notable that what historians have described as anti-party sentiment in this period was mobilized not to reject politics, but rather to create new political parties, such as the Know-Nothings and the Liberty Party.24 Ironically, in their effort to mobilize people to reform politics, these organizations often employed the same bombast and spectacle for which they had so sharply criticized Democrats and Whigs.

23 In his study of American manliness (in actuality, a study of nineteenth century, New England bourgeois concepts of manhood), Anthony Rotundo has noted that in this era Americans conceived of boyhood and attendant childishness as the opposite of manliness. See Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993): 20-26. 24 See, for example Michael Voss-Hubbard, Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics Before the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 28

Figure 2: Richard Caton Woodville, Politics in an Oyster House, 1848, The Walters Art Museum25

No matter Americans‟ opinion of their political parties and the carnivalesque character of the frequent election campaigns that peppered the calendar, newspapers remained the lifeblood of both their political and social interaction. The public reading of papers only increased the reach of their influence. The broad reach of newspapers through the franking privilege encouraged Joseph William Gray, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, to solicit advertisers in

1850 by claiming that his paper was “read” by 30,000 to 50,000 people every week. This was far beyond the official circulation figures that Gray reported to the Census that year of 3,500

25 Image from the Walters Museum website, at http://art.thewalters.org/viewwoa.aspx?id=28889. 29

customers for his daily and weekly issues.26 The entire population of Cleveland itself was only about 17,000 that year and Cuyahoga County, of which Cleveland was the county seat, numbered just over 48,000 residents according to the federal census. Still, public reading and broadcast distribution of his paper netted Gray a massive readership, at least by his own estimate.

Partisan editors ignored the desires and tastes of their far-flung readers at their own peril.

In a wry editorial, the physically unimposing Gray amusingly catalogued the many impositions readers made on him in the course of a typical day. After rising early and enjoying a brief repast, the editor,

Finds a weight of duty, mountains high, before him, in the shape of exchanges and correspondence, which calls for his immediate attention. He reads, cuts and slashes among the papers, and makes up his matter for the evening issues to his own liking. From the moment he seats himself with his paper before him, pen in hand, well filled with ink, headings all made, properly underscored and pointed, the accustomed din of daily life begins … A man enters with his hair on end raging furiously, and demands that we blow up someone that has insulted him. A wheat dealer complains that our market reports set the prices up too high for his advantage; another declares they are too low, when an argument takes place occupying just one and a half hours… Three lounging loafers sit on our table, one on either side of us, with very enquiring minds, look at every word we write, telling us all the while what we should do to make our paper interesting…Five business men are in complaining that their advertisements are not placed in a conspicuous place. A man comes up to us, with a rawhide ready elevated, declaring if we do not contradict the statement made last night in relation to some personal matter, we must take the consequences!... Michael McLoney wants to know why the Editor reported him drunk and taken to the watch-house last night. A boy comes in with a cake of shaving soap and two boxes of matches with Messrs. Tradesmen, Dicker & Co.‟s compliments, would be pleased to have the Editor notice favorable [sic] the specimens sent.27

Notwithstanding his claim that the editor made up that day‟s issue of the paper “to his own liking,” Gray‟s humorous editorial betrays the considerable extent to which news in a partisan

26 Plain Dealer, 21 November 1850. Circulation figures come from Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Catalogue of the Newspapers and Periodicals Published in the United States…Compiled from the Census of 1850 (New York: J. Livingston, 1852): 37. Some newspapers supplied specific, and presumably accurate, figures, while others seemed to have supplied estimates or approximations rounded to the hundreds or thousands of subscribers. Though it had one of the largest circulations in the state, the Plain Dealer, according to the census, still lagged behind both of Cleveland‟s other major newspapers, the Herald (a Whig paper) and the True Democrat (a radical Democratic, later Free Soil paper). Both of those papers boasted a minimum of 4,000 subscribers according to the census returns. However, Gray repeatedly disputed those claims. See Plain Dealer, 3 January 1851. 27 Plain Dealer, 19 August 1850. 30

paper was a matter of negotiation. The wheat dealers‟ argument and the gift of soaps and matches from the amusingly named Dicker & Co. illustrated the extent to which merchants and other businessmen expected newspapers to advocate their interests, while the unsolicited advice of the loafers revealed readers‟ demands for an entertaining journal. The furious man demanding redress for a perceived slight underscored how readers at times treated newspapers less as a source of information than as a medium of interpersonal communication. Finally, the bully armed with the rawhide whip amply demonstrated the dangers incumbent in publishing unpopular opinions, political or otherwise. This editorial clearly was designed not only to answer criticism of Gray‟s conduct of the paper, but to try to head off future criticism as well.

None of the popular pressures that Gray recounted in and of themselves would influence editors to alter their partisan principles, but they clearly shaped how editors applied those principles to the needs and tastes of their readers and their community. Editors of small presses did not simply dismiss or ignore the queries, advice, and information offered by their readers. To the contrary, they often relied on readers as important sources of community news and attitudes.

Editors of small to middling journals often employed only one or two people to assist them in editing and printing their newspapers, and thus they lacked the manpower resources of modern newspapers to report and produce news. Occasionally they arranged for relatives or friends to act as correspondents for their newspaper, particularly to supply travelogues. The vast majority of partisan papers lacked the funds to hire reporters, and so editors often relied on their personal contacts in the business community and local associations to supply them not only with advertisements and subscriptions, but also news.

Gray acknowledged his debt to the community in supplying his paper with various, local content. In a wry article titled “Local Department,” he asserted, “everybody knows an editor‟s 31

solicitude on the subject of items, accidents, prodigious births, changes of the political weathercock, etc. They are to him what water is to the milkman, or Asiatic cholera to the undertaker – the pegs – so to speak – on which hang all his earthly hopes.” This lighthearted attitude informed his account of a visit to a local dry goods merchant, where he noticed a massive rack of elk antlers on the sidewalk in front of the shop. Hoping that there was a dramatic story behind their procurement, he questioned the merchant, who knew nothing of their provenance. Undeterred, Gray loitered in the shop, hoping that the enormous antlers might prove a humorous obstacle to passersby laden with packages, or, “what is still more desirable – some unlucky blunderer may tumble over and impale himself through the gizzard.” When the antlers failed to produce any slapstick accidents, the editor mockingly chastised his readers, “What can be expected from papers when the public are so remiss in furnishing interesting items?”28

This brief, humorous editorial underscored the informal, ad hoc character of developing content for a newspaper. While advertisements and clippings from other newspapers provided the bulk of newspaper content, the entrepreneurial Gray sought local news that would distinguish his paper from others and entice more Clevelanders to purchase it. He did not simply seek comical material from his customers, but also sought items of significance to the community, too. For instance, during the devastating cholera epidemic of 1849, Gray frequently relied on townspeople‟s stories of cholera deaths in their neighborhoods to inform his readers of the progress of the disease. Of course, such an informal method of gathering news led to inaccurate stories, subsequent retractions, and Gray‟s perturbed admonition that people who volunteered news to the paper “get the whole facts” first.29 This mild reproach underscored the intimate

28 Plain Dealer, 5 May 1851. 29 Plain Dealer, 12 July 1849. The cholera epidemic ravaged the country, killing thousands in New York City, St. Louis, and New Orleans and hundreds more in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Boston and several other cities. The 32

relationship between these entrepreneurs and their customers. Readers were not merely consumers but contributors, as well. When editors of local, partisan journals gathered news from readers and sought out items of interest during their daily forays into the community, their papers assumed a very personal, nearly immediate character for their readers.

Despite Gray‟s earlier protests over readers‟ intrusions into editors‟ business, he and his colleagues clearly relied heavily on them for both content and sales. This was not quite a collaborative relationship, for editors retained ultimate control over the development of content and its presentation. Still, it was an intimate relationship that shaped the newspaper as much as partisan patronage did. While the needs of the party and the needs of reader-contributors often were consonant, they were not always so. Therefore, to understand how editors balanced their obligations to both constituencies, we must understand the character of the major parties in the antebellum era and their influence on the press.

Democrats and Whigs

The Democratic and Whig Parties were not simply political organizations. They were organic institutions, clothed in a political culture that defined members‟ identification with the party. In her groundbreaking study of northern Democrats, Jean Harvey Baker broadly identified political culture as a system of empirical beliefs, values, and expressive symbols that defined the context of political action. These cultural symbols deepened party members‟ attachment to the institution and its members. Even when the parties lost elections and languished out of power, final death toll was in the tens of thousands. Charles Rosenberg noted that a predilection for blaming victims for their plight (people knew that filth generally enabled the spread of disease) hampered civic efforts to combat the disease during major epidemics in 1832 and 1849. By 1866, New York City physicians convinced the public and city officials that the disease was microbial in origin, paving the way for a rational, scientific plan to attack subsequent epidemics. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 33

their members‟ deep-rooted attachment kept them strong and vibrant. Consequently, Daniel

Walker Howe, one of the pre-eminent chroniclers of the Whig Party, perceptively noted, “there is a special appropriateness in treating Whiggery as a culture rather than merely as a party, because the culture was more powerful than the party.”30 Indeed, several of their objectives, such as public education and the creation of a national banking system, outlasted the party itself.

Howe identified two defining strains of Whiggery: evangelical reformism that grew out of the revivals of the Second Great Awakening and a secular impulse toward modernization.31

These strains at times could diverge in intra-party conflict or merge in cooperation. Didactic

Whig leaders like the abolitionist Joshua Reed Giddings and the Reverend Lyman Beecher sought the moral reformation of society, while more secular-minded leaders like Abraham

Lincoln pursued social order and liberty through the expansion of institutions such as the market economy and education. Yet, their mutual desire to shape society in such a way as to harness the genius and the abilities of the people (while checking their selfish passions) in pursuit of material growth and moral progress united them. Howe aptly maintained that evangelical reformers themselves “were in many ways the champions of modernization, that is, of changes in structure of society and individual personality that emphasized discipline and channeled energies by the deliberate choice of goals and rational selection of means.”32

30 Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs: 3. Jean Harvey Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 31 Whitney Cross‟ history of revivalism in upstate New York remains the most impressive study of this phenomenon, largely because of its sheer breadth and the aplomb with which he handles his subjects. He questions the practice of identifying two distinct “Awakenings” in American history. Rather, the country experienced periodic waves of revivalism from the 1740s throughout much of the nineteenth century. See Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1950). 32 Howe, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North During the Second Party System,” The Journal of American History, vol. 77 no. 4 (March 1991) 1216. 34

In the competitive political arena, parties had to differentiate themselves and offer voters clearly defined choices in order to assure their continued survival. Therefore, Howe identified a series of cultural oppositions that sharply delineated Democrats and Whigs. Whigs tended toward evangelical religion, while Democrats tended toward traditional, confessional religion.

Whigs often espoused Puritan ideals, while Democrats typically preferred Enlightenment ideals.

Whigs were proto-nationalists, but Democrats were regionalists (apparently irrespective of

Andrew Jackson‟s ardent nationalism). Whigs were pro-revival, Democrats were anti-revival.

Perhaps no historian has so satisfactorily distinguished between the cultural mores and mindsets of Democrats and Whigs. However, his categories were overly broad, tended to obliterate the considerable similarities in both parties‟ membership, and also ignored the fact that both parties crafted and changed their platforms in response to election needs, not cultural imperatives.

Still, Howe‟s categories, no matter how imperfect and overly rigid, drew on the groundbreaking ethno-cultural studies of historians like Lee Benson. Benson used voting and demographic records to ascertain the factors that influenced party attachment and voting patterns. Dismissing analyses that were heavily predicated on class, he argued that ethnicity and religion were the deepest sources of partisan division among voters, with immigrants and

Catholics far more likely to vote Democratic than Whig. Likewise, native-born, evangelical

Protestants were far more likely to vote Whig than Democratic. These voting habits thus shaped a party system that reflected and reified ethno-cultural divisions within society.

While Benson‟s demographics began to fill in the outlines of Democratic supporters in the antebellum period, Baker‟s analysis of the educative sources of Democratic culture revealed how Democrats were “made.” Benson revealed that Democrats tended to be more tolerant and welcoming of Catholicism and the cultural traditions of immigrants, while Whigs privileged the 35

cultural traditions of native-born Protestants. Those same Whigs felt impelled to discipline society and encourage the assimilation of the various immigrant traditions to (Protestant)

American culture. Undoubtedly many Democrats felt similarly, but they largely expressed more forbearance for other cultural and religious traditions. Unlike Whigs, they preferred to harmonize, rather than homogenize, the disparate elements of democratic society. Democrats‟ repeated and fervent invocations of Enlightenment philosophy as the source of their political creed undergirded these efforts. They did not believe that all people or groups were equal, but, adopting the attitudes of conservative thinker Edmund Burke, they did believe that a natural hierarchy provided order and opportunity in a heterogeneous society.

Though the research of Howe, Benson, Baker and others identified the main features and character of Whigs and Democrats, something remained missing. All of their studies presumed a pronounced, staunch, and stable partisan loyalty among party members. In Baker‟s case, her study focused more on the content of political culture than the modes by which it was communicated. None plumbed the ways in which the very sources of party identity, particularly newspapers, could also challenge that identity and undermine loyalty to the organization.

Historian and communications theorist Harold Innis was one of the first scholars to seriously study the medium through which political messages moved. He forcefully argued that there was very little individuality or freedom in the early nineteenth-century American press.

Focusing on the medium, rather than the message, he concluded that the diffusion of information that prevailed at that time gave a preponderance of power in shaping the news to a very small number of fortuitously placed, urban journals. Innis traced a process in which newspapers in commercial cities along the eastern coast were the first to produce important news, particularly foreign news brought by ship to those cities. Newspapers in other cities and smaller towns 36

subsequently copied those news items, as the news spread inexorably from the coastal, urban core to the interior, rural periphery. This meant that a handful of large, urban journals dictated how newspapers and readers in very different communities and constituencies throughout the country would consume news. Betraying his dim view of the early nineteenth century press,

Innis sardonically concluded that urban journals alone enjoyed “untrammeled freedom to twist and misrepresent the news.”33 Such newspapers established the foundation for what he saw as the development and rise to prominence of overweening press monopolies in the twentieth century.

Though Innis described this as a monopoly of knowledge, it can more accurately be described as a monopoly of press communication. True, most newspapers relied on news clipped directly from larger urban tribunes. However, we need to look beyond the process of disseminating news to ascertain whether smaller newspapers were little more than doppelgangers of those predominant journals. Innis suggested that smaller newspapers did not reproduce news, but rather the “twisted” narrative of the news crafted largely by the New York dailies. Smaller papers simply lacked immediate access to news itself. Yet, if we examine the content of these papers, we will see that the seemingly lesser papers crafted their own narratives of the news they received from other sources. They did not passively receive news from urban papers like manna from Heaven. Instead, even partisan newspapers editorialized and commented on the news that they received, making it conform to local political, economic, or social concerns. In this way, they profoundly affected popular perceptions of the press itself.

33 Harold Adams Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951): 139. Innis argued that the invention of the telegraph broke the partisan press‟ monopoly over knowledge by obliterating the limitations of time and space on which their monopoly had relied. Menahem Blondheim countered that the telegraph merely gave birth to a new communication monopoly in the form of the Associated Press. By the 1870s, the AP was the single biggest customer of Western Union, which held a monopoly on telegraph communication, accounting for 10% of that company‟s revenue. Moreover, by the 1880s, over 80% of the copy in western newspapers came from the AP, which collected, “winnowed, standardized” and subsequently distributed news. Menahem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844- 1897 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994): viii. 37

Perceptions of the Partisan Press

Party papers‟ dual roles as tribunes of political culture and the fount of news for their community left them open to criticism by those who questioned their commitment to the party or their aptitude for public service. For instance, Innis‟ dim view of the press as a manipulator, not a reporter, of the news echoed popular antebellum attitudes. Mott had previously described the early antebellum period as “the dark ages of partisan journalism.” Whereas the Revolutionary generation largely viewed the press as an upright, loyal, patriotic institution, many antebellum

Americans complained that the press had abdicated the lofty ideals of nationalism and patriotism.

Instead, these papers were slavishly devoted to parochial, partisan concerns. Partisan papers in this period often indulged in unseemly and outlandish slander against their opponents in the rough and tumble arena of Jacksonian politics. Humor “always played a considerable part in political lampooning, but vile innuendo and open accusation of personal turpitude are scarcely funny,” Mott concluded.34 His conclusion presumed that newspapermen should have been guided by a clear code of ethics. However, this was an era of pre-professional journalism, and independent, partisan newspapers exhibited few scruples in pursuit of their party‟s goals.

David Nord characterized the press of that period as “outrageously partisan,” “factional,” and unrelentingly bent on subverting not merely the government but the state. Nord inaccurately conflated state and government, interpreting newspaper attacks on the federal administration as attacks on the state itself, and presumably its very structure. Clearly though, out-of-power factions wished to preserve the state apparatus, not demolish it, in order to assume its control themselves. Mark Neely was more accurate in his assessment of the damage that partisan presses

34 Mott, American Journalism: 167, 168. 38

did during crises such as war. He argued that the persistence of the unreformed two-party system during the Civil War “was a matter of business as usual, and some of that business definitely put self before country and party before public safety.” Intemperate attacks by some un-reconciled

Democratic organs on the Lincoln Administration‟s handling of the war during its nadir in early

1864 showed that, “such partisans were willing to engage in brash and astonishing brinksmanship – without making any concessions to the times.”35 In conflicts such as these, the partisan press revealed itself to be obstinately independent, unpredictable (except perhaps in its consistent loathing of the opposition), and irascible.

Even contemporary accounts of the press decried its penchant for irresponsible bellicosity. Humorist Mark Twain came of age during the antebellum period in a politically- minded family. His older brother Orion apprenticed at a Democratic newspaper and later was appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory by Abraham Lincoln. His second cousin, Jeremiah

Clemens, was a Democratic Senator from the state of Alabama in the 1850s. Twain‟s recollection of the partisan newspapers of the mid-nineteenth century clearly influenced his short story, “Journalism in Tennessee,” which appeared in Sketches New and Old in 1893. In the story, a young man travels to Tennessee, hoping the climate will improve his health. Taken on as assistant editor at the evocatively named Morning Glory and Johnson County War Whoop, the young man finds his pugnacious boss using the paper primarily to harangue municipal officials and prominent citizens alike for seemingly benign actions. The editor fights a duel with one aggrieved target of his wrath (during which the new assistant editor is wounded multiple times), killing the man in the process. Afterward, the seemingly unperturbed editor prepares to leave the

35 Mark Neely, Jr., The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002): 34, 116. Nord, Communities of Journalism: 81-83. 39

office in the care of his injured assistant in order to attend to some personal business. Before departing, he dispenses the following instructions:

Jones will be here at 3 – cowhide him. Gillespie will call earlier, perhaps – throw him out of the window. Ferguson will be along at 4 – kill him. That is all for today, I believe. If you have any odd time, you may write a blistering article on the police – give the Chief Inspector rats. The cowhides are under the table; weapons in the drawer – ammunition there in the corner – lint and bandages up there in the pigeon-holes. In case of accident, go to Lancet, the surgeon, downstairs. He advertises – we take it out in trade.36

Though written in the late nineteenth century, this story was imbued with many of the exaggerated characteristics of the antebellum press: an individual editor uses the newspaper to tweak his foes and rivals and, in order to sell papers and titillate readers, responds to innocuous incidents with disproportionate furor and wrath. The editors‟ actions precipitate unnecessary and thoughtless violence (the assistant editor is later thrashed by Jones, Gillespie, and Ferguson) and even death. The farcical names that Twain gave the War Whoop‟s rival organs, the Earthquake,

Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, Morning Howl, Daily Hurrah, and Moral Volcano point out the hyperbole that characterized newspaper reporting of this period and also exposed the hypocrisy of their inflammatory behavior in supposed service of the public trust.

Antebellum partisan editors were not blind to such criticism. Indeed, they often proved the harshest critics of their own profession, as Altschuler and Blumin have noted. Yet, they also would have taken umbrage at Twain‟s unflattering, if amusing, depiction of them. The paradigmatic image of the partisan press was that it was a myopic, selfish, and potentially dangerous institution that marched blindly in lockstep under party orders. In contrast, partisan editors themselves would have argued that they were proudly independent, laboring in the best interests of the unique communities they served. When criticized for presumed political

36 Mark Twain, “Journalism in Tennessee” in Sketches New and Old (Hartford: American Publishing, 1893). Google Books: 34. 40

dogmatism, editors vehemently retorted that their newspapers were not “mere party organs.”

Their partisanship was sincere, but not all-consuming. It was a means of economic support for these editors, and the vehicle by which they could express the political principles that they believed ought to guide the country‟s development. Still, party editors believed their highest obligation was to promote the progress of the community. The success of the party and its principles ranked clearly ranked below this goal. If they were guilty of intemperate language and fomenting conflict, it was only in the service of educating their readers and illuminating the path to progress.

Democrats and Whigs defined progress in remarkably similar ways, though they frequently differed as to the best means of achieving that progress. Though progress itself held a transcendent meaning for most, connoting spiritual and moral uplift, most Americans located it in immediate, material terms. For instance, Whigs saw internal improvements not merely as a means to increase commercial wealth, but also as an obligation that bound the present generation to the next in producing and sharing that wealth. Public schools similarly promised increased opportunity for social mobility and advancement, another vital path to progress. Where Whigs often saw government as a moralistic goad necessary to control society, Democrats typically evinced a utilitarian view of government, charging it with providing the greatest good to the greatest number. While Whigs sought to balance and harmonize society‟s disparate interests,

Democrats instead focused on increasing access for all to the market and to educational institutions, in order to provide real opportunity for social mobility. Ultimately, both major parties emphasized the material antecedents of progress, because the spread and growth of material comfort would further separate Americans from the country‟s primitive past and allow people the leisure to pursue intellectual, moral and spiritual growth. In the following sections, we 41

will see how some party editors pursued progress in ways that put them at odds with their own partisan principles.

Modernized Democracy in Maine

Charles Holden was a printer by trade, having first worked as a compositor for John K.

Baker, publisher of one of the earliest newspapers in Maine. In 1819, when he was fourteen years old, Holden began an apprenticeship in the offices of the Eastern Argus in Portland. At the age of 21 he became a journeyman in the same office, serving eight years in that capacity until becoming joint proprietor of the paper with Ira Berry. In 1831, Berry had been co-proprietor of the Augusta Age with Francis O. J. Smith, newspaper magnate, congressman and, later in life, a shrewd telegraph entrepreneur. In 1835 Berry and Holden transformed the Argus into a daily paper, with Holden serving as editor. The partnership between the two men did not seem to be a harmonious one. A mere two years after bringing out the Argus as a daily, Berry left the paper and Holden became the primary proprietor. Holden‟s former partner later would start a new paper, the Argus Revived, to challenge what he felt was Holden‟s political apostasy and the changing politics of the venerable paper they had owned once together. However, Berry‟s new tribune failed within two years, and Holden‟s Argus became the predominant mouthpiece of the

Democratic Party in the Pine Tree State. By 1850 it was the largest circulating newspaper in the state, with just over 4,000 subscribers to its daily, tri-weekly, and weekly editions.37

37 Kennedy, Catalogue of the Newspapers and Periodicals Published in the United States: 15. The next largest Democratic paper in the state, the radical Belfast Republican Journal, claimed 2,500 subscribers in 1850. Holden‟s nearest Whig rivals, the Portland Advertiser and Kennebec Journal, claimed 1,800 and 2,150 total subscribers, respectively. Interestingly, temperance newspapers proved quite popular in the state, with the Cold Water Fountain of Portland and The Fountain of Waterville listing 2,000 and 2,300 subscribers respectively. 42

A series of men succeeded Berry as Holden‟s partners in the paper, while he remained the constant, guiding force of the journal and its most frequent editor. Eliphalet Case, O. L. Sanborn, and Franklin Sanborn provided him with vital operating capital and also participated in the paper‟s daily operations, freeing Holden to pursue political office. He steadily ascended party ranks, becoming chairman of the state central committee in the 1840s and serving three terms in the state senate in 1839, 1847 and 1848. Holden continued to contribute the lion‟s share of editorials to the Argus even during his tenure at the State House, and the newspaper remained largely his personal creation until he sold it in 1856.38

When Berry founded the Argus Revived, he was criticizing Holden for abandoning the radical principles that had defined Jacksonian Democrats and allegedly kept them in the good graces of the voters. Those principles included practicing a strict economy in government expenditure and steadfastly restraining government from interfering in or attempting to direct the economy. Radicals believed that if government attempted to shape the economy it would inevitably create inequity, establishing an elite entrepreneurial class that would lord over all others and erect laws to protect and preserve their class superiority. Yet Holden consistently favored a combination of public and private funding for internal improvements in order to encourage new industry and commerce that might transform the city. In pursuing this course, the editor put what he presumed to be the best interests of the community of Portland ahead of the traditions of party. By extension, Holden believed that what was good for Portland, the largest and wealthiest city in the state, was good for the state as a whole. His editorial career suggested

38 Joseph Griffin, ed., History of the Press of Maine (Brunswick, Maine: Press of John Griffin, 1872): 70. In 1849, Holden found himself at odds with Franklin Sanborn over whether to support regular Democratic candidates for local office or those Democrats who had bolted to the Free Soil Party (this will be more fully covered in chapter four). The dueling editorials both penned for the Argus in support of different candidates for the same office lent the paper a schizophrenic character during the state and local elections that year. 43

that he firmly believed that his party should be flexible enough in its policies (if not its principles) to adapt itself to the needs of the communities it served.

For example, when the Eastern Argus celebrated a remarkable increase in charters for railroads and other transportation improvements throughout New England, radical Democratic editors were aghast. They protested that the state‟s leading Democratic journal was derelict in its duty to oppose the proliferation of chartered corporations, which were legal monopolies and thus inherently anti-democratic and anachronistic in a free republic. While paying cursory homage to the traditional Jacksonian fear of monopolies, Holden peremptorily replied, “but as odious and dangerous as monopolies are considered, we never knew an instance of any corporation in the

United States having a monopoly of anything.”39

Here, the Argus thumbed its nose at a cardinal principle of its own party, but why? The paper was a major booster of a proposed railroad to connect that city with Montreal in British

Canada. Holden was an early investor in the corporation that eventually made this road a reality: the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Rail Road (the partnering Canadian firm was the St. Lawrence and

Atlantic Rail Road), and he firmly believed that, in order for the venture to succeed, the corporation had to be clothed with broad monopoly powers. Competition from rival ventures would only divide capital resources and prevent the project‟s successful completion, Holden reasoned. Only a corporation vested with exclusive powers could complete the road and bring a vast commerce to Portland and allow it to take its place among the nation‟s foremost, wealthy, commercial cities.

39 Eastern Argus, 27 February 1845. For an example of radical criticism of the Argus, see Belfast Republican Journal, 7 March 1845. 44

It did not trouble Holden at all that his position was adopted heartily by leading Whig journals. The Bangor Whig and Courier touted the proposed railroad as the means to ending

Maine‟s commercial servitude to her wealthier, more industrialized neighbor to the South,

Massachusetts. Maine‟s commercially-minded Whigs eagerly anticipated breaking the shackles that bound the state to Massachusetts‟ superior transportation system and more developed economy. In language echoing Democratic paeans to progress, the Whig and Courier boasted,

“with this road we have the ability of erecting ourselves into an independent State, possessing sources of inexhaustible prosperity within us – without it, we must continue to be as we now are, hewers of wood and drawers of water to our neighbors.”40 Similarly, the Argus argued this improvement was essential to the development of the state‟s resources and wealth. Perhaps because Holden appeared to be acting in the best interests of Portland and the state, his paper easily weathered the criticism of dismayed radical newspapers.

Editors were not the only ones who vigilantly observed and critiqued the actions of partisan newspapers. Readers, of course, did so as well. A resident of the coastal town of

Ellsworth, signing himself “Leonidas,” wrote a jeremiad against incompetent editors to Luther

Severance‟s Kennebec Journal. Severance was a member of the United States House of

Representatives, and his Journal rivaled the Portland Advertiser as the state‟s leading Whig newspaper. That “Leonidas” chose the Journal, which was published in the capitol city 80 miles distant from Ellsworth, suggests that the writer was a Whig in sympathy, if not in practice. His condemnation of an irresponsible partisan press suggested that the writer had been discomfited by the democratization of politics and society and the advent of Jacksonism. Indeed, even the choice of the moniker “Leonidas,” ancient monarch of the martial city-state Sparta, revealed a

40 Bangor Whig and Courier, 28 August 1845. 45

predilection for order and discipline over the individualism associated with democracy. Noting that newspapers exerted more influence on public institutions and individuals than institutions of higher learning, he admonished his readers that these journals “should be under the guidance of able, pure and discreet minds, whose labors shall tend to enlighten, purify and lift up society, rather than to excite its passions, vitiate its tastes, and prostrate its dearest interests.”41 The writer appeared to bemoan the incendiarism of the party press, but simultaneously acknowledged the public trust those papers retained in educating the public and inculcating normative values and virtues in them.

The distressed “Leonidas” lamented that too many unenlightened and unscrupulous editors propagated too many dangerous and immoral ideas through the press. The writer admonished both Severance and his readers,

The times are truly portentous. Crude and mischievous notions of law, politics and morals pervade to a great extent, the masses of the people, while enormous wickedness, with brazen front, sits enthroned in high places. A race of selfish pigmy politicians have taken the place of patriots and statesmen in the government of the country; a tribe of insolent young rowdies, have seized the government of schools, families and villages – and a host of venal and destructive writers are constantly engaged in miserable attempts to degrade truth and justice – to bring education and refinement into disrepute – and to stimulate all those passions and propensities which tend to poison the minds, corrupt the morals, and overthrow the government of the American people. Civil liberty is in peril. Great evils are struggling for perpetuity, and can only be broken down by great power. Interests of infinite moment are at stake. We want public writers with the energy and power of great minds, who will maintain and defend these interests with fervor and vehemence.42

41 Kennebec Journal, 20 February 1846. Severance was another printer turned politician. A Massachusetts native, he learned the printing trade under Jonathan Bruce of Peterboro, New York. He later worked for William Duane‟s Aurora in Philadelphia and in the office of the Intelligencer in Washington, D.C. in the early 1820s. At the request of a group of Augusta residents, he settled in the city in 1825 and established the Kennebec Journal to support John Quincy Adams‟ re-election bid. He served several terms in the legislature before serving three nonconsecutive terms in Congress as a Whig from 1839 to 1847. Under President Taylor, Severance was appointed commissioner to the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, where he served from 1851-1854, hoping that the climate would improve his precarious health. Sadly, it did not, as Severance died in January 1855, less than a year after his return to Augusta. See Griffin, History of the Press of Maine: 94-95. 42 Kennebec Journal, 20 February 1846. 46

This letter eulogized a bygone deferential age when communities acquiesced to the political leadership of “natural” elites and accepted their wisdom; when young men yielded to their elders and sought to emulate them; and when a staid decorum supposedly had suffused the practice of politics.

Though the growth of newspapers had been integral to the raucous spread of democratic ideals and egalitarianism in the antebellum period, this resident of Ellsworth ironically saw newspapers editors themselves as the solution to these “problems.” The country did not need to be free of political writers and papers. Rather, they needed more political writers of skill and more papers of merit to instill proper moral values and ideals in society. Leonidas therefore expressed a common sentiment among the reading public: no matter how steadfast they might be in their own partisan loyalties, these readers expected, even demanded, something loftier than mere partisanship from their newspapers. They believed newspapers had an obligation to the community and society that stretched beyond the narrow confines of party.

Holden, and partisan editors of his ilk, heartily agreed with Leonidas‟ assessment. The newspaper was not simply a tool of party. Rather, it was arguably the most important means of civilizing and “republicanizing” Americans. The newspaper was a remarkable, self-contained school that educated Americans to be Americans. This was an important technology for a growing nation that did not yet overspread the continent. Americans perceived much of that continent as a wilderness that remained in a pristine state of nature, and when settlers migrated to the vast, unorganized West, many Americans feared they would descend into a primitive, even savage social state. Americans were circumspect about the future of the Oregon Territory, which then encompassed the entire Pacific Northwest. The country was embroiled in a dispute with

England (which jointly occupied and administered the territory) over the demarcation of the 47

border between the territory and British Canada. Moreover, many Americans worried that the isolated settlers in Oregon would separate from the United States and transform the territory into an independent state. Holden was not so apprehensive of this possibility. The United States

Postal Service had begun regular mail deliveries, including newspapers, to the territory, providing a vital link between the territories‟ residents and their American compatriots. The editor assured his readers that these transportation and communications links with the territory would bind its residents to the United States in a political and cultural union.43

Touting the transformative and educational power of newspapers above all other technologies, he concluded, “the press – the mail – and the railroad – together with the commercial marine – are the great civilizing instruments of this modern age.”44 As a school of civilization and a beacon of republicanism, the newspaper subsumed narrow partisan objectives within its larger, nobler purpose. This larger purpose revealed a latent independence in the press.

Where party dictates seemed to diverge from the best interests of the community, as perceived by individual editors, the latter typically prevailed. Several of Holden‟s fellow Democratic editors in upstate New York and the Western Reserve similarly conceived of their editorial duty as ensuring the progress of their communities, not merely adhering slavishly to party dictates.

Office-seekers and Speculators in Upstate New York

When Martin Van Buren‟s powerful Albany Regency ruled New York‟s Democratic

Party, they searched for a promising young editor to helm the Albany Argus, the mouthpiece of the party leadership. In 1823 they chose 26-year-old Edwin Croswell for the task. Croswell came

43 Eastern Argus, 1 November 1845. 44 Eastern Argus, 1 November 1845. 48

from a printing family. His father, Mackey, and uncle, Thomas O‟Hara Croswell, had founded and the Catskill Recorder. Another uncle, Harry Croswell, had become infamous for publishing intemperate attacks on Thomas Jefferson in his Hudson, New York newspaper, The Wasp. A staunch Federalist, Croswell was tried for libel by New York‟s attorney general and defended by

Alexander Hamilton in a landmark case that established that publication of true material facts was a sufficient defense against libel charges. Edwin Croswell learned composition, and probably the art of combative political rhetoric as well, from his father and uncles. As a young man, Croswell briefly joined his father as a partner at the Recorder, eventually leaving to become a reporter for the Argus and subsequently its co-owner and editor.45

One of his biographers has argued that Croswell initially distinguished himself for his fierce loyalty to the Regency. As a bachelor, he had roomed with Regency leaders William

Marcy (a loyal lieutenant to Martin Van Buren and future governor of New York) and Roger

Skinner. Yet, Croswell also was an incurable speculator, and he began promoting the expansion of state banking and internal improvements at a time when the radical Regency opposed such measures and preached a strict economy in government expenditures. Croswell‟s liberal promotion of economic growth and state-sponsored improvements eventually estranged him from the Regency leadership. After 1837 his career as head of the Argus was marked by bitter conflict between radical Democrats and Croswell‟s more conservative or economically progressive Democratic allies.46

Van Buren‟s radical supporters withdrew their patronage from the Argus and established a rival paper, the Albany Atlas, under the proprietorship of William Cassidy and James French.

45 On Croswell‟s early life, see Richard H. Manning, Herald of the Albany Regency: Edwin Croswell and the „Albany Argus,‟ 1823-1854. PhD. Dissertation (Miami University: 1983). On his uncle‟s groundbreaking libel trial, see Mott, American Journalism: 167-168. 46 Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson: 180, 237-238. 49

The Atlas kept up a steady fusillade of invective against the apostate Croswell and strove to lure

Democrats back to their tried and true radical principles. However, the lucrative patronage

Croswell‟s Argus derived from its state printing contract and the continued loyalty of many of its customers allowed the paper to withstand the upstart Atlas‟ challenge. The Atlas could not amass even half the subscriptions that the well-established Argus enjoyed.47 Croswell gleefully thumbed his nose at his discomfited rivals and remained utterly unapologetic for straying from the

Regency‟s path. He affirmed the limitless progress of commercial expansion and consistently argued that the state‟s primary duty was to spare no necessary expense to maintain New York‟s position as the premier commercial emporium in the Union.

The editor threw himself into the state‟s burgeoning commercial and industrial development, and his reckless behavior in this regard eventually proved his downfall. He invested in several mills and foundries in the Albany area, but his bank speculation proved most reckless. Croswell had been a founding officer of Albany‟s Canal Bank. He and the cashier,

Theodore Olcott systematically engaged in unethical and likely illegal practices that eventually brought down the bank itself. Croswell was the bank‟s largest shareholder, owning over 900 shares. Yet, he bought most of those shares on credit, in violation of the bank‟s bylaws. His personal liabilities in unpaid bank capital, bank loans, personal overdraws, and his portion of the bank security (which was supposed to be deposited in the state‟s banking safety fund) amounted to nearly $190,000. This dwarfed the $71,000 in personal assets that the editor owned in 1849.48

47 Even as late as 1850, when the political influence of the Argus had begun to decline, it still claimed nearly 16,000 subscribers, while the Atlas logged a mere 7,000. See Kennedy, Catalogue of the Newspapers and Periodicals Published in the United States: 26. 48 Report of the Select Committee of the Senate Showing the Fraud and Peculations of Edwin Croswell, Theodore Olcott, John L. Crew, and Others by which the Canal Bank was Ruined (Albany: H. H. Van Dyck, 1849): 4-5. 50

In concert with the cashier, Croswell allowed unsecured loans to other stockholders far in excess of their personal deposits in the bank (violating another by-law). The two men hid their questionable practices from the president of the bank (who had also been the Democratic mayor of Albany from 1845-46), John Keyes Paige. Olcott also extended a $50,000 loan to the Pratt

Bank, a dummy corporation consisting of one individual, Elisha Pratt. The cashier likely had made the loan in order to list it as a credit on the Canal Bank ledger, though it was highly unlikely the loan would be repaid in reality. Such desperate measures were employed to shore up the bank‟s advancing insolvency as a result of its officers‟ periodic misappropriation of funds and the failure to recover unsecured loans. The bank collapsed in 1849, burdened with debts of nearly $600,000 and collectible assets of just over $230,000. As a deposit bank for several contracting firms that serviced the state‟s canals, numerous workers went unpaid in the wake of the bank‟s collapse.

The Canal Bank failure was the beginning of the end of Croswell‟s political career. The year prior to its failure he had relocated to New York City and founded a new newspaper, The

True Sun, hoping it would prove profitable enough to pay down his mounting debts. Though he still maintained a controlling interest in the Argus, his political commentary grew far less frequent. In 1855 he sold the Argus to his radical rivals, but that sale and subsequent business ventures failed to rescue him from his mounting debt. An invalid by 1860, Croswell was penniless and living with his daughter in Princeton, New Jersey when he died in 1872.

Croswell‟s riches to rags story seemed to paint a portrait of an unscrupulous, heedless and insatiably greedy character, crippled by the foolish optimism of the inveterate gambler trying to recover lost fortunes through more speculation. However, Croswell, like Gray and Holden, approached his duty as an editor with gravity. Despite his innumerable personal failings, he 51

accepted with sincerity the public trust that was placed in him. Likewise, he believed his consistent support for the liberalization of laws regulating economic activity in the state was a signal service to the people of New York. Dedicated mainly to the pursuit of personal wealth and the material progress of the state, Croswell unhesitatingly risked proscription by the same radical

Democrats who had provided him a position of influence within the party.

Whereas Holden identified the press as the primary civilizing technology of the modern world, Croswell fixed on the railroad, the means by which newspapers reached so many far-flung readers. Urging New Yorkers (and their representatives in the legislature) to invest in the building of a whole network of railroads, the editor loftily concluded, “the impulse which leads to the linking of the iron bands of brotherhood and union is a noble one.” To him, the railroad physically linked Americans in a shared identity and shared progress. Indeed, the railroad was

“productive of the highest good to man,” a vital element “in the progress of civilization throughout the world.”49 As an avid speculator, Croswell saw both personal opportunity and social duty in his advocacy of railroad building.

More so than most of his editorial colleagues, Croswell held a deep faith that all progress flowed from advances in commerce and the accumulation of material comforts. Surveying the stunning growth of the United States in population, wealth, and influence in the world, he patriotically proclaimed, “Her vast production of all that ministers to the comforts of man must give her sway in the commercial world. Her institutions begin to sway the tides which carry forward the progress of the People in the old world.” The nation‟s burgeoning production of material comforts validated the political and social institutions that had unleashed Americans‟ entrepreneurial creativity and verve and served as a lesson in the progress of civilization for the

49 Albany Argus, 11 July 1845. 52

superannuated and increasingly anachronistic monarchies of Europe.50 His feud with the party leadership notwithstanding, Croswell believed that the Democratic principles that had preserved the nation directly inspired the progress of political liberty in European society. However, it is revealing that his paper voiced its faith in commerce, not those principles themselves, as the critical source or mode of that progress. Confident that commercial growth would serve the community and the nation at large, Croswell greedily set himself to the task of getting his fair share (and much more) of that growth.

There were numerous acolytes of Croswell‟s vision of commercial progressivism among

New York‟s editorial fraternity. Not surprisingly many of them resided in the towns that lay along the Erie Canal and its lateral lines, which dramatically re-shaped the commercial habits and patterns of those communities. However, most of them voiced a more expansive, high- minded notion of progress. One such journal was the Rome Sentinel, an Oneida County paper edited by Henry T. Utley, a vigorous proponent of public-funded commercial expansion.

Northern Whigs dismissed the seemingly inconsistent and incongruous political principles put forth by Democrats like Utley, Croswell, Holden, and others. These Democrats pledged to preserve individual freedom and restrain the powers and purview of government on the one hand, while simultaneously soliciting government intervention in the economy on the other hand.

Whigs sarcastically labeled this peculiar brand of politics “progressive Democracy.” Yet, Utley and his likeminded Democrats proudly appropriated the term to describe their unique, utilitarian conception of Democracy. Utley hailed the nonpareil Thomas Jefferson as the father of

“progressive Democracy.” Not satisfied with this pedigree, he further claimed,

50 Albany Argus, 3 January 1846. 53

We may go much further back, and discover that the idea of „progress‟ in a very extensive sense is embodied in the very nature of a Democratic system of government. As all past history attests, the nearer an approximation to such a system has been attained, the greater has been the „progress‟ in all that tends to promote the moral and intellectual elevation, the real happiness of the great mass of mankind.51

Here, finally, was a notion of progress that was not separate from partisanship, but resulted directly from it. The nearest approximation of the democratic system Utley spoke of lay in the principles of the Democratic Party itself. In this statement, the editor did not appear to exhibit the same degree of independence from partisanship in pursuit of that progress as did Croswell and

Holden. Still, it is important to note that it was the advance of progress itself, not the advance of party, that remained the ultimate goal of this and all “civilizing” and “republicanizing” papers.

Independent Jacksonians on the Western Reserve

While Empire State Democrats were deeply and bitterly divided in this period, Western

Reserve Democrats tried mightily to reconcile their progressive predilections with radical principles. One of the leaders of the Reserve Democrats was Joseph Gray, a man who had a seemingly impeccable radical, Jacksonian pedigree. He was reared in St. Lawrence County, New

York, the home of radical Democrat, Silas Wright. Wright served the county in the state legislature and the United States Congress and was so respected by his party‟s bitterly opposed factions that he briefly united them during his successful campaign for governor in 1845. Gray patterned his politics after Wright and put them into action when he and his historically-named older brother, Admiral Nelson Gray, migrated to Cleveland in the 1830s. They purchased the

Cleveland Advertiser in 1841 and promptly re-christened the paper the Plain Dealer to reflect its

51 Rome Sentinel, 13 February 1846. 54

political ethos. In 1845, the younger Gray converted the weekly paper into a daily, becoming only the second daily newspaper in Ohio at that time and the only daily north of Cincinnati.52

Gray, who would manage and edit the paper until his death in 1862, established the Plain

Dealer as a stalwart Jacksonian tribune. Yet, he was careful to maintain that the paper did not owe its existence or its loyalty to party alone. Significantly, in the inaugural issue of the daily,

Gray recommended the paper to businessmen of both parties. The Plain Dealer would serve the interests of those commercially-minded men who Gray believed would create the conditions of material progress that would uplift the community itself. This goal superseded more parochial, partisan aims. The editor confidently alleged, “all agree that it is for the direct interest of the place to support a well conducted daily paper independent of each of the great political parties; so that, whichever party is in power, local interests shall not suffer from want of an effective advocate.” However, this did not mean that Gray was abandoning partisan journalism or that he was disenchanted with his party. Instead, he was disposed “to let the „turbid pool of politics‟ comparatively alone, until such times as „the war trump needs to sound,‟ or until silence shall cease to command success.”53

Where Twain was derisive of partisan journalism, Gray seemed ambivalent. Yet, as the following chapters will show, he was a dedicated, loyal Democrat. At the same time, the editor also was a committed booster for Cleveland and the Western Reserve. He respected his party‟s ideals, but he also dismissed the myopic cant that might distract the party from doing whatever

52 Archer Shaw, The Plain Dealer: One Hundred Years in Cleveland (New York: Knopf, 1942): 52. A. N. did not serve as co-proprietor long, quickly moving on to other business interests. He grew wealthy from providing rails, spikes, and other materials to several railroads that built lines connecting with Cleveland‟s port on Lake Erie. Nicholas Gray, the middle brother, joined J. W. as an assistant editor and an occasional correspondent from the state capitol in Columbus and Washington, D.C. The younger Gray later would serve as Cleveland‟s postmaster from 1853-1858. In the latter year he challenged Republican Edward Wade for his congressional seat, but lost overwhelmingly. Antislavery politics had flourished on the Western Reserve since the 1840s, paving the way for Republican dominance after the collapse of the Whigs in the 1850s. See Shaw, The Plain Dealer: 33-41. 53 Plain Dealer, 7 April 1845. 55

was necessary to expand opportunities for economic enterprise and social advancement for the community at large. To Gray, those imperatives and their immediate impact on his community trumped any narrow partisan concerns.

In a brief and grandiloquent editorial titled “The Power of the Press,” Joseph Gray celebrated this distinctly modern technology that was imbued with unique power to wipe away the anachronistic epistemologies of past generations. In his evocative language, newspapers functioned like “an electric chain of mind, wherein thought and purpose can spread themselves most extensively and perpetual [sic], allowing one man to affect in one year many a millions of minds.” However, despite the inordinate power that newspapers bestowed on their editors to affect millions of minds, the press was not a mere cultural homogenizers. Instead, the press was

“one grand dispenser of light,” because it paid witness to “the thousands of peculiarities of every age.” In newspapers, “apprehension, prejudice, and the like receive their due. Each generation its requisite influences, privileges, and obligations.”54 This editorial seemed to describe a marketplace of ideas and worldviews where parochial “apprehensions” and “prejudice” would be superseded by modern, liberal enlightenment thought, just as naturally as one generation succeeded the next.

While newspapers were joined around the world in an “electric chain of mind,” as Gray put it, each labored in its own field for the benefit of its immediate readers and customers. In this respect, the family of newspapers seemed to hold a mirror up to the nation, reflecting its character and urging the improvement of its society. In the late Jacksonian period, Gray confidently looked ahead to a bright national future. An enthusiastic supporter of westward expansion, the editor restlessly proclaimed, “great as our country is, we want to see it still

54 Plain Dealer, 16 November 1850. 56

greater. We go for extending the „area of freedom‟ over the whole world – nothing short of it will satisfy our progressive democracy.” An unrepentant cultural imperialist, he firmly believed that the ideals of individual freedom and democracy that sustained the United States would inexorably spread over the globe, “liberating” the people of all nations. This idealistic and revolutionary sentiment often drew criticism from other parties, but its adherents were undaunted. John Harmon, editor of a Democratic journal in Ravenna and state assemblyman, acknowledged, “I am aware that some sneer at the idea of „progressive democracy,‟ but they may observe every science, yes, everything in nature is progressive.”55 Thus, it was only natural that these self-styled progressives and the press would work together to further that progress.

The grand, national and social progress that Gray envisioned began with the individual, and toward that end the editor unabashedly dispensed moral instruction to his readers. His paper promoted temperance and abolitionism, unperturbed by the fact that those issues typically were championed by Whigs journals, not Democratic ones. Political historians long have noted that imperious Whigs consistently supported moralistic legislation, particularly temperance, in their effort to modernize and reform society. In contrast, Democrats largely opposed such elitist attempts to codify a peculiar moral code in general law.56 However, Gray seemed untroubled by this sensitivity.

For instance, the editor did not scruple against lecturing his readers on the dangers of drink. He repeatedly urged them to embrace the values of sobriety, thrift and industry in order to ensure both individual and communal advancement. The editor urged the laboring men among

55 Plain Dealer, 11 April 1845; 1 December 1845. 56 See particularly, Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs: 19-31; and Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (New York: Atheneum, 1965): 186-207. Howe asserted that Whigs‟ organic view of society conditioned them to seek the intertwined material and moral progress of society. Benson noted that Democrats defended the diverse social and cultural values of their constituents, particularly Catholics, against the moral evangelizing of the Whigs. 57

his readers to dispense with the “cigars” and “spirits” they turned to for comfort and enjoyment after a long, hard day‟s work. Instead, he suggested that they put the money wasted on such idle pursuits toward purchasing a subscription to his paper, for it would nourish their mind and provide them with tools and information for material success. Sounding every bit the paternalist, he argued, “health consists in temperance; peace, in having employment for the mind as well as the body; and a competence is the natural result of both.”57

This brief editorial promoted values that Gray believed would benefit the community; not necessarily the values of Gray‟s beloved Democratic Party itself. At the same time, his solicitous interest in the pecuniary competency of his readers was not necessarily altruistic. Rather, it was occasioned by a combination of self-interest and faith in human progress. The sober industry of the individual was crucial to ensure the growth of his community, as well as its material comfort and moral enrichment. These developments were vital for the success of the editor and his political ambitions, as well.

Whenever something threatened the well-being and the progress of his community, Gray sought swift solutions. In 1849, a cholera epidemic ravaged much of the United States. The new transportation routes that had linked distant communities together and brought wealth to many of them, now spread the disease in the bodies of afflicted travelers. Beginning that summer in

Cleveland, the epidemic killed dozens of residents. On the one hand, Gray exhibited what historian Charles Rosenberg referred to as a “moralistic ontology” of disease, noting that it seemed to afflict the drunken, the indigent and the unhygienic. On the other hand, the editor also called for stringent methods to eradicate the disease and rescue Clevelanders from its effects. In

57 Plain Dealer, 19 April 1845. 58

an era that did not yet understand how micro-organisms caused disease, the editor pondered how miasms or a surplus or deficit of atmospheric electricity might have caused the epidemic.58

Yet, despite such seemingly quaint or folkloric conceptions of disease, Gray and others who grappled with the epidemic, intuitively understood that the variety of human and animal wastes that choked the streets and basements of American cities somehow harbored the disease.

To that end, the editor advocated the expansion of civic power to enforce new hygienic standards on city residents. As he put it,

If filth, in the form of rotten vegetable and animal matter, is the source of cholera miasm, then should the most rigid discipline be enforced in cleansing matter of every sort, liable to decay, from cities, by-lanes, privies, sheds, outhouses, cellars, and by-ways. This discipline should be enforced on dirty families, groceries, stores, drains, sloughs, &c.; dirt, always a source of sickness, is vastly more so in a season when cholera miasm is produced by atmospheric causes.59

What is notable in this statement is not the confused comparison of filth and miasms, but the insistence that the civic authorities had both the right and the duty to enforce a hygienic discipline on city residents, especially its dirty families. It is noteworthy that the editorial indicted these families but not the landlords and business owners who were responsible for the collection of refuse in the city streets and the maintenance for outhouses, cesspools, sloughs and sinks.

Gray seemed to propose investing civic leaders with broad powers to pass hygiene ordinances and identify dirty families and compel them to comply with the new regulations. That

58 Plain Dealer, 6 August 1849. Rosenberg‟s monograph remains the best monograph on the waves of cholera epidemics that afflicted the United States in the nineteenth century. Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849 and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). Rosenberg argued that civic authorities were slow to respond to the initial epidemics, because they viewed the disease as a result of personal sin. By 1866, New York City public health officials had convinced residents there that a micro-organism caused cholera and that scientific methods alone would provide for its eradication. 59 Plain Dealer, 6 August 1849. Sloughs essentially were cesspools, and sinks were troughs that were connected to sewer lines by a sluice gate. These were infrequently emptied. Even when emptied, the drains that connected cesspools, sloughs or sinks to city sewer lines often became clogged with mud, refuse and other debris, allowing sewage to back up onto streets. 59

these families were victims of poverty, insufficient city services, and subpar housing, did not seem to trouble the editor. Expanding government‟s reach directly into the household in this manner seemed to contradict the small-government principles of the Democratic Party and certainly would have offended the sensibilities of radical Democrats. One might argue that an unprecedented epidemic that threatened to decimate the city itself required a drastic response, one that would have coerced any party member to forsake his partisan persuasion in favor of draconian measures that promised salvation. That might be so, but it also highlights the editor‟s more immediate concern for his community and his place in it as a trusted public figure. Gray recognized that Clevelanders looked to his paper for answers to the devastating spread of cholera, not a Democratic perspective on how to arrest the disease.

Conclusion

Partisan editors‟ interests in shaping and disseminating the partisan creed and their interests in promoting community growth often were consonant, but sometimes sharply divergent. Harmonizing one‟s political creed with the specific, prosaic needs of a growing community was not always easy. Though such creeds typically were broad enough to allow some room for disparate interpretations, editors periodically were forced to perform rhetorical gymnastics to justify certain local policies that appeared to contradict the principles of their party. Such instances invited factional divisions within parties and critical scrutiny of partisan presses.

These periodic, inherent conflicts cast partisan editors‟ relative independence in sharp relief. They balanced their service to the party not only with their service to the community, but also with their own entrepreneurial self-interest in a tense juggling act. For the most part, these 60

editors were able to do so with little difficulty. This was made easier by the fact that party leaders also implicitly expected and explicitly condoned regional and parochial variations in the party messages transmitted by a heterogeneous network of newspapers.

In fact, the parties themselves often deliberately ran different campaigns with different platforms in different sections of the country. Whigs, Democrats, and their many challengers had to appeal to heterogeneous coalitions in different regions of the country that possessed their own unique histories and political cultures. Even presidential elections reinforced this atomization, for aspirants to the office did not campaign directly, but instead relied on the distribution of brief campaign biographies (often produced and published by partisan editors) and surrogates in each state and region to stump for them. This enabled them to run campaigns tailored to their unique constituency without straining the bonds that united them with men of divergent views in the national party.

Like these politicians, most partisan newspapers served a discrete region or locality that did not typically cross state boundaries. However, they functioned differently than did elected leaders in securing voters‟ loyalty to the party. Voters typically heard only periodically from their representatives in government, but they had much more frequent contact with their party newspapers. To a large extent then, these newspapers represented the parties more consistently than did the candidates. For many voters, the press was not merely the voice of the party, but the very embodiment it.

Thus, when newspapers challenged or refashioned the principles of the party they represented, they had the potential to dramatically affect voters‟ conception of what the party stood for as well as voters‟ attachment to it. Indeed, partisan papers, even had the power to lead voters away from the party standard, as when Croswell‟s Argus challenged the leadership of the 61

radical Albany Regency and tried to lead loyal Democratic voters to the standard of his more conservative faction. Such rebellions, especially sustained ones, had been infrequent in the

Jacksonian period. Yet, significant geo-political changes, beginning with the U.S.-Mexican War, made them more frequent in the antebellum era.

The new territory gained in that war held enormous agricultural and mineral resources and promised seemingly limitless commercial growth. Reflecting this promise, the Democratic

Administration of James K. Polk, which had prosecuted the war, also slashed tariff rates in order to increase both imports and exports. These policies reified the progressive outlook of the partisan papers, rewarding those editors‟ tireless commitment to the improvement of their own communities.

Despite the fact that Democratic policies created the new commercial opportunities that these editors thirsted for, it did not necessarily galvanize their loyalty to the party itself. Instead, these policies further buttressed the independence of these journals and also unleashed unpredictable forces (particularly the thorny question of whether or not to allow slavery into the new territories) that buffeted both parties and strained the bonds of its members. Similarly,

Whigs did not benefit from the increasing divisions among their rivals. The same philosophical divisions that plagued Democrats also applied to Whigs, particularly as they battled over whether to pursue antislavery or the resurrection of the American System of economic development in the wake of the war. Yet, this dissertation will only examine the function of Democratic newspapers in the North during the Polk Administration and the early 1850s to show how the

Administration‟s tremendously successful policies weakened its own party in that period and contributed to the eventual re-organization of the party system by 1857.

62

Chapter 2: Democratic Editors in the North and the “Go-Ahead Age”

In April 1845, shortly after the inauguration of Democratic President James K. Polk, the

Cleveland Plain Dealer enthusiastically anticipated a prosperous future for the growing city on

Lake Erie. Sitting astride the Cuyahoga River where it drains into Lake Erie, the city was poised to become a commercial giant in the developing West. Joseph Gray, the paper‟s editor, clamored for internal improvements that would increase the city‟s access to the state‟s agricultural hinterland and transform its harbor into a leading port on the Great Lakes trade routes. Claiming broad support among the citizenry for such improvements, Gray exulted in a boosterish editorial,

This is emphatically the go ahead age . . . the whole civilized world, like ourselves, is bent on making daily progress. The present – the all-absorbing present – monopolizes everything; while the eye of every man, woman, and child dwells with delight on the seductive visions of the future.1

Gray‟s association of commercial expansion with “civilized” progress was not unusual by the middle of this decade. Yet, his fervid advocacy of commercial development and internal improvements initially strikes us as uncharacteristic of Democratic policies of this period.

Prevailing interpretations of the major political parties in the antebellum era maintain that

Jacksonian Democrats and their Whig rivals coalesced around starkly opposed economic platforms. Jacksonians exhibited a zealous circumspection of government intervention in the economy, while Whigs eagerly embraced a comprehensive, national plan for economic development. Conceived by Whig Congressman Henry Clay and dubbed the American System,

1 Cleveland Plain Dealer, 7 April 1845; 11 April 1845. The go-ahead age perhaps was best represented by Samuel F. B. Morse‟s new invention of the telegraph the previous year, which revolutionized the transmission of information and the newspaper industry. Gray‟s editorial appeared less than a week after the federal government began charging customers to use the federal telegraph line connecting Baltimore and Washington, D.C. As a result, reporters and correspondents (acting as liaisons for several papers rather than as professional employees of a single journal) assumed supreme importance in transmitting news from the nation‟s capitol to distant tribunes. Menahem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994): 44. 63

the Whig platform called for a national bank to manage the nation‟s currency supply and for federal funding of transportation improvements that would link regional markets into a national system. These improvements, in turn, would be funded by the proceeds of a protective tariff designed to encourage manufacturing and provide government revenue. Jacksonian Democrats vigorously opposed this system, arguing that the Constitution did not grant the federal government the necessary, specific powers to create a national bank and fund internal improvements. Not surprisingly, President Andrew Jackson sought to dismantle the incipient

American System, refusing to re-charter the United States Bank in 1835, and selectively vetoing federal funding for certain internal improvements.

Democratic hostility to the American System grew markedly in response to the periodic panics and business contractions that characterized the fitful emergence of a burgeoning national market system. This new and increasingly volatile national economy gradually re-shaped both the partisan dynamic and the economic policies of the country‟s major parties. The Panic of 1837 was defined by a spate of bank and business failures due to a sudden contraction of credit, as well as the near bankruptcy of several states that had borrowed heavily to fund internal improvements. The post-World War II generation of historians, influenced by emerging studies of the Great Depression, examined the visceral responses of the two parties to the calamitous depression that followed the Panic. They concluded that the Panic shaped Democrats into an organization that yearned for a return to agrarian, republican simplicity and turned its back on the new, frightening and modern economic order. The party called for the destruction of chartered banks, the end of inflationary paper currency, and a halt to government funding of improvements. Whigs, in contrast, shrugged off the results of the Panic and intrepidly forged ahead, confident that continued market expansion would render the economy gradually less 64

volatile and the nation progressively more prosperous and stable. All that was needed, they argued, was to stay the course. In these concerted actions, the major political parties assumed starkly opposed views of the new market economy and its benefits to society.2

Depression Era interpretations of the Democrats had been quite different. Bernard De

Voto and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, for example, had portrayed Democrats as a dynamic, innovative, and forward-looking party. They credited the party with settling the continent, spreading democratic institutions westward, and unleashing the country‟s commercial and industrial might. The New Deal, the Democratic Party‟s revolutionary response to economic catastrophe, especially had shaped Schlesinger‟s celebratory portrayal of antebellum Democrats.3

However, the post-World War II era saw a dramatic revision of this portrait. Marvin

Meyers pioneered this change fifty years ago, when he framed the supposedly divergent mindsets that defined Democrats and Whigs in his seminal study, The Jacksonian Persuasion. He concluded, “Whigs distinctively affirmed the material progress of American life as it was going; and they promised to make it go faster.” In sharp contrast, Democrats were timid, “venturesome conservatives,” distrustful of the “insubstantial world” of credit and paper (bank) money that encouraged irresponsible speculation and built up an overweening, paper aristocracy.4 They lashed out at institutions of the new economic order, principally banks and corporations, fearing that those institutions undermined traditional modes of work and stolid accumulation of wealth.

2 On the role of the 1837 recession in hardening partisan economic ideals, see Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development: from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1992). For the internal Democratic debate over the party‟s response to the Panic of 1837, see James Rogers Sharp, The Jacksonians Versus the Banks: Politics in the States After the Panic of 1837 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). 3 See Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), The Course of Empire (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1952); and Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson. 4 Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957): 13, 26, 50. On the Market Revolution, see Charles Grier Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 65

In so doing, the new market economy eroded social stability. According to Meyers‟ framework, these partisan mindsets became self-sustaining and self-perpetuating, for the parties attracted supporters who already shared their mindsets and reflexively supported their policies.

Glyndon Van Deusen, an admiring chronicler of the Whigs, seconded Meyers‟ characterization of the two parties‟ adherents. He patronized Jacksonian Democrats for joining

“an appreciation of the common man, and a desire to serve his needs and aspirations, with an inadequate concept of the economic methods by which liberty and equality might be achieved and maintained on behalf of the masses of mankind.”5 Consequently, Democrats tilted at the

United States Bank and chartered corporations like Don Quixote at so many windmills, for they feared that such institutions created an ersatz aristocracy in an otherwise egalitarian society.

Their unsophisticated opposition to corporate development only exacerbated the fitful market cycles of expansion and contraction.

The New Political History that emerged in the 1960s sought a more sophisticated explanation of partisan behavior, moving beyond fuzzy notions of the role of mindsets and partisan ideologies. Turning instead to rigorous quantitative analysis of voting patterns, these studies concluded that ethnic and cultural background, not class or economic ideals, drove partisan affiliation. Moreover, the institutional dynamics of partisan competition, not ideology, shaped party platforms. As Michael Holt put it, Democrats did not oppose the American System because it offended their principles. They did so because it was a Whig system, and they needed to provide their voters with an alternative to that plan at the ballot box.6

5 Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: 26, 50. Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Jacksonian Era (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959): xi. 6 Lee Benson is perhaps the best-known pioneer of these methods. See The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: 47-57. Benson revealed the intersection of cultural parochialism and economic ideals in this work. Native-born, Protestant New Yorkers tended to see immigrants and Catholics as undisciplined, unproductive and 66

Still, these methods largely represented a different route to the same conclusions regarding partisan economic thought. For example, in his magisterial history of the Whig party, Holt concluded,

Democrats were a coalition of those still outside the market economy who feared its spread and those who had experienced and been victimized by market mechanisms. Whigs, in contrast, attracted those who wanted to expand the market sector because they had already enjoyed its benefits or hoped to do so in the future.7

This interpretation of Democratic and Whig thought echoed the assessment of the two parties in

Lawrence Kohl‟s The Politics of Individualism. In that study Kohl opined, “the Jacksonian

looked out on a world organized to thwart his ambitions,” in which, “modern methods of credit

and new means to create money, which Whigs considered agents of liberation, seemed quite the

opposite to the Jacksonian – they were attempts to rob him of his freedom.” In contrast, Kohl‟s

prototypical Whig felt “little frustration with his world” and “expressed great confidence that he

and the country were destined to prosper.”8

This characterization of the economically circumspect Democrat, the man who Charles

Sellers claimed clung to “yesterday‟s radicalism” in the face of “a threatening tomorrow,” has

been so reified in the literature, that even attempts to correct it fall short. In his incisive

biography of the party, The Rise of American Democracy, Sean Wilentz cogently argued that

radical Democrats simply favored a “modulated commercial system partially regulated by a

democratically elected federal government,” rather than “a commercial system run wholly by

and foremost for capitalists,” as Whigs apparently desired. Yet, Wilentz‟s Democrats remained

loyal to foreign potentates, rather than their new home, so that they embodied none of the values of self-reliance, individualism and industriousness of natives. As such, natives saw these foreign masses as a brake on economic dynamism and a burden on the economy. 7 Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 115. 8 Lawrence Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989): 21, 29, 63. 67

committed to hard money and resolutely opposed the “credit-and-paper, boom-and-bust system” that, he insisted, defined Whig economic planning.9 Indeed, true Democrats, in Wilentz‟s view eschewed debt-funding of internal improvements and other profligate plans of economic development.

This paradigm presumes the existence of fairly stable partisan mindsets without investigating the processes by which they developed. These scholarly investigations did not account for the role of newspapers as the omnipresent medium through which partisan principles were communicated to devotees, shaping their mindsets. Consequently, they missed or ignored important aspects of the messages people received through their party papers. For instance, these histories tended to conclude that Democrats had been almost thoroughly radicalized by the Panic of 1837 and, either out of ignorance or probity, began to view the market as a threat to equal rights. This ignores the fact that intra-party debates over economic policy raged ferociously with the return of prosperity by the mid-1840s.

Moreover, the misplaced focus on partisan mindsets overlooks a crucial aspect of party thought in this period, particularly among Democrats: the editors who shaped and propagated party attitudes were creative, energetic, and undaunted economic boosters. Particularly during the Polk Administration, these editors began to argue that a dynamic market shaped through wise policy could be a powerful engine for the growth of individual wealth and communal progress.

Embracing this “progressive” ethic, some Democrats began to theorize that corporate economic activity itself could be structured to further, rather than assail, equal rights in the marketplace and in society.

9 Charles Grier Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian American, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991): 342. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005): 440, 511. 68

The historiography, which focuses mostly on the policy and pronouncements of the national parties, consequently ignores the formation of economic goals and partisan principles at the local level. Donald Ratcliffe perceptively noted in a 1996 essay that “Jackson‟s policies had served to decentralize [economic] issues and shift the responsibility for furthering the market revolution onto the states,” leaving state Democratic leaders in a quandary over how best to accomplish that.10 This quandary still has not been explicated sufficiently in the literature. Surely the national leadership of the Democratic Party expected the various states to employ a variety of solutions to this problem. In this environment, Democratic editors sponsored a variety of development programs, some of which were at odds with the principles of the party or its policies under Polk.

This chapter argues that both inter-party and intra-party conflicts over economic platforms among northern Democrats were highly localized in their features. Thus, the allegedly unifying shibboleths of the Democratic Party, such as opposition to the Monster Bank or the aristocratic American System, had only limited power to unite the Democratic masses. Indeed, in the post-Jackson era, the Democrats appear to have been a much more fragile coalition in the

North than the historiography has hitherto captured.11 Specifically, geographic expansion and the pursuit of free trade by the Polk Administration in the 1840s introduced new issues into the

Democratic Party that strained its unity. Domestic and international economic policy became

10 Donald Ratcliffe, “The Crisis of Commercialization: National Political Alignments and the Market Revolution, 1819-1844” in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800- 1880, Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996): 186. 11 The standard work on Democratic political culture, which delineates the complex of beliefs, prejudices and symbols that allegedly united and defined Democrats, remains Baker, Affairs of Party. John Lauritz Larson recovers some of the local exigencies that shaped debates over internal improvements. Not strictly a study of partisan policy toward improvements, he argues that selfish parochialism doomed numerous improvement projects that might have tied the states more firmly together commercially and spread the country‟s wealth. Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 69

intimately intertwined, shaping northern Democrats‟ perceptions of where their community and region stood in the national economy and in the wider world as well.12

Expansion and Free Trade During the Polk Administration

The inauguration of Democratic President James K. Polk in March 1845 was a catalyst for profound change in the outlook of the Democratic Party. Polk narrowly won election to the presidency on a boldly expansionist platform that sought the annexation of Texas, the acquisition of California (then part of Mexico) and the incorporation of the entire Oregon Territory into the

Union.13 Historians often have focused on these dramatic diplomatic goals as the distinguishing features of the Polk presidency. However, these issues did not stand alone, for they were linked to an expansionistic commercial policy. The President also promised to lower the tariff (a plan that Democrats touted as “free trade”) to increase American exports and spread commercial wealth throughout the growing republic.

Historians have noted that the twin planks of geographic and commercial expansion appealed to a young generation of politically active men, the so-called Young Americans, who saw it as their generation‟s providential mission to spread republicanism and liberty throughout the hemisphere (and even beyond). This ethic of expansion received its fullest expression in the

12 Perhaps the best recent work that explores the connections between expansion and the economy is Yonatan Eyal‟s Young America and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828-1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 13 Before Polk could take office, the outgoing president, Democrat-turned-Whig John Tyler, effected the annexation of Texas through a joint resolution of Congress. Though Polk promised to revisit the process of annexation upon his inauguration, he eventually assented to the fait accompli. In 1846 Britain and the United States jointly occupied Oregon. British Canada claimed the northern half of the immense territory, above the 49th parallel. The Democratic Party claimed the entire territory up to 54˚ 40′. The Polk Administration eventually acquiesced to division of the territory at the 49th parallel in June 1846. 70

self-serving, imperialistic concept of Manifest Destiny.14 Territorial expansion, even through militant means, appealed to the aggressively nationalist Young Americans, but the party‟s economic platform, in which that same expansion would serve commercial growth, appealed to an even broader range of devotees and voters.

National expansion was integrally linked to free trade principles that defined the economic persuasion of Polk‟s administration. Progressive Democrats consistently argued that free trade would provide equal opportunity for all to achieve prosperity, and they cheerfully anticipated a new era, in which the government also would promote transportation and communication improvements that would accelerate economic growth and spread its benefits throughout the country. Yet, the new President was a devoted, radical protégé of Andrew

Jackson, and he had no plans to commit the federal government to investing in internal improvements. On this score, many radical Democrats would claim Polk as one of their own, a staunch Jacksonian true to the party‟s radical principles. However, undaunted progressives (who rivaled Whigs in their support for government sponsored internal improvements) claimed ideological kinship with him too, due to Polk‟s support for expanded commercial activity at home and abroad. The predictable result was that Polk inspired increasingly fractious debates over the party‟s principles and platforms, which strained Democratic cohesion.

Polk and expansionist Democrats were tapping into a popular anticipation of looming material progress. Despite the Panic of 1837, the 1840s brought rising wages and increasing

14 Young Americans came from both major political parties, but tended to be Democrats. Thus, it was a consciously political, but not consistently partisan, movement. It was a chauvinistic and racist cultural movement that sought to establish the United States‟ unique cultural, economic and political superiority in the wider world. See Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Robert May, Manifest Destiny‟s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); On Young America‟s political impact on the Democrats and the nation, see Eyal, Young America and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828-1861. 71

capital investment in agriculture, transportation, and manufacturing. Many Americans seemed to feel that they were on the precipice of substantial change, when the United States would assume its place in the first rank of nations in terms of expanse, wealth and power. Indeed, economic historians have noted that the period from 1840 to 1860 witnessed a significant increase in per capita production, or output, in the United States.15 Tapping the country‟s productive potential and the people‟s teeming enthusiasm for growth, Polk based his economic policy on free trade, designed to increase commercial activity.

Polk‟s “free trade” policy made sense only when linked with expanding market opportunities. Western expansion, Democrats argued, provided such opportunities. With expanded home markets, a protective tariff was no longer necessary, they concluded. To that end, Polk worked to replace the protective tariff with the revenue principle, which lowered tariff duties to a level commensurate with providing the federal government with sufficient income to meet its necessary functions and expenditures. Ultimately, Polk‟s Secretary of the Treasury,

Mississippi‟s Robert J. Walker, designed a bill that mixed the revenue and protective principles, in order to broaden the appeal of tariff reform.16

15 Walt Rostow famously argued that 1840 to 1860 was the “take-off” point for American industrialism, during which per capita production, or output, rose dramatically. Thomas Weiss subsequently debunked the “take- off” theory and concluded that productivity increased gradually and steadily throughout the 1800s. Still, the increase in productivity from 1840 to 1860 outstripped previous decades. Walter W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). See especially chapter four. Thomas Weiss, “Economic Growth Before 1860: Revised Conjectures,” in American Economic Development in Historical Perspective, Thomas Weiss and David Schaefer eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994): 11-27. 16 The tariff provided between 90 and 99% of all federal revenue. More important, it allowed the government to raise funds without taxing the general population or property, either of which might include slaves. As Robin Einhorn recently concluded, “the impost was the only tax Congress could adopt without talking about slavery.” Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006): 120. Still, debates over tariff reform invariably threatened to re-ignite sectional arguments over the distribution of the costs and the benefits of the tariff and slavery‟s role in federal apportionment. On the role of slavery in tax debates during the early days of the republic, See Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government‟s Relations to Slavery, completed and edited by Ward McAfee (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001): 24-27. 72

Democrats also teamed the Walker Tariff bill with a warehousing bill that would allow merchants to keep imports in federal warehouses duty-free for up to a year. The purpose of the latter bill was to curry support for the Walker tariff among merchants by allowing them the flexibility to store their goods and then pay duties at times of optimum cash flow and high prices.

George B. Moore, a Democratic leader and editor of the Belfast Republican Journal noted that the warehousing system would allow merchants of small capital to better compete with large merchant firms. Under the old system, merchants had to pay duties on all of their imports as soon as they were landed, before they could be sold. This meant that only heavily-capitalized firms had the cash on hand to pay for large volumes of imported goods. The warehousing system finally allowed more modest merchants to store high volumes of imports in government warehouses and sell them piecemeal, until they recouped enough money to pay their duties.

Despite the opposition of protectionist Pennsylvania Democrats and Whigs to both measures,

Congress passed the Walker Tariff on July 29, and the House passed the warehousing bill on

August 1, 1846.17

The Walker tariff also was integral to Polk‟s diplomatic policies, for it encouraged the loosening of import restrictions in the German states and the repeal of the Corn Laws in Great

Britain, opening those markets to American agricultural exports. To John Harmanson, a

Democratic representative from Louisiana, the tariff would be the linchpin of a commercial empire. Through the Walker Tariff, he argued,

17 Debate on the warehousing bill was surprisingly brief, but some Whigs objected that it functioned as de facto patronage and gave the federal government influence over merchants, which it could employ to manipulate the economy. See The Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 1st Session, John Rives ed. (Washington DC: Rives 1846): 718, 1174. See also Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 1st Session: 1164. The motion to take up the warehousing bill on the day it was passed carried by a narrow 88-80 vote. Moore expressed his support for the positive effects of the warehousing bill in 1850, after it had been in operation nearly four years. See Belfast Republican Journal, 25 January 1850. 73

We will carry out the great principles of free trade. We will take that position among the nations of the earth that nature intended. We will freight our thousands of ships to every quarter of the habitable globe, carrying peace and comfort to every man‟s door; a Bible to teach him the true doctrines of Christianity; our declaration of rights, that he may know his own, and learn to respect those of others. And ere half a century passes by, the stars and stripes will float in every part of the habitable world. No longer will it be sung that Britannia rules the waves. Her day will have passed; her power will have gone into other hands. It will be our proud boast that America rules the waves.18

This empire would not be centered in the United States‟ thriving commercial ports, but rather in the expanding West, the nation‟s pre-eminent producer of agricultural commodities. To tap that region‟s burgeoning resources and allow the emergence of this nascent commercial empire, many northern Democrats began to promote transportation systems that would link western producers with eastern and international markets. Ironically, Polk‟s own economic and diplomatic policies thus inspired challenges to his beloved radical creed, which opposed federal funding for local internal improvements.19

Despite the latent contradictions in the Polk platform, the President and his party enjoyed several stunning successes by the summer of 1846. By February of that year, Texas had accepted annexation by the U.S. By June, Polk had negotiated a compromise settlement of the Oregon boundary with Britain, after unilaterally terminating joint occupation of the territory. Finally, by

July, he had signed the Walker Tariff into law, seizing the initiative for economic development from the rival Whigs. Yet, these successes carried ominous portents for the future, beginning

18 Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 1st Session: 748. 19 Marc Egnal has concluded that the rise of the Great Lakes economy strained and ultimately shattered the bonds of the existing party system. The necessity of improving the access of Lakes region products to the major national and international markets increased intra-party conflict among Democrats and lessened conflicts between pro-improvement Democrats and Whigs. Following Michael Holt‟s model that declining differentiation between the major parties turned off voters, Egnal argued that voters in that region began to abandon Democrats for the Free Soil and Republican standards. See Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009). Egnal‟s thesis does help explain how regional economic interests undermined the stability of the major parties and voters attachment to them. Yet, it over-reaches in claiming that this was a primary cause of the Civil War. His work also presumes that most Lakes region Democrats who supported internal improvements funding eventually joined with Free Soilers and Republicans. However, there were significant populations of pro- development Democrats who fought both new parties as zealously as they had fought the Whigs.

74

with local challenges to Democratic radicalism. The national administration‟s bold economic program met with approbation from boosterish party newspapers, whose editors immediately envisioned prodigious local largesse as a result of increasing national wealth. Polk‟s policies did not necessarily purchase the unquestioning loyalty of these editors, though. Indeed, their vested interest in the growth of their communities consistently trumped their commitment to the

(radical) party line. This lent an almost schizophrenic quality to the press, in which many

Democratic editors clamored for some federal funding of potentially valuable internal improvements, only to reverse course and congratulate the president for his scrupulous vetoes of such legislation.

Still, national and market expansion in the 1840s undoubtedly encouraged a more progressive, market-friendly outlook among many northern Democrats. These self-styled

“progressive” Democrats rejected radical notions that government involvement in the economy created artificial classes and strained the social harmony of the republic. Instead, they saw an expanding market, aided by state and federal government, as the very embodiment of equal opportunity for all citizens. Historian Daniel Walker Howe concluded that economic development indeed, “broadened and enhanced” American democracy, but he credited development-minded Whigs for that fact.20 Progressive Democrats, on the other hand, anticipated that the market could be a bulwark of democracy, rather than a bastion of aristocracy (as it allegedly was under Whig direction). By promoting easier incorporation laws and networks of transportation systems, the North‟s progressive Democrats sought to break down class and ensure market access to all. This led to a conflicted Democratic Party, as partisan editors actively

20 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007): 850-851. 75

questioned the party‟s radical principles and its economic limitations, while striving to re-fashion the party‟s distinctive creed to fit the dynamism of the accelerating market revolution.

International Development and Provincial Anxiety in Maine

Maine shipping accounted for a large share of the United States‟ carrying trade in the antebellum period. Yet, its manufacturing and commerce were dwarfed by eastern Massachusetts and the port of Boston, and the state produced little of the agricultural commodities that were increasingly in demand in Europe. Polk‟s election on a platform of national expansion, allowed

Pine Tree State Democrats to envision a new role for the state in the burgeoning national and international market systems. The state‟s Whigs worried that the annexation of Texas and expansion to the Pacific would diminish Maine‟s political clout in a growing nation, but Charles

Holden, editor of the Eastern Argus and the chairman of the Democratic Central Committee, saw tremendous opportunity for the party and the state in this expansion. His home of Portland was the state‟s largest city and a spacious deep-water port that was closer to Europe than any other major port in the country. If the state could develop internal improvements to connect itself with western markets, it then could command a significant portion of the western trade bound for

Europe.

Indeed, the state‟s Democratic leaders argued that judicious improvement of the state‟s several navigable rivers and the development of rail networks would successfully exploit the state‟s natural advantages. Since the financial panic of 1837, radical Democrats had characterized internal improvements as profligate schemes to manipulate commerce, but now

Maine‟s Democratic leaders promoted internal improvements as a prudent means to enhance the state‟s natural commercial advantages. The centerpiece of the improvements they promoted was 76

the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, a road that was chartered in February 1845 to link

Portland with Montreal, Canada.

William Pitt Preble, a founding member of the state Democratic Party and a state

Supreme Court justice, predicted that this railroad would end the state‟s economic vassalage to

Boston capitalists and merchants. In a speech to the state legislature to promote funding of the road, he opined, “our connection with Boston is not a natural one, but entirely artificial. Boston has been, and now is, seeking to make Maine merely an appendage to her, when nature never designed such a connection.” Preble boldly argued that the state needed to wean itself from

Boston‟s capital and the transport networks that diverted Maine trade to that city. He concluded,

“so long as we play „second fiddle‟ to Massachusetts, so long our great interests will suffer. We must go to work „on our hook,‟ or we never shall rank as the God of Nature intended we should.”21

The promise of economic independence proved irresistible to a boosterish editor like

Holden. Tirelessly soliciting investors for the Atlantic and St. Lawrence, the editor appeared to equate that single project with his party‟s improvement goals generally. Holden believed the state‟s small producers desperately wanted easier access to markets through systemic improvements. Ironically though, the editor essentially deserted this constituency in his promotion of corporate growth. The paper trumpeted an economic program tailored to the investment needs of The Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, fighting for exclusive privileges in

21 Eastern Argus, 10 June 1846. Preble went so far as to discourage the state from supporting a Massachusetts plan to push a narrow gauge railroad through New Hampshire into the manufacturing center of Lewiston, Maine. The Atlantic and St. Lawrence‟s corporate officers decided on a wide gauge of five feet, six inches for their road, in part because they believed that a wide gauge was superior in moving great quantities of commodities, but also because they wanted to prevent Massachusetts‟ standard gauge lines from being able to intersect with their road and divert traffic toward Boston. See William R. Siddall, “Railroad Gauges and Spatial Interaction,” Geographical Review, vol. 59 no. 1 (Jan. 1969): 37. 77

its charter and siding with the corporation in disputes with its investors. Holden believed these decisions were necessary to bring this project to fruition and bring more commercial traffic and wealth to Portland (and the state). However, these same decisions flagrantly contradicted the avowed principles of the party, which sought to limit the power of corporations to preserve the liberties and encourage economic opportunities of individual producers.22

Shortly after the legislature‟s passage of the Atlantic & St. Lawrence‟s charter, radical legislators proposed a bill that would have made individual investors liable for all corporate debts, rather than holding them liable only up to the amount of capital they had invested in the corporation. Through the pages of the Argus, Holden assailed the bill as a misguided measure that would become an obstacle to corporate investment. The Argus subsequently reminded its readers that the Portland-Montreal railroad was just such a project “where capitalists at a distance, and out of the State, and even in Europe, would cheerfully risk certain sums, with the prospect of gain, without the individual liability, who would not touch a dollar of the stock with it.”23 Holden argued that rather than an ill-conceived personal liability law, Maine‟s citizens would be better served by a law limiting corporate debt to the amount of its paid capital stock.

Tellingly, however, no such bill came forth from the state‟s Democratic legislature in 1845.

With its opposition to the personal liability law, the most influential Democratic organ in the state asserted that the party no longer was the implacable foe of monopolies, as it had been under Jackson. This represented a dramatic, if not unprecedented, rupture with radical,

22 The Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad Corporation was bipartisan in its make-up. Whigs John Alfred Poor and John Neal (a virulently nativist lawyer) joined Preble as founders of the corporation. However, Democrats asserted a symbolic ownership of the project, particularly in the pages of Holden‟s newspaper. In the state legislature Whigs and progressive Democrats combined to pass the bill chartering the road by an astounding 104-10 vote. The only opposition came from radical Democrats centered in the state‟s mid-coast region, far removed from the location of the proposed railroad. See Phineas Barnes to John Neal, 8 February 1845. Atlantic & St. Lawrence Railroad Company Records, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library. 23 Eastern Argus, 12 March 1845. Quotation from Eastern Argus, 27 February 1845. 78

Jacksonian ideals. Whereas radicals saw special corporate privileges as an affront to the equal rights of all citizens, Holden suggested that corporate privileges spurred market investment, which in turn expanded market opportunities for all. He thus placed equal opportunity ahead of the concept of equal rights that was the foundation of his party.

In exasperation at this seeming heresy, the radical Belfast Republican Journal groused,

“there is no distinction between his [Holden‟s] position and that of the federal [Whig] papers of this State.” The editor of the Republican Journal saw a dangerous tendency in Holden‟s plan to augment the rights of corporations at the expense of the rights of common citizens and small producers. This tendency obliterated the principles that had defined the Democratic Party since the days of Jackson, and the Journal insinuated that it drove radicals in some localities to abandon the ticket in that Spring‟s local elections.24

Similarly, the stupefied editor of the Bangor Whig and Courier, the leading Whig journal in eastern Maine, sourly complained, “the leaders of the democracy whose mouths were so short time ago full of bitterness are now eloquent in their praises of corporations – have forgotten they were once monopolies, and now out-whig the Whig party in supporting them.” John Poor was a

Whig and the man who both conceived of the Portland to Montreal rail link and did the most to organize the corporation. Years later, he noted that certain Democratic leaders had “made no secret of their design to throw party overboard on the railway question, and, if need be, break down their party in the State on it, rather than longer forego the advantages of railroads.”25

24 Belfast Republican Journal, 21 March 1845. Democrats routinely referred to their Whig rivals as “Federals” or “Federalists” in an often successful effort to stain them with the aristocratic taint of that defunct party. 25 Bangor Whig and Courier, 5 March 1845; John A. Poor, Memoir of Honorable Reuel Williams: Prepared for the Maine Historical Society (Cambridge, Massachusetts: H. O. Houghton and Co. 1864): 45. Poor‟s brother, Henry Varnum Poor, made a successful career of collecting and providing statistics and insurance for railroads. He later founded the Standard and Poor‟s corporation. 79

Holden and the Argus were in the vanguard of this effort to change the party‟s economic outlook or throw it over, as Poor put it.

Poor‟s claim was strikingly accurate, for the railroad issue threatened to divide Maine‟s

Democrats. Indeed, radicals protested the failure of the liability bill, and regular Democrats even suspected them of abandoning the party‟s slate of candidates in the 1845 state canvass. Despite these ominous portents, the party held together in the main. In fact, the progressive leadership of the party had boldly repudiated radical Jacksonian principles precisely because its radical wing was largely impotent and unable to rebuke progressives at the ballot box. Democratic triumph in the state elections despite the alleged radical defection only emboldened Holden in his singular cause.26

In contrast, Maine‟s aimless Whigs were floundering after their failure in 1844.

Democrats‟ visionary platform of internal improvements, expansion and free trade deprived

Whigs of their traditional monopoly of internal improvement as a campaign issue in 1845.

Having consistently argued in the past that internal improvements and market expansion would bequeath material and moral progress to the nation, Maine Whigs now were in the odd position of arguing that these same programs, without sufficient protection of manufacturing, instead would bring destitution and ruin. Heading into the 1845 election, the state‟s first referendum on the Polk Administration‟s policies, Whigs argued that Texas annexation and free trade, rather than increasing market activity, would only degrade the American laborer. Furthermore, expansion and increased exports of the agricultural bounty of the young West also would only serve to shift wealth and political clout to that region, away from the old Northeast, they argued.

26 On the defections of radicals, see Kennebec Journal, 21 February 1845 and Eastern Argus, 19 September 1845. 80

To discredit the seductive allure of free trade, Luther Severance‟s Kennebec Journal relentlessly tied Polk‟s policies to the aggrandizement of slavery. The paper castigated Senator

John Calhoun‟s contention that annexation would safeguard the growth of slavery and thereby drive down the prices of slaves and the items they produced. Severance sardonically asked, “if the policy of cheapening labor is so very desirable – if we are to obtain the most work at the least cost, why not repeal the prohibition against the foreign slave trade?” Then, the United States could undersell the products of Europe, and “slavery on both shores would be the great lever by which all labor, in every department would be made as cheap as possible consistent with mere animal subsistence.”27 Severance‟s critique was not so much designed to assail slavery as it was to defend Whig concepts of free labor. To Whigs, free labor encouraged self-reliance, perseverance and ingenuity in pursuit of self-advancement. However, cheapening labor would remove this goad to self-improvement and sink laborers into inescapable poverty, he argued.28

Appealing to Maine‟s producing classes, Severance argued that free trade also would put

American laborers at a disadvantage in international competition. Because the surplus of labor in

England depressed wages, English monopolists could out-produce American capitalists at cheaper rates. Severance‟s Journal lauded the status of the American laborer who, “does not labor for a bare subsistence,” unlike his English counterpart, “but receives such a reward for his industry as enables him, by prudence and economy, to accumulate something with which to commence a career of prosperity.” To put the ennobled American laborer on a par with English hirelings in the international market would “level down” the American, “instead of leveling up”

27 Kennebec Journal, 14 February 1845. 28 On Whig concepts of free labor, see Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs. On the belief that free labor was the route to entrepreneurship and future wealth, see Gabor S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 81

the English laborer.29 The congressman hoped to highlight the great contradiction that bedeviled the Democratic Party: that it was a party that defended equal rights and uplifted the producing classes, while also defending the property rights of aristocratic slave owners.

Whigs further complained that free trade favored the growing West over the settled East.

Britain‟s repeal of their Corn Laws unleashed tremendous demand for American agricultural products. The Journal sagaciously noted, “We can never compete with the great West in raising grain, pork, beef, or any kind of provisions or wool, for export.” Severance predicted that the increase in the West‟s rich agricultural export trade would encourage fully one quarter of

Maine‟s population to desert for the West, leaving the state bereft of labor, politically weakened in the House of Representatives, and economically stagnant.30 However, Severance‟s arguments availed little, both in Maine and in the Congress. Despite lengthy debate, the Walker Tariff earned easy passage on July 29, 1846, having been supported by Maine‟s entire Democratic contingent and only consistently opposed by one of their two Whig senators, the well-regarded

George Evans.31

For Severance and his Whig colleagues in Maine, the Walker Tariff was simply another symptom of Polk‟s pervasive truckling to western interests. The congressman pointedly complained that the Administration had refused to settle a dispute between Maine and New

Brunswick, in which the latter had imposed duties on American lumber floated down the St.

John‟s River (their common border) in violation of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. The unjust imposition of duties was a flagrant rebuke to Polk‟s free trade principles, yet the

29 Kennebec Journal, 23 February, 27 February, 13 March 1846. 30 Kennebec Journal, 20 February 1846. For an example of the genealogy of the fear of the West as a drain on labor and talent, see Bernard Bailyn‟s contribution to the Merle Curti lectures in Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: an Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1986): 9, 39. 31 The Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 1st Session (Washington D.C.: Rives, 1846): 1159. Whig opposition to the Walker Tariff was somewhat softened by the fact that it would not take effect until the new year. 82

administration did not complain to the British government. Remarking on Polk‟s absorption in squabbles over Cabinet appointments during this dispute, the editor sardonically mused,

The administration may regard the interests of Maine as subordinate to the settlement of their party feuds and difficulties; but the people down here look at it differently. They have the idea (somewhat old fashioned and obsolete perhaps) that the officers of our National Government were elected partly for the purpose of regulating our foreign affairs, and protecting the interests of the several States which the people have committed to their trust.32

Exacerbating this neglect, in the spring of 1845 the Administration successfully fought an amendment to a river and harbors bill that would have appropriated $15,000 for the improvement of the Kennebec River, one of the state‟s two most important commercial thoroughfares. The amendment had the support of both Democrats and Whigs in the Kennebec Valley, where the capitol of Augusta lay, but that did not prevent its defeat. The President justified his opposition to the amendment by arguing that only interstate river systems ought to receive federal support (a position that the Democrat Holden, despite his zeal for improvements, supported).

However, Severance and his Whig brethren claimed that this was emblematic of unequal treatment in internal improvements doled out between East and West. The Democratic Congress eagerly supported improvements to the Great Lakes, designating them “inland seas” to justify federal expenditures there. Looking to the improvement of the West, the Journal bitterly protested that the president and Congress “seem to regard that portion of the Union as emphatically the nation, and the Atlantic States as only provinces, whenever national improvements are talked of.”33

32 Kennebec Journal, 20 March 1846. 33 Kennebec Journal, 20 March 1846. Severance had sponsored the amendment, but his speech in favor of its adoption was so biting in its attacks on Democratic economic policy and Polk‟s diplomacy, that it appeared to be a pretext for mere partisan grandstanding. 83

While Whigs complained that Polk‟s programs were shifting wealth and power to the

West, Maine Democrats urged the state to view the West as a potential source for its own prosperity. Re-imagining the state‟s place in the Union and the world, Judge Preble argued that by seeking commercial contacts with their western neighbors, they would finally begin to emerge from Boston‟s suffocating commercial imperialism. This westward focus also contained an international dimension, for the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad itself was funded by both

American and British capital, and it ultimately would link with its sister corporation in Canada, the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad, firmly uniting Maine with British North America in commercial partnership.

This fledgling partnership was a notable exception to long-held Democratic hostility toward Britain. Democrats across the nation long had regarded Great Britain as the United

States‟ traditional enemy, and many had supported the annexation of Texas to ward off Britain‟s perceived diplomatic intrigues in the hemisphere. Indeed, Thomas Hietala has shown there was pervasive fear in the United States in 1845 that Britain was scheming to preserve an independent

Texas and to split the Oregon Territory in order to block American expansion. Not merely designed to limit national growth, these moves also were intended to preserve favorable trading relations between Britain, Mexico and Texas, and prevent the United States from possessing valuable ports on the Pacific Ocean that would enable the country to increase its presence in the

Asian trade.34

Yet, Maine‟s Democrats dismissed such fears and heralded the state‟s new relationship with Great Britain at the groundbreaking ceremony for the terminus of the Atlantic and St.

34 Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985). 84

Lawrence in Portland. The symbolic importance of this venture was amply illustrated by the fact that the groundbreaking was the central event of the city‟s Fourth of July celebration in 1846. At this event, several speakers extolled the railroad‟s power to redress New England‟s unfortunate estrangement from Britain since the Revolution. William Paine, a Portland native then practicing law in Bangor, mused that his last memory of his hometown was of Portlanders busily digging earthworks to guard against possible British invasion during the War of 1812. Now ground again was being broken near the city harbor,

But now it is turning up the surface of the earth, not that the engines of war may be planted thereon, but to make way for those of peace and commerce – the termini of an adamantine chain which is to link together two cities, nay, two great reconciled nations, parent and child, in perpetual peace, friendship and prosperity – to help unite the Atlantic with the Pacific, and bind them both in pacific obligations.35

Paine‟s expression of filio-piety toward Britain would have been anathema to most Democrats throughout the country. Yet, it made sense in the context of progressive Democrats‟ advocacy of free trade, a policy which the state party‟s leaders hoped would make the U.S. the crossroads of international trade. Paine‟s remarks represented a tidy summation of the carefully crafted interdependence of these programs of expansion, development, and (free) trade.

Democrat John Anderson, Collector of the Port of Portland and one of the directors of the railroad, echoed Paine‟s filial sentiments. He asked his audience, “what New Englander does not rejoice at the enlargement and quickening of social facilities here, and what New Englander would fail to rejoice at being united to Old England, our parent country, by every possible tie, of mutual honorable interest, and honorable peace?”36 Anderson had been a young adult, attending

35 Eastern Argus, 7 July 1846. A massive public fete preceded the groundbreaking, where more than 6,000 people sat down to a repast of 2,600 pounds of ham and beef, eight kegs of pickles and other sundries. See Robert Babcock, “The Decline of Artisan Republicanism in Portland, Maine, 1825-1850,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 63 no. 1 (March 1990): 29. 36 Eastern Argus, 7 July 1846. Anderson joined fellow Democrats Preble and Holden as both an investor and booster of the rail project. 85

college and then studying law during the War of 1812. Now, this veteran Jacksonian eschewed the deep animosity toward Britain that gripped many of his colleagues and instead welcomed his country‟s rival as a partner in Maine‟s economic progress.

Whether guided more by their “quickening filial sentiments” or their visions of commercial prosperity, Maine Democrats sought to influence Polk Administration diplomacy with Britain to their own ends. In 1846, while many Democrats were counseling war against

Great Britain to seize the entirety of Oregon, Maine‟s Democrats joined with their Whig opponents in calling for a peaceful resolution of the joint occupation of the territory. They wished to see no protracted war that might desolate a region that was integral to their vision of the nation‟s commercial future. Holden‟s Argus already had confidently predicted that an

American Oregon would be “one of the great commercial marts of the world.” More immediately, Judge Preble cautioned that the state must not “make war” against the foreign capital that was so vital to the Atlantic and St. Lawrence. Thus, when the Polk Administration negotiated a compromise settlement of the Oregon boundary, ceding the northern half of the territory to British Canada, Maine Democrats rejoiced.37 To the state‟s Democratic leadership, progressivism meant laying aside outdated, petty animosities and embracing old rivals in new ways for the mutual commercial benefit of both.

Still, the Oregon boundary settlement engendered substantial bitterness among some northern and many western Democrats. They argued that Texas‟ annexation added valuable western territory to the South, while the Oregon settlement robbed the North of its own potentially valuable western territory. Maine Democrats ignored such complaints among their

37 Eastern Argus, 4 September 1845; 10 June 1846. For the fear that British investors would pull out of the project at the prospect of war, see the Eastern Argus, 21 July 1846. 86

colleagues, remaining focused on augmenting the state‟s commercial role in the growing Union.

Their boosterism for internal improvements was not limited to the Atlantic and St. Lawrence

Railroad itself. Indeed, the very purpose of that project was to connect to an ever-expanding chain of transport systems that would funnel western trade through Maine. In pursuit of that goal, in 1847 the state legislature sent a resolution to Congress urging it to fund New Yorker Asa

Whitney‟s plan for a railroad from Lake Michigan to the Pacific (which would run through the newly demarcated Oregon Territory).38 In contrast to Whig fears that Polk‟s westward focus left

Maine out of his national vision, Democrats argued that such a rail system would have the opposite effect, binding the Northeastern states to the West through transcontinental trade.

Connecting the old Atlantic states with the young West, Maine Democrats argued, would make

Maine integral, not peripheral, to the nation‟s geographic and commercial growth.

The ascendancy of the progressive free trade liberals within the Maine Democratic Party significantly altered partisan conflict within the state. Holden had taken the lead in shoving his radical colleagues into the background, while simultaneously “out-whigging” Whigs in promoting internal improvements. Maine Democrats looked to the nation‟s growth with confidence that the state would form a vital part of the channel of trade from the Atlantic to the

Pacific. On the other hand, their Whig opponents, typically characterized by historians as

38 House Document No. 2, 27th Maine Legislature, 2 June 1847. Whitney‟s project was a controversial one, for while the railroad would be government-owned, he demanded a provision that would allow him and his associates to purchase the corridor it would run through (a corridor 60 miles wide) for only sixteen cents per acre (prevailing prices for government land were $1.25 per acre). William Mosley Hall, a Buffalo Democrat lambasted the Whitney plan “as exorbitant, as sordid, and as dangerous in the extreme; more monstrous as a monopoly, if carried out, than even the British East-India Company, and liable to place our foreign commerce, our domestic trade, and our common interests at the mercy of the secret legislation and the secret political influences of a set of foreign stockholders.” Quoted in Robert Fergus, Chicago River and Harbor Convention: An Account of its Origin and Proceedings (Chicago: Fergus Printing, 1882): 99. Hall was no foe of internal improvements. In fact, he was one of the New Yorkers (most of them Whigs) who had called for and organized the 1847 Chicago River and Harbors Convention, which sought to convince the federal government to fund an ambitious national system of improvements. Unlike Hall, Maine‟s progressive Democrats seemed more comfortable with special corporate privileges (if not monopolies themselves) than their progressive colleagues in other states. 87

relentlessly optimistic regarding material progress, beheld the same growth largely with anxiety and foreboding.39 Holden and his colleagues seemed to have won a resounding victory in modernizing the party‟s economic outlook and jettisoning anachronistic principles. Though it seemed to adapt the party to the “go-ahead” age, this dramatic change ultimately engendered new sets of problems and concerns for Pine Tree State Democrats. The new direction of the party caused many radicals to wonder if Holden and the Democratic leadership had transferred their loyalties from the party and its principles to the corporations.

Equal Rights on the Western Reserve

The impotence of radicalism within their party had emboldened Maine Democrats‟ defense of special corporate privileges and speculative continental railroad plans. Consequently, the party‟s progressive leadership appeared to be little more than Whigs in disguise. That was not the case in Ohio, where the radical (or hard money) clique, headquartered in Columbus and led by Ohio Statesman editor Samuel Medary, ruled the state Democracy as their own fiefdom. This powerful group included U.S Senator William Allen of Chillocothe, State Auditor John Brough, and his brother Charles, editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer. Economically progressive (or soft money) Democrats in Ohio chafed at radicals‟ near monopoly of the state party‟s leadership positions.40

39 On the modernizing and progressive persuasion of the Whigs, see Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs and “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North During the Second Party System.” 40 Generally, “soft money” Democrats resided in burgeoning commercial communities that needed credit to fund increased commerce. “Hard money” Democrats, on the other hand, tended to reside in rural areas or established commercial centers (like Cincinnati) with little need for paper money. See Sharp, The Jacksonians Versus the Banks: 176-177, 187-190; and William G. Shade, Banks or No Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics, 1832- 1865 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972): 173. 88

On the state‟s Western Reserve on the southern shore of Lake Erie, progressive

Democrats further found themselves in a minority in a region dominated by Whigs.41 Joseph

Gray, despite his radical bona fides, fashioned a unique Democratic creed that paid lip service to

Columbus‟ hard money values, but appealed to the soft money, or pro-development, desires of the burgeoning commercial community of Cleveland and its Whig-inclined voters. The editor imagined an ambitious plan of internal improvements to rival traditional Whig programs on the

Reserve. Unlike Maine‟s Democratic leaders, whose progressive ideals were driven almost wholly by self-interest, Gray crafted a much more principled progressive style, infused with the principles of equal rights and equal opportunity that were at the heart of his radical principles.

However, his gestures toward soft money would bring him and, by extension, Reserve

Democrats into fratricidal conflict with the radical Columbus clique.

Ohio had become a banner radical state in response to the Panic of 1837. Seduced by the success of New York‟s Erie Canal, the state had engaged in a furious burst of canal and railroad construction from the mid-1820s through 1837. In doing so, it thoroughly revamped the state‟s political and financial structure, appointing a Canal Board to manage construction of internal improvements and allowing that board to establish a de facto state deposit bank system to handle construction contract payments. The seven-member board, led by Whig capitalist Alfred Kelley of Cleveland, was given authority to sell large batches of state bonds to promote canal and railroad construction. An ill-timed 1837 law allowing railroads to subscribe up to 1/3 of their capital stock in state bonds further extended state credit to improvement projects. With the sharp credit contraction that precipitated the Panic of 1837, the majority of railroads defaulted on their

41 The Western Reserve comprised the northeastern portion of Ohio. It was originally known as The Connecticut Western Reserve, for it lay within Connecticut‟s sea-to-sea land grant in its original colonial charter. Connecticut eventually sold the reserve land to Ohio in 1796. 89

obligations to repay the state bonds, costing Ohio nearly $500,000. In order to avoid defaulting on their own contractual payments for canal construction in 1840 and 1841, the Canal Board illegally drew advances from the State Treasurer and sold $300,000 in state bonds at 1/3 below par to the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Corp. (of which Micajah Williams, a Democratic member of the board, was a founding investor). Though Kelley‟s bold actions narrowly averted bankruptcy for the state, radical Democrats saw his behavior as symptomatic of the cause, not the cure, of the Panic.42

Widespread outrage over the Canal Board‟s activities and the suddenly straitened finances of the state allowed Democrats to recapture the governor‟s office and the legislature in

1842. The radical legislature immediately sought to sharply limit the proportion of corporate liabilities to capital on hand. They quickly passed the Latham Act, which strictly limited the amount of paper notes banks could circulate in proportion to their specie reserves, and the

Bartley Act, which required individual liability of stockholders for banks‟ debts. The latter act also mandated the forfeiture of bank charters if any bank refused or was unwilling to redeem its notes in specie at any time. While many existing banks refused to re-incorporate under the

Latham and Bartley Acts, the measures effectively halted the growth of banking in the state and gutted its supply of paper currency and available credit. Desirous of patronage and party harmony, Ohio‟s progressive Democrats reluctantly supported these laws, despite their effect of

42 Harry N. Scheiber, “Alfred Kelley and the Ohio Business Elite, 1822-1859” Ohio History, vol. 87 no. 4 (Autumn 1978): 365-392. Kelley and other commissioners profited enormously from investing in banks in which the commission deposited the proceeds of state bond sales and from investing in lands whose values increased due to canal construction. Scheiber also acknowledged that Kelley‟s actions steadied the state‟s economy, allowing it to emerge from the financial crisis in 1842 with its credit intact. On the use of state bonds to fund railroad construction, see Eugene O. Porter, “Financing Ohio‟s Pre-Civil War Railroads,” Ohio History, vol. 57 no. 3 (July 1948): 215- 226. The state agreed to pay the 6% interest on the state bonds that it loaned to the railroads to sell to investors, with the understanding that the railroads would reimburse the state after the completion of construction. The state recovered less than 40% of the value of these bonds, and much of what it recouped were heavily depreciated railroad stocks. Ohioans came to refer to the 1837 law derisively as the Plunder Law. 90

choking off the state‟s money supply and inviting a flood of shaky notes from out of state banks

(notably from Michigan) that were beyond the reach of the state‟s regulatory laws.

Disturbed by the sudden paucity of reliable credit and chafing at the autocratic methods of radical rule, Ohio progressives split from their radical colleagues in the 1844 election.43 As a result, the radicals‟ hand-picked gubernatorial candidate, David Tod, lost an excruciatingly close election, falling short by only 1,311 votes out of 300,253 cast. The Whigs also narrowly won control of the legislature and the new Whig regime immediately sought to re-establish the state‟s banking system and revise its tax structure to accrue funding for further improvements.

However, pro-development Democrats did not welcome this development. Instead, they feared a return to the unrestrained and aristocratic schemes of the Kelley-led Canal Board.

What the state now needed, according to J. W. Gray‟s Cleveland Plain Dealer, was a free market alternative to radical retrenchment on the one hand and Whig profligacy on the other.

Looking to the Polk Administration‟s bold plans of expansion and free trade for inspiration and legitimacy, Gray used his paper to shape a progressive platform of internal improvements and free market banking that would unleash the productive capital of Ohioans and extend market opportunities to all. Gradually sloughing off his early radicalism, he came to see state encouragement of market growth as the solution to, not the cause of, economic and social inequality in society. Seeking patronage opportunities denied him by Ohio‟s Democratic

43 The state party‟s convention rules allowed unlimited delegates, rather than proportional representation. Since the state convention typically was held in central Ohio, Medary‟s Columbus clique consistently packed it with loyalists before many “legitimate” delegates could arrive. They used this method to dump the soft-money Governor William Shannon in 1844, and nominate the relatively unknown Tod for governor in his place. Gray and the soft money Democratic editors of the Dayton Miamian, and the Chillicothe True Democrat refused to support the ticket. Election figures can be found in The Ohio State Journal, 3 December 1844. On Tod‟s campaign, see Delmer J. Trester, “David Tod and the Gubernatorial Campaign of 1844,” Ohio History, vol. 62 no. 2 (April 1953): 162-178. 91

leadership, the editor linked his economic vision to President Polk‟s platform of free trade and expansion as the surest embodiment of the new progressive spirit of the “go-ahead age.”44

To that end, Gray lobbied to supplant the Whigs‟ chartered banking system with free banking. Free banking had been pioneered in Scotland and then adopted in several U.S. states in the late 1830s in response to radical Democratic assaults on state chartered banking systems.45

Free banking laws generally allowed any group that raised sufficient capital to open a bank. Gray argued that chartered banking obstructed equal opportunity in the marketplace, denied equal political rights and created an ersatz privileged class, by conferring special rights on bankers.

Perhaps more important, the editor believed that the restrictive charter requirements prevented

Ohioans from raising the necessary capital to serve the state‟s productive needs.

While soft-money Democrats like Gray presumably wanted to channel more money into commercial investment, Whigs instead directed capital toward banks, by passing a law that taxed capital invested at trade over $100. Investments in banks were not similarly taxed, because their profits already were capped by law at 6%. Gray angrily contended that the Board of Control (a majority of whom were Whigs) now could regulate the money supply and influence the

44 As Chairman of the Cuyahoga Democratic Central Committee, Gray petitioned Polk unsuccessfully to remove Timothy P. Spencer from his position of postmaster of Cleveland, for consistently failing to promote Democratic candidates for local office (see Cleveland Plain Dealer, 21 November 1845). Gray had a pecuniary interest in trying to replace Spencer in that position. Local postmasters would often use their influence to encourage postal customers to take subscriptions in certain papers (see Leonard, News For All: 15). Polk divided his patronage in Ohio among both softs and hards, seeming to favor neither faction. See Stephen E. Maizlish, The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844-1856 (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1983): 43. 45 The first definitive study on free banking in the United States is Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957): 572-604. Also, see Hugh Rockoff, “The Free Banking Era: A Re-examination,” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, vol. 6 no. 2 (May 1974): 141-167; and “New Evidence on Free Banking in the United States,” The American Economic Review, vol. 74 no. 4 (September 1985): 886-889. In the latter article, Rockoff argued that free banking, despite a relatively high failure rate, produced a more efficient allocation of bank capital and more competitive rates of return than chartered banking. Arthur J. Rolnick and Warren E. Weber‟s quantitative study of the free banking era in the U.S. (1837-1863) similarly found that free banking was a generally stable system. See Rolnick and Weber, “New Evidence on the Free Banking Era,” The American Economic Review, vol. 73 no. 5 (December 1983): 1080-1091. 92

employment of capital in Whig-sponsored improvement projects. He feared that the crafty Whigs had designed a system “not only to regulate the monetary, but the political affairs of the State.”46

With this unprecedented regulatory power, the editor feverishly imagined, the Board of

Control would,

Make money scarce or plenty; the former, whenever a panic is needed to carry an election, the latter, when the cry of „good times‟ will subserve a similar purpose. . . Fairly entrenched with fifteen or twenty banks subject to their „control‟ in different parts of the State, they can wield a power above the people, and will dictate laws for their own benefit. . . They will indeed hold the purse-strings of the State, and with it can „control‟ not only public opinion, but the price of produce. Every farmer and laboring man will be dependent on their administration of the affairs of State ten years hence, and these exchequer barons, this privileged order of charter mongers and money changers will be our masters.47

Gray shrewdly employed the paranoid style in what appeared to be a hard-money assault on the banking system.48 However, his allusion to manipulations of the price of produce underscored his desire not for the destruction of the banks, but rather for more transparent financial markets and a liberalized banking system.

In pursuit of this goal, Gray allied himself with Charles Creighton Hazewell, who bought the Ohio Statesman from Samuel Medary in 1845. Hazewell initially appeared to be a rock- ribbed radical, but subsequently earned radicals‟ wrath by supporting the reform, rather than repeal, of chartered banking. Hazewell insisted that with a free banking system, “guided by an imperative law of trade, specie would flow in upon us, and constitute pretty much the whole of our circulating medium,” rendering state-chartered banks and paper currency unnecessary. Gray approvingly reprinted this and similar editorials in the pages of his Plain Dealer.

Notwithstanding Hazewell‟s assurance that Ohio commerce would attract a sufficient influx of

46 Plain Dealer, 26 July 1845. 47 Plain Dealer, 26 July 1845. 48 See Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays and Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style. 93

specie, both men plainly desired more banks and more paper to finance the state‟s business.

Ohio‟s hard money Democratic leaders saw Hazewell, Gray, and like-minded editors not merely as dissident party members, but as alienated mercenaries, recruited by the Polk Administration to undermine the Columbus clique‟s power in the party.49

Like Holden in Maine, Gray wanted to unleash capital for investment in a railroad project that would command much of the Great Lakes trade. He led Reserve Democrats in promoting a rail line from Cleveland to Cincinnati, intersecting with the state‟s canal system and tying every region of the Buckeye State together in a single transport network. The Plain Dealer anticipated

“a vast amount of trade” from the improvement and confidently predicted that with it,

“Cleveland will be to northern Ohio what Cincinnati is to Southern.”50 The railroad would render

Cleveland into a great commercial depot and allow it to dominate the Great Lakes trade.

Just as Democratic support for internal improvements in Maine forced that state‟s Whigs into the odd position of forecasting economic doom, Gray‟s advocacy of internal improvements on the Reserve engendered uncharacteristic Whig opposition. Elisha Whittlesey, a former Whig congressman and president of the Sandusky, Toledo and Michigan City Railroad, feared that the new road would reduce the value of existing railroads and divert trade from other lake communities, namely Sandusky. In a letter to the radical Democratic Cleveland Herald,

Whittlesey retorted that if Cleveland “wishes to advance rapidly she must adopt liberal measures looking to the whole country and not exhaust her energies in endeavoring to cripple or crush

49 Quotation from Plain Dealer, 27 August 1845, reprinted from the Statesman. See also Plain Dealer, 31 July 1845; 27 August 1845. Gray repeatedly commented on the demand for out-of-state bank notes in Ohio, suggesting that the state lacked sufficient currency to transact business. Worse still, when out-of-state banks failed, Ohioans had no regulatory mechanisms to recover the value of their defaulted notes. See Plain Dealer, 17 June 1845. Medary would buy the Statesman back from Hazewell in 1846, only a year after selling to him. On radical reactions to the editors‟ machinations, see Maizlish, Triumph of Sectionalism: 44-46. Radicals distrusted Polk after he refused to favor them exclusively with patronage and solicited counsel from both soft-money and hard-money leaders in the state. 50 Plain Dealer, 28 June 1845. 94

other towns from a spirit of jealousy.”51 The former congressman‟s complaint echoed the log- rolling mindset of those profligate Ohio legislators who had built the gargantuan canal system.

As we have seen, that system nearly bankrupted the Buckeye State. In contrast, Gray advocated concentrating investment in a single, large improvement project, rather than exhausting capital in a diffuse and potentially wasteful system of improvements.

Gray envisioned a partnership of private and public capital to construct this great road.

Notwithstanding his criticism of the Whig tax on capital invested in trade, in the summer of 1845 the Plain Dealer promoted a plan by which the city of Cleveland would subscribe $100,000 worth of stock in the proposed railroad, to be financed by taxing invested capital. Gray sacrificed political consistency to the capital needs of the improvement. The Whig-led city government agreed to the plan with alacrity, eventually subscribing $200,000 worth of stock.

Civic investment notwithstanding, Gray saw this primarily as a people‟s project. Urging the investment of small producers, the paper asked, “where is the mechanic who cannot take a single share of this stock? Only five dollars are required to be paid down, and time to our citizens is given on that. Let each mechanic in this city take a single share, and the Road is built.”52 The community of Cleveland would secure a bright future for itself by investing in this road, and presumably Gray expected to benefit as well from increased trade, a growing population, and a loyal readership appreciative of his advocacy of the project.

By encouraging the investment of small producers in the project, the journal implicitly rejected radical Democratic fears that corporations were aristocratic entities that subjugated small producers and dominated local markets. Instead, Gray and his progressive comrades

51 Elisha Whittlesey to editors of the Cleveland Herald, 17 May 1845. Elisha Whittlesey Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society. 52 Plain Dealer, 25 June 1845. 95

conceived of railroad investment as one means of mobilizing individual, productive capital and giving producers greater control over the growth of their local economy. Moreover, they saw the stock market itself as a place where the rich and the modest could meet on equal terms to invest their hard-earned capital and reap the social and monetary rewards of the market. Ignoring disparities in wealth and power in this marketplace, the editor celebrated the alleged equality of opportunity to participate in it. Unlike radical Democrats, he promoted a concept of the harmonious union of interests between producers, merchants, and capitalists, embodied in the railroad. As if to underscore this relationship, a gleeful correspondent to Gray‟s newspaper noted a “great change in favor of the farmer,” the iconic small producer, which was “mainly to be ascribed to the opening of canals and the rapidly increasing facilities for business of every kind.”53

The success of those facilities that enlarged trade in Ohio depended heavily upon

President Polk‟s economic platform, particularly the dismantling of protective tariffs that tamped down foreign demand for American goods. Lauding the Walker Tariff, a “hard-working mechanic,” signing himself “Opifex,” lectured the readers of the Plain Dealer that a protective tariff was “a waste of capital – a waste of the means of improvement,” for it only encouraged hoarding in the government. It also diverted money that could have been re-invested in productive ventures toward paying higher prices for both imported and domestic goods.54 The

Plain Dealer heartily concurred in the need to unshackle markets both at home and abroad.

The destruction of the protective tariff also promised to break the overweening power of eastern merchants and begin to weaken what many Ohioans perceived to be eastern domination

53 Letter, “Agricola” to Cleveland Plain Dealer, 29 April 1845. 54 Letter, “Opifex” to Plain Dealer, 1 may 1845. 96

of the federal government. Gray bitterly complained of western acquiescence to eastern political might, and lectured his fellow western editors,

There is too much servility in the Western press. They support Eastern men and measures in preference to their own, they allow nine tenths, yea nineteen twentieths of all the important offices to be filled by Eastern men without complaint. They see their treasures squandered upon the Atlantic Coast, to build unnatural harbors and magnificent Custom Houses without murmur.55

In this criticism of the parasitic East, Gray further revealed his competing loyalties. Seeing himself as both a representative and a servant of the western people, he suggested that western editors were obligated to act in concert, irrespective of party, to demand the region‟s fair share of patronage, federal disbursements, and national respect.

In a noticeably nonpartisan editorial, Gray presaged, “that day we shall welcome, when with such an accession to our representation in Congress, the interests of the West shall be main ones, and when we shall be able to hold the balance of power,” between North and South, while also limiting the political power of New England itself.56 Of course, western expansion, which was crucial to the accession of its representation, was a partisan issue, and the Plain Dealer rallied Reserve Democrats to support the annexation of Texas and the incorporation of the entire

Oregon Territory into the United States. Through these measures the U.S. would secure valuable commercial ports on the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico and would be well positioned to open the continent to Pacific trade routes. The nation‟s traditional enemy, Britain, opposed these measures, The Plain Dealer explained, because,

England has long feared that our institutions, in their progress would overrun California, and thus open to us plenty of good harbors upon the Pacific. The main object she has in obtaining all the upper part of Oregon is to get all the harbors of that territory – well

55 Plain Dealer, 1 August 1845. 56 Plain Dealer, 26 May 1845. 97

knowing that the rest, if allowed to us, could be of very little moment, as it is wholly destitute of a single good harbor.57

If the United States failed to check this “aggression,” Britain would continue to frustrate

American expansion and thereby obstruct its commercial destiny.

Consequently, the Plain Dealer did not distinguish between the annexation of free territory or slave territory. What mattered was defending the nation‟s interests against British intrigue in the region. Not only did the paper support Texas annexation, but it urged the Polk

Administration to do everything possible to keep Spain‟s slave colony of Cuba, and its strategically vital port of Havana, from falling into British hands.58 The Reserve‟s progressives airily dismissed Whig criticism that Texas annexation augmented the strength of slavery and weakened the nation‟s commitment to equal rights and liberty. Gray countered that the evils of slavery ranked second to the evils of “British dominion” in the Americas, and he invoked a utilitarian notion of equal rights when he asserted,

Our motto is, „the greatest good to the greatest number,‟ and we are happy to belong to a party whose acts are based upon this principle. Our creed opposes every species of tyranny over the minds, bodies and pursuits of man, and of whatever name and nation. We do not waste our energies upon a single sectional evil… and let the Shylocks of the money power forge the galling chains of a monster bank upon us. Neither do we waste our sympathies upon the slaves when a tariff taxation is bowing our necks to earth at home. We act with a party who fights for liberty upon its broadest basis.59

The editor re-affirmed that the menacing British presence on the frontier, the restriction of free trade, and the predations of chartered banks, not slavery, were the chief threats to Ohioans‟ liberties.

57 Plain Dealer, 11 July 1845. 58 Plain Dealer, 18 July 1845. Havana had a large, deep-water harbor in close proximity to Caribbean sailing routes. Some Democratic journals feared that Britain would pressure the impoverished Spanish Empire into selling Cuba to the British. For American designs on Cuba, especially those of the filibusters, see May, Manifest Destiny‟s Underworld, and Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. 59 Plain Dealer, 18 July 1845; 20 May 1845. 98

However, the editor‟s assessment of slavery as a negligible threat to western interests would change dramatically during the summer of 1846. The passage of the Oregon compromise treaty (splitting the territory between Britain and the United States at the 49th parallel) and

President Polk‟s veto of the so-called River and Harbors Bill, which would have allocated federal dollars to improve and enlarge several commercial harbors on the Great Lakes, dashed the hopes of Ohio‟s progressive Democrats. Gray had supported the country‟s claims to all of

Oregon both out of national pride and regional interest, for it would mean,

Our commerce will increase, and we shall become the great highway of nations in the future commerce with China, and in the trade of the Pacific. If we omit this golden opportunity, we lower our national dignity and give up our bright prospect of future independence.60

When the Senate ratified the compromise treaty on 18 June 1846, the editor lamented the loss of

Vancouver Island and its superior harbors to the British as much as he lamented the symbolic failure to check British “dominion over our own republican soil.”61 Ohio‟s radicals likewise were outraged, and Senator William Allen protested by resigning his chairmanship of the Foreign

Relations Committee.

Gray largely laid the “loss” of the northern half of Oregon at the feet of southern congressmen. When northern Democrats voted for the annexation of Texas, they had done so to preserve national honor and protect the southwestern frontier from British political intrigue.

They believed that the Oregon crisis demanded the same commitment from the South‟s representatives. Instead, southern senators voted for the compromise treaty, to avoid further conflict with Britain. In Gray‟s mind, these southern turncoats gave away northwestern trade

60 Plain Dealer, 13 February 1846. 61 Plain Dealer, 16 June 1846. 99

routes and thus deliberately checked the growth of liberty and prosperity in the West. The Plain

Dealer asserted,

We are hemmed in with the parallel of 49 and British slavery on the North, and Mason & Dixon‟s line with African slavery on the South. The two realms of tyranny unite to lessen our limits, as in the late Oregon question, and it is time the lovers of freedom should unite in opposing the common enemy by fixing bounds to their aggressions.62

Gray would have been perfectly willing to abide slavery in an expanding, free republic, had it not denied equal opportunity to free labor for its own commercial and geographic expansion. The

Oregon compromise thus re-oriented western sectionalism from an east-west axis to a north- south axis.

In a fit of pique, Gray now urged northern and western congressmen to refuse to support the Walker Tariff Bill, a piece of legislation that was vital to southern Democrats. The editor acknowledged, “the interest of the West, no less than the South, demands an immediate reduction of the tariff, but it is better for us to bear oppression for a season, than to suffer the late indignities we have borne from the South to go unrebuked.”63 Indeed, the majority of Ohio‟s congressional delegation abstained from the final House vote on the tariff, but their defiance did not prevent the bill‟s passage.

Gray‟s failed rebellion against the Walker Bill loomed even larger when, barely a week after signing the new tariff into law, President Polk vetoed the River and Harbors Bill. The editor did not quibble with President Polk‟s constitutional scruples against signing such a large appropriations bill. Rather, he was disappointed that western congressmen did not succeed in

62 Plain Dealer, 22 June 1846. The historian Francois Furstenburg has reminded us that the Appalachian Mountains were a formidable barrier separating the West from the East, making the former‟s incorporation into the U.S. nation tenuous at best in the early national period. It remained a significant barrier for military logistics as well. Indeed, Gray had urged the government to improve harbors and establish navy depots on the Lakes to protect the region from potential British aggression. See Plain Dealer, 6 June 1845. See Francois Furstenburg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” The American Historical Review, vol. 113 no. 3 (June 2008): 647-677. 63 Plain Dealer, 23 June 1846. 100

holding up consideration of the Walker Bill until the President had acted on the River and

Harbors Bill, which had been in his hands for nine days. Again, the Plain Dealer suspected southern opposition to western interests, this time in the guise of Polk‟s southern advisors.

Surveying the national legislation passed in the first 18 months of the Administration, the paper could find “not a single measure of any great importance to the West, but what has been defeated, either by the arts of Southern diplomacy or the aid of a Southern President.”64

Heading into the state‟s fall elections in 1846, progressives thus found themselves in a precarious position. Their radical colleagues remained committed to the same tired platform that had sent the party down to defeat in each of the two previous elections, and the machinations of southern congressmen and an equivocating president were undermining the programs of expansion and internal improvements that were vital to western growth. Progressives unsuccessfully had sought the reorganization of the Ohio Democracy at the state party‟s annual

January 8 convention (the anniversary of Andrew Jackson‟s victory over the British at New

Orleans during the War of 1812). If Democrats were to achieve the necessary economic reforms to unleash Ohio‟s productive capacity and democratize the marketplace, they had to begin by democratizing the party itself. Simply put, they had to ensure proportional representation for all

Ohioans in the state party conventions and do away with the at-large representation that allowed

Medary and his Columbus clique to pack state conventions with their loyal supporters and rule the party practically unopposed.

Instead, Medary again controlled the state convention in 1846, and radicals re-nominated the hapless Tod, declaring, “uncompromising hostility to the frauds of Banking and Paper

Currency” as the main plank of the Democratic platform. A disappointed Gray gave tepid

64 Plain Dealer, 11 August 1846. 101

support to the candidate and platform, but he also published the resolutions of Democratic mass meetings in the counties of Bedford and Wayne that explicitly rejected the anti-banking and anti- paper resolutions of the state party platform. In a highly unusual move, the Plain Dealer largely ignored the election, only reporting its results (another Whig sweep of state offices) briefly ten days after its consummation.65

Exhausted by the Medary clique‟s anachronistic, radical opposition to a regulated credit system, the Plain Dealer continued to lobby for the adoption of proportional representation based on counties or districts at future state conventions. Such a rule would increase the representation of progressive Democrats throughout the state, leading to increasingly progressive

Democratic platforms. Gray had staked his reputation on the completion of the Cleveland-

Columbus-Cincinnati Railroad and other necessary improvements to bring transformative, revitalizing commerce to Cleveland. To ensure the fruition of those improvements, the editor thus unhesitatingly sought to overhaul the leadership of his party and revolutionize its platform and principles.

Violent Factionalism in Upstate New York

Gray‟s brand of progressive Democracy was a minority within the state, but was buoyed by its predominance on the Reserve and in neighboring counties. In New York, a similar diffusion of the party‟s power to county and local organizations sustained factional challenges to the party leadership. Especially in the canal towns and the counties of Oneida and Albany,

65 Quotation from Plain Dealer, 12 January 1846. Bedford and Wayne counties were the only ones where Democratic leaders openly refused to support Tod‟s candidacy. The Bedford meeting resolved that the state party‟s anti-bank platform “breathes a doctrine too „agrarian‟” for its entrepreneurial tastes. Plain Dealer, 10 February 1846. See also Plain Dealer, 3 March 1846. The Plain Dealer‟s seemingly disinterested election post-mortem appeared 22 October 1846. 102

economically progressive Democrats wielded considerable power. However, we also see a new dynamic in New York in this period that is absent from the other regions of this study: a repetitious cycle of tenuous coalition and violent faction within the Democracy. This cycle was a response to the fact that, until the implementation of a new state constitution in 1847, most state offices were appointed by the legislature. Thus, progressives and radicals fought bitterly for control of the party during the convention process, but then grudgingly united during elections themselves in the hopes of reaping the spoils of office.

A dizzying array of politicized reform movements further complicated partisan politics and Democratic factionalism in the antebellum Empire State, leading many historians to analyze partisan development through the lens of ideologically-inspired reform.66 In The Age of Jackson,

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. identified New York‟s Jacksonian Democrats as the embodiment of the egalitarian reform impulse, courageously overturning an elitist political system and inaugurating truly democratic government dedicated to the defense of equal rights.67 Though the New Political

History largely dismissed this ideological portrait, the Schlesinger thesis has enjoyed a revival among historians seeking to recover intellectualism and ideology as significant factors in party behavior. Recently, Jonathan Earle has suggested that political antislavery, the hallmark of antebellum political reform, was “rooted in Jacksonian notions of egalitarian democracy and

66 Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1950). See also, Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy; Paul A. Johnson, A Shopkeeper‟s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Douglas M. Strong, Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999). 67 Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson. 103

producers‟ rights” which “owed far more to the radicalism noted by Schlesinger than to the evangelical perfectionism commonly linked with the antislavery movement.”68

Still, the Schlesinger thesis has a significant limitation. New York‟s antebellum

Democratic Party, which was largely the creation of Martin Van Buren, was not a reform organization, but a machine. Electoral strategies, not ideology, dictated its behavior. In pursuit of office, the Albany Regency, the cadre of Van Burenites who shaped Democratic platforms and policies and doled out political appointments, proved to be a profoundly reactionary institution, often preferring to cling to long-venerated practice, rather than embrace new reforms.69 The

Regency‟s reaction to the single largest reform movement the state witnessed in the antebellum era, the Anti-Rent crisis of 1839-1860, belied radical Democrats‟ alleged egalitarian bona fides.

By 1845, between 25,000 and 60,000 tenant farmers in eleven counties bracketing the Hudson

River resisted the collection of rents in arrears and refused to continue to abide by the feudalistic terms by which they tenanted land on enormous, privately held estates. Those terms had included not only an annual rent, but yearly service to the landlord, payment to him of one-quarter of the

68 Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery: 5. Earle challenged the theory, popularized by Paul Johnson‟s Shopkeeeper‟s Millennium, that commercial changes wrought by the Market Revolution inspired moral reform movements, as elites tried to regain social control of increasingly transient and egalitarian communities in bustling commercial communities. Earle argued that communities that were relatively unaffected by the Market Revolution experienced their own reform movements inspired by bedrock, democratic ideology. See Johnson, A Shopkeeper‟s Millennium: Society and Revials in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). 69 It is well established that Van Buren led the Democracy at various points in opposing such reforms as free banking, the popular election of state officers, and the popular election of presidential electors. See Joel Silbey, Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002): 28-33. On Van Buren‟s opposition to the popular election of presidential electors, see Edward Widmer, Martin Van Buren, the American Presidential Series, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed. (New York: Holt & Co., 2005): 62; Silbey argued that Van Buren was chastened by the popular backlash in response to his opposition to the direct election of presidential electors. However, even after that episode, Van Buren still fought to preserve appointed state offices, in order to conserve the Regency‟s power to confer those appointments when Democrats controlled the legislature. 104

sale price of any real property (chiefly land and buildings) they sold, and the landlord‟s right to re-possession, among other punitive provisions.70

The Anti-Renters‟ cause would seem to have been a natural one for so-called Democrats to champion. Yet, the radical Regency privileged the inviolability of contracts over the condition of the small producers.71 They were especially alarmed by the occasionally violent and extra- legal methods that the Anti-Renters employed to resist rent collections and retain possession of their homesteads (which they often had built and improved through their own hard labor). While the rank and file of the radical Democracy in New York might have burned with the reformist impulse, their leadership burned with a passion for retrenchment. Radical invocations of the sanctity of contract law, hinted at the real source of factionalism in the Democratic Party in the

1840s: economic policy.

The seeds of that factionalism had been sown by the startling accumulation of state debt in the 1830s and the Panic of 1837. The looming debt, contracted to extend the Black River and

Genesee Valley Canals and widen the Erie Canal, had depressed the value of state bonds as much as 25% below par, endangering the state‟s ability to meet its contractual obligations. In

70 Charles McCurdy deftly combined political and legal history to reveal the complexities of leasehold contracts and the factors behind their long-lived tenure in the best history by far of the Anti-Rent movement. The inviolability of contract law allowed feudal tenures to persist, despite widespread dissatisfaction with them among the people, the courts, and even the government. McCurdy notes that Anti-Rent protests began in earnest on July 4, 1839 on the Rensselaerwyck Manor, in response to Stephen Van Rensselaerwyck IV‟s attempts to collect several hundred thousand dollars‟ worth of rents in arrears upon his inheritance of the lands from his deceased father. McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839-1865 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 71 Violent Anti-Rent protests began in December 1844 and eventually led to three deaths, including the murder of Deputy Sherriff Osman Steele during a distress sale to recover a tenant farmer‟s back rent. In his annual message to the legislature in January 1845 (before the murder of Steele), Governor Silas Wright, a stalwart radical Democrat, thoroughly denounced the Anti-Rent movement as an outlaw phenomenon. Defending the prosecution of Anti-Rent leaders for incitement to violence, the governor asked his audience (some of whom were elected by Anti- Rent votes) “whether rights of property are to be trampled upon, the obligations of contracts violently resisted, the laws of the State set at defiance, the peace of society disturbed, and human life sacrificed.” Charles Z. Lincoln, ed., State of New York: Messages From the Governors, vol. IV, 1843-1856 (Albany: J.B. Lyon, 1909): 141.

105

1842, the Democratic legislature passed the so-called Stop and Tax Law, which stopped canal construction and levied a direct tax to pay down the state‟s obligations. The law staved off bankruptcy and restored the state‟s credit, which was reflected in an immediate and sustained rise in state bond premiums. Edwin Croswell had supported the law as a solution to the state‟s immediate financial crisis, but the inveterate speculator never accepted a direct tax as the proper means of funding improvements. Thus, he joined with Whigs to lobby for the defeat of the so- called People‟s Resolution in 1842, a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have required debt-funded improvements to be approved through specific legislative acts and ratified by the people at the next general election before taking effect.72

As the Stop and Tax law stymied New York‟s efforts to develop a state rail network,

Croswell feared that other commercial entrepots, particularly Boston, would surpass New York with railroad networks that could offer greater carrying capacity than the state‟s outdated canal system.73 Radicals dismissed these concerns as a mere ploy by conservative Democrats (radicals refused to acknowledge them as progressives) to distribute largesse through wasteful canal contracts. They derisively branded the apostate Croswell and like-minded Democrats as

Hunkers, a corruption of a Dutch term, meaning office-holder. The term connoted scheming

72 Fifty-five Democrats voted for the amendment, 19 voted against and 21 abstained. Though the recorded vote was 55-49 in favor of the amendment, it did not receive a majority of votes from all elected representatives as required for amendments to the state constitution, and thus failed. McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era: 83-86. On the impact of the Stop and Tax Law, see McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era: 83-125 and Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, chapter 16. Of course, small steps toward factional division had occurred prior to 1842, most notably in 1840 when loyal Van Buren lieutenant William Marcy blamed his failed gubernatorial re-election bid on the timing of President Van Buren‟s Independent Treasury Act. The act removed millions of dollars in federal deposits from state banks, obviating their use as capital funding for canal extensions and deepening the state‟s recession. McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics: 5-6. In his 1843 annual message to the legislature, Governor William C. Bouck all but nullified the principles of the Stop and Tax Law, underscoring the longevity of this split over economic policy. See Charles Z. Lincoln, ed., Messages From the Governors, vol. IV (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1909): 16, 58-60. 73 See Albany Argus, 2 August 1845. The paper was particularly alarmed by the building of a railroad linking Boston with Ogdensburg, New York, on the St. Lawrence Seaway. That road threatened to divert Canadian commerce from New York City. For Whig fears of commercial stagnation, see the Utica Daily Gazette, 9 June 1845. 106

politicians who abandoned Democratic principles in their selfish desire for the spoils of office.

Hunkers in turn dismissed radicals as Barnburners, myopic ideologues who would destroy the party itself in their zealous desire to purge it of innovative, progressive ideals. The term alluded to a popular, humorous story of a hard-headed farmer who burned down his barn to rid it of rats.

Hunkers‟ and Barnburners‟ conflict reflected a fundamental schism over notions of equal rights and progress. Radicals viewed the state credit as the embodiment of the people‟s trust and consequently insisted that it should be employed only in ventures that would bring equal benefits to all. Moreover, they fretted that improvements benefited speculators and merchants over producers. If that were true, Hunkers countered, funding improvements through a direct tax on all of the state‟s property-owners was inherently unfair. In 1844 Hunker Governor William

Bouck declared, “every system of internal improvement should contain within itself the elements of its creation and maintenance.”74 Using the state‟s credit to fund canal improvements and then recouping costs through tolls (or use fees) was a much fairer funding method. Rather than tax the whole citizenry, those who would most benefit from the improvements would bear their cost.

Finally, Hunkers assured New Yorkers that further improvements would cause property values in their vicinity to appreciate markedly, increasing tax revenues. Those revenues then would ensure that the state could pay any securities that backed the improvements, redeeming the state credit.

Radical Barnburners and progressive Hunkers thus approached the problem of commercial growth from significantly different perspectives. Hunkers thought broadly and deeply about wealth creation. Confident that judicious improvements (such as those augmenting the capacity of the already successful Erie system) would enrich the state through increased canal and tax revenues, Hunkers believed the most pressing issue was how to fairly distribute of the

74 Lincoln, ed., Messages From the Governors: 58. 107

costs and benefits of those improvements. Barnburners, however, were more narrowly and immediately focused on preserving the state‟s credit than creating additional wealth. Whereas

Hunkers looked to the uncertain but potentially massive growth of commerce to enrich the state,

Barnburners preferred the steadier, though less spectacular, increase of wealth through the appreciation of the state‟s credit by paying down its current debt and limiting future debt.75

Croswell himself added another dimension to Hunkers‟ views on wealth creation. He gambled heavily on the continued extension and improvements of the state‟s massive transportation systems. Invested heavily in real estate, manufacturing, railroads, and banking, the editor warmly supported legislation that proposed to increase the state‟s commerce. Indeed, through his enormous speculation in Canal Bank stocks in the 1830s and 1840s, Croswell also was personally invested in the state‟s canal improvements. Having broken with the Regency on state-funding for those improvements in the 1830s, the editor steadfastly pursued his seemingly progressive course for the enrichment of the state and, above all, for himself.76

The divergent economic views of Hunkers and Barnburners clashed during the state‟s constitutional convention of 1846. The convention had been arranged by Barnburners and liberal

Whigs ostensibly to draft a constitution that would safeguard the state from future legislative profligacy, democratize state government and expand the civil rights of the citizenry, especially

African-Americans. Barnburners initially had sought compromise with Hunkers to amend the constitution to limit the state‟s ability to incur future debt. However, when liberal Whigs expressed a desire for a new constitution that would expand suffrage and eliminate feudal tenures, Barnburners joined them in the early spring of 1845 to organize a popular referendum

75 For this view on preserving the state credit, see Silas Wright‟s first annual message as governor in January 1845. See Lincoln, ed., Messages From the Governors: 95-120. 76 See Manning, Herald of the Albany Regency: 17-20, 184-185. 108

for a new constitutional convention. In an unusual alliance, Barnburner leaders pledged support for liberal Whig efforts to include unqualified black suffrage in a new constitution. In exchange

Barnburners sought liberal Whigs‟ acquiescence in stringent constitutional restrictions against incurring further state debt and against using canal revenues for further improvements.77

Bipartisan co-operation thus trumped party loyalty in the Barnburners‟ desire to prohibit the economic program of the rival Hunkers and thereby strengthen radicals‟ control of the party.

At the state constitutional convention, Barnburners gained control of the Committee on

Canals and Finances and crafted an article that would appropriate the lion‟s share of canal revenues for the payment of both the existing canal debt and the state‟s general debt (which stood at approximately $30,000,000 in 1846). This stringent article ostensibly left little, if any, monies for completion of unfinished works on the Erie, Black River and Genesee Valley Canals.

Hunkers, represented by former Governor William Bouck countered that the canal revenues should first pay for the completion of unfinished works, before paying down the state debt.78

During debate of the article in late September, William G. Angel, a Democratic representative from Allegany County in the western part of the state, argued that the state had a responsibility to spread the benefits of its commerce and expand market opportunities for all its citizens. Noting that the unfinished improvements lay almost entirely in western New York,

77 For a comprehensive delineation of this unusual alliance, see McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era: 185-194. The abolitionist Alvan Stewart allegedly promised Barnburners the enduring support of his antislavery followers at the ballot box, as long as the former promised to fight for black suffrage in the state constitutional convention. See the New York Globe, 18 February 1846. Eric Foner has argued that Barnburners adopted an antislavery outlook by 1848, but were not truly committed to political rights of African Americans. See Foner, “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited,” The Journal of American History 56, 2 (September 1969): 262-279. 78 The article appropriated a minimum of $2.1 million annually from the canal revenues (after deducting expenses of toll collection and maintenance) to payment of the two debts. Canal revenues did not exceed $2 million in any year until 1845. The article also limited future appropriations to no more than $1 million for specific, single projects. Each appropriation also had to be accompanied by a tax to pay for it, both of which had to be passed by the legislature and then approved by the people at the next general election. See William G. Bishop & William Attree, Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of New York: 1846. (Albany: Evening Atlas, 1846): 461-462, 660, 750, 776. 109

Angel warned the convention that if they failed to grant “constitutional recognition” to the necessity of completing those improvements, it would “annihilate all your friends in the western part of the state.” Worse, it would render western New Yorkers virtually “enslaved” to the more prosperous eastern region.79 Instead, Angel insisted that it was the government‟s duty to enhance the economic opportunities of those dwelling in the western part of the state.

Angel also objected to radicals‟ narrow focus on preserving the state‟s “good faith” through immediate redemption of its credit. When it had commenced canal extensions in the western part of the state, it induced hundreds, if not thousands, of New Yorkers to make improvements to their own lands in anticipation of increased commerce in their communities.

The Stop and Tax Law, he claimed “sunk the property and desolated the homes of those poor people” in Allegany and Cataraugus counties in particular. Angel argued that the state had to redeem its good faith with those people and finish those improvements.80 In his mind, government-funded internal improvements did not necessarily create class divisions. However, government abandonment of unfinished internal improvements certainly exacerbated them.

Rather than allow markets to grow haphazardly, government bore the responsibility of shaping its growth to provide the greatest possible access to the market.

William Angel‟s conception of the state‟s duty in relation to economic development showed that Hunkers were not simply acquisitive capitalists. Indeed, they consistently based their commitment to internal improvements on the belief that it was a practical means of furthering social and economic opportunity and political equality. To that end, Hunkers fully

79 Bishop and Attree, Debates and Proceedings of the Convention: 915, 914. Angel defied categorization. A proud radical Democrat, he nevertheless supported progressive improvement measures. He was loyal to the Barnburners and became a Free Soil Democrat after the party split in 1847. 80 Bishop and Attree, Debates and Proceedings of the Convention: 914, 915. 110

embraced the Polk Administration‟s reduction of the tariff and expansion toward new markets, and sought to apply the principles behind those measures to the state‟s financial policies.

This was especially true in the community of Rochester, which had been dramatically changed by the Erie Canal, wending its way through the center of the city. The canal had brought jobs, spurred a population explosion and turned Rochester into a major manufacturing and commercial center. The Democratic Rochester Republican boldly proclaimed, “we go for removing the absurd restrictions upon trade so as to allow the farmer free access to the markets of the world.”81 Its editor, Isaac Butts, deliberately echoed his editorial colleague, Edwin

Croswell, in supporting government promotion of improvements and free trade.

Both Butts and Croswell thus sought to tear down barriers to market participation at home. Echoing the principles behind the Walker Tariff, the Albany Argus applauded the canal commissioners‟ report of January 1846, which called for significant toll reductions by July.82 In this instance Hunkers and Barnburners were in agreement. The canal commissioners, led by radicals, promoted toll reductions due to their hostility to what they interpreted as an unfair tax

(the tolls themselves) on agricultural producers. Hunkers supported such reductions largely to increase the volume of canal traffic and encourage greater participation in the market. Their agreement on the need to lower canal tolls showed that the sharpest point of division between the two factions did not lie in their divergent economic principles, but in their differing conceptions of the relation between the marketplace and individual rights.

New York‟s progressive Democrats argued that expansion was essential to spreading the benefits of the market. They viewed the settlement of Oregon as a particularly powerfully

81 Rochester Republican, 7 July 1846. 82 Albany Argus, 7 November 1845; 9 January 1846. 111

transformative moment in the United States‟ young history. Croswell predicted that gaining access to Pacific trade routes would dramatically shift power and wealth westward, while making the United States one of the largest and most secure countries in the world. Through the growth of western trade, he imagined a future America,

With its Heart in the great West . . . its vast domain spread over with hundreds of millions of industrious and thriving people. Under circumstances so favorable, time will rear up a government and institutions on the North American continent in power, such as transcends even the dreams of imagination, and in every element of greatness such as has no parallel even in the history of Her who claimed to be the mistress of the world.83

Interestingly, Croswell characterized the nation‟s future greatness not by the liberalism of its institutions, but by the power of its industry and government. The Argus indulged this fantasy of power in large part to jab at the British, “who claimed to be mistress of the world,” and whose commercial wealth and military prowess remained the envy of a young America. However, this editorial specifically invoked an inchoate imperial power that would re-fashion government and spawn new institutions in its service. Remarkably, the editor evinced no concern for how that power might operate on the democratic rights of the citizenry. The expanding market itself seemingly would preserve democratic rights and enable moral progress, even as it accrued unimaginable power for the nation.

The staunch support of papers like the Republican and Argus for the Polk

Administration‟s expansionism and reduction of the tariff redounded to the benefit of the state‟s

Hunkers. The President appointed numerous Hunkers to federal posts in New York, including

Bouck, who was installed as assistant treasurer for New York‟s branch of the Independent

Treasury in the fall of 1846. Through this and similar positions, Hunkers could hire loyalists to serve in these federal departments and in return expect contributions of money and labor for their

83 Albany Argus, 3 January 1846. 112

future electoral campaigns.84 Barnburners interpreted this as a direct challenge to their leadership, and they responded by removing Hunkers from positions of power on the central committees that dictated party practice, such as calling and conducting nominating conventions, at the county and local levels.

To accomplish this, Barnburners had to deviate from the regular party practices that had shaped and defined Democratic loyalty for nearly two decades. Martin Van Buren had forged the

Democratic Party into a formidable organization by instituting a uniform and relatively transparent nominating practice that, in turn, commanded the loyal support of the party faithful at election time. Radical devotion to standard practice long had been buttressed by their control of the state party apparatus, which allowed them to shape state conventions to their liking. Yet, at the county-level, they now abandoned that established practice with alacrity, claiming that

Hunker central committees were frustrating the popular will.

Beginning in the autumn of 1845, radicals had initiated a concerted effort to overthrow the Hunker leadership in the pivotal counties of Albany and Oneida. State District Attorney John

Van Buren, who was rapidly assuming the leadership of the radical Democracy from his venerable father, encouraged radical uprisings in the two counties. This resulted in the irregular appointment of new Democratic Party County Committees to challenge the legitimacy of the

84 Much has been written about Polk‟s patronage in New York and its role in party factionalism. Eric Foner has suggested that Polk‟s selection of the Hunker William Marcy for the War Department and his acquiescence in the annexation of Texas unwittingly, yet irrevocably, strained his relations with the state‟s Barnburners. Other historians claim that Polk repaired that division to a certain extent by filling several lesser positions with Barnburners and urging the factions to unite behind the leadership of Barnburner Governor Silas Wright in 1845. See, Foner, “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited.” See also Niven, Martin Van Buren and Joel Silbey, Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2002). Both Niven and Silbey suggest that Treasury Secretary Walker, not Polk, deliberately exacerbated factionalism in New York by favoring Hunkers over dissident Barnburners for Treasury posts. 113

counties‟ existing, Hunker-dominated committees.85 Hunkers decried the radical effort to usurp control of the Albany and Oneida County Democratic Parties as a purely dictatorial betrayal of democratic processes.

Perhaps this was most clearly demonstrated on 31 March 1846, in the Albany County convention to nominate delegates to the aforementioned constitutional convention. At this conclave, “hired bullies” rounded up by Attorney General Van Buren, Albany County District

Attorney A. J. Colvin, canal commissioner H. C. Southwick, Democratic General Committee

Chair Peter Cagger, and Atlas owner James French literally overawed and beat Hunker delegates into submission.86 Most of the violence was perpetrated by delegates from the city of Albany against country delegates, who leaned heavily to the Hunker side. Radicals held a slight majority of delegates from the city of Albany, but several of their seats were contested by Hunkers, and the Barnburners had feared that the overall Hunker majority at the convention would give the disputed seats to Hunker challengers. In the masculine arena of competitive politics, it was common to hire bullies to influence party conventions and even voting. However, to sic bullies on respected party leaders was shocking and unacceptable. Indeed, Edwin Croswell bitterly reproached his radical foes, not for resorting to hired bullies themselves, but for the manner in which they employed them.

Surprisingly, this violent episode did not sunder Albany‟s Democratic organization.

Though both factions initially nominated completing slates of delegates to the constitutional

85 Albany Argus, 26 September 1845; Rome Sentinel, 11 and 18 November 1845.Rome Sentinel, 16 January 1846; Albany Argus, 7 March 1846. 86 Albany Argus, 8 April 1846. The Argus was one of several newspapers that reported accounts from delegates themselves of having been beaten, stomped and driven from the convention room. One delegate even claimed to have seen another one stabbed by Van Buren‟s foot soldiers. Hunkers had held an overwhelming majority of the seats, 48 of 70. Several men, including Cagger, were indicted for their roles in the violence. John Van Buren himself only narrowly escaped indictment, with a majority of the 17 members of the grand jury in favor of including him in the indictment. See Manning, Herald of the Albany Argus: 286. 114

convention, they then met to settle on a compromise slate, with two candidates, one from each faction, stepping aside. This brief rapprochement of Albany Democrats was necessitated by each faction‟s desire to keep Whigs from sweeping the county‟s delegation to the constitutional convention. Moreover, this was a mere truce, for both Hunkers and Barnburners knew that their best opportunity to stake a claim to the leadership of the party would occur at the next state

Democratic convention.

At the state convention in the summer of 1846, the party leadership had to determine both the legitimacy of the irregular committees got up by radicals in Albany, Oneida and Madison counties, as well as the claims of their radical delegates to convention seats. Hunkers argued against seating these claimants, reminding their fellow delegates that standard Democratic practice held that a county committee remained in existence until the recurrence of the annual convention at which it had been appointed. The irregular committees that had sent radicals to the state convention had been formed only months after the installation of the regular committees.

However, the convention ultimately seated the radical Barnburners, for their nominations, though irregular, had represented the most recent expression of the political will of Democrats in those counties.

Chastened Hunkers were dealt a further blow at the conclusion of the constitutional convention, when they failed to obstruct or amend the article on canal finances. In fact, Hunkers‟ lone success occurred in their successful opposition to unqualified black suffrage in the new constitution.87 Outnumbered and outmaneuvered at both the constitutional and state party

87 Bouck had offered a compromise funding article at the constitutional convention, but it suffered a narrow defeat, 60-54. Hunkers and Whigs solidly supported the measure, but radicals and a scattering of liberal Whigs carried the opposition. See the vote in Bishop and Attree, Debates and Proceedings of the Convention: 932. Like their progressive colleagues of the Western Reserve, New York progressives proclaimed equality before the law for African-Americans, but not the privilege of suffrage. The Cayuga Patriot, wished to go no farther than ensuring that 115

conventions, disaffected Hunkers subsequently protested at the ballot box. Their party had re- nominated Silas Wright for governor and Addison Gardiner (who was popular with both radicals and Hunkers) for lieutenant governor. Thousands of Hunkers withheld their votes from Wright, but not Gardiner. The ironic result was that the Whig candidate for governor, John Young, defeated Wright by approximately 11,000 votes, while Gardiner defeated Young‟s running mate,

Hamilton Fish, by more than 13,000 votes. Whigs also won a majority of assembly seats and congressional seats, while Democrats maintained a 2 to 1 majority in the state senate.88

At the close of 1846, Hunkers and Barnburners had demonstrated that each had the power to the throw the state to the Whigs, but neither yet had the power to control the Democratic

Party. Radicals had scored significant victories in writing a fiscally conservative new constitution and dethroning Hunker committees in Albany, Oneida and Madison. However,

Hunkers reaped benefits from Polk‟s patronage and flexed their muscle in denying Silas Wright a second term as governor. As 1847 neared, both factions had to determine whether to seek a lasting settlement or continue their damaging internecine conflict.

Conclusion

The Polk Administration‟s bold program of national expansion, diplomatic brinksmanship, and nominally free trade with European powers seemed to drastically change and modernize the Democratic Party in the 1840s. It offered a plan of growth that rivaled the Whigs‟

“we would protect them by equal laws, and would not countenance their being oppressed, enslaved, or injured.” Cayuga Patriot, 11 March 1846. 88 Albany Argus, 9 November 1846. Hunker papers attributed Wright‟s defeat to Anti-Renters who had pledged their support to Young and Gardiner, who had been popular among them for vocally supporting their efforts to bring an end to feudal land tenures. See, for example, Goshen Independent Republican, 1 January 1847. Hunkers were not the only ones to abandon the party ticket. The Independent Republican claimed that Barnburners voted the Whig ticket for legislature, rather than see a Hunker victory in Orange County. Goshen Independent Republican, 6 November 1846. 116

old American System, and in doing so it seemed to release Democrats from the economic pessimism that had gripped the party in the wake of the stunning 1837 Panic. Though the Polk program might have been expected to cause consternation among committed radicals, they appeared to be mollified by the President‟s firm constitutional scruple against committing federal funding for internal improvements, for which numerous communities throughout the country now clamored. Instead, the federal government funded economic expansion in other ways, primarily through subsidized warehouses in ports of entry for the use of merchants and producers alike. Indeed, Young Hickory appeared to have enjoyed the rare success of crafting a major economic and diplomatic program that appealed to radicals and conservatives/progressives alike.

However, this unity of approbation was illusory. The revival of free trade allowed market-oriented Democrats, like William Pitt Preble, who had been superseded within the party by radicals during the Panic of 1837, to re-emerge in leadership roles. Attracting new converts, like J. W. Gray, they again began to promote market expansion through transportation improvements, especially with government assistance. These Democrats interpreted such measures as integral to the new, modernized Democratic Party. The powerful editors that eagerly promoted them, like Croswell, Butts, and Holden, did so in particular because they resonated with the ambitions of their immediate communities. Not surprisingly, these editors subsequently devoted much of their daily labors to building fruitful market networks through transportation improvements. Once the genie was out of the bottle it would prove nearly impossible to restrain these editors as their passion for growth, expansion and progress began to supersede their commitment to partisan principles.

Even in the early days of the Polk Administration, there were portents of the strains that soon would plague Democrats. Maine‟s free trade Democrats, for instance, evinced the least 117

sincere progressive attitudes in this period. Though they professed a desire to increase market opportunities for all, they also clung to conservative notions that exclusive corporate privileges were integral to promote necessary investment in improvement projects. Rather than seeing such privileges as restraints on competition, these Democrats conceived of them, much like Whigs, as enticements to outside investors, and they consistently supported legislation that benefitted resource-rich corporations above all others in the marketplace.

In contrast, progressive Democrats on the Western Reserve and in the canal communities of upstate New York evinced a more philosophical and consistent progressive creed. In both regions, these Democrats believed that the market was a crucible of democracy itself, a spontaneous, voluntary gathering of individuals who expressed their independence in their pursuit of material and social advancement, a community that offered the opportunity to participate to all who could produce a good or service for use by others. Along with radicals, they sought the removal of barriers to market participation. Yet, they also went further than those timorous radicals in insisting, as William Angel did, that it was government‟s duty to bring the market to as many of their constituents as possible. Thus, some Democratic editors and leaders in these regions pushed their state parties to create a vibrant, egalitarian marketplace that would strengthen the citizenry‟s commitment to Democratic principles of egalitarianism, equal rights, and equal opportunity. However, unlike Polk and their radical colleagues, they firmly believed that government was not a threat to those principles. Rather, it had a crucial role in creating the conditions for those principles to flourish, namely through legislation and funding that would encourage the kind of material growth that would bring widespread social progress in its train.

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Chapter 3: The Mexican War, the Wilmot Proviso and the Problem of the Northern

Doughface

When President Polk‟s resolute pursuit of expansion led to war with Mexico in May

1846, it injected a new conflict (whether or not territorial conquests would remain free of slavery) into the partisan dynamic. Not surprisingly, this conflict divided Democrats along sectional lines. It also divided northern Democrats between the unflinching expansionists and devotees of Manifest Destiny and those who were unwilling to countenance the spread of slavery in common with the growth of the nation. Literary scholar Edward Widmer has insisted that the latter sincerely believed that expansion would bring the blessings of liberty and democracy to the rest of the hemisphere, but they abandoned the project when it appeared it would merely serve the crude, jingoistic interests of northern entrepreneurs and southern slavocrats. Similarly,

Yonatan Eyal argued that the war eventually shattered the progressive movement within the

Democratic Party, thwarting their efforts to modernize the party‟s economic goals and expansionist outlook.1

Of course, both inter-party and intra-party disputes over the causes, purposes, and merits of the war were waged primarily through the press. The advent of the telegraph (first successfully demonstrated in 1844) and the outbreak of the Mexican War combined to spur the founding of the Associated Press by the leading newspapers in New York City. The Sun, Courier and Enquirer, Journal of Commerce, Express, Herald, and Tribune newspapers combined their resources to charter a daily express from New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama, carrying war news to be telegraphed to New York. These papers were willing to share the $700 expense because they

1 Widmer, Young America: 15, 185. Eyal, Young America: 232. 119

accurately predicted that timely accounts of war would sell more papers.2 Indeed, Woodville‟s aforementioned painting, War News from Mexico, further suggests that Americans eagerly devoured news from the distant theater of war.

Of course, most editors justified their coverage of the war as an important public service, and they likely were sincere in that belief. However, self-interest clearly was at work, as well, and no matter an editor‟s opinion on the war, it appeared to be a boon for them. Even Whig editors who opposed the war consistently reprinted lengthy, detailed accounts of battles. John

Sayward, the proprietor of the Bangor Whig and Courier, was one such editor. When one of his anti-war Whig readers complained about the ceaseless war coverage, the editor meekly replied,

“we cannot help it,” for the public demanded frequent news from the front.3 Simply put, war was good business, regardless if one was a supporter or opponent of the conflict. Large urban dailies printed extra editions that recounted the latest battles in breathless detail. War fever stoked a sales fever among all newspaper editors, regardless of party. Though many Whig politicians continued to claim that the war was unjust, many Whig editors profitably printed patriotic celebrations of American victories in the field.

Of course, the major parties and their presses perverted the meaning of the war for their own partisan purposes. While Whigs praised the gallantry of American soldiers, they argued that the war was not fought in defense of national honor, but rather was fought for the expansion of the Slave South. Democrats, on the other hand, defended the war as a manly response to

Mexican violations of American sovereignty, namely Mexican incursions into Texan territory.

2 Blondheim, News Over the Wires: 48-49. Initially, Moses Sperry of the Sun established the express to “scoop” his rivals by 24 hours. However, when he was sure that sales would rise even without “scoops” from the seat of war, he sought partners to defray the considerable cost of the operation. 3 Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, 7 April 1847. 120

Most Americans had had forebodings of war as soon as the United States began debating the annexation of Texas prior to Polk‟s inauguration. Mexico vigorously denounced annexation and was further incensed that Texas and the United States both claimed the Rio Grande as the new state‟s southern border. Mexico claimed that Texas‟ southern border lay at the Nueces

River, approximately 150 miles north of the Rio Grande. It had tried to reclaim this territory militarily at least twice after 1836, and despite some successes, had not been able to maintain effective control of the region. Both Mexico and the United States now sent federal troops to defend “their” territory, and in late April 1846 skirmishes erupted between American and

Mexican soldiers in the disputed region.

In a message to Congress on May 11, Polk claimed that the skirmishes (along with

Mexico‟s refusal to receive John Slidell as U.S. Minister) provided the causus belli for a declaration of war, arguing that Mexico had violated American territorial integrity and ruthlessly shed American blood. Congress dutifully complied with a declaration two days later, in which only 14 Whigs (all resolute opponents of militant expansion or slavery) voted against war.

Democrats immediately began to look toward the seizure of the Mexican states of Alta California and New Mexico as punishment for Mexico‟s “impudence,” and as the final pieces to complete continental expansion.

Though often outnumbered, United States forces experienced a nearly unbroken string of victories during the war, thanks largely to the skill of their artillery and cavalry units. General

Zachary Taylor granted Mexico an armistice in September 1846, after the first major battle of the war: the American victory at Monterey. When the armistice failed to yield a peace treaty, an impatient President Polk directed General Winfield Scott to resume hostilities in January 1847.

Scott‟s forces (many of whom had been transferred from Taylor‟s command) began an 121

inexorable march toward Mexico City, ending with the city‟s capture and the cessation of hostilities by September of that year. The following winter and spring were then spent negotiating a treaty that eventually severed the northern half of Mexico (a total of 55% of its territory) and attached it to the United States, in exchange for an $18 million indemnity from the

Polk government and the United States‟ assumption of American claims against Mexico for property losses extending as far back as the 1820s.

As the opposition party, Whig leaders initially opposed what they described as an unprovoked war of conquest. Opposition to the war fit well with the party‟s preference for measured, limited expansion through negotiation and treaty, rather than through conquest.

Moreover, John C. Calhoun‟s declaration that the annexation of Texas had been necessary to preserve southern slavery raised the hackles of antislavery northerners. Anti-war campaigns redounded to Whigs‟ benefit in the 1846 fall elections, as voters seemed to respond to the party‟s doubts regarding the legitimacy of the nation‟s claim to the Rio Grande border. However, successful prosecution of the war throughout 1847 rendered Whigs‟ anti-war stance both irrelevant and seemingly unpatriotic.

Though northern Democrats overwhelmingly supported the war, they also struggled to provide it with a meaning that would be palatable to most northerners. Progressive Democrats tended to tout the potential commercial benefits of a continental republic, tapped into Pacific and

Atlantic trade routes. Acolytes of Martin Van Buren, disaffected by Calhoun‟s pro-slavery rationale for the annexation of Texas and the alleged outsized influence of pro-slavery southerners in the party, hoped to make the war serve antislavery purposes. Democratic

Congressmen Jacob Brinkerhoff of Ohio and David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced the so- called Wilmot Proviso to a $2 million congressional appropriations bill for the war in July 1846. 122

The Proviso stipulated that any territory gained from Mexico in the war must remain free of slavery. The House approved the amendment and passed the bill by a large vote, before it failed to pass the Senate before Congress‟ summer adjournment. New York Democrat Preston King quickly reintroduced the Proviso as an amendment to a new appropriations bill at Congress‟ next session, in January 1847. However, President Polk used the persuasive powers of patronage to induce six northern Democrats who had previously supported it to vote against this second iteration of the Proviso.4

The stark sectional vote on the Wilmot Proviso (it initially gained overwhelming support from northern congressmen and universal opposition from their southern colleagues, regardless of party) and its quixotic journey influenced many historians to perceive it as a “northern” measure. This reflexive conflation suggests that northerners who opposed the Proviso (most of whom were Democrats) were treasonous to their own section. Both Widmer and Eyal, for instance, have suggested that truly progressive Democrats washed their hands of this project when it was prostituted to augment the backward and barbaric system of slavery.

Yet, this is an oversimplified account of the Proviso‟s source of support. Those

Democratic newspapers that embraced the Proviso and defied the Polk Administration did so not merely out of loyalty to the North and hostility to the Slave South. They did so, because they ardently believed that keeping the new national territories free was integral to the progress they pursued in their own communities. Likewise, those newspapers that followed the Polk

Administration‟s lead and opposed the Proviso did so not out of simple racism or toadying to

4 Eric Foner described the Proviso as a defensive measure on the part of Van Burenites hoping to retain their credibility with their anti-slavery constituents. Foner, “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited.” Fifty-two of the 56 northern Democrats, and every northern Whig, in Congress voted for the initial Proviso. The core proponents of the Proviso were all young men in their first or second terms in Congress. See Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: 592-598. 123

southern interests. Rather, they did so out of a fear that the divisiveness that that measure sowed in national politics jeopardized not only the nation‟s progress, but also the progress they sought in their own communities.

At the time, Proviso supporters labeled their northern opponents doughfaces: northern men with southern principles. The historiography of antislavery activity in the North implicitly has reinforced this image. Both Joseph Rayback and Chaplain Morrison argued that northern

Democrats opposed the Proviso in order to curry favor with their southern colleagues and perhaps earn patronage from the president. Leonard Richards went even further. He categorized northern votes against the Proviso as “voting with the South” and identified so-called doughfaces as integral members of a Slave Power plot to commit the federal government to the expansion and protection of slavery. He argued that these myopic politicians did so to curry favor with the southern leaders of their party and because they favored the “harsher forms of white supremacy” that defined the Democratic Party.5

Though Richards‟ portrait of Proviso opponents was extreme, classifying northern opponents of the Proviso as dogmatic racists or dough-faces simply does not fully account for the myriad reasons that some northern Democrats supported the war but rejected the Proviso.

This chapter examines how Democratic presses functioned as part of the party apparatus in shaping the disparate responses to the war and the Wilmot Proviso in northern communities. The

North‟s Democratic editors interpreted the war and the Proviso in the context of the

5 Richards, The Slave Power: 112-133, quotations on 111, 116. William W. Freehling first revived the notion that a Slave Power conspiracy had been a reality in The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Richards offered perhaps the most convincing etymology of the term “doughface,” suggesting that it derived from a children‟s game in which they would apply dough to their faces to hide their features and make grotesque masks. See pages 86-88. Chaplain Morrison, Democratic Politics and Sectionalism: The Wilmot Proviso Controversy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967): 103-107and Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1970):113-144. Also see Murray E. Heimbinder, Northern Men with Southern Principles: A Study of the Doughfaces of New York and New England. (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University: 1971). 124

developmental aspirations they had for their own communities. Thus, the debates over the war and the Proviso challenged northern Democrats‟ conceptions of how best to secure the nation‟s moral and material progress and also demonstrated that economic development was not simply a matter of log-rolling pork for these editor/politicians, but an ideological issue of deep resonance.

Democratic Antislavery and Whig Abolitionism Clash on the Reserve

The Whig press on the Western Reserve felt emboldened in 1846. Capitalizing on discontent with the conduct of the Mexican War, their party won a sweeping, though razor-thin, victory in the state elections (Whigs took the governorship and house, while preserving a tie in the senate). The Ashtabula Sentinel, a Whig journal that served as the mouthpiece of radical abolitionist Congressman Joshua Reed Giddings, characterized the war as the offspring of an increasingly aggressive Slave Power that was bent on increasing slavery through colonizing new lands. The Sentinel blunted Democrats‟ patriotic support for the war by claiming that it was being prosecuted solely for the purpose of “increasing the slave power, in order to subject the people of the Free states to its control.”6 To preserve the freedom of white northerners and their political equality within the federal system northerners, Giddings sought to commit the Whig

Party to the destruction of the cancerous system of slavery.

The political antislavery crusade typically focused more on restraining and destroying slavery in the South than ameliorating the lives of free blacks in the North. However, the

Ashtabula Sentinel linked its opposition to the war with a campaign for the repeal of the state‟s

6 Ashtabula Sentinel, 17 May 1847. The Geauga Whig and Cleveland Herald denigrated the Sentinel‟s characterization of the war. Reflecting the attitudes of conservative Whigs on the Reserve, these papers feared that criticism of the war and the South might alienate voters during a period of relative national unity in the face of a grave martial contest. Still, the Ohio legislature passed resolutions condemning the war as unjust, the result of American aggression. See Plain Dealer, 20 June 1848. 125

Black Laws. These Black Laws sharply circumscribed black freedom in Ohio. Among other obligations, they required that blacks settling in Ohio post a $500 bond as a guarantee of their civil behavior, register with their county courts (for a 12.5 cent fee), and provide proof of freedom as a prerequisite for employment.7 The Sentinel attacked the Black Laws both on political principle and moral grounds. These unjust laws were “subversive of the principles of republican equality” and “opposed to the benevolence of the Gospel.” The paper concluded,

“with all this slavery is well pleased,” for the unequal treatment of blacks in the North approbated the notion of black inferiority on which southern slavery rested.8 Interestingly,

Giddings‟ paper suggested that white northerners had to cease their oppression of the African-

Americans in their midst in order to preserve the political independence of the white North.

Giddings‟ hectoring of Democrats over the inequality of the Black Laws forced Joseph

Gray to respond. From the editorial offices of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, he also criticized the

Black Laws as anti-republican and called for their repeal. However, he detected hints of oppression, not freedom, in Whigs‟ moral didacticism. It suggested a desire for “a reconstruction of society in this country on the broad platform of social and political equality with the blacks, as contended for by the abolitionists. There is something in our very nature which revolts at this, and which no appeals to our humanity or interests, however eloquent, can ever overcome.”9

7 Most communities did not enforce the Black Laws, but in 1829 Cincinnati authorities announced their intention to enforce the laws after a significant influx of black settlers. The announcement inspired a white mob to harass the residents of Cincinnati‟s Little Africa until roughly half of the neighborhood‟s 2,000 residents fled. See Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 8 Ashtabula Sentinel, 8 February 1847. 9 Plain Dealer, 2 October 1846. In more vicious language, the editor lamented, “none but a curly head and long heels can go to the Legislature. Every candidate must have the niggerometer applied to him, and if he has not colored blood enough to raise the abolition mercury, he is no go.”11 September 1846. Plain Dealer, 9 September 1846. Signifying African-Americans not merely by the “color” of their skin, but by such attributes (often imagined) as curly hair or “long heels” reveals the very visceral nature of white racism of this period. Mark M. Smith has written insightfully of how whites used the senses of sight, hearing, smell, and touch to craft racist depictions of 126

Gray‟s outlook was too utilitarian to embrace such revolutionary change. A perfect social and political equality among whites and blacks threatened to produce more ill than good, he believed, for it would necessarily turn social mores and institutions upside down. To the editor and his followers, there was no contradiction or hypocrisy in fighting for the legal equality of Ohio‟s black citizens, while allowing white society to determine whether or not to grant African-

Americans social or political equality.

Historians long have noted that the antislavery movement implicitly prioritized free labor as a progressive and superior labor system, one that would be exponentially more remunerating for producers and the country than the backward system of slavery. However, the Plain Dealer maintained that Whig concern for the plight of blacks differed markedly from their attitude toward free workers. The paper argued that distant slavery was far less a menace to Ohioans‟ individual liberties than regressive, Whig taxes and monopolistic incorporation laws. While they deprecated the plight of southern slaves, Whigs themselves were busy fixing financial fetters on the white laborers of Ohio. The combination of a regressive tax policy and special incorporation laws fastened on the worker “such a chain of necessities and so heavy and unequal burdens of taxation that he … must will to work and work for what he can get.” As a consequence “the combined monied interests of the North is as prolific of white slavery, as the „peculiar institutions‟ of the South are of black; and we are bound to oppose slavery in every form, while

African-Americans. See Smith, How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation and the Senses (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2006) and Sensory History (New York: Berg Publishers, 2008). On Democratic racism, see especially Baker, Affairs of Party. On the history of the Black Laws and repeal efforts, see Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws: Race and the Legal Process in Early Ohio (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005). Several efforts to repeal the Black Laws from 1845 through 1848 failed, though the legislature did repeal the restrictions against black immigration and black court testimony against whites by February 1846 (other punitive laws remained in effect). Middleton noted that the majority of those pushing for repeal were progressive Whigs, and he suggested most Democrats rabidly opposed repeal. 127

they [the Whigs] oppose it only in one.”10 Ultimately, the repressive system of taxes sharply limited the productivity of free labor.

Though Gray did not reject the antislavery sentiments of his fellow Democrats (and some

Whigs) outright, he instead prioritized the tax and financial reforms that he believed would bolster the productive capacities of the Western Reserve and bring opportunity and wealth to his readers. Indeed, the editor proved remarkably unconcerned with the potential ramifications of the national debate over slavery‟s potential expansion. Acknowledging that this issue would dominate the new congressional session opening in December 1846, Gray airily concluded, “the debates of the next session will be interesting and important on this account, as no doubt a new organization of both the old political parties will follow the discussions.”11 It is telling that Gray referred to the Whig and Democratic parties not by name, but merely as “both the old political parties.” Indeed, his nonchalant speculation that a reorganization of both parties was imminent, suggested that Gray‟s investment in the Democratic Party was conditional and limited. Rather, he seemed more deeply invested in achieving the financial reforms that would benefit Ohio producers and merchants.

Gray invoked the image of “white slavery” (meaning, wage slavery) to criticize the nascent industrial market system and ennoble its white victims in place of the victims of slavery.

Eugene Genovese has argued that the concept of wage slavery emerged from a pre-capitalist ethic of craft labor, and workers used it specifically to critique and rebuke capitalism itself. Yet,

10 Plain Dealer, 10 September 1846. On the free labor antecedents of antislavery see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). On Democratic racism see Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Verso, 1990). On Democratic racism and the capitalist critique in the concept of wage slavery, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991). 11 Plain Dealer, 4 December 1846. 128

Gray used the concept of white slavery specifically to expose the hypocrisy of Whig humanitarianism, not to assail the capitalist market system. After all, he believed that system could be made more inviting and egalitarian simply by jettisoning the outmoded, conservative and aristocratic policies of the Whigs.12

Whig financial policy, the Plain Dealer expounded, prevented the kind of entrepreneurial opportunities and economic growth that free trade promised. The Whig tax on invested capital, for instance, penalized direct investment in internal improvements and manufacturing, while encouraging the hoarding of capital in banks. This system artificially sustained the Whig banking system and forced small producers to pay high premiums on commercial bank loans. Gray complained that Whig banks “are monopolizing the purse strings of the country and are doing all the business that is worth doing.” He insisted that creating incentives for direct investment in commercial agriculture and manufacturing would expand economic productivity, while obviating the need for the state‟s specially-chartered banking system.13 Notably, the editor did not share radical Democrats‟ circumspection of taxes. Rather, he advocated strategic taxation not merely to raise funds necessary for civic operations, but also to manage the public credit supply and direct commercial activity.14 Whereas the Whig financial system served the interests of elite bankers, a

Democratic system would serve small producers by increasing commercial opportunities for all

12 Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South, 2nd ed. (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989). 13 Plain Dealer, 28 June 1847. The paper pinned the slow sales of Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati Railroad stock, and the lack of investment in manufacturing on Whig tax policy. See Plain Dealer, 14 April, 18 June, and 27 July, 1847. 14 Gray supported an 1847 municipal bond measure to buy back unredeemed city orders (essentially I.O.U.s to city contractors) that were trading well below par. The depreciation of those orders had led to a ¼ to 1/3 increase in contractors‟ charges for municipal construction and services. The editor confidently asserted that a city tax to pay for the bond would “be most cheerfully borne” by the citizenry, for it would lessen the drain on the city treasury, bring more coin into circulation and free up capital for investment in shipping, railroads, manufacturing and commerce. Though the plan was proposed by Cleveland‟s Whig Mayor (and Gray‟s bitter editorial rival of the Cleveland Herald), Josiah Harris, the Plain Dealer editor eschewed partisanship in assessing its merits for the municipality. Plain Dealer, 16 March 1847. 129

Ohioans. Though the nation had been rescued from the Whigs‟ high tariffs and national bank,

Gray believed Democrats still had to labor to rescue Ohioans from Whigs‟ regressive financial aristocracy.

Here was a crucial distinction between Gray and his party‟s economic principles.

Whereas the party strove to restrain government from intervening in the economy, the editor instead believed that government had to be more deeply involved in the economy, albeit on the side of small producers, not privileged entrepreneurs. His view was particularly conditioned by

Cleveland‟s own peculiar economic situation. Nestled along lucrative trade routes in a region rich in natural resources, the city nevertheless lacked the wealth to exploit its natural advantages.

If the populace did not have the means to create a flourishing market, the government was obligated to aid them in creating one, Gray reasoned. He paid lip service to restraining state government from profligate improvement expenditures, but not because he scrupled against government investment in such projects. Rather, he preferred a different model of funding, in which private investors and local governments loaned their capital and their credit to accomplish these projects.

These commercial concerns also informed Gray‟s support for the U.S.-Mexican War. He and many other Democratic editors saw the potential territorial gains from the war as a field for free labor and an integral link in the expanding chain of free trade that already was bringing increased wealth to Ohio. This vast commercial promise meant that Whig opposition to the war was both unpatriotic and foolishly shortsighted.15 In the spring of 1847, Ashtabula Whigs took up

15 Plain Dealer, 25 January 1847. In addition to valuable ports in California, the editor urged the United States to seize a slim strip of territory in southern Mexico that appeared to be ideal for the construction of a ship canal from the Gulf of Mexico to the city of Tehuantepec on the Pacific Ocean. Gray confidently asserted that such a canal would enrich not only the United States, but also southern Mexico and the nearby rebellious state of Yucatan. The canal would thus afford a practical peace among all parties, built on mutual commercial interests. See Plain 130

the cause of “no territory” (first put forth by southern Whigs). “No territory” was a political expedient, designed to point up the considerable difference between a punitive war in defense of national honor and an unjust war of naked conquest. Whigs particularly hoped that it would be a useful tactic in the coming presidential election, allowing them to oppose the conduct of the war, not the war itself, especially in the likelihood that triumphant General Zachary Taylor would carry their standard in the coming campaign. Though, the Cleveland Herald would become the only Whig paper on the Reserve to endorse “no territory” in time for the October 1847 state elections, the party as a whole vigorously debated the issue throughout the year.16

To commercially-minded Democrats like Gray, “no territory” was an insult to the human and financial sacrifice Americans had made in prosecuting the war. Through the Plain Dealer, he argued that rejecting territorial concessions would be tantamount to choosing impoverishment over wealth. Gray approvingly reprinted an article from the Washington Union that dismissed

“no territory” as folly. The article noted that by occupying California alone, the U.S. already was

“throwing its harbors open to our 600 whalers and our 20,000 seamen – possessing some of the finest harbors in the world – and opening that beautiful region to the men and manufactures and

Dealer, 27 April 1847. Gray even suggested that leading Whigs‟ opposition to the war was not just patriotic, but downright treasonous. Ohio‟s Tom Corwin, a Whig congressman, had gained attention for voting against military appropriations and making an anti-war speech in which he imagined himself a Mexican welcoming American soldiers to “hospitable graves.” An irate Gray subsequently published a rumor in the pages of the Plain Dealer that U.S. troops had found 500 copies of Corwin‟s infamous speech in General Santa Ana‟s captured baggage train after the Battle of Cerro Gordo. Plain Dealer, 17 May 1847. For Corwin‟s quotation, see Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: 249. Notwithstanding his opposition to the war, Corwin was not an adherent of the antislavery movement and generally was a conservative Whig. See Norman Graebner, “Thomas Corwin and the Election of 1848: A Study in Conservative Politics,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 17 no. 2 (May 1951): 162-179. 16 Ashtabula Sentinel, 10 May 1847. For a thorough and concise explication of the development of “no territory”, see Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: 252-258. The equivocating Herald later would abandon “no territory” out of antipathy to antislavery Whigs‟ increasing power in the party. Historian John Schroeder has argued that Whigs‟ seemingly inconsistent and temporizing opposition to the war succeeded in rallying diverse groups to oppose the war, while ultimately leading to Whig congressional gains in 1846. See John H. Schroeder, Mr. Polk‟s War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846-1848 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973). 131

shipping of the North and of the whole Union.”17 In this view, the war literally had been an investment. The country needed territorial concessions that would augment the national market in order to redeem the country‟s expenditure of wealth and blood.

In fact, commercialism framed the Plain Dealer‟s discussion of the thorny issues that blossomed in the wake of the war. Rejecting “no territory,” the paper embraced the Wilmot

Proviso to defend the sacrifice northerners had made in the war. In supporting the Proviso, Gray joined with radical leaders of his party, like former Senator Benjamin Tappan, but he framed his support in a distinctly different way. Rather than supporting the Proviso mainly as a rebuke to the South and check on the growth of slavery, he employed it as a tool to protect and recover northern investment in the war. Claiming that fully three-quarters of the wealth expended on the war derived from the commerce-rich free states of the North, Gray characterized the Proviso as an admonition to the President that he “shall not purchase territory with our money” only to open it to slavery.18 To Gray, the Proviso would preserve northern honor and plant the free labor system in the West, while the war itself would preserve national honor and increase international trade.

In this vein, the Proviso also provided a gentle rebuke to the President for his veto of the

River and Harbors Bill the previous year. Whigs and developmentally-minded Democrats believed that it was necessary to remove river obstructions in the West and develop harbors on

17 Plain Dealer, 15 September 1847. Interestingly, the Union article referred first to the men and manufactures of the North, and only afterward to the Union as a whole, as the principle agents in “redeeming” California. This peculiar ordering of subjects betrayed a belief that the South did not represent a true market economy and thus did not have the requisite entrepreneurs or materiel to tap incipient markets in the West. There has been a long and lively historical debate concerning whether or not the South had a true capitalist economy in this period and in what ways it was fundamentally similar or dissimilar to the northern economy. See especially, See Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Vintage, 1965): 19-24; Genovese & Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Knopf, 1982); and Egnal, Clash of Extremes. 18 Plain Dealer, 25 January 1847. 132

the Great Lakes to complete a truly national trade network, linking all regions of the country together. In July 1847, Gray had joined the Ohio delegation at a massive River and Harbors convention in Chicago. Organized by New York Whigs, the convention was advertised as a nonpartisan gathering, but Whigs made up an overwhelming majority of its delegates and used the event to jump start the party‟s 1848 presidential campaign. Not surprisingly, Ohio‟s leading radical Democrats, Tappan and Medary, spurned the convention, but the stubbornly independent

Gray eagerly attended.19

He subsequently joined a committee appointed to present the convention resolutions to

Congress and to President Polk in December 1847. The president twice had vetoed internal improvements bills on the grounds that while the federal government lacked the authority to fund improvements in service of domestic commerce. In response, the River and Harbors Convention resolutions argued that foreign and domestic trade were “so inseparable that they should be regarded as one.”20 Gray unsuccessfully attempted to convince Polk that internal improvements in the Great Lakes region served national purposes and, as such, were entirely consonant with

Democratic principles. The editor‟s concomitant support for both western improvements and the

19 Horace Greeley, Thurlow Weed, Jesse B. Thomas, Millard Fillmore and James Barton were among the Whig leadership of the convention. For the debates, committee reports and resolutions of the convention see Robert Fergus, Chicago River and Harbor Convention: An Account of its Origin and Proceedings (Chicago: Fergus Printing, 1882). Though the convention was the brainchild of Whig merchants based in New York, Gray hailed it as an expression of western might. In distinctly non-partisan language, He described the gathering as a demonstration that the “Young Lion” of the West “will no longer appear the whining sycophant for favors at the doors of our National Congress, but will demand justice with a roar.” Plain Dealer, 21 June 1847. 20 Plain Dealer, 10 July 1847; Plain Dealer, 27 December 1847. Polk ultimately vetoed a third western improvements bill in the summer of 1848. On the first day of the 30th Congress in December 1847, Whig Congressman Samuel Vinton of Ohio offered a resolution to divide the House Commerce Committee into domestic and foreign subcommittees. Vinton hoped that the committee‟s only two westerners, Democrats Kingsley Bingham of Michigan and John Wentworth of Illinois, would be appointed to the subcommittee on domestic trade and thus more easily bring improvement bills to votes on the House floor. Democrats Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina and Henry Bedinger of Virginia led a successful charge to defeat the resolution, unabashedly complaining that it would encourage federal meddling in the domestic slave trade. To improvement-minded northerners, this was yet another instance in which the imperatives of maintaining the slave system were directly at odds with northern schemes of commercial expansion. See, CG: First Session of Thirtieth Congress, 28-29. 133

Proviso implied that free western territory, on the model of the North, was vital to ensure the continued spread of the industry and commerce that would enrich the nation as a whole.

On the Reserve itself, the Proviso also served as a mechanism by which Gray‟s party could lure disaffected antislavery Democrats back to the fold. In January 1847, prior to the

Proviso‟s reintroduction in Congress, the Plain Dealer confidently asserted, that if northern

Democrats united in “setting bounds to slavery,” then “the abolition societies throughout the country, enrolling as they do from 75 to 100,000 voters, would be effectually disbanded; and thousands of good Democrats and true would return to our ranks, bringing multitudes of those once our political opponents with them.”21 However, his shrewdly calculated support of the

Proviso on the Reserve brought unforeseen consequences from Washington.

In the summer of 1847 the Cleveland Times won the lucrative contract to advertise the

U.S. Post Office‟s lists of unclaimed letters and mail lettings for Cleveland and its surroundings.

The Times was a Democratic rival to the Plain Dealer recently got up by the city‟s Postmaster,

Timothy Spencer, with the assistance of Benjamin Tappan.22 The loss of the contract stung Gray deeply, not only because he saw himself as a loyal Polk supporter (whereas Tappan was a Van

Buren acolyte), but because Postmaster General Cave Johnson, of Tennessee, seemingly had violated a new law that directed the Post Office to advertise its mail lists in the papers of largest circulation in each city and county. Gray claimed that the Plain Dealer had the largest circulation

21 Plain Dealer, 11 January 1847. Gray‟s pro-Proviso editorial was occasioned by New York Democrat Preston King‟s reintroduction of the Wilmot Proviso in Congress. 22 On Tappan and Spencer‟s relationship, see Plain Dealer, 2 December 1845. Historians generally regard Tappan as a staunch opponent of slavery, but as a young U.S. Senator, he had denied the federal government‟s right to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of resident slave owners. His friend Francis J.N. Neef facetiously remarked, “this means in plain English that Congress ought not to prevent a set of robbers from robbing without the robbers being willing to stop robbing; this will go down slick enough in an assembly of robbers.” Francis J.N. Neef to Benjamin Tappan, 3 May 1840. Benjamin Tappan Papers. See Daniel Feller, “A Brother in Arms: Benjamin Tappan and the Antislavery Democracy,” The Journal of American History, vol. 88 no. 1 (June 2001): 48-74. Feller argued that Tappan‟s brand of antislavery evolved out of traditional Jacksonian ideals of equal rights and not out of political expediency or a desire to avenge northern pride. 134

of any paper in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, leading him to expect that the contract would be his. Yet, in a private interview with Johnson in Washington during the same trip in which

Gray called on the President, the Postmaster General coldly dismissed the Plain Dealer as a

“Proviso paper,” unworthy of the patronage of this administration.23

Here was the limit of Gray‟s independence as an editor. Patronage was a crucial, if not essential, aspect of his newspaper‟s growth and profits. After being denied Post Office patronage the previous year, a bitterly disappointed Gray had questioned the entire patronage system as a means of building and maintaining party. He proclaimed, “we are sick of the whole post office monopoly. As a political engine of vast power and mischief, the people of this country may well fear it, and as a great government monopoly, at war with every principle of equal rights, they may well detest it.”24 While his invocation of equal rights sounded grand, Gray really was most upset at serving a party and an administration that, in his opinion, did not reward him and his business appropriately. To attack the patronage system was to attack the very means by which parties were founded, maintained, and rewarded. Thus, his criticism of the Post Office patronage machine was a criticism of the party system itself. Though he did not break with the party over this issue his ongoing battles with the Post Office seemed to undermine his attachment to party.

Instead, the editor seemed to pledge his support only to those Democratic leaders who potentially could repay his loyalty.

23 Plain Dealer, 4 January 1848. Though the Times had a much smaller circulation than the Plain Dealer, the Times published a one-time, large, special issue distributed throughout Cuyahoga County by the post offices. The paper then used the resulting circulation figure for this single issue to make its claim for the printing. Gray sent signed affidavits to the Post Office from two of the Time‟s own pressmen, indicating that the true circulation of that paper was less than half of the Plain Dealer‟s. Plain Dealer, 2 October 1847. On Gray‟s meeting with Johnson, see Plain Dealer, 4 January 1848. Spencer also unsuccessfully sued Gray for libel, after the latter had charged him with inconsistencies in the accounting practices of the Cleveland Post Office. The case was decided in November. See Plain Dealer, 19 November 1847. 24 Plain Dealer, 22 September 1846. 135

After Johnson‟s cold proscription of his paper, the editor conferred with compromise- minded Democratic congressmen in Washington and blithely abandoned the Proviso for a new position. He now joined those who declared that Congress had no power to prohibit or introduce slavery into any new territories. These compromisers reasoned that since any territory to be gained from Mexico already was free, it could only be introduced there by explicit provisions in the treaty of cession then being negotiated. Mexico, the editor assured his readers, hardly would acquiesce in such a provision, which proved “Wilmot Proviso enough for all practical purposes.”25 Gray ostensibly changed his position in hopes of securing future federal patronage.

Ironically, the Proviso, which had been designed to preserve the North‟s right to denounce slavery and its freedom to promote its free labor ideology, had the opposite effect on the Reserve. Somewhat demoralized, Gray seethed,

One section of country, or class of public functionaries, has no right to use the power of place, conferred by a common constituency, to dictate the policy of another section, nor has it any right to disburse the treasures of the common people to favor and build up, or to discountenance and put down any policy or opinion.26

Interestingly, Gray seemed nearly as offended that northern wealth was being employed to secure territory that would be open to slavery as he was by Johnson‟s impudent attempt to stifle free expression among his fellow Democrats in the North.

Though Johnson refused to reverse his decision on the mail contract, Gray persisted in his abandonment of the Proviso. Again, regional developments dictated his course. The editor feared that if Congress failed to compromise on the disposition of future territories, it also would fail to ratify the treaty to end the war, then being negotiated in Mexico City. This would jeopardize the country‟s ability to secure any territorial concessions at all. Without a link to the Pacific, Ohio‟s

25 Plain Dealer, 24 December 1847. 26 Plain Dealer, 9 February 1848. 136

commerce would experience much more meager growth, he worried. Acquiescing in the

Proviso‟s defeat at least would allow the speedy consummation of territorial acquisition.

Another, more immediate, cause was Lewis Cass‟ campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Cass adopted non-intervention, the theory that the federal government did not have the power to prohibit or introduce slavery in the territories, as the focal point of his campaign.27 Gray became an early supporter of his candidacy, believing that the election of a westerner to the presidency would finally break the East‟s hold on federal power and address western concerns, especially the need for transportation improvements in the region. While Cass conceived of non-intervention (soon to be known as popular sovereignty) in order to curry favor with southern leaders in the Democracy, Gray supported it to gain favor with Cass and his western advisors.

Ultimately, the editor‟s course in relation to the Proviso defies easy explanation or categorization. Though he had abandoned the Proviso, Gray declared the motto of northern

Democrats for the upcoming 1848 national campaign to be, “Free Labor, Free Territory, and a

Free Press,” the last issue in response to southern dictation of northern political attitudes.28 This was not the expression of Leonard Richards‟ doughfaces who found comfort and order in the harsh forms of southern white supremacy and who consequently found the Proviso anathema.

Gray‟s rejection of the Proviso entailed an entirely different political calculus, one that went unrewarded by his own Administration.

27 Cass‟s non-intervention essentially left slavery in a legal limbo in the territories. On Cass‟ political temporizing and long-standing presidential aspirations, see Willard C. Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996). 28 Plain Dealer, 27 January 1848. 137

Temperance and Corporate Rights in Maine

Like their colleagues in Ohio, Maine‟s Whigs rebounded in 1846 on the strength of their opposition to the Mexican War. Unlike their counterparts on the Reserve though, Maine‟s Whig editors tended to attack the war as a reckless act that would invite British intervention, altering the hemispheric balance of power. As early as 1845, Luther Severance had predicted, “if we push matters to extremities, and bring on a general war, we shall probably find at the end of it,

England in possession of Cuba, California and Oregon, while we may have the Canadas.”29

International cooperation on the

Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad notwithstanding, the country still was locked in competition with Britain for hegemony in the Americas.

Maine‟s Democratic leadership stubbornly dismissed these concerns and justified the war in nakedly commercial terms. Democratic Governor Hugh J. Dana concluded,

As Mexico is unable to pay or secure to us indemnity for the past and the expenses of the war, a cession of a portion of her territory to the United States seems inevitable. By this acquisition we shall secure an extent of coast on the Pacific, almost equal to that on the Atlantic with a practical line of communication between the two oceans. Thus situated between Europe and Asia, we become the central point, and command the commerce of the world.30

Favorably situated on the Atlantic rim, Maine was positioned to reap the benefit of inter-ocean trade routes coursing through the continent. The governor thus tied the state‟s prosperity intimately to the successful completion of continental expansion. Dana assumed that a network of improvements (roads, railroads, telegraph lines) would link the coasts and unite the communities between, allowing transcontinental trade to flourish.

29 Letter, Luther Severance to Kennebec Journal, 7 March 1845. 30 “The Governor‟s Message,” 19 May 1847. 27th Legislature. On the economic vision embedded in the concept of manifest destiny, see Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 138

The Governor‟s reassurance proved unavailing among Maine voters, who increased Whig totals in the 1846 elections. However, this was not a sign of resurgent Whig strength, for both major parties saw significant defections among the voters in those elections. Split tickets and the proliferation of third-party temperance candidates swelled many of the legislative and municipal races, preventing clear majorities and necessitating numerous run-off races. Some municipal and legislative races were not decided until May of 1847.31 In his seminal study of party reorganization in the 1850s, Michael Holt demonstrated how new political issues, such as nativism and antislavery, irrevocably fractured the hidebound Democrats and Whigs and eventually led to Republicans supplanting the Whig and Know Nothing Parties. The temperance issue provided an early example of such challenges to the major parties in Maine.

Initially, both parties sought to co-opt the temperance issue, with Democrats supporting the passage of a state licensing law for the retail sale of liquor in 1841 and Whigs calling for more prohibitive measures. However, Democratic editors particularly tried to marginalize temperance, which they saw as ancillary to their developmental goals. The uneven and unenthusiastic enforcement of license laws (which Democratic leaders condoned) galled the state‟s various temperance organizations, and in 1846 Neal Dow‟s Portland Association for the

Promotion of Temperance began to mobilize itself to contest local elections. Dow challenged the respected Whig Phineas Barnes for his legislative seat from Portland. Though the temperance

31 Maine law at that time required victorious candidates in all races to poll a majority of the votes cast. The last race to be decided was the legislative canvass in Hampden, a small town just south of the state‟s lumbering capital of Bangor. Native son Hannibal Hamlin, who later would serve in the U.S. Senate and become Lincoln‟s first vice-president, won the seat. As a result of the interminable and costly run-off process, the state‟s voters ratified several constitutional amendments allowing pluralities to elect the governor, state senators and state assemblymen. The amendment allowing election of the governor by plurality succeeded by the narrowest margin of the three. See Eastern Argus, 21 September 1847. 139

crusader did not come close to victory, his dogged campaign forestalled Barnes‟ re-election through nine ballots and a full nine months after the initial spring canvass.32

The spring 1847 municipal elections in Bangor, eastern Maine‟s largest city and the heart of the state‟s lucrative lumber market, illustrated the potential of the temperance issue to undermine the major parties. Neither Democrats nor Whigs nominated candidates for mayor in those elections. Instead, a Citizens‟ Temperance Council nominated Whig businessman Charles

Hayward for mayor and established a three man committee for each of the city‟s seven wards to nominate candidates for other offices and organize the canvass.33 Though his opponent also was a committed temperance man, Hayward handily won office with the help of the Council‟s thorough mobilization of the city‟s wards.

That a Whig would win municipal office on a temperance ticket perhaps is not surprising in this period. Daniel Walker Howe long ago explicated the tendency toward moral and social perfectionism that suffused Whig ideals and shaped their political goals. Sean Wilentz, among numerous others, further detected an emphasis on cultural homogeneity and a strain of intolerance among the largely native-born, Protestant Whigs in response to the dizzying changes

32 Daily Whig and Courier, 6 and 9 March, 1847. On the contentious race between Dow and Barnes, see Portland Advertiser, 12 November 1847; and Eastern Argus, 16 November; 3 December; 28 December 1847. Dow eventually would ride the temperance hobby to election as mayor of Portland in 1850. For more on Dow, see the illustrative but unabashed hagiography by Frank L. Byrne, Prophet of Prohibition: Neal Dow and His Crusade (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1961). Temperance became an especially powerful issue in the city, for it was one of the largest importers of sugar and molasses (for the production of rum) on the East Coast. Portland‟s near monopoly of Cuba‟s sugar trade allowed it to surpass even Boston in sugar imports. In the 1840s, when Portland‟s population was between 16,000 and 20,000, the city sported seven rum distilleries. See David Carey, Jr., “Comunidad Escondida: Latin American Influences in Nineteenth- and Twentieth Century Portland” in Creating Portland: History and Place in New England, Joseph Conforti, ed. (Durham New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005): 94-95; and Roger Duncan, Coastal Maine: A Maritime History (New York: Norton & Co., 1992): 281. 33 Daily Whig and Courier, 1 March 1847. The council leadership and ward committees were dominated by artisans, merchants and other businessmen, particularly lumber mill owners, most of whom had resided in the city for at least several years. Bangor City Directory, 1846-51. 140

wrought by increasing immigration.34 For the most virulent nativists, many of them Whigs, temperance was the means to close down the taverns where immigrant men often expressed their collective identity, asserted their independence and often mobilized themselves in support of the

Democratic Party.

However, for Bangor‟s Whigs, temperance was not strictly a moral problem. It also was a problem of political economy. A correspondent to Bangor‟s Daily Whig and Courier argued that the city spent over $2000 every year to alleviate pauperism caused by intemperance. In response, this Whig mouthpiece promoted dramatic increases in the fines levied to punish liquor sellers, because, “capital does not like to remain idle, and when it is forced out of alliance with the evil of intemperance it will seek investment where it may promote the welfare of the community.”35

Bangor Whigs did seek the moral redemption of the drunkard and society, and they clearly attempted to coerce immigrants and imbibers to adopt native, Protestant values of thrift, sobriety and self-denial. Yet, they seemed intensely pre-occupied with directing and maximizing the productive capacities of their community as well, through temperance. In this instance, they employed a baldly capitalist means to discipline society.

The 1846 state elections in Portland and the Bangor municipal elections of 1847 taught the state‟s Whigs an important lesson. Badly outmaneuvered by Democrats on economic issues, temperance seemed to be the only viable issue on which to stake the party‟s future. On the other hand, Maine Democrats, though troubled by the increasing stridency of the temperance

34 See Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs, and Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, chapter 15. 35 Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, 6 March and 26 June 1847. Of course, there was a strong element of social control in this expression of political economy, too. Nativist Whigs particularly believed that the vice of intemperance was endemic among Catholic and Irish immigrants. Consequently, the Whig and Courier gave special notice to the St. Patrick‟s Day festivities of Bangor‟s Catholic Total Abstinence Society and the Hibernian Total Abstinence Society. The city had seen a sizable increase in its population of Irish immigrants since 1838. A cholera epidemic in New Brunswick that year sent hundreds of newly arrived Irish immigrants from that province into eastern Maine, many of them to Bangor. 141

movement, remained largely fixated on bringing their major internal improvements projects to fruition.

As we saw in the previous chapter, Portland‟s Eastern Argus, the state‟s most influential

Democratic paper, spearheaded efforts to develop a modern transportation infrastructure in the state. The paper broke with radicals in defending exclusive corporate charters as the best means by which to modernize and develop the state‟s economy. Committed to promoting economic development through private corporations, the Eastern Argus advocated a staunchly conservative interpretation of corporate privileges. The paper insisted that such charters carried implied rights of exclusivity to protect their ventures from being devalued through competition with potential corporate rivals.

In January of 1847, when the Kennebec and Portland Railroad Corporation (hereafter designated as the K & P) sought a new charter to extend their existing road from Augusta to

Waterville (a sizable manufacturing town about 20 miles north of the capital), Charles Holden promptly objected. The proposed route threatened to come into direct competition with an existing railroad corporation that held a charter to build a route running southwest from

Waterville to the textile manufacturing town of Lewiston, approximately 25 miles southwest of

Augusta. In the pages of the Eastern Argus, a letter from a man who signed himself only “A. B.” sharply criticized the K & P‟s maneuver. In legalistic language, he lectured his readers that capitalists invested their funds in internal improvement corporations with the understanding that

“no counter or rival project which shall interfere with, or impair the rights secured by their charter, or which tends to diminish the value of the property invested under the authority thereof, shall receive the countenance or approval of the Government.” As a consequence, the decision of the K & P directors to seek a new charter essentially was intended to seduce the next session of 142

the legislature “to violate its faith pledged to its own citizens, for the unworthy purpose of hindering the progress of a valuable enterprise, of great public utility, and of prime necessity to the people of a large section of the State.”36 In making this argument, “A. B.” and Holden‟s

Eastern Argus revived a fundamental debate over whether corporate charters carried implied, exclusive rights or explicit, limited rights.

Almost exactly ten years earlier, the Supreme Court, under Democratic Chief Justice

Roger B. Taney, had rejected this very argument in the case of Charles River Bridge vs. Warren

Bridge. The case arose when the Massachusetts legislature chartered the Warren Bridge

Corporation in 1828 to build a bridge, free to public traffic, across the Charles River, linking

Boston and Charlestown. The new bridge paralleled, and thus came into competition with, the older Charles River Bridge, a toll bridge chartered in 1785. The Charles River Bridge

Corporation subsequently sued the WBC for unlawful appropriation of its property (the commercial pedestrian traffic), arguing that the older corporation‟s charter implied an exclusive right to handle the traffic over the Charles River. On February 14, 1837, the Taney Court determined that corporate charters could grant only express powers and privileges. Wherever a charter was vague in the rights it conveyed, the state legislature was free to interpret in the best interests of the public. A decision in favor of the CRBC to uphold exclusive proprietary rights for chartered corporations would undermine the sovereignty of the people (as represented by their legislature) and halt technological advances in industry and transportation, Taney argued.

The Democratic Party immediately hailed the decision for buttressing states‟ rights and

36 Portland Eastern Argus, 22 January 1847. David Bronson, who would be nominated for governor by the Whigs later that year, presented the resolution that directed the K & P‟s Board of Directors to seek the new charter. Bronson and the board hoped to tap the agricultural hinterland in the western part of the state and thus ensure Augusta, which sat astride the broad, navigable Kennebec River, would never be dependent on Portland for its commerce. 143

subjecting private property and capital to the authority of legislatures representing the interests of the democratic masses.

Ironically, the tenth anniversary of this signal “Democratic” triumph found the most powerful Democratic newspaper in the state of Maine essentially repudiating the reasoning behind this decision. Through the Eastern Argus, Holden gravely asserted,

The magnitude of the question involved in this discussion cannot be overestimated. It is no more nor less than to determine whether rights of property invested in internal improvements, under the authority of the State, shall be respected, or whether the Legislature will, by granting charters for parallel and intersecting roads where there is no great public necessity to demand them, destroy the value of what was then personally invested.37

The editorial invoked the “public necessity,” but its reasoning was in strict counterpoint to the logic of the Taney Court. This unqualified support for implied rights in corporate charters troubled some of the party‟s loyal Jacksonians. One of the K & P‟s most active directors was longtime Democrat Reuel Williams, a contemporary of Preble‟s and a former state legislator and

U. S. Senator. In 1848, Williams would return to the legislature hoping to “break the chain of charters that held in check all extension of railways above Augusta.”38 In the legislature, he sponsored general incorporation acts (which would carry no exclusive privileges) to attract capital investment and spur creative competition among corporations. Yet even a Jacksonian stalwart like Williams could not break his party‟s heavy reliance on the Atlantic and St.

Lawrence as the single best path to commercial prosperity, and his bills went down to defeat.

37 Eastern Argus, 15 February 1847. 38 Poor, Memoir of Honorable Reuel Williams: 46. Williams invested nearly $300,000 of his own money in the K & P, losing, according to Poor, roughly 2/3 of that investment when the road failed to realize a profit. 144

Whig journals chortled that the Eastern Argus now supported monopoly rights, a charge that the paper itself often had hurled at protectionist Whigs.39 Holden‟s newspaper countered that it was defending the viability of the charter as an instrument of attracting capital investment.

Radicals, it contended, would waste capital through profligate chartering of impecunious and incompetent corporations, miring the state in unfinished improvements.40 However, Holden could not conceal the tortuous manipulation of the party‟s Jacksonian principles. He and many of its leaders were both politically and literally invested in the Atlantic & St. Lawrence project.

They were determined to see it succeed even at the cost of open, unfettered competition in the marketplace.

Benjamin and G. C. Griffin, editors of the Belfast Republican Journal provided an interesting contrast to Holden‟s promotion of corporate privilege. Only a few years before, workers “in a neighboring state” had been prosecuted for organizing in pursuit of higher wages.

The workers‟ combination had been illegal, yet “combinations are common among corporations to reduce the wages of their workmen,” the editors noted. They succinctly concluded, “the law respects corporations too much.”41 The only solution to this imbalance of power between capital and labor was for the federal government to provide workers with the opportunity to gain their independence through property ownership.

The government, the Griffins argued, should cease selling the public lands at market value and simply sell them at cost (of surveying) in individual lots to heads of households. The

Journal suggested that the loss of revenue from land sales would be more than compensated

39 See the Eastern Times, Gospel Banner, Augusta Age, 9 February 1847. Whigs seemed content merely to tweak their Democratic rivals over their changing principles, for the completion of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad only promised to benefit Whig schemes to extend rail lines into eastern Maine and eventually create a statewide rail system. See Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, 17 March 1847. 40 Eastern Argus, 11 February 1847. 41 Belfast Republican Journal, 18 February 1847. 145

through increased agricultural production for export, reinforcing free trade and continuing the growth of national wealth. The Griffins thus continued to hew to the radical ethos of the

Jacksonian Era, siding with labor in its seemingly inextricable war with capital. However,

Holden unhesitatingly abandoned this position and sought to marry the fortunes of the party in

Maine to the fate of capital of itself.

Democratic leaders like Holden and Preble were so deeply implicated in this improvement scheme, they even proved willing to sacrifice free territory for the success of the project. Like Governor Dana, many Maine Democrats believed that expansion was vital to tap into the trade that would make this project viable. Consequently, they remained committed to the

Mexican War and its potential territorial gains. Anything that threatened the potential cession of vital territory thereby threatened the commercial well-being and future prosperity of Maine.

When Preston King reintroduced the Wilmot Proviso into Congress at the start of the new session in 1847, the Eastern Argus lamented that it was the wrong time to legislate the disposition of future territories. However, this time Holden reluctantly bowed to pressure from antislavery leaders within his own party, and only days later he proclaimed that the Maine

Democracy would not “sanction any vote which will lead to the introduction into the Union of another inch of slave territory, which is now free.”42 Still, he maintained that because Mexican territory already was free, the Proviso was unnecessary in practical terms, though it did symbolize northern resistance to overbearing southern demands.

As Holden‟s about-face in the pages of the Eastern Argus suggests, the Maine

Democracy‟s position on free territory was, at best, schizophrenic. Democratic Congressman

Hannibal Hamlin succeeded in attaching a revised version of the Proviso to Polk‟s war

42 Eastern Argus, 3 and 5 February 1847. 146

appropriation bill on February 15. However, in an effort to remain in the president‟s good graces, he also introduced an amendment to extend the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law to all new territory gained in the war. The latter amendment failed, but the appropriations bill with the revised

Proviso attached passed the House 116 to 83, with the support of the entire Maine delegation.43

Throughout 1847 Democratic leaders attempted to walk a tightrope. They openly preferred that any new territories gained from the war remain free, but they were loath to ignite a sectional dispute over slavery that might jeopardize the acquisition of those territories.

This was perhaps best illustrated in the obfuscating resolutions of the York County

Democratic convention during the 1847 election season. Too timid to refer to slavery by name, that convention resolved that northerners “cannot refrain from forming opinions of the domestic policy of other members of our confederacy.” Moreover, northerners had the right to act on those opinions and “guard against any extension of such objectionable domestic policy in any future acquisition by the joint means of the whole Union.”44 This milquetoast pledge meekly reaffirmed the right of free expression that northerners already enjoyed. Here, Maine‟s Democratic leaders fell short of the bold stance taken by their colleagues on the Reserve. Unable or unwilling even to condemn slavery forthrightly, they abdicated their leadership within the party on the issue of human rights. Indeed, Holden‟s pre-occupation with heading off challenges to the Atlantic & St.

Lawrence project seemed to cause him to see the slavery agitation as an ill-timed annoyance.

43 Though the House passed the bill with the Proviso attached, the Senate defeated it. For the House vote and the wrangling over this version of the Proviso, see Rayback, Free Soil. Hamlin had been first elected to the 28th Congress in 1843, and subsequently served in the state legislature, where he built a coalition of legislators who later would elect him to the U.S. Senate. Hamlin‟s biographer (his grandson Charles) portrayed him as an uncompromising opponent of slavery. However, we see here Hamlin‟s willingness to compromise by mixing anti- extension with expanded policing of the institution. See Hamlin, The Life and Times of Hannibal Hamlin: 147-154. 44 Eastern Argus, 14 July 1847. 147

Though he eventually joined Hamlin and other party leaders in the state in calling for the restriction of slavery from the new territories, it was hardly a high priority for him.

Such timid antislavery sentiment, along with temporizing on the Proviso presaged a potential split in the Democratic ranks between loyal adherents to the Polk Administration and those who agitated antislavery as a response to what they perceived as the aggrandizement of southern political power. In June 1847, Whigs and antislavery Democrats combined to pass a legislative resolution that likened slavery to “the blight of mildew,” which did “violence to the rights of man, as a thinking, reasonable, and responsible being.” The implication of the resolution was clear: far from an affair of honor, the Mexican War was a calculated plot to expand the field of slavery at the expense of basic human rights. Democratic leaders in the legislature at least temporarily smoothed over this potential split when they subordinated this resolution within a subsequent one that pledged the state‟s allegiance to maintaining the compromises of the Constitution.45 However, the ominous signs of dissent within the Democracy over the issue of slavery still resonated. Radical Democrats, disaffected with Holden and

Preble‟s leadership, expressed their objections by acting in concert with antislavery Whigs and, ironically, nativist temperance advocates in the state‟s fractionalized political arena.

The struggle to control the meaning and the legacy of the Mexican War, both between

Whigs and Democrats and within the Democracy itself, was further embodied in President Polk‟s visit to the state in early July 1847. When Polk had earlier announced his attention to undertake a tour of New England and the Northeast, Portland‟s Whig Mayor, Eliphalet Greeley, and the

Whig-dominated Board of Aldermen greeted the announcement with icy silence. Public pressure

45 27th Maine Legislature, Senate Document 12, 19 June 1847; 27th Maine Legislature, House Document 14, 30 June 1847. For the latter resolution, see Eastern Argus, 13 July 1847. 148

eventually moved them to extend an invitation to the president to visit Portland and to plan a presidential procession through the city. However, the Board of Aldermen arranged only for carriages and a marshal to lead the procession. They pointedly refused to organize marching bands, the ringing of bells or the firing of cannon at the federal forts (typically ordered by a state‟s adjutant general) to greet the Head of State. In the pages of the Eastern Argus, Holden perceptively noted that this procession, “was to be conducted in the most solemn and decorous silence,” which “would have passed for a highly respectable and admirably appointed funeral.”46

Holden was perceptive, for Portland Whigs quite consciously had arranged the funereal procession as a protest against the carnage of the Mexican War and the sacrifice of lives for the expansion of slavery.

Holden hastily rallied prominent local Democrats to stave off the potential embarrassment of Portland‟s intended snub of the Chief Executive. They organized three bands, a full militia escort, the local fire companies, fraternal organizations, and charitable associations to accompany the procession. They also arranged for the ringing of the city‟s church bells (all but the 2nd parish Congregational Church complied) and assembled 130 guns to be fired on

Munjoy Hill, the highest point in the city‟s northeast end. The volunteer committee further drafted handbills to send to communities up to 50 miles away, urging people to travel to Portland to welcome the president. While their efforts ensured a warm reception for Polk, he registered his displeasure with the city‟s tardy invitation by pointedly refusing to entertain visitors after the procession. This episode was pregnant with meaning, for Holden and his fellow Democratic leaders dared not offend the president, for fear of alienating the patronage that was essential to the party‟s success.

46 Eastern Argus, 8 July 1847. 149

Indeed, Polk‟s response to Portland‟s snub symbolized his willingness to punish opponents of his Administration, a lesson that Maine‟s Democracy took to heart as the party continued to debate the contentious issue of slavery in the territories. The next day, at a reception for the president in Augusta, a chastened Governor Dana beseeched the president to accept the state‟s cordial welcome “as evidence that Maine in her sympathies knows no geographical limits

– that she will never permit her patriotic attachment to every member of the confederacy to be weakened by appeals to local prejudices, or sectional jealousies.”47 Holden and Dana‟s efforts to assuage Polk‟s anger over his disrespectful treatment seemed to evince the stereotypical attitude of the doughface: fearful of angering the South and kowtowing to a southern-dominated administration in order to preserve harmony in the party.

If Polk‟s visit to Maine literally embodied the intrusion of sectionalism and the slavery issue into local politics, Maine Democrats at least temporarily prevented these issues from cleaving the party in two. With temperance organizations cutting into Whig votes in the southern part of the state and the nation rejoicing over American victories in Mexico, Democrats rebounded smartly from the previous year‟s election. Governor Dana, having been elected by the legislature the previous year after winning only a plurality of the vote, won re-election by a narrow majority, despite the scattering of over 7,000 votes to the Liberty Party and unaffiliated temperance candidates. Though 58 legislative races remained undecided after the election (the new law allowing election by plurality would not take effect for legislative races until the next year), Democrats had won 70 seats to the Whigs‟ paltry 23 after the votes were counted.

The election results perhaps emboldened the Democratic leadership too much. The

Eastern Argus, no longer wringing its hands over the Proviso, now called for the entire

47 Eastern Argus, 10 July 1847. 150

subjugation of Mexico. Again, linking expansion and trade, the paper reminded its loyal readers that conquering Mexico “would open a splendid market for our surplus enterprise.”48 However,

Holden‟s triumphalism was premature. Antislavery Democrats seemed reluctant to accept the notion that such imperialism would redeem Mexico and buttress democratic ideals of equal rights and self-determination. Instead, they would begin to solicit support from more aggressive reform-minded groups, including the temperance movement, to elevate the antislavery issue in the 1848 election season.49

By the close of 1847 then, Holden seemed to resemble the archetypal doughface: reluctant to offend the Polk Administration and eager to sacrifice the Proviso in order to retain sectional peace within the party and the nation in pursuit of national expansion. His course diverged sharply from that of his party‟s growing antislavery wing. More troubling still,

Holden‟s valorization of exclusive corporate privileges suggested that he had abandoned

Democratic principles of equal rights and equal opportunity entirely, merely for short-term gain.

What Maine Democrats imbibed from their premier paper during the Mexican War were some decidedly anti-democratic doctrines and vacillating statements on the issue of slavery‟s expansion. It appeared that the editor had become unmoored from the party‟s principles, leaving his readers adrift among a sea of contradictory and confusing partisan messages.

48 Eastern Argus, 25 October 1847. 49 The Liberty Party, though seemingly primed to reap the benefits of increasing antislavery sentiment in the state, failed to do so. The new plurality rule should have enhanced their ability to affect the outcome of Maine elections; however, the temperance movement‟s courting of both nativist Whigs and antislavery, pro-temperance Democrats left the much smaller and impecunious Liberty Party out in the cold. Though it promoted a broadly democratic platform (not just antislavery), including free trade, cheap postage, and opposition to dueling, the party was too poor and small to compete with the better organized, larger and wealthier temperance movement or the major parties. For Liberty Party efforts to raise money and better organize their campaigns, see Hallowell‟s Liberty Standard, 11 February, 17 June, and 23 September 1847. The party hoped to overcome their lack of committed adherents by hiring agents to canvass the state for the 1847 and 1848 elections, but the faithful could not raise sufficient funds for this kind of professional canvassing. See 11 February 1847. 151

The Proviso Splits the New York Democracy

The Wilmot Proviso shaped the central political drama that dominated upstate New York in 1847: the rupture of the Democratic Party at its state convention in Syracuse. Arthur

Schlesinger identified this event as the spiritual birth of Free Soil politics. Both factions of the party had pledged support for the war to varying degrees, but Schlesinger claimed that

Barnburners walked out of the convention en masse to protest its refusal to adopt the Wilmot

Proviso as a central plank of the upcoming state campaign. They subsequently organized a rival rump convention at Herkimer in late October, dedicated to the defense of “Free Trade, Free

Labor, Free Soil, Free Speech, and Free Men.” Thus, a principled commitment to antislavery had caused the Barnburners to break with apostate Hunkers and purify their party through the

Herkimer baptism. Sean Wilentz recently recapitulated this interpretation in his account of the party rupture. He argued that the Herkimer convention reified the principles that had defined the

Democratic Party since its inception under Andrew Jackson: an unerring commitment to the individual liberties of (white) men.50 According to this narrative, Hunker doughfaces surrendered democratic principles of equal rights with alacrity and basely submitted to the pro-slavery dictation of the Polk Administration in exchange for the president‟s patronage. That alone kept this unrepresentative minority faction of the party in power in New York.

However, this romantic interpretation of the radical revolt within the New York

Democracy fails to account for the peculiar intersection of the debate over slavery‟s extension with parochial battles over state economic policy and the dispensation of leadership positions in the state party. Indeed, continued conflict over the funding of internal improvements shaped the

50 Herkimer Convention. The Voice of New York, Samuel Young, ed. (Albany: Albany Atlas, 1847): 5. Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson: 460-461. Sean Wilentz reproduced Schlesinger‟s account nearly verbatim in The Rise of American Democracy: 609. 152

milieu in which Barnburners sought to re-organize the party on an antislavery basis. The new state constitution, which took effect in 1847, was supposed to have settled this question, as it essentially appropriated all sources of extant canal funding for other needs and placed considerable restrictions on the state‟s ability to contract additional debt.51 Notwithstanding these obstacles, progressive Democrats and Whigs sought creative ways to continue funding the expansion of the Erie Canal system without violating the constitution. These efforts directly affected the agenda of the Syracuse convention, as Barnburners and Hunkers fought over control of the party and its economic platform, through a bitter and violent nominating process.

In January 1847, newly installed Whig Governor John Young devoted much of his brief annual message to the potentially injurious consequences of the cessation of the unfinished canal enlargements. Echoing Democrat William Angel‟s speech at the constitutional convention,

Governor Young deprecated the impact this would have on small producers. The limited capacity of the canal led to dramatic increases in the volume of traffic immediately after harvest season, which in turn caused teamsters to hike the rates they charged to handle the canal traffic. What was good for the itinerant teamsters was detrimental to the stolid farmers, who saw increasing transport costs diminish the fair value they received from the sale of their produce. Young therefore challenged the legislature to provide means to finish the Erie enlargements, and the stubbornly independent Croswell approvingly seconded his call in the pages of the Argus.

51 The constitution pledged a minimum of $3,000,000 annually from the canal revenues to pay down the canal debt, the state‟s General Fund debt, and to contribute some monies to the Treasury for general expenses. These measures and the provision requiring popular ratification of all improvements bills effectively halted canal construction in 1847. 153

Following the editor‟s lead, progressive Democrats joined with Whigs to pass just such a bill in

May as the Governor desired.52

Predictably, Barnburners assailed Croswell and his fellow Hunkers‟ brazen apostasy and their failure to abide by the spirit of the new constitution. The Albany Atlas called for the excommunication of all party members who were willing to risk the state‟s credit in uncertain and potentially profligate internal improvement schemes. Croswell retorted that opposition to internal improvements never had been a party principle. Rather, it had been employed only once as a specific, pragmatic response to mounting debt.

He countered that the conflict between Hunkers and Barnburners was little more than a generational conflict between established leaders of the party and the upstart John Van Buren and his young acolytes. The Argus defended its Hunker followers against the Atlas attacks, declaring that their character was,

Far superior to that of the upstart pretenders and placemen who assume to dictate to their seniors and to eject from the Democratic Party all, no matter how long-tried and constant in their devotion or disinterested in their efforts, who refuse to become the pliant instruments of an arrogant clique of politicians that claim to play the dictatorship by prescriptive right.53

Here, Croswell attempted to deflect criticism of his support for Whig-sponsored improvements by highlighting his and other Hunkers‟ long service to the Democratic Party. However, his allusion to members‟ refusal to become mere “pliant instruments” of party leaders only reinforced his image as an unreliable, headstrong, and perhaps only “nominal” member of the party. Not surprisingly, the maverick editor clearly seemed more interested in preserving

52 Lincoln, Messages From the Governors, vol. IV: 370. The same legislative coalition would pass another law in December to continue the enlargement of the Erie. Young also urged the legislature to consider amending the constitution to postpone the mandated payments from the canal revenues to the state‟s various debt funds until the completion of the Erie enlargement and the unfinished lateral canal extensions. Albany Argus, 5 January 1847; 13 January 1847. 53 Albany Argus, 13 January 1847. See also Albany Atlas, 11 January 1847. 154

individual freedom of thought and action within the Democracy, rather than uniting the party behind a single creed.

Emboldened by the Argus‟ defiance, Hunkers tried to remove established Van Burenites from power through a call for “new men.” This clever campaign appealed to western New

Yorkers who largely felt bypassed by canal improvements and in nominations for state office.

Azariah Flagg, editor of the Plattsburg Republican and the state‟s long serving comptroller

(1833-39 and 1842-47), embodied both frustrations for western New Yorkers. Next to John Van

Buren, Flagg arguably was the most powerful Barnburner in the party and was one of the senior

Van Buren‟s longest-serving lieutenants. As comptroller, he directed the implementation of state fiscal policy, including canal improvements. By removing Flagg from this influential post,

Hunkers could rebuke the upstart Barnburners who idolized Flagg and also free themselves of a significant impediment to the completion of the Erie enlargement and extension.

Ironically, the new constitution, crafted largely by Barnburners, provided the means for removing Flagg. For the first time all state offices would be elected by the people, which meant that Flagg had to secure nomination to his post at the party convention in Syracuse. Looking toward that convention, the progressive Rome Sentinel became the first prominent paper from that faction to oppose his nomination. Declaring a need for new blood in the post, the paper denounced Flagg‟s steadfast opposition to the completion of the Erie enlargement and the extension of the canal‟s lateral lines. The Sentinel‟s editor reminded its readers that Flagg actually had fought for a more restrictive constitutional article regarding internal improvements, one that would have forever forbidden the completion of those projects. A correspondent to the

155

journal further charged Flagg with having manipulated the canal revenues to limit the funds available for continued construction of the unfinished projects.54

By the time the party convened at Syracuse in late September, Barnburners knew that

Hunkers would make a concerted effort to unseat Flagg. The convention was a turbulent one.

Former Governor Silas Wright had died suddenly of a massive heart attack at the end of August, and Flagg scornfully indicted Hunkers as “regicides” for allegedly hounding Wright out of office and into ill health.55 Under this ominous pall, rival slates of Hunkers and Barnburners contested the seats from Albany, Erie, and Otsego counties, as well as New York City. A committee consisting of members from both factions compromised in dividing several of the contested seats between them.56 However, they were unable to resolve all of the contested seats, leading the convention to extend voting rights to nine additional delegates, rather than disfranchise all rival

54 Rome Sentinel, 9 July 1847; 23 July 1847. An 1842 law mandated that each year the canal commissioners had to allocate money to the sinking fund from the surplus tolls equal to 1/3 of the interest on the remaining unpaid debt. Each year the payments would shrink as the debt was reduced. However, the correspondent noted that Flagg‟s 1846 comptroller‟s report claimed that the surplus revenues allocated to the sinking fund had to equal 1/3 of the interest on the total debt, not the remaining debt, keeping payments to the fund high and limiting funds available for further extensions and repairs. The real issue behind Hunker opposition though, was that Flagg allegedly had supported Peter Cagger‟s introduction of rival tickets for the state‟s judicial elections in Albany, Greene and Rensselaer Counties, tickets which excluded two of the Hunkers who had been nominated by a united State Democratic Judicial Convention in May. Walter L. Ferree, The New York Democracy: Division and Reunion, 1847-1852 (PhD. Dissertation: University of Pennsylvania, 1953): 43-45. 55 Azariah Flagg to John A. Dix, 31 August 1847. For Wright‟s death, see Albany Atlas, 28 August 1847; and Albany Argus, 31 August 1847. Wright died at his local post office while reading his mail. He complained to the postmaster of terrible pains shooting from his chest into and down his left arm and noted that he had been feeling such pains intermittently for a few days. He sat down to ease the pain, then collapsed and was dead before the end of the day. 56 The convention was willing to seat Peter Cagger of the Barnburner faction, one of the chief henchmen of the “outrage” at New Scotland. It balanced his admission by seating Edwin Litchfield in place of John Van Buren as representative from Albany‟s fourth ward, despite significant evidence of fraud in Litchfield‟s selection. At Syracuse, an aggrieved Van Buren introduced a deposition from Samuel Strong, an Albany Whig, in which Strong claimed that Edwin Croswell gave him money to bribe local Whigs to storm the Democratic ward meeting and carry the nomination for Litchfield. See Herkimer Convention. The Voice of New York! (Albany: Albany Atlas Extra, 1847): 27-30. For his part, Litchfield testified before the committee that Van Buren had plied his supporters with liquor and supplied them with rotten eggs and stones to disrupt the same ward meeting and drive off Litchfield‟s supporters. See Rochester Republican, 5 October 1847 and Rome Sentinel, 8 October 1847. 156

claimants. As nearly all of the additional delegates were Hunkers, this accretion of voters gave that faction a slim majority in the convention.

Still, Hunkers did not use their majority to ride roughshod over their mourning radical foes, largely because they knew they would need Barnburner votes to defeat Whigs in the state elections. They nominated Levi Chatfield, a radical from Otsego, for attorney general. Perhaps naively, they also sought to placate Barnburners by securing the nomination of U.S.

Representative Orville Hungerford in place of Flagg for comptroller. In Congress, Hungerford had proposed an alternative to the Walker Tariff that would have instituted higher rates of duty than those sought by southern congressmen. Hungerford and stalwart radicals David Wilmot and

Jacob Brinkerhoff characterized the bill as a rebuke of the southern proslavery ideologues who had denied Van Buren‟s re-nomination and now dictated the policies of the Polk Administration.

Though the bill ultimately failed, its author at least had expressed fealty to the elder Van Buren and defended northern economic interests in the face of southern dictation.57

Despite this carefully considered maneuver, Hunkers‟ hopes for compromise were in vain. Vengeful Barnburners were outraged, not mollified. They successfully moved to suspend the nominating process and immediately introduced a resolution to incorporate the Wilmot

Proviso as the main plank in the party‟s election platform. When Hunkers united to table that resolution and proceed with the remaining nominations, the Barnburners bolted. Democratic

Party hagiographers from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to Sean Wilentz largely have ignored the timing of the Barnburners‟ introduction of the Wilmot Proviso at the Syracuse convention as well as the timing of the second convention call. Yet, the timing of both was critical. Barnburners

57 Despite the defeat of his bill and a subsequent amendment he had offered to the Walker Bill, Hungerford eventually voted to pass the latter measure. In introducing his substitute bill, the congressman urged the South, “to consider that the North, too, have rights, and that there is a limit beyond which we cannot go.” Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 1st Session: 1025. 157

introduced the Proviso resolution to register their disgust at Hunkers‟ treatment of Flagg and thereby provide themselves a lofty justification for abandoning the convention. Thus, defeat of the Proviso was not the cause of the convention‟s rupture, but the pretext. Its introduction was a rearguard action by a faction that had lost control of its party and was retreating from the battle.58

Hunkers had opposed the peculiar motion to suspend nominations in order to introduce the Proviso resolution. They clearly recognized the request for what it was: an attempt to disorganize the convention. They were neither implacably opposed to the measure, nor unequivocally supportive of it. Instead, they were united in their determination to dispose of the party‟s nominations before addressing the platform. Especially emboldened by Croswell‟s insurgent opposition to radical leaders like Flagg, Hunkers refused to buckle under the

Barnburners‟ tactics.

Nearly a month passed before the bolting Barnburners organized a rival convention in

Herkimer, scant days before the state canvass. Just as the Argus had complained of the impudence of these upstarts, Flagg lamented to the elder Van Buren that the Atlas clique had consulted none of the older radical leaders before calling for the rump convention.59 The lag between the abandonment of the Syracuse conclave and the call for a new meeting in Herkimer suggests there was no sense of urgency for the party to be reorganized along antislavery principles. Rather, the Herkimer convention can most accurately be seen as an attempted coup by young Barnburners who now sought to displace not only older Hunkers but also the older

58 It was not merely Flagg‟s failure at nomination that weakened the Barnburners. The Syracuse convention also installed a new state central committee with a Hunker majority. The central committee had the authority to call future state conventions and also establish the mode of electing delegates to those conventions, which practically allowed it to choose who would represent the Democracy in convention. Perhaps the fullest account of the machinations of this convention appears in Ferree, The New York Democracy: 60-83. 59 The call for a new convention appeared in the 12 October 1847 issue of the Albany Atlas. Flagg and Martin Van Buren both opposed it. Van Buren admitted that the Wilmot Proviso was a just measure but to be made “a party cry” would only rip the Democracy asunder. See Martin Van Buren to Azariah Flagg, 12 October 1847; and Flagg to Van Buren, 13 October 1847. Martin Van Buren Papers. 158

radicals who refused to repudiate the Syracuse convention. Even David Wilmot invited the displeasure of the young bolters when he addressed the Herkimer convention and urged reconciliation with Hunkers, whom he considered largely tried and true Democrats.60

If the order of resolutions adopted at the Herkimer convention indicated their relative importance, then antislavery and the defense of free, white labor ranked below fiscal policy. The first ten resolutions deprecated the ascendance of conservatives in the party and reiterated the core principles of the Democracy (as defined by radicals): free trade, fiscal retrenchment, and commitment to the People‟s Resolution of 1842. Only by the 11th resolution did the convention celebrate the “dignity and rights of free labor,” and decree that all future territory must be kept free of slavery.61 The ordering of these resolutions suggested that the primary source of continued conflict between Barnburners and Hunkers remained their divergent views on state- funded internal improvements. Ultimately, the organizers of the Herkimer convention seemed to be more concerned with solving the problem of Croswell‟s audacious propagation of extravagant improvement schemes and the seemingly intractable divisions this had spawned within the party.

In their mind, antislavery endowed Barnburners with the moral authority to call for greater unanimity and obedience from party members.

However, this is not to say that Barnburners cynically used the Wilmot Proviso merely as a smokescreen in their factional battles in New York. Rather, many Barnburners sincerely

60 Herkimer Convention: 2-3. Negative outbursts from the floor caused Wilmot to cease his plea for unity and move on to the subject of the Proviso. Using a long-lived antislavery rhetorical technique that was typical of the racist attitudes of the era, Wilmot cast white northerners in the slave‟s place and likened the conflict with proslavery southerners to a test of northern manhood: “Are we so tame, so servile, so degenerate, that we cannot maintain the rights of a free soil and free people? Where is the spirit of our Fathers? Are we Slaves, that knowing our rights, we dare not maintain them?” Herkimer Convention: 13. 61 Herkimer Convention: 8. These resolutions argued that the inequalities in congressional representation inherent in the 3/5 Compromise (which allowed southern states additional representation based on 3/5 of their slave population) must not be extended to future states. The northern states at the Constitutional Convention had agreed to that compromise solely as a prerequisite to establish the Union, and they could never accept it as a universal principle. 159

believed that the northern Democracy inevitably would be reorganized, and more firmly united, on the principle of antislavery. The venerable C. C. Cambreleng confidently claimed, “new issues are about to convulse and divide parties for years to come, involving principles upon which our free institutions are founded.” These issues apparently traversed party lines, as well. In

January 1847, state Senator Samuel Young, a co-owner of the Atlas, arranged for the Whigs to introduce a resolution in the legislature that requested New York‟s representatives and directed its senators to vote against any peace treaty with Mexico that did not explicitly bar slavery from the new territories. The united efforts of radical Democrats and Whigs led to the passage of the resolution with only 12 negative votes, all but one of those cast by Hunkers.62

Barnburners‟ promotion of the Proviso as a defense of northerners‟ equal rights in the federal system did seem to force some Hunkers to reconsider their support for expansion. When

Isaac Butts assumed ownership of the progressive Rochester Republican and Daily Advertiser, his first editorial questioned whether the vast territories of Alta Mexico (the present-day

Southwest and California), really would be fair value for the amount of money and blood the country had expended to secure it. Butts admitted “we need the harbor of San Francisco and adjacent territory to facilitate our commercial operations in the Pacific – and that, too, more perhaps lest it might fall into the hands of our maritime rival than for its positive advantages to us – and of what earthly use can the remainder be to the nation at large?” In light of the dubious value of the territory, the editor continued, “Would it not be wise to forego territorial acquisitions

62 Cambreleng quotation from Herkimer Convention: 16. On Samuel Young‟s bipartisan resolution, see Ferree, The New York Democracy: 27. Senator Daniel Dickinson, a staunch Hunker, ignored the instructions in the resolution and refused to vote for the Wilmot Proviso. Samuel Strong was the only New York congressman to do the same. 160

in which are planted the seeds of national discord and animosity, and perhaps of federal disruption?”63

Much like J.W. Gray, Butts envisioned a primarily urban, commercial settlement of the

West, and he doubted the territory had any substantive value beyond that. Butts ultimately retreated to a position that failed to satisfy Barnburners: since the territory in question already was free and slavery could only be instituted by local positive law, then slavery could not be introduced to that territory in any way. Yet, he was not simply pandering to his radical colleagues. On the contrary, his invocation of California‟s commercial value underscored his commitment to the kind of market expansion that troubled New York‟s Barnburners.

As the expansion of slavery had become the pretext for a potentially disastrous party split, the dogged editor appealed to the old issues that had united Democrats against Whigs in an attempt to repair the rift. Without renouncing the legislature‟s right to undertake internal improvements, he accused Whigs in the Assembly of floating bills that would commit the state to reckless and profligate spending on the unfinished canal works. Moreover, he detected an unsettling plot among northern Whigs to try to resurrect a protective tariff and a national bank. A

Massachusetts Whig convention had called for just such a program and, “with a remarkable coincidence of language, which could result only from a pre-arranged concert of action,” New

York Whigs had followed suit.64 This was a favorite tactic of the paranoid style of early republican politics. Butts appealed to radical Democrats‟ assertion that the election of Polk indicated a popular rejection of protectionism and a national bank. Now Whigs were conspiring to foist such policies on the people through intrigue, and Democrats must unite to expose the

63 Rochester Republican, 16 February 1847. Butts‟ plea echoed those of anti-expansionist Whigs, who, despite their stance against acquiring Mexican territory, remained open to the idea of annexing San Francisco, insisting that it had long enjoyed virtual independence from Mexican rule. 64 Rochester Republican, 12 October 1847. 161

“plot” and preserve the liberties of the electorate. However, Barnburners, epitomized by

Cambreleng‟s attitude, dismissed this attempt to resurrect the old issues at the expense of fighting for free, white labor and free land.

Barnburners maintained that slavery‟s allies already had hijacked the national party, implementing the 2/3 rule at the 1844 Baltimore nominating convention to prevent the majority of delegates from re-nominating Martin Van Buren for president. They sincerely believed that the Hunkers had absorbed this lesson in treachery and used their patronage positions from

President Polk to frustrate the popular will of New York‟s Democrats. Thus, in historian John

Mayfield‟s succinct synthesis, when the Barnburners made the Wilmot Proviso a new test of party regularity, “the convergence of enemies – southern and northern – was complete in the

Radical mind.”65 Ironically, radical Democrats in New York defended northern liberty and resisted what they saw as southern authoritarianism by becoming increasingly authoritarian within their own party, finally proscribing Croswell and his Hunker ethos through the Herkimer rebellion. Thus, Cambreleng‟s new issues simply offered a new way to continue and intensify the ongoing fratricidal battle in New York over old issues.

To defeat their northern enemy at home, radicals resorted to an interesting tactic: popular sovereignty. Barnburners claimed that Polk‟s distribution of patronage to Hunker supporters had invested them with an illegitimate source of power, since it did not derive from the popular support of New Yorkers. Hunkers then had employed the emoluments of their office to build a network of slavish hirelings (such as those who sent Edwin Litchfield to the Syracuse convention) to help them usurp leadership of the party. Rejecting the anti-democratic tendencies

65 John Mayfield, Rehearsal for Republicanism: Free Soil and the Politics of Anti-Slavery (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1980): 33. 162

of federal patronage, the penultimate resolutions at Herkimer declared that the decentralization of federal power was “indispensable to the purity of our elections and the success of our institutions.” They called for a constitutional amendment that would rescind the president‟s patronage powers and allow for the popular election of federal officers by voters in states, territories, or any appropriate “subdivision thereof.” They further called for another amendment that would allow Congress to fix the terms of those positions to prevent individuals or factions from becoming entrenched in office.66 These resolutions envisioned a dramatically new model of party organization, where state level leaders and voters would control patronage.

The irony of the Barnburners‟ appeal to popular sovereignty, of course, was that it later would be employed by Proviso opponents to settle the issue of territorial expansion. Indeed, in

December 1847, Michigan‟s Democratic Senator Lewis Cass, an opponent of the Wilmot

Proviso, would pen his famous letter to A. O. P. Nicholson, former Democratic senator from

Tennessee. In that letter, Cass argued that Congress‟ power “to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory and other property belonging to the United States” did not extend to imposing laws on those territories. In lieu of that power, the only logical way to organize the territories was through popular sovereignty, to allow the settlers themselves to erect their own legal and political institutions.67 Cass‟ letter put popular sovereignty at the forefront of the 1848 presidential election, which would prompt Barnburners to reject it as an insufficient tool for preventing the spread of slavery.

66 Herkimer Convention: 8. These resolutions previously had passed the Barnburner-led state senate on 25 October 1847, though they did not pass the House. 67 See Willard C. Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996): 163-181. Cass was responding to a letter from Nicholson soliciting his political views in preparation for the Democrats‟ presidential nominating convention in 1848. Cass argued that the Constitution‟s “territories” clause merely gave Congress the power to determine how to administer or dispose of territories as national property. 163

Radicals did not appear to see the contradiction in retaining the principle of popular sovereignty as a basis of equitable relations between the federal government and states, while rejecting the same principle as a basis of relations between the federal government and the territories. Instead, their stance was resolutely pragmatic. The expansion of slavery eroded individual liberties and the opportunities for free, white labor in the West. Thus, it had to be stopped. Federal patronage at home transgressed the rights of New Yorkers to select the officers that administered their local offices of the federal government. Therefore their voices of New

York‟s voters must be restored. This equivocating commitment to the concept of popular sovereignty starkly revealed the messy and problematic interactions of abstract partisan ideals and parochial partisan exigencies, all caused, at least indirectly, by Empire State Democrats‟ inability to rein in Croswell and his intransigent Hunker following.68

Barnburners‟ inconsistency was mirrored in the Herkimer convention itself. Having staged their rebellion, they grudgingly eschewed making separate nominations for state office.

However, their supporters needed little coaxing to withhold their support from the Syracuse ticket. Thus, for the first time, the Democracy was unable to overcome its factional divisions for the purpose of contesting the election against their Whig rivals. Vote totals for both Whigs and

Democrats declined from the previous year, but Democratic totals fell far more precipitously.

Whigs trounced their bickering rivals, piling up majorities between 23,000 and 38,000 votes as they swept the races for executive branch offices. This was a devastating defeat for the

68 Barnburners‟ fumbling over popular sovereignty also illustrated an ongoing debate over the proper conception and scope of popular sovereignty. Christian Fritz has deftly argued that the Constitution itself invoked a restrained concept of popular sovereignty, in which the people‟s sovereignty is largely located in and circumscribed by their representative government. However, the ratification process in some states exhibited a more expansive view of popular sovereignty, in which the people, not their representatives, ultimately determined the legitimacy of the government that ruled them. As a consequence, popular sovereignty remained an ambiguous concept until after the Civil War. See Fritz, American Sovereigns: The People and America‟s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 4-5. 164

Democrats, but not necessarily for Croswell himself. The continuation of the Whigs in office meant a continuation of efforts to fund canal construction and enlargements. This in turn meant that the Canal Bank would continue to be a depository for improvement funds, putting more capital at the disposal of Croswell. Thus, the insurgency that the editor had instigated, first by rebelling against radicals‟ cautious economic platform and then by deposing Flagg, had sundered the party, but it did not appear to jeopardize his own considerable economic interests.

The historiography of the devastating dissolution of the Democratic Party in New York in

1847 has tended to ignore this aspect of the split. Instead, it has emphasized the role of the

Wilmot Proviso in the fracturing of the party. In this reading, Hunkers, derelict in their duty to defend freedom in the territories, willfully shattered their party rather than accept the principles of the Wilmot Proviso as a party creed. Hunkers‟ reliance on Polk Administration patronage and their consistent and vehement opposition to anti-war dissent seemed to reveal them to be nonpareil doughfaces. However, that epithet obscures the more complex issues at work here. The

Wilmot Proviso and the antislavery movement it represented was not a cause of the party‟s split, but rather a result of it. It was the tool by which Barnburners hoped to regain control of their party and the northern Democracy as a whole, fighting the expansion of slavery in the distant

West and improvident improvement schemes at home in the North. The tactic largely seemed to work, too. Editors like Isaac Butts, who formerly had followed Croswell‟s lead, now seemed to accept that the party had to look beyond parochial economic concerns and take a forthright position against the expansion of slavery. The latter‟s self-serving revolution had galvanized

Barnburners into an increasingly dogmatic and authoritarian cohort dramatically intensifying the competitive dynamic between them and the conservative Hunkers and altering the party‟s outlook in the state for years to come. 165

Conclusion

The historiography of the northern Democrats still has difficulty coming to grips with the self-styled economic progressives who failed to support the Wilmot Proviso. The paradigmatic interpretation suggests that the Proviso redeemed antislavery northerners from subservience to a proslavery clique that dominated the Democratic Party and controlled the federal government.

More important, the Proviso symbolized the flowering of true, democratic principles of equal rights, principles that should have purified and strengthened the party throughout the free North.

To explain why it did not do so, historians typically have looked with disappointment, if not contempt, on the Proviso‟s opponents, the so-called doughfaces. Motivated by a lust for office, severe racism, or admiration for the “harsher forms of white supremacy” that disciplined southern society, they abandoned allegedly “northern” interests for southern favors.69 Historians from Arthur Schlesinger to Jonathan Earle have recovered the reputations of radical Democrats as the principled and dogged defenders of human rights. Yet, in so doing they have cast Proviso opponents as insincere democrats who prevented their party from becoming the great antislavery vehicle it was designed to be.

When we examine the behavior of Democratic editors, whose papers elucidated divergent opinions within the party on the Proviso, this narrative ultimately proves unsatisfying. The course that Joseph Gray pursued on the Western Reserve belied any sympathy with the racist authoritarianism of the slavocracy. Principally opposed to the extension of slavery, he first supported and then abandoned the Proviso out of a unique kind of sectional calculus. To Gray,

Lewis Cass‟ concept of popular sovereignty would free western settlers from overbearing eastern

69 Richards, The Slave Power: 116. 166

regulation and allow western expansion and development to flourish while sidestepping the brewing dispute over slavery. Furthermore, a Cass presidency finally might bequeath to Gray the

Post Office patronage that he agonizingly lusted for yet could not secure during the Polk

Administration.

In upstate New York the Proviso cannot be assessed simply on its own terms. It was a tactical weapon, wielded by radicals to challenge insurgent Hunker control of the party and discipline them for their apostasy under Edwin Croswell‟s singularly contrarian leadership.

Neither Gray nor Croswell abandoned the Proviso without sober consideration. They did not simply give in to base racism or quail before southern demands to protect property rights in slaves in the territories. Rather, these editors both believed that supporting the Proviso would weaken their power upon the effect it would have on their power within their party and the potential remuneration they and their newspaper might reap from it.

Only in Maine did the leading Democratic press fail to provide meaningful leadership on the issue of slavery‟s expansion. Myopically fixated on completing a system of internal improvements for the state and developing the commercial capacities of Portland, the editor of the state‟s most influential Democratic journal eschewed any controversy that seemed to threaten either project. He also blithely jettisoned the Jacksonian ideal of an unfettered, open marketplace, characterized by vigorous competition. Instead, he promoted the conservation of capital and exclusive rights for the completion of specific improvement projects. Without a stout challenge from radicals within his own party, Charles Holden and like-minded leaders in the party were loath to take up the cause of antislavery. Having tied expansion specifically to the commercial growth that was necessary to retain Maine‟s population and lift the state out of Massachusetts‟s

167

economic shadow, they steered wide of any controversy that might imperil Polk‟s expansionist program.

Joel Silbey has argued that the strength of the major parties and the continued resonance of old issues that divided Whigs and Democrats stifled the potential reconstruction of party politics on the issue of the Wilmot Proviso or antislavery in this period.70 In this dynamic, conservative Democrats blindly clung to old issues, rather than recognize the threat that the expansion of slavery posed to the rights of the free North. These conservatives joined with

Leonard Richards‟ racist, office-hunting Democrats to keep their party a bastion of unenlightened white supremacy. Yet, those Democratic editors who rejected the Wilmot Proviso steadfastly maintained a progressive faith. Radical antislavery was designed not merely to serve the interests of free labor but also to elevate radicals‟ position in the party and augment their authority. On the other hand, these progressive editors believed that their actions also served free labor by offering Democrats a modern commercial plan that could challenge the Whig American system successfully.

Yet, just as radicals hoped antislavery would bring them to power in the party, Holden,

Gray, Croswell and their allies in the editorial fraternity hoped that the economic platforms they promoted would bring them increasing readers. Moreover, they knew that the course they pursued would attract the favor of merchants and other entrepreneurs, whose advertisements would fund their newspapers and whose patronage could lead to further business ventures

(especially in Croswell‟s case) in their communities. To that end, the completion of a continental commercial system, based on free trade and enabled by an expansive system of improvements,

70 Joel Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). See also, Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1991) and Party Over Section: The Rough and Ready Presidential Election of 1848 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2009). 168

was their paramount concern. Despite their aggressive pursuit of self-interest, these editors did not view such improvements as mere pork designed to fatten legislators and the entrepreneurial elite (a class to which they all aspired). Rather, they conceived of such improvements in consistently democratic terms. Improvements represented economic opportunity for the masses and thereby provided a check against monopoly. These editors believed that to distract themselves with the issue of slavery was to risk losing the whole game.

Moreover, their faith in the progress of improvements and the free market seemed to render it impossible for them to imagine that a system of plantation slavery (which they condemned as inefficient and backward) could supplant free labor in the West. They consistently imagined western territories redeemed through commerce that would bring the products of

American free labor to the nations of the Pacific. Slaves and plantations simply did not enter these visions. In the seminal study of Republican ideology, Eric Foner noted that many northerners in the antebellum period feared that the “backward” system of commodity agriculture in the South would retard both the nation‟s material and moral progress. However, these progressive Democrats seemed to harbor no such fears.71

Self-identified progressive Democrats left behind Thomas Jefferson‟s vision for the nation as a country of small producers and independent, freehold farmers. Instead, they saw the

Mexican War as a singular opportunity to accelerate the nation‟s commercial development and enrich it, not simply through self-reliant agricultural production, but by tapping into lucrative international trade. As the Wilmot Proviso intensified sectional tensions within the major parties,

71 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: chapters one and two. In Republicans‟ free labor ideology, the West was necessary to absorb surplus laborers from the East and allow them the opportunity to become independent freeholders and small producers. In contrast, southern slavery did not allow for self-improvement, which was the great spur to hard work, thriftiness, independence and entrepreneurial innovation, all of which benefited the individual and community. 169

those parties began to fracture, if only briefly. Waning party unity only further encouraged progressive Democrats to pursue local self-interest, regardless of whether it was consonant dissonant with party principles.

170

Chapter 4: Northern Democrats’ Half-hearted Commitment to Free Soil

Despite its repeated defeats, the Wilmot Proviso had demonstrated such deep political resonance in the North that Liberty Party abolitionists and opponents of slavery in the major parties began to see wisdom in combining their forces in a new, antislavery party by 1848.

Before taking that step, antislavery Whigs and Democrats in the North first sought to force their respective parties to acknowledge the imperative of preserving free soil in the West. At the

Democratic national convention in Baltimore in late May, competing Hunker and Barnburner delegations both claimed the right to represent New York. The Barnburner delegates carried the free soil standard to Baltimore, whereas their Hunker rivals pledged to support whatever platform the convention crafted. When the convention offered to seat both slates of delegates and divide the state‟s convention votes between them, the Barnburners walked out. Undaunted, the convention subsequently nominated Lewis Cass for president, thereby endorsing his principle of popular sovereignty in the territories.

Only a few weeks later, Whigs convened in Philadelphia and nominated Zachary Taylor, a slaveholder and a hero of the Mexican War, for president. Antislavery conscience Whigs from

Massachusetts and Ohio were frustrated both by the nomination (Taylor‟s political views were opaque at best) and the subsequent platform, which studiously ignored the issue of slavery. Like the angry Barnburners, they returned to their home states and organized populist, antislavery conventions to lash their party for their myopic and cowardly refusal to tackle the problem of slavery‟s expansion.

In a series of antislavery political conventions in late June and July, these Conscience

Whigs and radical antislavery Democrats demonstrated against the stolid intransigence of their 171

respective parties and established the common ground on which these elements would unite into a new party, the Free Soil Party, to contest the 1848 federal elections. Western opponents of slavery inaugurated the new party at a People‟s Convention in Columbus, Ohio on June 21.

Abolitionist lawyer Salmon P. Chase presided over that convention. More importantly, he negotiated the Liberty Party‟s merger with the new party, encouraging them to abandon their nomination of the radical, antislavery senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire for president and to support the eventual Free Soil nominee. The next day, a Barnburner convention in Utica called for all upstanding northern Democrats to unite with them and vote for Martin Van Buren for president to rebuke southern domination of their party and keep the blight of slavery out of the pristine, free territories of the West. This convention also prepared to invite northern foes of slavery to a mass antislavery political convention in Buffalo that August. Six days after the demonstration at Utica, antislavery Conscience Whigs in Massachusetts held a convention pledging their support to a mass antislavery movement throughout the North.1

New York‟s Barnburners (in collaboration with Chase) dominated the grand Free Soil convention at Buffalo on 9 August and nominated Martin Van Buren for president, redressing his ignominious defeat by pro-slavery zealots at the Democratic national convention four years earlier. Lacking the deep organizational structure in the northern states that the major parties had long since developed throughout the country, the Free Soil Party still won 10% of the popular vote (though they did not carry a single state and won no Electoral College votes). They elected

1 For a detailed narrative of the various conventions, see David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, completed and edited by Don Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976): 77-81; Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: 316-330; and Silbey, Party Over Section: 45-85. In Ohio, the Liberty Party dominated politics on the Western Reserve, but was rather impotent in the remainder of the state, rendering them amenable to an alliance with antislavery Democrats. On Chases‟ role, see John Niven, Salmon P. Chase: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 87-113; and John Mayfield, Rehearsal for Republicanism: Free Soil and the Politics of Antislavery (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1980): 90-135. 172

fourteen congressmen and two senators to the 31st Congress.2 Taylor narrowly defeated Cass, but his party experienced mixed success in congressional races. They narrowed Democrats‟ majority in the Senate, but lost their own majority in the House to a Democratic plurality.

The seeming strength of the Free Soil showing was illusory, though. Over half of the party‟s votes came from only two states, New York and Massachusetts. Even though they were instrumental in giving New York‟s Electoral College votes to Taylor, the Free Soilers did not throw the election as a whole to the Whigs. Rather, Democratic abstention from the polls proved the main factor in that party‟s defeat. When the Barnburners, who had supplied the party with the bulk of its votes in that election, reconciled with their Hunker adversaries the very next year and returned to the Democratic fold in New York, the Free Soil Party essentially died. It limped its way to the 1852 federal elections, recording little more than half the number of votes it had logged in 1848.3 Though the party failed to alter the outcome of either election and died a relatively quick death, it proved that antislavery was politically viable, influencing the eventual emergence of the antislavery Republican Party in 1854.

Histories of the Free Soil movement typically have been colored by the subsequent successes of the Republicans. That party pledged to maintain freedom in the nation‟s territories and won the presidency and a majority of seats in the Congress in the 1860 federal elections.

Republican commitment to preserving free soil in the West was a central factor in southern

2 The standard histories of the Free Soil Party and the larger movement are Chaplain W. Morrison, Democratic Politics and Sectionalism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1967); Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: the Election of 1848 ( Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1970); and Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848-54 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1973). 3 For federal and state election results, see Congressional Quarterly‟s Guide to U.S. Elections (Washington D.C: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1994). Thomas Alexander, Michael Holt and Joel Silbey all have concluded that voter abstentions, not Free Soil, dictated the outcome of this presidential race. See Alexander, “The Dimensions of Voter Partisan Constancy in Presidential Elections from 1840-1860” in Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840-1860, Stephen E. Maislish and John Kushma eds. (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1982); Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, chapter 11; Silbey, Party Over Section, chapters 6 and 7. 173

secession from the Union and the onset of Civil War, a war that, ironically, enabled the eventual destruction of the entire slave system. In this teleology, the limited electoral success and early demise of the Free Soil Party in the late 1840s and early 1850s simply was an interruption in the

Free Soil revolution, a revolution that eventually was completed by the Republican ascendancy.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., pre-eminent Democratic Party hagiographer, traced the ideological origins of political antislavery from the Republicans, back through the Free Soilers, to the egalitarian ethos of radical Democrats. Schlesinger thus redeemed the Democratic Party from historical charges of white supremacy and vitriolic racism, by locating the ideological impetus for the eventual abolition of slavery in radical Democrats‟ commitment to equal rights and individual liberty.4 Moreover, the advent of a democratic Free Soil movement was an essential step on the road to the eventual abolition of slavery.

Schlesinger‟s argument influenced subsequent historians to mine the ideological core of the political Free Soil movement. Joseph Rayback acknowledged that the Free Soil campaign of

1848 was a cathartic act of defiance by Van Burenites who were angered at being displaced within the Democratic Party by Hunkers and pro-slavery southerners. Nevertheless, he also claimed that the party transcended this petty squabble. From disparate backgrounds, Free Soilers

“united in a common desire to advance the cause of human rights,” a cause they believed was obstructed by the major parties. Eric Foner, acting in the Schlesinger tradition, had a somewhat darker view of Free Soil. Though inspired by the revolt of radical Barnburners and Conscience

Whigs, it eventually was subsumed within a free labor ideology that struck at slavery in the

South while simultaneously legitimizing exploitative wage labor in the North. In this reading,

Free Soil exchanged the horrifically abusive system of chattel slavery for the more subtly unjust

4 Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson: 460-468. 174

system of free, contract labor. Proponents of the latter system disingenuously maintained that laborers faced a surfeit of choices of remunerative labor and thus had entire freedom to determine whether to work or not.5 Widespread acceptance of this theory proved vital to the emergence of industrial capitalism, fueled by wage labor, in the late nineteenth century. Despite their sharp divergence, both Rayback and Foner concluded that Free Soil sprang from deep ideological roots.

Frederick Blue justifiably complained that this focus on the translation of ideology

(whether humanitarian or capitalistic) into a political platform ignored the more prosaic, institutional factors in Free Soil‟s birth. Though he did not doubt the movement‟s sincere commitment to restricting the growth of slavery, Blue argued that the Free Soil Party was an exercise in political expediency. It represented an opportunity for young political neophytes and older partisans bypassed in their own parties to pursue individual political advancement. Though

Blue saw the Free Soilers as the first party to have “stressed ideology,” he maintained that these were not true believers, but instead were skilled political operatives. These shrewd politicians were “not quite the dedicated reformers they professed to be,” and “many advocated coalition or even fusion [with the existing parties] as the best way to attain anti-extension ends.” Moreover, some conceived of the movement as a way to reform or reconstitute their “home” party, and enhance their own power within it. In an early article on the Free Soil Party in Ohio, he argued

5 Rayback, Free Soil: 249. Rayback noted that the party‟s democratic principles were not confined merely to antislavery. Absorbing many former members of the National Reform Association, a sizable minority of Free Soilers sought limits on the amount of private property one could own in order to break up the land monopolies that enriched speculators, plantation owners, and even petit industrialists (249-265). Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: 11-39. This concept of free labor was further elucidated by Gabor Boritt in his excellent study of Lincoln‟s thoughts on the economy and labor. See, Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Heather Cox Richardson echoed Foner and drew more overt connections between Republican free labor and the exploitations of industrial capitalism during the Gilded Age. See Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997). 175

that Free Soil leader Salmon Chase counseled coalition with the Democratic Party exactly for that purpose.6

In his masterful synthesis of the coming of the Civil War, David Potter acknowledged this tendency of the Free Soilers to try to augment their power through brokering coalitions.

After the collapse of the national Free Soil organization, pockets of Free Soilers in the northern states still retained considerable political clout, particularly in Ohio and New York. They held the balance of power between Whigs and Democrats in the former and were the predominant threat to Whigs‟ grip on power in the latter. Still, Potter insisted that they used this power not for individual advancement primarily, but to pressure the major parties to take a firm stand on the restriction of slavery from territorial growth.7

Blue‟s corrective to the historical infatuation with Free Soil ideology has much to recommend it. He not only restored the individual ambitions or desires of the party members to the story, but also highlighted how the Free Soil movement was wholly conditioned by the existing institutional party system. Following that example, this chapter reconsiders Democratic apprehensions of Free Soil and its antislavery principles. While many Democratic converts to the third party movement no doubt never wavered in their desire to effect the restriction of slavery from the territories through political means, many others clearly utilized the Free Soil Party primarily to effect changes in the major parties of the North. To a certain extent, Free Soil was a reaction to the inconsistent and self-serving policies propagated by those Democratic editors who remained fixated on economic development, at the expense of antislavery.

6 Blue, The Free Soilers: 81, 291. Blue, “The Ohio Free Soilers and the Problems of Factionalism,” Ohio History, vol. 76 (1967): 17-32. 7 Potter, The Impending Crisis: 227-231. 176

The historiographical claim that radical Democrats sustained themselves in the Free Soil

Party largely through their ideological commitment to liberty and equal rights ignores the fact that many of them were negotiating the terms of their return to the Democracy from the moment they joined the Free Soilers. In this respect, Free Soil functioned as a halfway house, where radical Democrats demonstrated their clout by removing their support from their true, “home” party and punishing the party leaders and editors who seemingly had abandoned party principles.

The terms of reunion typically focused on promises of office as much as including some form of opposition to slavery in future party platforms. Consequently, the Free Soil movement, almost from its inception, strove for compromise more than revolution.

Joel Silbey articulated the impotence of the Free Soil Party in his primer on the election of 1848, Party Over Section, in which he firmly rejected the historiographical tradition that identified Free Soil as a revolution in political ideology. Instead, Silbey maintained, Free Soil proved unable to supplant the traditional political issues and ideals that had defined competition between Whigs and Democrats since 1832. The movement proved unable to shake the deep loyalties of Whig and Democratic voters, and the Free Soil Party itself essentially was stillborn on its arrival in the 1848 campaign.8

Silbey‟s blunt assessment of the limited impact of the Free Soil Party was the product of years of research into the psychological, institutional and sociological factors that predicted

Americans‟ identification and adherence to the dominant parties in the antebellum period. In this

8 Silbey, Party Over Section. See especially, chapters three, six, and seven. Silbey‟s faith in the durability of the existing system challenged the conclusions that Thomas Alexander reached in his voter analysis of the 1848 election. Alexander believed that the election showed the vulnerability of the existing parties to a new party that could combine the issues of antislavery and, more importantly, economic development into its appeal to voters. Thomas B. Alexander, “Harbinger of the Collapse of the Second Two-Party System: The Free Soil Party in 1848,” A Crisis of Republicanism: American Politics during the Civil War Era. Lloyd Ambrosious, ed. (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). 177

monograph, he ignored the crippling factionalism that gripped those parties in several of the northern states, suggesting that their national organizations were healthier and more robust than they really were. However, he also provided some insight into understanding why the Free Soil

Party was so short-lived. He argued that most voters retained their original partisan allegiances, but he could have applied this argument to many of the politicians who supposedly had converted to the Free Soil cause. Indeed, it appears that many of them, particularly Democrats, never truly abandoned their allegiances to the original.

This chapter will not attempt to chart the partisan wanderings of disaffected Democrats.

Rather, it will examine how Free Soil was subsumed by the larger partisan dynamic dictated by competition between Whigs and Democrats in Maine, upstate New York, and Ohio‟s Western

Reserve. In the first two, there was as much negotiation as there was conflict between bolting

Free Soilers and their “former” Democratic colleagues. On the Reserve, Free Soil was co-opted by antislavery Whigs, rendering it an impractical outlet for Democrats‟ expression of antislavery sentiment. The result in all of these regions was that Free Soil had a limited impact in shaping the major parties‟ positions on slavery.

Democratic Unity in Maine

Richard Wescott and Edward Schriver have noted that Maine‟s political parties were plagued by factionalism from their inception almost to the Civil War. The fierce debate over the

Wilmot Proviso sustained these factional divisions, but it was the temperance issue that inflamed them. Though Whig and Democratic newspapers typically had expressed approval of the temperance movement, they generally were ambivalent toward temperance as a political policy.

As we saw in chapter two, this caused a third party insurgency by disgruntled teetotalers in the 178

1846 state elections. Temperance Whigs, some antislavery Democrats, and Liberty men subsequently coalesced in the Free Soil Party, while temperance Democrats remained with their venerable party. The result was a morass of factionalized parties that had been influenced in large part by the singular refusal of the partisan organs of both major parties to address the issue of slavery or temperance. Both Schriver and Wescott have suggested that Democrats in particular were badly rent between antislavery “woolheads” and conservative “wildcats” by 1849.9

However, despite the intensification of factionalism, divisions among Democrats were not irrevocable, and the state‟s fledgling Free Soil organization proved largely unable to manipulate their split for its own purposes.

Sensing the opportunity to attract voters who were dismayed over the failure of the

Wilmot Proviso, Maine‟s Liberty Party held an early state convention in February 1848 to nominate candidates for office. They turned to Samuel Fessenden, prominent Portland lawyer, peripatetic abolitionist lecturer, and father of future U.S. Treasury Secretary William Pitt

Fessenden, as their gubernatorial candidate. The convention passed a bold slate of resolutions, highlighted by the goal of achieving the “entire abolition of slavery” throughout the country, not merely in federal jurisdictions.10 Yet, the most sobering aspect of the convention was the report of the Liberty Association, the arm of the party that mobilized volunteers to propagate abolitionist literature throughout the state. That body flatly stated that they lacked both the funds to print abolitionist materials and the volunteers to distribute them throughout the state.

9 Edward O. Schriver, “Antislavery: The Free Soil and Free Democratic Parties in Maine,” New England Quarterly, vol. 42 no. 1 (March 1964): 82-94. Richard Wescott, New Men, New Issues: The Formation of the Republican Party in Maine. Portland, Maine: Maine Historical Society, 1986. On woolheads and wildcats, see Wescott and Schriver, “Reform Movements and Party Reformation, 1820-1861” in Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present, Richard W. Judd, Edwin A. Churchill, and Joel W. Eastman, eds. (Orono, Maine: University of Maine Press, 1995): 206-212. 10 Hallowell Liberty Standard, 10 February 1848. 179

This was a damning indictment of both the party‟s resources and popularity. Scarcely a year before, the party‟s flagship newspaper had laid out a simple plan to create a more effective party organization. Austin Willey, an abolitionist Congregationalist minister and the editor of the

Liberty Standard, believed it was feasible to hire five agents to distribute party literature and abolitionist appeals to every town in the state in preparation for the federal canvass in 1848. The paper estimated the cost of hiring agents and printing these documents at no more than $3000, a sum that easily could be raised through assessments of Liberty men. However, a year later, it was clear that the party had fallen far short of that goal, and Willey beseeched Liberty men to make up the difference by subscribing to the paper individually.11 As was previously noted, sharing newspapers among neighbors was a common and long-lived practice in antebellum America, and it impaired the impecunious Liberty Party‟s efforts to fund its political activities.

Liberty Party newspapers functioned similarly to other partisan presses, but were also marked by important distinctions. First, the Liberty Party itself was not nearly so well established as the Whigs and Democrats. Furthermore, the party won few offices, depriving it of the life- giving patronage that sustained antebellum political organizations. Alan Kraut has argued that the Liberty Party strove to establish a sophisticated party structure, but its efforts to synthesize religious and political ideals within that structure only confused voters and “limited its possibilities for electoral victory.”12 Ironically, Liberty Party editors like Willey maintained a

11 Liberty Standard, 11 February 1847. The Liberty Standard struggled from its inception. When Austin Willey assumed the editorship of the paper, he kept it afloat with his own money and the generous contributions of friends. See Willey, The History of the Antislavery Cause in State and Nation (Portland, Maine: Brown Thurston and Hoyt, Fogg & Dunham, 1886): 193-194, 361. Willey particularly welcomed funds from women‟s antislavery associations. See Alice Taylor, “From Petitions to Partyism: Antislavery and the Domestication of Maine Politics in the 1840s and 1850s,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 77 no. 1 (March 2004): 73-74. On the appeal to subscribers, see Liberty Standard, 18 May 1848. 12 Alan M. Kraut, “Partisanship and Principles: The Liberty Party in Antebellum Political Culture” in Crusaders and Compromisers: Essays on the Relationship of the Antislavery Struggle to the Antebellum Party System, Alan M. Kraut ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983): 84. 180

consistent ideological message and also had a sophisticated grasp of party organization, but they could not translate that into electoral success. On the other hand, Democrats and Whigs were plagued at times with inconsistent and stubbornly independent presses, and though this weakened party unity, both organizations proved remarkably long-lived.

The impoverished circumstances of Willey‟s party and press likely dictated his eventual embrace of Free Soil. In 1847, both the editor and Fessenden rejected the prominent abolitionist

William Goodell‟s call to broaden the platform of the party in order to attract new voters, for fear that it would merely dilute and then destroy the original, noble purpose of the organization.13 Yet, desperate for funds and voters, both men had relented and joined the movement by the summer of 1848. They eagerly anticipated snatching up antislavery Whigs and Democrats bolting their parties in protest of the nominations of Zachary Taylor and Lewis Cass. To that end, Liberty

Party leaders and temperance Whigs, led by Neal Dow, organized the state‟s inaugural Free Soil convention in Portland. Several weeks later, Willey rechristened his paper the Free Soil

Republican and unveiled a new platform that maintained opposition to slavery but also borrowed liberally from the socialist National Reform Association in calling for free homesteads, cheap postage, and limits on land ownership.14

The young Free Soil Party reaped immediate benefits in Maine‟s state and local elections in September, winning 11 seats in the state House. Democrats retained a majority in the

13 See Schriver, “Antislavery: The Free Soil and Free Democratic Parties in Maine,” New England Quarterly: 82-83 14 Liberty Standard, 3 August 1848; Hallowell Free Soil Republican, 2 November 1848. Willey and Dow represented Maine at the national Free Soil convention in Buffalo, August 9, 1848, and their attendance inspired Portland‟s African-American leaders to hold a convention on September 5 in support of the Free Soil Party. They issued an address urged black northerners to support the Free Soil party wherever “the elective franchise is not wickedly withheld from them.” Interestingly the Free Soil Republican did not report on the convention itself. Its resolutions only appeared in its pages nearly a month after the event, in the form of a letter from a New Hampshire resident who had attended. The Republican‟s long period of silence suggested Free Soilers had little interest in the political or social concerns of African-American in the free North. See Free Soil Republican, 28 September 1848. 181

legislature, but one that was significantly reduced by the addition of those 11 Free Soilers and nine additional Whigs. Democrat John W. Dana again earned a plurality in his gubernatorial re- election bid, though his tally was reduced from the previous year by abstentions and defections to the Free Soilers. However, the success of this initial Free Soil effort ultimately proved fleeting. In the federal elections, they polled barely more than half of the 20,000 votes they had hoped to garner, and that total actually represented a slight decline from the state elections two months earlier.15

As Silbey has argued, voters‟ long-time partisan loyalties had held in the main. However, that is only one reason for the older parties‟ continued strength. Particularly among the

Democrats, divisions over the issue of slavery simply were not yet so sharp or irrevocable. To best understand the limited appeal of Free Soil in Maine, one has to see how the Democrats responded following the 1848 canvass. While the state‟s Democratic leaders were troubled by divisions over slavery in the national party, they retreated to the local issues that had sustained them for the past few years and promised both the prosperity and the bright future that the slavery debate ominously threatened to occlude.

Holden and Preble hoped to hold the party together by emphasizing the benefits that would accrue to Democrats upon the successful completion of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence

Railroad and other smaller improvements throughout the state. They further maintained that the party was duty bound to ensure that the benefits of such improvements flow to the masses as far as possible. This was where Holden and the progressive leadership encountered difficulty: reconciling these democratic ideals with a corporate project that pitted the gargantuan capital needs of the corporation itself against the limited resources of its investors. Holden steadfastly

15 Free Soil Republican, 30 November 1848. 182

continued to support the project, despite conflicts over its feasibility and its impact on local economies in the state. To his way of thinking, the increased commerce promised by this project was essential to providing opportunity and preserving order in the state‟s communities, specifically the burgeoning and diverse community of Portland. Democrats long had insisted that laboring classes and small producers who populated these communities were their most prized constituents. Yet, when the railroad‟s development began to exert a negative impact on this same population, Holden offered only a meager defense of their interests. Though he did not abandon them, the editor‟s subsequent course of action suggested that his most prized constituents were the entrepreneurs and merchants that promised to bring new commerce to Portland and the state.

No sooner was the election of 1848 over than Portlanders, those who stood to gain the most from the state‟s future commercial prosperity, began preparing for the city‟s charter elections on April 3, 1849. Charter elections typically had been desultory affairs, characterized by low voter turnout, but this year Charles Holden and his colleagues believed the charter elections offered a signal opportunity to advance the city‟s material and moral progress dramatically. A long editorial in the Eastern Argus described the city as having somnambulated indifferently through the past. Yet, now it was awakening to “a new career. Like Pompeii, she has been exhumed, and her streets are now the avenues of living, bustling enterprise.” To safeguard and build upon this new, energetic spirit of enterprise, the city needed new,

Democratic, leadership at its helm. The paper breathlessly insisted,

Men are now wanted in the municipal government who are equal to the go ahead spirit of the times – who will appreciate the necessity of improvements, and who will have the courage to drive them through – who will not be afraid of an increase of taxation, when the advantages of that increase will flow back to the taxed. We would not be understood as advocating lavish expenditure. We are for strict economy and strict accountability in our public officers. As the city increases in population and business, additional expenses must necessarily be incurred – but there will be more people and property upon which to raise the needed revenue. In the selection of our city government we want neither over- 183

rash nor over-cautious men; but we do want those who are equal to the claims of the present.16

Though the editorial paid lip service to maintaining “strict economy” in city government, it betrayed no concern over the potential of long-term debt, which it assumed easily could be borne by future residents of the city. Holden sought a comprehensive array of improvements, including broadened streets, more consistent collection of trash, the professional reformation of the city police and watchmen, further city investment in the piecemeal construction of the Atlantic and

St. Lawrence, and the sale of the city‟s Exchange Building to the federal government.17

Holden‟s calls for a more economically progressive city government directly challenged radical Democratic principles of strict economy in small government. However, this particular campaign, predicated as it was on issues that could bring immediate benefits to the city, did not seem to alienate Portland‟s Democrats. Instead, it produced one of the closest mayoral races in the city‟s recent memory, though one that again ended in Democratic defeat.18 Undeterred,

Holden and Preble continued to labor for the continuation of both city and state-wide internal improvements, and they consistently linked such improvements with the preservation of order in the state‟s growing communities.

16 Eastern Argus, 2 April 1849. 17 Merchants desired a new, larger warehouse and exchange building to accommodate the city‟s increased trade. In late April, Congress passed a bill allowing the Secretary of the Treasury to purchase the building for $149,000 to serve as a new customs house. The sale netted the city $49,000 profit, and they retained space in the building for city offices. Democrats urged that the windfall be used to widen Commercial Street along the waterfront, pay down the city‟s debt and invest in the Atlantic and St. Lawrence. See Eastern Argus, 21 March; 3, 25 April 1849; and 9 February 1850. 18 For the mayoral race, see Eastern Argus, 14 and 17 April 1849. The Democratic nominee, Charles Q. Clapp, narrowly outpolled incumbent James B. Cahoon, 1076 to 1067, but failed to win a majority of votes. The Whig city council subsequently re-elected Cahoon. Neal Dow‟s temperance campaign for mayor netted 61 votes, further demonstrating that Dow‟s growing temperance bloc held the balance of power in the city, despite his meager polling. The Clapp family might have been the city‟s wealtheiest. Clapp and his brother, Asa, founded the city‟s first gasworks. In 1831, Asa Clapp‟s taxable wealth was nearly four times as great as the city‟s next highest taxpayer. See Babcock, “The Decline of Artisan Republicanism in Portland, Maine, 1825-1850”: 12. 184

Holden‟s quest to maintain order in the bustling city of Portland shaped his loyalty to the

Democracy and colored his response to antislavery agitation. The conflict over slavery fed disorder and riot in the North, but not due to the agitations of extreme abolitionists. Rather, the aggressive demands of the proslavery South were to blame. In the pages of the Eastern Argus, the editor noted that the North consistently had protected the growth of slavery through constitutional and legislative compromises and harsh repression of abolitionists at home, only to be met with increasing demands from the South to yield still more. “In short,” Holden concluded,

“everywhere the mob spirit of the North has run riot to accommodate their Southern brethren, but without avail.” Thus, the political upheaval caused by the conflict over slavery‟s westward expansion was not an esoteric issue. Rather, it was manifested in disorder and riots that destabilized northern communities socially, morally, even economically.19

In Portland itself, Democratic leaders were preoccupied with signs of disorder, especially the seeming increase in juvenile delinquency. Comparing this problem with the deadly Asiatic cholera epidemic that would kill tens of thousands of Americans from 1849 to 1850, the Eastern

Argus complained that the unchecked vagrancy of “idle, dissolute, smoking, drinking and thieving boys… poisons all the channels of mental and spiritual life – disorganizes society – violates law – prowls about with dirk and dagger- increases taxation – fills your alms houses and your cells – and finds employment for the hangman.” Vagrancy thus was both a moral and economic problem, and Holden urged, “the moralist and the civic economist should both engage in devising and accomplishing a remedy” to this moral cancer and drain on the city‟s tax

19 Eastern Argus, 9 February 1849. Leonard Richards authored what remains the definitive work on anti- abolitionist popular violence in the antebellum North. Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Richards argued that young, upstart abolitionists challenged the traditional moral authority of older, established elites in northern communities, and those elites sought to re-establish their authority by leading violent riots to suppress abolitionist activities. 185

revenue.20 Now was the time to stamp out this problem, before it literally derailed Portland‟s various improvement projects. Historians typically have pointed to Whigs as the party that was most impelled to discipline society by regulating social behaviors, whereas Democrats defended individual liberties against such crude authoritarianism. Here, though Holden evinced little concern for the liberties of idle, young men, and instead yearned to discipline them into becoming productive, rather than destructive, members of the community.

Not all instances of disorder were equally threatening to the editor, however. Prior to the city‟s celebration of Washington‟s birthday in February 1849, the city marshal forbade the traditional burning of tar in barrels on the city streets, for fear of causing a devastating conflagration. Portland‟s adult revelers largely obeyed the decree, but a number of children did not, and several “little boys” were arrested by the city police and placed under guard in the watch house. When their parents and neighbors unsuccessfully sought their release, a mob shattered the windows of the watch house, stove in the doors and extricated the young boys (who apparently withstood the siege unharmed). Democrats argued that the short-lived riot exposed the myopic vision and authoritarian bent of the Whig city government. Though the volunteer watch was on duty the night of the riot, the city also had paid for the city police to conduct patrols in a redundant show of force. All they accomplished was the suppression of a popular celebration of the birthday of a revered president. Yet, perhaps more importantly, the Whig city government had contributed to the conditions that inspired the riot, having left the city streets “unlighted and

20 Eastern Argus, 1 February 1850. An 1845 petition from Portland citizens to the state legislature was instrumental in the passage of a state law that year allowing towns to construct juvenile detention homes. The law went into effect the following year. See Robert Babcock, “The Decline of Artisan Republicanism in Portland, Maine, 1825-1850”: 25. 186

uncleaned.”21 The lack of street lights particularly had caused the children to burn tar barrels in order to illuminate their celebrations. In this instance, Democratic leaders suggested that internal improvements would have inspired a more orderly celebration of Washington‟s birthday specifically and would militate against rowdy-ism generally.

Though the pursuit of improvements promised to benefit the community as a whole, it also acted to the detriment of the city‟s poorer laborers and small producers, the very backbone of the state‟s Democracy. In January 1849, the board of directors of the Atlantic and St.

Lawrence Railroad announced that they would auction off all shares that were $35 or more in arrears (individual shares had been offered at $50). The corporation initially had allowed the public to purchase shares with as little as $5 down, with the remainder to be paid in quarterly installments of $5 each, beginning in January 1846. In a letter of protest to the Eastern Argus,

“Justice” denounced the decision as tantamount to an elitist takeover of the corporation. The writer called the railroad a “project of the people,” arguing that “while capitalists of our State and city stood aloof, the mechanics, farmers, and working men subscribed freely for the stock.”22

Holden published the letter without comment, leaving it to his readers to guess whether he approved or disapproved of the writer‟s concerns.

In a cruel irony, rents and real estate valuations had increased dramatically after the railroad‟s groundbreaking but before the road itself brought increased business or higher wages

21 Eastern Argus, 24 February 1849. Quotation from Eastern Argus, 29 March 1849. This was one of three major riots that occurred in the city in 1849. That autumn, a group of sailors, angry at having been ejected from an alleged brothel, turned a cannon on the house, precipitating an exchange of gunfire with the owner and a subsequent riot. One month later, a fight between two sailors in a tippling shop grew into a battle between sailors and the city watch and fire companies (called out as reinforcements for the watch). See Eastern Argus, 8 and 10 September; and 8 October 1849. 22 Eastern Argus, 8 January 1849. A rebuttal appeared in the January 11 edition of the paper, from “Stockholder,” who argued that the corporation had allowed plenty of time for shareholders to pay their assessments. Even with rising rents and property valuations, shareholders should have been able to save $5 each quarter to meet their obligations. 187

to the city. Thus, while small investors now struggled to meet their assessments, the city‟s wealthy speculators and lords of property grew fat off of advancing property values. Auctioning off delinquent shares would deal the coup de grace to widespread public ownership of the road.

Now that the road was in operation and increasing the volume of trade in the city, the people‟s auctioned shares would be bought well below par by a small number of speculating capitalists, confident of profit, critics claimed. Furthermore, the city‟s voters already had voted to loan the city‟s credit to the corporation, which was more than adequate to meet its immediate operational needs. Alluding to this capital at the corporation‟s disposal, “Shareholder” (another correspondent to the Argus) argued that the auction was unnecessary. Instead, he characterized the proposed auction as a groveling attempt to attract the investment of wealthy capitalists, who might provide a steady flow of future assessments.23 Worse still, if the people‟s project were now hijacked by the city‟s elite, it would belie the Democracy‟s claim that the marketplace was a bulwark of equal rights and equal opportunity for self-advancement.

As Chairman of the Democratic Central Committee and editor of the Argus, Charles

Holden was in a position to redeem the democratic pretensions of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence project by opposing the auction. Instead, his paper prized the speedy completion of the road above the interests of its humbler, loyal partisans. A specie drain, caused in part by the increased imports that came with free trade, had begun to paralyze northeastern financial markets and slow investment in internal improvement projects. Desperate to solicit investments that would fund construction of the road to the state‟s border with Quebec, Holden penned an editorial in the

Argus supporting the immediate auction of all delinquent shares until the road was laid out to the

23 Eastern Argus, 15 January 1849. Americans in the mid-nineteenth century detested the image of the grasping speculator who greedily accumulated wealth through sharp dealing rather than through honest, productive labor. Such a man was not a good citizen. Trading off of the labor of others, they were parasites who diverted profits away from true producers and contributed nothing to the material or moral advance of the community. 188

border. In a comparative study of the ports of Portland and St. John New Brunswick, Robert

Babcock has found that the 1840s saw an increasing capitalization of Portland businesses and a concomitant increase in both pecuniary and social divisions between wealthy entrepreneurs and their laborers. Democratic leaders like Holden were complicit in this development.24

Holden did seek to ameliorate the worst effects of intensive capitalization, though. For instance, the party did try to protect the city‟s laborers and small producers from the specter of bankruptcy, threatened by the inflation of rents and property values. In the pages of his newspaper in April 1849, the editor called for a state law to exempt homesteads from debt seizure. His reasoning evinced a nostalgic yearning for a simpler past when commercial dealings were firmly embedded in and conducted by the rituals of social custom. He argued that a homestead exemption would ensure social order, for it would prevent men from being turned out of their homes, only to become desperate and reckless in their need to secure shelter and sustenance. Despite complaints from some correspondents that such an exemption essentially would destroy business by placing debts beyond the reach of creditors, by late August the legislature passed a bill exempting $500 of real estate or $500 of personal property for those who did not own their own homes.25

Holden and Preble were pleased that they had succeeded in pushing the Atlantic and St.

Lawrence Railroad project forward while simultaneously erecting some financial safeguards for

24 Eastern Argus, 5 May 1849. An initial auction of delinquent shares in March, netted between 71 and 76 cents on the dollar per share. Eastern Argus, 13 March 1849. Babcock, “The Decline of Artisan Republicanism in Portland, Maine, 1825-1850”: 19. Michael Holt notes that in 1848 alone U. S. banks‟ specie reserves dropped by $10 million as a result of paying for increasing imports. See Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: 365-366; and David A. Martin, “The Changing Role of Foreign Money in the United States,” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 37 no. 4 (December 1977): 1019-1020. Martin suggests that the conversion of foreign currency into U.S. coin, followed by sharply increased demand for U.S. silver and a growing trade imbalance beginning in 1848 contributed to this specie drain. 25 For an example of such complaints, see Eastern Argus, 23 April and 2 May 1849. The bill did not repeal the previous property exemption law (which had protected $200 of property), so the total value of property exempt from debt under the two laws was $700. The legislature chose not to rectify this unintentional result. 189

those citizens who would feel most acutely the project‟s impact on housing costs and price increases. Still, they had compromised their own political principles in the process, tacitly approving of the corporation‟s aggressive efforts to raise the capital pledged to it at the expense of its smaller stockholders. One would not have blamed the city‟s small producers and laboring families if they had felt betrayed by the party that claimed to defend their interests against the aristocratic Whigs.

With the settlement of the railroad funding and debt exemption issues, Democrats began to look toward the state‟s September elections. These would serve as a referendum not only on local issues of commercial development, but also the party‟s handling of the issues of expansion and slavery. While their brethren in New York conducted separate state conventions before settling on a plan of reunion (for the second consecutive year), Maine‟s wildcat and woolhead

Democrats met in a single state convention in 1849, in which each faction elected its own chairmen and secretaries. These rival officers then appointed a committee consisting of equal numbers from both factions to draft a plan of organization that would be acceptable to all. Unlike

New York, the party‟s split over slavery was neither deep nor wide, and they reached a quick and compromise.

Dr. John Hubbard of Hallowell, a former one-term state senator, free soil sympathizer, and temperance advocate comfortably won the party‟s gubernatorial nomination over John

Hodgdon, a staunch, conservative Democrat from Houlton in the state‟s northernmost county.

The support for both men was dictated as much by geography as by principle. With the exception of all eleven of Portland‟s delegates, Hodgdon‟s support came almost exclusively from the remote eastern and northern portions of the state, while Hubbard‟s support derived mainly from the southern part of Maine, where the temperance crusade was most firmly established. Thus, the 190

Eastern Argus characterized the nomination battle as a clash of ephemeral, regional interests.

Such a pronouncement in reference to a divided party typically would sound disingenuous, but party members indeed left the state convention remarkably united.26 Holden had preferred

Hodgdon, for he worried that temperance and antislavery only diverted energy from the pursuit of much-needed improvements. However, for the sake of unity, he gladly accepted the relatively unknown Hubbard as the party‟s standard bearer.

Hubbard‟s nomination did not foreshadow a radical antislavery or temperance platform.

Rather, the first several resolutions were a model of judicious compromise, allowing for differences of opinions and encouraging their expression. The first several measures applauded the successful measures of the Polk Administration, particularly his conduct of the war with

Mexico. They insisted that the issues that traditionally had divided Whigs and Democrats, though they “may not at this moment be subjects of exciting debate,” nevertheless remained unchanged. The platform equivocated on the issue of arresting slavery‟s expansion. One the one hand, it declared that the constitutionality of the federal government‟s power to restrict slavery

“has been settled by judicial construction” and numerous congressional acts. On the other hand, this power involved a principle which was not and could not become “part of the distinctive creed of the national Democratic Party.”27

Perhaps the best clue to unraveling how free soil Democrats and party regulars united in compromise is contained in the party‟s address to the state‟s Democratic electors, a mammoth document that appeared in serial form in Democratic newspapers throughout the state. In essence, the address stated that geographic and commercial expansion remained the party‟s core

26 On the factionalism that attended the state party convention, see the Eastern Argus, 25, 29, and 30 June 1849 and Portland Advertiser, 2 July 1849. 27 Eastern Argus, 4 July 1849. 191

goal. Invoking the legacy of Jefferson, the address argued that the chief benefit of the Louisiana

Purchase had been its expansion of the nation‟s commerce. It triumphantly claimed “from the

Mississippi and its branches would be annually distributed a greater variety of and more value in the products than ever the Volga, the Danube, or the Rhine in the most fortunate year bestowed upon the people of Europe.”28 Similarly, Polk‟s acquisition of Mexican territories would honor

Jefferson‟s legacy by further expanding American liberties and inaugurate truly global commerce, flowing through the providentially situated United States.

The material benefits of this expansion rippled through every community and were among Democrats‟ greatest bequest to their country. To Holden, this was the proper foundation for a truly modern Democratic Party. Government could shape expansion and development to enrich the nation and its citizens through wise action. The editor and his fellow Democratic leaders thus sought to rewrite the party‟s history, rejecting its Jacksonian legacy of divorcing the government from the economy. The address specifically invoked Jefferson to suggest that, from its inception, the Democracy was intended to guide the nation‟s geographic expansion and economic growth in subtle but firm ways.

All of Maine‟s Democrats, even those committed to free soil, could agree on the moral and material benefits of such expansion. Similarly, all of the state‟s Democrats, even those most concerned with securing additional territory, were not insensible to the possibility that the admission of slavery into those territories might undermine the industry and entrepreneurial spirit of free labor that was necessary to create and sustain remunerative commerce there. Progressive

Democrats insisted that pecuniary interests would bind the country together. Holden suggested that intersectional business relationships, particularly between the West and Northeast, were

28 Eastern Argus, 18 July 1849. The serial publication of the address lasted through six daily editions. 192

“among the surest guaranties of general harmony. They form a web that nothing but the most aggravated outrage will break.”29 However, it is unclear whether Holden and his progressive comrades perceived the spread of slavery as just such an outrage.

In the state party address, Maine‟s Democratic leaders admitted that they were troubled by the fact that southern settlers with slaves in tow already had begun migrating into the new western territories. They urged northern congressmen to halt slave migration into the territories until settlers there had the opportunity to determine whether or not to allow the existence of the institution among them. Rejecting the legal theory that slavery could exist only where “positive law” specifically brought it into existence, Holden‟s Eastern Argus warned, “the stealthy march of slavery has hitherto only been arrested by statutory law.”30 Such law must have an opportunity to take effect prior to the existence of slavery for it to have any legal force. However, Holden did not suggest what legal or constitutional basis Congress would have for instituting such a crypto-

Proviso in the territories. The editor‟s conflicted position suggested that he was neither fully committed to non-intervention, nor to free soil.

The tenuous bonds linking free soil Democrats and non-interventionist Democrats were embodied in the ownership of the Eastern Argus itself. In 1849, Holden entered into a partnership with Franklin Sanborn to co-own and co-edit the Eastern Argus. Initially, both men expressed sympathy for the free soil cause, but they had become alarmed by political horse trading between Free Soilers and Whigs. In Cumberland County, the most populous county in the state, Whigs had agreed to nominate a Free Soiler on one senatorial ticket in exchange for

29 Eastern Argus, 15 April 1850. As evidence of this, the paper noted that schools in San Francisco, Oregon and “Mormon” Salt Lake City had ordered primary school textbooks from Portland‟s Sanborn & Carter Co. No doubt the paper was gratified both by the business and the exportation of New England cultural values in the pages of those texbooks. 30 Eastern Argus, 23 July 1849. 193

Free Soilers replacing a Democrat with a Whig on another ticket. In the pages of the Eastern

Argus, Holden derisively asked Cumberland County Free Soilers if they were “willing thus to be trafficked about, as cattle in the market, at the option of political hacks?” Yet, Democrats‟ real concerns were maintaining party discipline and regularity against the disruptive machinations of

Whigs, not Free Soilers themselves.31

However, just one year later, the imperative to maintain party discipline against the

Whigs failed to unite the Argus‟ co-owners. In the spring of 1850, young Democrat George F.

Shepley accepted the nomination of a joint Free Soil and Whig caucus to fill a vacant senatorial seat from Cumberland County. The Democratic organization immediately repudiated him and nominated a rival candidate. This time Sanborn supported the Free Soil ticket, placing Holden in the awkward position of editorializing against Shepley‟s irregular nomination while simultaneously acknowledging that his co-editor supported Shepley‟s candidacy.

Sanborn‟s decision undoubtedly was influenced by Shepley‟s pedigree and possibly even by personal connections to the latter‟s well-respected family. George was the son of the venerable Ether Shepley, who had been a delegate to Maine‟s constitutional convention in 1819, was a respected founding member of the state‟s Democratic Party (along with William Pitt

Preble), and had served a term as U.S. Senator from Maine during Jackson‟s second administration. The younger Shepley was not an upstart Free Soiler but a loyal Democrat, who had served as a Portland alderman and United States Attorney for Maine.32 Regardless of

Sanborn‟s reasoning, this was perhaps the most bizarre example of the inconsistencies and

31 Eastern Argus, 7 September, 1849. 32 Shepley was part of the large defense team for the trial of six rioters accused of breaking into the watchhouse and freeing the youths who had been arrested during the celebration of Washington‟s birthday. All six defendants were known Democrats. Shepley was joined on the defense counsel by prominent Free Soil leader Samuel Fessenden. See Eastern Argus, 19 March 1849. 194

stubborn independence of partisan editors in this era. This was not a case of a maverick newspaper bucking the party, but two maverick editors pursuing divergent courses in the pages of the same newspaper. Portlanders thus were confronted with a schizophrenic paper that argued against itself during an important state election campaign. Remarkably, Sanborn‟s support of

Shepley did not threaten his partnership with Holden. That business partnership apparently was more important than was editorial unity in service to the party.

The conflict over Shepley illustrated the limited power of the Free Soil Party to disrupt the Democracy. Despite some alliances with Whigs, the majority of Free Soilers were trusted

Democrats, who still commanded the respect of loyal Democratic voters and leaders. As a result, in the September elections of 1849 Free Soilers lost all but four of the 13 seats in the state House that they had won the previous year. Both Democrats and Whigs increased their total number of seats, with Democrats holding 88 seats against a combined opposition of 63. Moreover, the

Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Hubbard, handily defeated his Whig rival Elijah Hamlin.

Maine‟s Democratic leadership had reason to feel confident after these elections. The forebodings of factionalism occasioned by the Free Soil campaign of 1848 seemed to have dissipated. The party was more united in 1849 than it had been the previous year, and

Democratic measures had preserved the social and political order they deemed necessary to the state and the nation‟s continued material and moral progress. Furthermore, the party appeared to have placated its most restive supporters, the laboring masses, by passing the homestead exemption law, blocking Whig attempts to repeal the state‟s 10 hour law (passed the previous year), and vetoing a liquor bill that would have vastly expanded the powers of justices to search both homes and businesses for signs of illegal liquor collection and distribution.

195

Yet, while the party seemed to clear the Free Soil hurdle with relative ease, the liquor issue would continue to bedevil Democrats. While Democratic voters undoubtedly appreciated the veto of the liquor bill, temperance advocates in the state were understandably frustrated.

Especially in Portland, the state‟s rum capital, the forces of temperance challenged the

Democratic leadership in ways that the free soil issue by itself had failed to do. Mindful of this fact, ambitious Free Soilers who only grudgingly assented to the compromises that kept the

Democratic Party intact, saw in the temperance movement an opportunity to reorganize the party with themselves at the head. Thus, temperance, not Free Soil, posed the greatest threat to

Democratic unity after 1849.33 The disruptive potential of the temperance issue was only heightened by Holden and the Democratic leadership‟s preoccupation with the continued development of internal improvements to the exclusion of other emerging political issues that were beginning to animate the state‟s electorate.

An Irreparable Breach in the New York Democracy?

New York‟s Democratic Party seemed to provide a sharp contrast to the tenuously united

Democracy in Maine. To Arthur Schlesinger the free soil revolution was the radical

Democracy‟s most noble stand, and it unleashed a storm of antislavery protest in the North that would contribute mightily to the coming of a sectional civil war over the issue of slavery. The eventual reunion of antislavery Barnburners and conservative Hunkers in New York had no place in this hagiography. However, despite the Hunker insurgency against Azariah Flagg led by

33 Eastern Argus, 22 August 1849. The liquor bill‟s passage presaged future factionalism in the state‟s parties. Free Soilers, Whigs and a small group of temperance Democrats had combined to pass the bill. The bill itself merely required the sworn testimony of three individuals to support a search warrant. That testimony also only needed to affirm the individuals‟ suspicions of illegal activity, not the actual witnessing of such activity. See Eastern Argus, 15 August 1849. On Portland‟s rum business, see Duncan, Coastal Maine: A Maritime History: 281. 196

Croswell in 1847, the split in the New York Democracy was not irreparable. Walter Ferree noted that, even after splitting from the party after the Syracuse convention that year, Barnburners consistently maintained that they had not left the party. Rather, they claimed the party had abandoned them.34 This was not mere rhetorical gamesmanship. First, Barnburners still identified themselves as Democrats, not as Free Soilers. Second, despite the fact that Hunkers believed they would benefit from Whig improvements spending, they knew that they would not wield power in the state unless Democrats gained power, which would require the united efforts of the party. The subsequent conflicts between the two factions therefore were waged with the constant desire on both sides for reunion.

Several historians, including Sean Wilentz, have pinpointed the national Democratic convention in Baltimore in May 1848 as a decisive turning point in the two factions‟ struggle for control of the state Democracy. Prior to the national conclave, Hunkers and Barnburners were unable to agree upon a method for electing delegates. Barnburners preferred the standard practice of electing delegates at large, which presumably would have favored the candidacies of its well- known leaders. Hunkers preferred to elect delegates by assembly district, which likely would have preserved Hunker representation from staunch Hunker districts. Barnburners feared that a

“divided” delegation, one answering to the whims of their districts rather than the state party leadership, would split its votes under pressure of the 2/3 nominating rule and cave in to southern dictation, just as northern delegations had in 1844.35 Unable to compromise on these points,

34 Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson: 460-483. See Ferree, The New York Democracy, chapters two and three. 35 On the district system of electing presidential electors, see Richard H. Manning, Herald of the Albany Regency: Edwin Croswell and the “Albany Argus,” 1823-1854 (PhD. Dissertation, Miami University, 1983): 50- 53.The Democratic Party had adopted the 2/3 rule for nominating the vice presidential candidate at its very first convention in 1832 (the convention delegates already pledged themselves to nominate Andrew Jackson for president prior to assembling). Leonard Richards argued that the rule, proposed by southern delegates, “enhanced the value of 197

competing Hunker and Barnburner delegations eventually set off for Baltimore, claiming to represent the interests of the Empire State.

In the Schlesinger thesis both factions looked to the Baltimore convention as a final showdown, hoping to deal a death blow to the other and claim the mantle of leadership of the

New York Democracy once and for all. This is an unsatisfying portrait of their dispute though.

After their embarrassingly decisive defeat at the hands of the Whigs, the purpose of their internecine conflict in 1848 was not to destroy the other but to determine the terms on which the party would reunite and who would wield power.

The Hunker-led Syracuse convention had departed from standard party practice by creating a new State Central Committee (the existing one, led by Barnburners had been intended to operate through 1849) and calling for the state‟s assembly districts to nominate delegates to the Baltimore convention. Initially, angry radicals who had gathered at Herkimer after bolting the Syracuse conclave sought to create a rival party and elect rival delegates to the national meeting. However, once their anger dissipated, they looked to the party‟s January legislative caucus, in which Barnburners would constitute a majority, as an opportunity to regain control of the party. There, they hoped to persuade Hunkers to compromise on a new plan for electing convention delegates that would unite the party through the regular and accepted standards of practice that defined party discipline and loyalty. When Hunker members of the incoming legislature rebuffed this offer, undeterred members of the outgoing legislature (consisting of 122

Democratic members) pursued their own conciliatory compromise.

the South‟s „rotten boroughs and gave the South a veto over whomever the northern majority might want for president or vice president.” In 1844, Richards noted, southern delegates used the rule to rid themselves of a losing candidate in Van Buren (despite the fact that a simple majority of delegates had arrived at the convention pledged to support his candidacy) and tighten their control over the party. Richards, The Slave Power: 114, 144-145. 198

These men crafted a long, laborious address to the Democratic voters that sought to point out the common ground on which the party could be re-united. Underscoring the original and long-lived source of conflict between progressives and radicals, the address began not with the issue of slavery, but rather the issue of internal improvements. Surveying the continued construction of canals in the state, since the late Silas Wright‟s administration, the convention concluded, “the sound financial policy contended for in the report of Governor Wright and by the

Democratic Party is not unfriendly to the progress of internal improvements.”36 The address further noted that unexpectedly high canal revenues allowed for continued expenditures on internal improvements. The radical authors of the address thus sought to vindicate the prudent course on improvements pursued by the unjustly maligned Wright, while grudgingly acknowledging the accuracy of Hunker claims that canal extensions would increase traffic and revenue sufficiently to offset debt-funded construction. Canal construction could continue apace, radicals admitted, with the signal difference being that such construction would be funded directly from canal receipts, not state debt. Finally, the concluding resolution of the address affirmed the constitutionality of congressional expenditures for Great Lakes improvements, a significant concession for old Jacksonian radicals who had been chastened by the improvement schemes that had succumbed to the Panic of 1837.

That caveat aside, the address of this caucus was replete with radical principles. The caucus reminded its audience that the legislature had resolved unanimously to instruct the state‟s senators and ask its representatives in Congress to oppose the addition of any new slave states to the Union during the Missouri Crisis and again during the Mexican War itself. The caucus also called for a unity convention at Utica to “meet the aggressive attitude of a portion of the South

36 Rochester Republican, 18 January 1848. 199

and to secure a free and full utterance of the voice of New York in the crisis of a war with a foreign power.”37 In this dramatic line, Barnburners suggested that all Democrats were united in opposition to a common foe: an aggressively pro-slavery South that sought to deny New

Yorkers‟ freedom of expression and self-determination within the Democratic Party and the nation. By this means, Barnburners hoped at least to sublimate the economic issues that recently had driven them and their Hunker colleagues apart.

It was significant that radicals appealed to unity while at war “with a foreign power.”

Rather than condemn the war as a sinister Slave Power plot to expand their reach, Barnburners subtly, if timidly, acknowledged Hunkers‟ claims that this national crisis demanded a unified response from the party. Of course, it was more convenient for Barnburners to assume this belated pose, now that Winfield Scott was in possession of Mexico City and active hostilities

(aside from sporadic guerrilla attacks) were at an end. Embodying these subtle attempts at compromise and reunion was the caucus president, William Marcy. A former radical who blamed his loss of the governor‟s seat on myopic radical economic policy in 1840, Marcy had gravitated toward Hunker economic principles and had aligned himself with that faction over the contentious struggle for control of the party at Syracuse. Moreover, he had been a valued patron and consistent champion of Croswell‟s. However, as the guiding force of this caucus, Marcy now made a concerted effort to repair party divisions and restore New York Democrats to power in the state and influence in the nation, and Croswell seemed to follow his lead.

Though passionate in its defense of radical principles, the overall tenor of the caucus address that Marcy helped to fashion was temperate and conciliatory. Still, it failed to unite the party, largely for two reasons. First, though the caucus broached the possibility of compromise

37 Rochester Republican, 18 January 1848. 200

on divisive issues and even principles, it did not resolve the thornier issues of power and place: who would wield power in the reunified party? Second, the divisions within the party were not clear and tidy. Voters, leaders in both camps, and even the party newspapers that disseminated party principles found themselves supporting both factions at different times. Ultimately, the attempt to find middle ground between the two factions meant that the party chose expediency over true resolution of their deep differences.

This is perhaps best illustrated by Isaac Butts‟ shifting allegiances in this period. As New

York‟s Democratic voters looked to their local partisan presses to guide them through this confusing period, they found shifting allegiances and inconsistent positions on the issues that most animated the party. Butts‟ home of Rochester had flourished (though not without some social upheaval) since the opening of the Erie Canal.38 Not surprisingly, his paper, the

Republican, exhibited the Hunker persuasions one might expect from a newspaper in a bustling commercial city. Falling in line with other Hunker presses, the Republican opposed the Wilmot

Proviso when it was first introduced in Congress. The editor insisted that the Proviso was antithetical to “enlightened progress,” for it would give Congress the power “to legislate for people not represented in that body, and to make laws which neither those people nor their descendents through all future time would be competent to repeal.”39 Such a principle would restrain the people‟s ability to govern themselves and to pursue their own best interests. This ran counter to the experience of Rochester residents who had re-oriented their political and social institutions to reap the benefits of the dynamic trade that the Erie Canal had brought them.

38 Paul Johnson‟s three-decade-old study of the changes that the Market Revolution wrought in Rochester remains perhaps the most intensive study of the city in the antebellum era. Johnson, A Shopkeeper‟s Millennium. 39 Rochester Republican, 15 June 1848. 201

In January 1848 the Republican supported popular sovereignty as conceived by Lewis

Cass and further elucidated by New York Senator (and staunch Hunker) Daniel S. Dickinson.

Through a set of resolutions, Dickinson sought to implement the principles of self-government that Lewis Cass had outlined in his Nicholson letter. Dickinson eloquently concluded that he had offered his resolutions “in the hope that all who believe in the great cardinal principle of freedom

– the capacity of man for his own government – would harmonize conflicting opinions and unite upon this common ground of justice and equality.” The Albany Atlas characterized Dickinson‟s maneuver as base truckling to the Cass machine and the party‟s pro-slavery wing. The

Republican immediately rose to the senator‟s defense. It insisted that the right to self- determination and self-government existed “independent of and superior to all human constitutions and codes.”40 This ideal had been embodied in the history of the American people from their democratic Revolution to their expansion across the continent. It was both the highest responsibility of human government and the destiny of the nation itself to shape its institutions and regulatory codes to ensure and expand such self-determination.

Historians largely have derided popular sovereignty as a fruitless concept that failed to take a clear position on whether or how slavery could be restricted from new territories. David

Potter sardonically called it “a proposal possessing all the charms of ambiguity.”41 The

40 Dickinson quoted in Albany Argus, 19 January 1848; Albany Atlas, 1 January 1848; Rochester Republican, 3 January 1848. The Hunker Albany Argus further claimed that the Wilmot Proviso, unlike Dickinson‟s popular sovereignty resolutions, “would preclude all acquisition of territory and of course all indemnity from Mexico.” Albany Argus, 19 January 1848. 41 Potter, The Impending Crisis: 57. Chaplain Morrison noted that northerners argued that popular sovereignty invested territorial legislatures with the power to legislate on slavery, but they simultaneously suggested to southerners that only when drafting a constitution could settlers regulate slavery. Morrison, Democratic Politics and Sectionalism: 87-88. Freehling dismissed popular sovereignty as misguided Democrats‟ “favorite fudge,” inexplicable to the electorate at large. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay: 476. Robert Johannsen consistently characterized popular sovereignty as an ambiguous doctrine, but he also noted that concepts of popular sovereignty pre-dated the territorial accession from Mexico. Furthermore, territorial settlers consistently interpreted it as bestowing local control from the inception of settlement. See Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York: 202

ambiguity, he and historians like Roy Nichols insisted, was deliberate. The concept sought to mollify pro- and antislavery factions alike without offering a real solution to the problem of slavery‟s expansion. The Wilmot Proviso had been ambiguous about what means Congress could use to restrict slavery from the West. Popular sovereignty was doubly ambiguous, for it did not spell out how or when settlers could legislate on slavery. In this view, popular sovereignty was a cynical ploy, molded by Democrats like Lewis Cass and Stephen Douglas to gratify their overweening presidential aspirations.42 Yet, the concept‟s very ambiguity allowed Democrats to invest it with real and immediate meaning. Popular sovereignty resonated with New York‟s

Hunkers for it symbolized the democratization of New York politics and the means of breaking

Barnburners‟ grip on power in the party. The elimination of appointed offices in New York under the state‟s new constitution reverberated with the democratic ethos that lay at the core of popular sovereignty. Radicals had proposed that measure, but Hunkers embraced the principle in their plan for electing delegates to the Baltimore convention by congressional district. They believed this principle would preserve individual expression within the party and militate against the advent of divisive tests of party orthodoxy. Consequently, many New York Democrats found

Oxford University Press, 1973): 440; Johanssen, “Stephen A. Douglas, „Harper‟s Magazine,‟ and Popular Sovereignty,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 45 no. 4 (March 1959): 606-631; Johannsen, “Oregon Territory‟s Movement for Self-Government, 1848-1853.” The Pacific Historical Review, vol. 26 no. 1 (Feb. 1957): 17-32; and Johannsen, “The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Pacific Northwest.” The Pacific Historical Review, vol. 22 no. 2 (1953): 129-141. In a forthcoming article in Civil War History, Christopher Childers astutely notes that the concept of popular sovereignty had been debated during every stage of territorial development in the United States‟ history. Consequently, the concept was contested, not ambiguous. Childers, “Interpreting Popular Sovereignty: A Historiographical Essay,” Civil War History, forthcoming. 42 Joel Silbey dismissed Cass‟ stance on the Wilmot Proviso as two-faced, using popular sovereignty to represent himself to northerners as an opponent of slavery extension and to southerners as a defender of individual, democratic rights. Silbey, Party Over Section: 110. In his revisionist historiography of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which applied popular sovereignty to the organization of those territories, Roy Nichols described Douglas‟ employment of the concept as a purely cynical tool to gratify his unquenchable presidential ambitions, no matter the cost to the nation. Nichols, “The Kansas-Nebraska Act: A Century of Historiography,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 43 no. 2 (September 1956): 210-211. 203

themselves torn between the antislavery commitment of the Barnburners and what seemed to be the broader democratic principles of the Hunkers.

The Republican‟s editor wrestled with this same internal conflict and found a resolution in adherence to regular party practice. For over a decade, Democrats recognized the party‟s legislative caucus as the expression of party will and authority. Thus, Butts maintained that the recent caucus call for a compromise convention at Utica superseded the Hunker-led State Central

Committee and its plans for a state convention in Albany. The Rochester paper, formerly a stolid and dependable ally of the Hunker faction, now called for Hunkers to embrace reunion on the

Barnburners‟ terms and make opposition to slavery a prominent feature of the party platform.

Significantly though, the paper did not renounce its support for popular sovereignty either in principle or as a means of restricting slavery‟s growth. Historians like Joel Silbey and Leonard

Richards have characterized slavish adherence to party loyalty and regularity as a conservative brake upon radical antislavery principles within the Democratic Party. Yet, in this instance, such invocation of standard practice actually sustained antislavery in the party while also working toward compromise and reunion.

However, the sincere efforts on the part of radical Barnburners (and some progressive

Hunkers, like Marcy) to broker real compromise and restore the party to its former prominence in New York proved unavailing in the short term. Still in control of the State Central Committee, most Hunkers were not yet ready or willing to give place to their Barnburner foes, and they dismissed the Utica convention proposal out of hand. Smarting over this rebuff, Barnburners unveiled what would become known as the Barnburner Manifesto at their Utica conclave. This document, authored by Martin Van Buren, gave full voice to radical grievances and vindicated the justice of antislavery politics. It typically has overshadowed the more conciliatory caucus 204

address in the historical literature. However, this document was not an uncompromising expression of antislavery principle. It overtly and clearly renounced any desire to make anti- extension a party test and instead supported the resurrection of the Wilmot Proviso as a fitting response to resolutions from Alabama, Virginia and Florida that uniformly denied Congress‟ power to prohibit slavery in the territories.43

Most radical Barnburners and some progressive Hunkers ultimately embraced this logic, especially after the national convention at Baltimore. Barnburners‟ dramatic walkout there emboldened William Lowndes Yancey, a leader of the Alabama delegation, to present the so- called Alabama Platform to the convention. This extremist measure rejected the Proviso and popular sovereignty alike, arguing that neither the federal government nor territorial governments themselves possessed the right or power to outlaw slavery in any new territories.

Butts‟ Republican perceptively noted that Yancey‟s proposal meant slavery “no longer owes its existence to state laws or to local authority, but founds its claims to vitality upon the Federal

Constitution – an instrument to which all the states are parties.” The Alabama Platform effectively would have nationalized the “peculiar” institution, rendering it peculiar no more.44

This position proved too extreme for a large majority of delegates. The proposed platform sought to overturn the long-standing conception of slavery as an institution born and sustained under local or state law. The convention resoundingly rejected the Alabama Platform, with a strong majority of southern delegations and all of the northern delegations voting it down.

Despite the limited appeal of the Alabama Platform, its extreme and undemocratic doctrine

43 For a detailed account of the manifesto and the convention, see Ferree, The New York Democracy: 146- 150; and Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854: 74. Ferree saw the manifesto as a staunch rebuke to Hunkers and does not see any equivocation or tentative compromise spirit in it. Earle saw it as the first instance in which Van Buren truly identified himself as a committed Free Soiler rather than a Democrat. 44 Rochester Republican, 8 June 1848. 205

influenced the Republican to reverse course and embrace the Proviso as a symbol for the general desire to prevent slavery‟s expansion and preserve democratic rights in the new territories. To the Republican it was unjust that Congress might legislate for territorial settlers who were not represented in that body, but it was utterly unacceptable to deny that those settlers had the right of self-determination over slavery.

Butts‟ Republican consequently re-conceptualized Hunker notions of progress and the chief threats to it in response to Yancey‟s Alabama Platform. In doing so, it abandoned popular sovereignty as an ineffective tool for the restriction of slavery from the national territories. In an editorial entitled “Progression,” the Republican asserted, “in this country the predominating idea is the POLITICAL EQUALITY of all mankind; and in so far as possible, the social equality also.” Previously, the Democratic Party had opposed Whig tariffs and banks as institutions that diverted wealth from the masses to the elite and prevented equal opportunity for advancement in the marketplace. To paraphrase Cleveland Plain Dealer editor J. W. Gray, Democrats had fought to sunder the “galling chains” of an economic servitude that threatened to enrich a few by impoverishing the masses. However, now it had become clear that “the whole system of artificial

Regulation,” encompassing both the authoritarian regimes of slavery and protection of capital, were “alike subversive both of social and political equality.”45

Economically progressive Democrats had never doubted that slavery was as antithetical to social and political equality as “aristocratic” protections of capital, yet they had not seen slavery as an immediate threat. The Republican now suggested that, at least among some progressive Hunkers, that attitude was changing. Where Democrats formerly battled the Whig- constructed Money Power, “just now the foe to Political Equality which chiefly excites the

45 Rochester Republican, 16 November 1848. 206

popular fear is the Slave Power.”46 It is difficult to ascertain if Butts truly believed that antislavery was now the North‟s gravest political concern, if he was responding to the shifting attitudes of his readers, or if he simply were betting on the resurgence of Barnburner leadership in the Democracy. Either way, his newspaper executed a sharp about-face from its Hunker allegiance and its uncompromising support of popular sovereignty several months earlier, and it clearly expected its readers to approve.

Since Joseph Rayback characterized the Free Soil Party as the first, deliberate political party founded upon the moral principle of equal human rights, subsequent historians have viewed its member as principled and uncompromising opponents of slavery and of the major political parties who refused to fight its expansion. The vehemence of the Barnburner Manifesto and its unsparing assault on conservatism, both in the guise of protectionist capitalist schemes and the brutal authoritarianism of slavery, have tended to reinforce this historical perspective.

When Silbey and Wilentz, among others, have assessed the causes of the sudden collapse of Free

Soil after 1848, they typically have pointed to the failure of regular Whigs and Democrats to break free from the shackles of loyalty to their home parties. However, this ignores the fact that, at least among Democrats, serious efforts at compromise and reunion had pre-dated the unprecedented birth of the Free Soil Party. Surely, most Free Soilers were committed to the principles of that party, but many others still clearly viewed this third party challenge as another tool of negotiation with their estranged Democratic colleagues. It was remarkable how quickly and blithely these Democrats abandoned this experiment.

The Rochester Republican, which had unfurled its banner for the Free Soil ticket of

Martin Van Buren and Henry Dodge during the presidential campaign, accepted the resultant

46 Rochester Republican, 16 November 1848. 207

election of Zachary Taylor on the Whig ticket with little surprise or consternation. Typically, such election post-mortems after a bitter loss were rife with accusations and recriminations against diffident or disloyal party members who failed to do the necessary yeoman work to ensure victory. However, Butts did not waste his energies in such fruitless allotment of blame.

Instead, the Republican closed the chapter on Democratic divisions, concluding, “it is certain that the great mass of the old Democratic Party hold to the same common political faith in the general sense” and “their sympathies and griefs naturally commingle, as though no factitious distinctions had ever distracted their councils.” The Free Soil revolt had been necessary to awaken the North to the dangers of a domineering South that sought to nationalize slavery. “Now, however, the imaginary tie which bound men of congenial principles to antagonistic organizations is sundered,” and it was time for Democrats to reunite (on the grounds that they would oppose the extension of slavery).47

The Rome Sentinel had been an even stauncher member of the Hunker camp, yet it too followed the Rochester Republican‟s lead. The Sentinel concluded by the fall of 1849 that, “in principle, there has not been, nor is there now, any difference of opinion” in the party over the principle of slavery restriction. Rather, there merely had been a difference of opinion over means of effecting such restriction. Again, this was a dramatic reversal from the paper‟s defiant resistance only a few years before to what it termed the introduction of new party tests: antislavery. At that time, this influential Oneida County newspaper insisted that antislavery agitation by Barnburners meant that “harmony cannot long remain in the party.”48

47 Rochester Republican, 16 November 1848. 48 Rome Sentinel, 24 October 1849; 18 November 1845. 208

This represented a surprisingly untroubled and tidy eulogy for a third party movement that supposedly had capitalized on serious, lasting and irreparable divisions in the North over the politics of slavery. The Republican and Sentinel‟s seemingly sudden commitment to party unity was rather convenient. With Whigs in control of the White House and the state government,

Democratic survival depended on the re-unification of the party for the upcoming state elections.

While the wary factions of the Empire State Democracy were willing to unite behind common slates of candidates, they steadfastly refused to renounce the divisive issues that had so troubled the party in the first place. Having led their readers and voters to oppose Barnburner demands, they now expected their readers to join them in rapprochement.

The editor of the Republican even reorganized the paper to reflect and assist that reunion.

First, Butts implemented new management in February 1849, broadening the scope of the paper beyond politics to include economic news more consistently. In April, he also welcomed three new publishing partners, Royal Chamberlain, James Benton, and George Cooper, none of whom had been associated with the leadership of either faction within the party. The Rochester

Republican would continue to promote bedrock Democratic principles, but would now steer clear of factional disputes. This seeming neutrality had the added benefit of releasing the newspaper from its belated and short-lived adoption of Free Soil principles. Even John Van

Buren seemed to relent in his factionalism, triumphantly claiming that the Free Soil campaign had served its purpose by putting slavery “in retreat.”49

In August of 1849, preparatory to the upcoming state elections, Free Soilers and

Democrats turned their attention from the slavery controversy to their prostrated condition in state government, where Whigs possessed the governor‟s seat and held margins of 24 seats to

49 John Van Buren to Martin Van Buren, 2 January 1849. Martin Van Buren Papers. 209

eight in the Senate and 107 seats to 21 in the House over their combined Democratic and Free

Soil rivals.50 That month Free Soilers and Democrats held separate but simultaneous state conventions in the Hunker stronghold of Rome (a significant concession by Free Soilers). Each convention elected a committee to negotiate terms on which to unite the conventions and present a unified Democratic ticket to the voters in the approaching canvass. The two committees quickly agreed that slavery was the only issue that divided the factions and that their former antagonism over economic aims essentially was settled.51 Moreover, it was only slavery in the territories that divided the factions, for both sides agreed that Congress had full power over slavery in the District of Columbia and no power over it in the states. Free Soilers insisted to no avail that Hunkers adopt the Wilmot Proviso, and Hunkers firmly responded that they would not commit themselves to any one means of prohibiting the extension of slavery, but instead would

“resist such extension by such constitutional and legal means as we may possess, whenever and wherever we are called upon to meet the question.”52

Despite the failure of reunion at Rome, numerous Democratic county committees throughout the state proceeded to unify their badly divided party on their own. These committees thus seemed to act in the spirit of popular sovereignty that appeared to be so dear to progressive

Hunkers, and they essentially forced the state party to respond to their initiative. Notwithstanding exhortations from some Free Soil leaders to retain the integrity of their crumbling party, radical

Barnburners at the county level eagerly accepted invitations from the Democrats to split their

50 Of the 21 Democratic Assemblymen, 13 were Barnburners/Free Soilers. Of the eight Democratic senators, only one was a Hunker. 51 Canal receipts outstripped all projections in 1849, and the paper confidently asserted that, despite the restrictions of the constitution, there would be sufficient revenues to complete extensions and enlargements. “So vast was the commercial traffic that the population of Buffalo (the state‟s major port on Lake Erie) had nearly doubled in ten years from 1835 to 1845. See Rome Sentinel, 26 September 1849. 52 Rome Sentinel, 22 August 1849. 210

tickets between Hunker and Barnburner candidates. Suffolk, Duchess, Livingston, Chenango,

Erie, Monroe, Onondaga, Orleans and Oneida Counties led the way in reuniting the party from the ground up.53 Yielding to the popular will of their supporters, Hunker leaders hastily arranged a new convention in September and offered to withdraw some of their nominations for state office, to be replaced with Barnburners/Free Soilers. The remnants of the Free Soil leadership accepted this offer and a tenuously reunited Democratic Party rebounded impressively in the state elections. Despite the late date of the party‟s reunion, the legislature elected in 1849 featured an even division in the assembly of 64 Whigs and 64 Democrats and only a slim Whig majority in the state senate of 17 seats to 15.54

However, both factions knew that this reunion was not necessarily full and complete

(indeed, this laborious process would be repeated again in 1850). Some counties refused to adopt the shared tickets, leading to the unexpected defeats of certain Democratic candidates in heavily

Democratic counties. Moreover, the party‟s aggregate tally still was down 20,000-25,000 votes from its height before the disastrous factional split. Still, reunion seemed to be a success.

Surveying the state of the party, the newly reorganized Rochester Republican concluded, “the first man in the ranks who begins to talk about Hunkers or Barnburners – conservatives or radical

Democrats – about proslavery men or abolitionist in respect to members of the Democratic Party of this State – let him be shot.”55

Historians have tended to be somewhat perplexed by Barnburners‟ overtures of reunion toward their Hunker rivals mere weeks after the conclusion of the 1848 election. Sean Wilentz has concluded that the consecutive reunions of 1849 and 1850 were half-hearted efforts, driven

53 Rome Sentinel, 12 September 1849. Ferree, The New York Democracy: 261. 54 Rome Sentinel, 2 January 1850. 55 Rochester Republican, 29 November 1849. 211

largely by the desperation occasioned by losing their lucrative patronage while the hated Whigs were in power. Moreover, rather than the honest alliance between equal partners, both sides cynically sought to restore themselves and subjugate their rivals in a reunited party. Essentially, he argued, reunion was necessitated by the fact that “the antislavery forces lacked a plausible alternative” to recover their political viability after 1848.56

The problem with this interpretation is that it fails to acknowledge that, from the very beginning of the Free Soil revolt, both sides consistently debated the terms and means of a potential reunion. Wilentz suggested that the Free Soil revolt was principled and sincere, but that the competitive imperatives of the partisan system necessitated the rebels‟ return to their former parties when it appeared antislavery, at that time, lacked viability. In contrast to Wilentz‟s focus on institutional mechanisms, Joel Silbey offered a cultural determinant to the failure of Free Soil.

He argued that antebellum voters had internalized the values and principles of their party, incorporated their partisan affiliation into their personal identities, and defined their family histories at least in part by a partisan loyalty spanning generations.57 With such deep roots of partisan identification, voters simply were not prepared to transfer their loyalties to an upstart organization. Both interpretations highlight significant contributing factors to the collapse of the

Free Soil Party, but both also are predicated on the assumption that the major parties were more stable and united than they appear to have been. Rather, from the Jacksonian Era into the antebellum period, the Democracy had been defined by its conflicts and hard-fought compromises more than by its consensus.

56 Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: 659. 57 Where Silbey saw a nation of committed, loyal and mobilized voters, Altschuler and Blumin instead saw ambivalent voters, reluctantly dragooned into the service of the party through herculean mobilizing efforts. See Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic. 212

The difficulties of a third-party insurrection and the inability to lure voters to a new standard alone did not doom the Free Soil movement. Instead, what scuttled Free Soil as a partisan exercise was the fact that, from its inception, radicals had conceived of and wielded free soil as a tool to reform the Democratic organization and restore themselves to power within it. At best, they were reluctant third-party revolutionaries, and this fact shaped the character of their reunion. Hunkers were still Hunkers and Barnburners still Barnburners, meaning that the parochial economic vision of Hunkers essentially remained unchallenged and still capable of disrupting the party in the future. Consequently, New York‟s Democratic voters had little reason to believe that their party had resolved its differences or finally settled upon a single, clear platform on which to contest future elections.

Supporting Popular Sovereignty and the Proviso on the Western Reserve

The free soil movement seemed to serve contradictory ends in New York. On the one hand it was a principled third party movement, and on the other it was means of reorganizing the

Democratic Party. If anything, the Democratic press‟ handling of fee soil on the Western Reserve was even less consistent and perhaps even more baffling. Perhaps due to his admiration of Silas

Wright, J. W. Gray vigorously supported the Barnburners in their factional struggle with

Hunkers in New York, despite the fact that his economic outlook aligned much more closely with the latter faction. More inexplicable still was the fact that Gray continued to support Cass and to promote popular sovereignty while also carrying the standard of the antislavery

Barnburners, who regarded both as absolute anathema. The Plain Dealer‟s laborious efforts to reconcile these conflicting political positions also were mirrored in its treatment of commercial issues. The paper continued to solicit capital investment in improvement projects on the Reserve, 213

while simultaneously waging war against the chartered banks that anchored the state‟s existing credit structure. Thus, the mouthpiece of Reserve Democrats offered its readers a morass of seemingly contradictory aims and principles.

Free soil was not the only movement to challenge the major parties on the Reserve in

1848. In February, a “Laboring Men‟s Meeting” in Cleveland urged producers to abandon established parties, which only divided them, and to unite socially and politically against the parasitic non-producers who siphoned off much of the wealth the laboring masses created. The meeting concluded, “the working classes will never be independent so long as any other class exists.”58 Inherent in this statement was the notion that the incipient capitalist economy was hardening class lines and that the laboring classes could best protect, preserve, and promote their interests as a class, rather than through a heterogeneous political party.

The laboring men‟s expression of anti-party sentiment, though apparently widespread, did not seem to trouble Gray. On March 6, the day of Cleveland‟s charter elections, The Plain

Dealer surveyed the factional discontent in the city and sarcastically announced, “Democrats,

Whigs, Liberty men, High School men, Low School men, Working men, Disbanded Firemen,

National Reformers – all have had tickets and done their best to elect them.”59 Indeed, Democrats even might have benefitted from the proliferation of factions in this election, as they captured the mayoralty and the city marshal‟s office after years of Whig dominance.

Undaunted by rampant factionalism and by nascent anti-partyism among small producers, the Plain Dealer saw a mandate for aggressive civic funding for improvements in the

Democratic triumph at the polls. In April 1848, Democratic control of the mayor‟s office

58 Plain Dealer, 25 February 1848. 59 Plain Dealer, 6 March 1848. 214

emboldened the paper to throw its weight behind a popular referendum directing the city to invest additional municipal funds in the Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati Railroad. Comparing the prices of agricultural products in Cleveland and Ravenna (approximately 40 miles to the southeast), the journal noted that Ravenna could undersell Cleveland farmers anywhere from 20 to 200%, depending on the item. With the completion of the railroad, the paper claimed, “prices would be uniform and competition through the county for a hundred miles around would make such products cheap.”60 This would be a boon both for consumers, who could enjoy lower prices, and producers who would be able to reach a larger market.

Yet, to ensure the smooth flow of commerce, the city and the region could not rely on the railroad alone. The Reserve‟s entrepots, particularly Cleveland, would need plank roads into the interior to enable local producers to “compete with more distant producers, who of course, have to patronize the railroads.”61 This introduced some nettling contradictions into the Democratic creed. Despite the paper‟s fulminations against special corporate charters, it applauded the legislature‟s creation of two such charters to build much needed plank roads in the area.

Pragmatism in the service of commerce thus trumped party principle. In this instance, Gray acted more like a booster than the tribune of his party.

To ensure a robust regional trade and not a mere trickle of local goods, Cleveland also had to join Sandusky to the west and pioneer additional steamboat lines connecting to the port of

Buffalo. Without such extensive transport networks, Gray fretted, “we shall be isolated from the traveling world.”62 Thus, the editor, an advisor to the newly elected mayor and member of the

Cuyahoga County Democratic Central Committee, sought to commit his party to an ambitious

60 Plain Dealer, 1 April 1848. On public investment in the railroad, see the Plain Dealer, 28 March 1848. 61 Plain Dealer, 13 March 1848. 62 Plain Dealer, 13 March and 7 April, 1848. 215

public-private partnership in the construction of an extensive and interlocking system of internal improvements that would unleash competition and foster a seemingly limitless commercial expansion in the region.

As individuals, party leaders matched civic and state investment in the region‟s transportation system with private action, as well. Sandusky, Ohio and Erie, Pennsylvania both had multiple steamboat lines running between their cities and Buffalo while Cleveland had only one. Competition from multiple lines serving those cities drove down ticket prices, with the result that passengers in Erie paid 50% less than did Clevelanders for a ticket to Buffalo while passengers in Sandusky only paid 9% more than did Clevelanders, despite being an additional 65 miles from Buffalo. Funded by state banks, these multiple steamboat lines diverted freight and passenger traffic from their “natural” channels to those cities. A group of investors arranged to buy a steamboat then being built in the Cleveland yards and run passengers and freight between the city and Buffalo three times a week. The cost of a ticket was pegged to the prevailing rate in

Erie. Newly inaugurated Mayor Lorenzo Kelsey, the proprietor of Cleveland‟s grand New

England Hotel and also an “experienced commander” according to the Plain Dealer, offered to captain the vessel.63 The lure of profit clearly induced Kelsey and his cronies to invest in the venture. Yet, so too did the opportunity to demonstrate that the Reserve‟s Democrats were as committed as their Whig counterparts to providing the Reserve with cheap and plentiful pleasure and commercial traffic.

Through this example, Kelsey, Gray and their fellow Reserve Democrats sought to demonstrate that chartered banking not only was not necessary to fund commercial development,

63 Plain Dealer, 20 May 1848. Gray‟s hypocritical criticism of Sandusky and Erie‟s steamboat lines implied that what was a virtue for Cleveland (improving its transport connections to far-flung markets) was a vice when practiced by other communities. 216

but that it actually was a hindrance to that development. Banking investment in transportation industries, such as in the Sandusky steamboat trade could increase competition and lower prices, but it also threatened to create artificial markets for transportation services. More often,

Democrats alleged, the prerequisite of bank investments in such projects meant, “wherever we go, and whatever we do, on land or sea, a bank monopoly price we are compelled to pay.”64 In their steamboat venture, Cleveland‟s progressive Democrats strove to demonstrate that the orchestrated combination of individual investments could target and redress under-served markets while restraining price inflation. Yet, it was unrealistic to assume that Clevelanders individually possessed enough capital to fund an entire system of transportation improvements and other entrepreneurial concerns. After all, it took the wealthiest individuals of Cleveland to pioneer this new steamboat line.

Banks actually stifled entrepreneurial activity and innovations, Gray claimed, for they were “the sole and supreme controllers of all commercial traffic, and they can say who shall and who shall not do business in a commercial way, by saying who shall have the „commercial facilities‟ and who shall not.” When a new cross-cut canal opened in the Reserve in 1848,

Cleveland became a depot for pig and bar iron. Gray excitedly proclaimed “with the raw staple in our immediate vicinity, capital alone is required to fully develop this important portion of the wealth of northern Ohio.”65 However, this capital was not immediately forthcoming from the region‟s banks, which instead were heavily invested in railroad and steamboat lines themselves, rather than manufacturing ventures. Instead, he urged individual citizens to pool their investments in furnaces that would convert the pig iron into finished steel to be shipped south

64 Plain Dealer, 11 May 1848. 65 Plain Dealer, 10 August 1849; 19 April 1848. Gray‟s older brother, Admiral Nelson Gray, needed no such prodding. He founded an iron foundry on rose to prominence in Cleveland, periodically serving as the city‟s inspector of flour and produce, as well as a city councilor. See Shaw, The Plain Dealer: 41. 217

and east along the canals, plank roads, and railroads to the markets of New Orleans,

Philadelphia, and New York. The editor suggested that banks‟ sinister desire to control and manipulate steamboat and railroad shipping rates had blinded them to a broader range of nascent, investment opportunities that could enrich both them and the region.

Gray‟s radical hostility to banks was only augmented by a string of bank failures in the state. He intimated that the failure of the Wooster Bank in March of 1848 proved the imbecility of special charters. The bank had been in full compliance with state law and its charter provisions, but that had not prevented it from overextending its credit until it collapsed. In order to encourage prudent management and attract capital into the marketplace, the editor argued, bank notes must be divorced from the “faith and credit which legislative enactments stamp upon it” and be regulated solely by the free market itself. The editor envisioned robust competition as a sufficient check on maladministration of banks. Deprived of both a monopoly and the special faith of the legislature, individual banks would have to earn the faith of their customers through transparent business practices. Instead, the collapse of the Wooster Bank produced a domino effect of collapsing banks, while upsetting the money market in Ohio. This was exacerbated by a subsequent run on some surviving banks. For instance, Columbus‟ Clinton Bank saw its notes depreciate between 10%-50% in trading due to rumors of imminent failure.66

The rabid opponent of monopoly drew a connection between the state‟s tottering banking industry and the creaking monarchies of Europe then being threatened by democratic uprisings across the continent. Ohioans, Gray concluded, needed a revolution of their own to overthrow the state‟s special charters and allow commerce to be conducted on the maxim of “equal rights.”

Historians frequently have alluded to the political and ideological kinship that free soilers felt

66 Plain Dealer, 14 April 1848; 9 and 11 May 1848. 218

with the young revolutionaries across the Atlantic. However, Free Soil was not the only connection Americans made with these revolutions. Unlike Isaac Butts in Rochester, progressive

Democrats like Gray fervently believed that while the Slave Power still was relatively contained

(despite its gradual western expansion), the Money Power remained a ubiquitous check on equal rights. Reforming the economy, these Democrats argued, was a more immediate concern than setting limits on the growth of the peculiar institution.

Yet, while Gray‟s political persuasion influenced him to see systemic, institutional inequality in the economy, his boosterish outlook simultaneously militated against this view. At times Gray seemed to contradict himself. Banks, he consistently harangued his readers, held an unfair advantage in the marketplace over individual citizens, and state laws placed obstacles in the path of individuals who might want to combine their resources and capital to pursue commercial ventures. The editor lamented this injustice, but then also extolled the virtues of poverty, the poverty that presumably resulted from the inequalities created by the Money Power.

Ironically, he argued that wealth was enervating, while poverty was stimulating. The result was that, “in our country, poor families are constantly rising, and rich families constantly sinking.

The ranks of wealth rise and foam like the waves of mid ocean, and like them, break and die away on the shore.”67 This sunny and evocative description of unfettered upward mobility was utterly at odds with Democrats‟ fears of a vast Money Power. Gray likely was sincere in his distrust of the Money Power, but giving too much credence to its existence flouted the very spirit of boosterism. Moreover, the editor was a salesman, selling his readers on the reality of the go- ahead age and seemingly placing the keys to upward mobility within their grasp.

67 Plain Dealer, 16 August 1850. 219

The invocation of the Money Power typically has been interpreted as a ploy to undermine the growing opposition to slavery and avoid the divisive debate over the institution‟s place in an expanding nation. At best it was an illustration of racist self-interest in the welfare of whites.

However, these opponents of monopoly power in the marketplace sincerely believed that economic inequality was perhaps the most widespread and intractable problem plaguing society; a problem that affected white and black alike. True to their commitment to full, equal, democratic rights, Joseph Gray and his Democratic cronies on the Reserve continued to labor, albeit unsuccessfully, for the repeal of the Black Laws in addition to the reformation of the state‟s regulation of the economy.68

Much as he did in his call for an economic revolution at home, Gray similarly equated slaves‟ struggle for freedom with the noble, democratic revolutions in Europe and their revolutionary antecedents in this country. In April 1848, the Plain Dealer‟s Washington correspondent (possibly his younger brother, Nicholas) related the remarkable story of 77 slaves who commandeered the schooner Pearl on the Potomac River in a valiant but vain attempt to sail to freedom. The correspondent surmised, “the negroes, catching the aspirations for universal liberty from their patriotic masters, presumed to follow the example of the French people.”69

With this comment, he subtly exposed the hypocrisy of slave owners‟ solemn invocations of liberty, while also acknowledging that the slaves were not oblivious to concepts of human rights and universal liberty.

68 During the 1850-51 state convention to draft a new constitution, Whig moral reformers, particularly Quakers, led a failed effort to extend the elective franchise to African-Americans and women. J. V. Smith, Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Ohio, 1850-51 (Columbus: Samuel Medary, 1851): 106, 107, 692. 69 Plain Dealer, 24 April 1848. 220

Yet, this commitment to equal rights existed alongside a crude, sometimes vicious, racism. Indeed, political equality was distinctly different from social equality. Merely two days after recounting the slaves‟ “great naval feat,” the paper included a sardonic observation on “our colored brederen.” The article responded to popular objections to allowing black citizens to take part in a torchlight procession in Cleveland, scheduled for the end of April to honor the European revolutions. Gray favored allowing African-Americans to march in this celebration of democracy. However, he reiterated,

We never was so much of an Abolitionist as to think that everybody ought at once to acknowledge that black is white or white is black…The Negro race is a degraded one, not by their faults, but the faults of others. They are now commanding the sympathies of the civilized world and are fast being regenerated, but everything cannot be done at once.

Still, the editor objected to the complaints of the city‟s “adopted citizens” who most strenuously objected to African-Americans‟ participation in the procession. He superciliously suggested that the disgruntled foreign-born Americans who sponsored the proposed fete were not qualified to determine who could rightly participate in a patriotic expression of support for democracy abroad. In a sarcastic and demeaning conclusion, the editor suggested that if the night of the parade were sufficiently dark, “let the procession dispense with torches, and then all can be darkies together; or, if they carry lights, let the darkies each carry two, which just make them as light as a white man.”70

Sounding more like a nativist than a Democrat, the editor seemed to dispatch both blacks and immigrants to the same rungs of society, distinctly below the white and native-born.

Moreover, with his facetious and racist comment about the torches, Gray mockingly suggested that abolitionists were just as willing to bring down white society as they were to „level up‟ black society. However, he also staunchly believed that he performed his democratic duty simply by

70 Plain Dealer, 26 April 1848. 221

maintaining the right of both groups, and of all citizens generally, to participate in a communal expression of democratic fealty and solidarity.

Jean Harvey Baker has described northern Democrats as nurturing an “intense racism,” reinforced by a belief that African-Americans were inherently and immutably inferior to white

Americans and by a conservative, Burkean commitment to the traditions of their society.71 For their entire lives, their society had promoted white supremacy and, often, the social segregation of whites and blacks. However, this did not seem to capture Gray‟s attitude fully or accurately.

The editor certainly was racist, and he clearly was skeptical that African-Americans and whites could live soon in social harmony and equality. However, he steadfastly believed that both

African-Americans and whites shared the right to celebrate the core democratic tenets and principles that animated the republic. The parade served as a practical communion in the democratic faith that united all, in Gray‟s opinion.

One might expect the editor‟s acceptance of a multi-racial polity and his adherence to the radical principles of Silas Wright, to influence him to join the Free Soil movement launched by

Wright‟s loyal followers in New York. Though his political persuasion pushed him in that direction, he and his Reserve colleagues ultimately could not consummate that union, for a variety of reasons. First, Ohio Democrats continued to see a Cass presidency as the most likely means to bring the West to prominence and power within the nation. When the Democratic national convention nominated Cass for president, the Plain Dealer exulted, “farewell to the East and the South; the days of your political supremacy are over! The great Valley of the West has at last assumed her rightful position; a position to which her vast population, wealth, extent of

71 Baker, Affairs of Party: 177-178. Baker did not assume that not all Democrats shared these attitudes. Rather she explained, “not all northern Democrats blended the elements of republicanism, racism, and conservatism in the same measure and this fact accounts for the variations in party opinion.” Baker, Affairs of Party: 178. 222

country, agricultural and commercial resources justly entitle her.” Moreover, when Cleveland became a new port of entry for foreign goods in the summer of 1849, Gray concluded that it would furnish “to the Western trade no necessity of looking farther east for the most ample supplies.”72 To Ohio Democrats then, the nomination of Cass augured the transfer of political power from the older East to the burgeoning West, whose growth in population and wealth was fueled by the magnificent resources and transportation routes offered by the vast Mississippi

Valley and Great Lakes waterways.

Yet, the Plain Dealer‟s embrace of the Cass campaign and its support for his vague concept of popular sovereignty did not mean that it rejected the principle of free soil itself. In perhaps one of the most incongruous marriages of rival political principles, the paper attempted to reconcile its support of Cass with its free soil predilections. Indeed, the paper probably was the only one in the North to emblazon “Free Trade, Free Labor, and Free Soil! Forever! Hurrah for

Gen. Cass!!!” on its masthead.73 The incongruous linkage of Cass with the very movement that emerged directly in opposition to him was dizzying and perplexing.

The two could not be reconciled long. Gray dismissed concern over the bolt of the Van

Burenites at the Baltimore convention. His paper consistently argued that those Barnburners represented the true will of the New York Democracy and that they had not abandoned “a single, essential democratic principle” in rejecting the decision of the convention. However, Gray‟s commitment to the advancement of western interests proved stronger than his affinity for Free

Soil. When Barnburners joined with Whigs to launch the Free Soil party, the editor lamented their secession. From his perspective, this was a base, selfish repudiation of majority rule. Gray

72 Plain Dealer, 29 May 1848; 18 July 1849. 73 Plain Dealer, 24 May 1848. 223

wondered, “shall all the states in the Union yield to one? Or, rather to the part of one; for it is only a fraction of the democracy there opposed” to Cass‟ nomination.74 He was understandably unwilling to countenance the intransigence of a single state to the ascendance of western interests in the party and the nation in the person of Cass. If the Free Soil campaign cost Cass the presidency it would not simply obstruct Democrats‟ quest for power, but it would continue the galling political supremacy of the East, potentially denying loyal, western partisans like himself the opportunity for power, place, prestige and perhaps pecuniary remuneration through the patronage of a grateful Cass administration.

When Cuyahoga County Free Soilers nominated candidates for local and state races in

1849, they also crafted a platform dominated by resolutions deprecating the existence of slavery and resolutely defending the right of Congress to prohibit slavery from the western territories.

The Plain Dealer acknowledged the moral principle behind the platform, but questioned its pragmatism in relation to local and state races. In his summation, Gray noted, “the farmers, every branch of trade, merchants, mechanics, and all business men are groaning under the oppressions of the worst moneyed monopoly which ever cursed this or any other state…Yet, the word „Bank‟ is not found in their long string of most wordy resolutions.”75 To Gray, this myopia could only be explained by one fact: these Free Soilers really were Whigs in pedigree and persuasion. Though sensitive to the injustice of slavery, they remained oblivious to other forms of oppression, economic inequality chief among them.

This did not mean that Democrats ignored the topic of slavery in the territories, but they framed their opposition to its growth in distinctly different terms than did Free Soilers when they

74 Plain Dealer, 24 May 1848; 23 June 1848. See also 2 and 27 June, 1848. 75 Plain Dealer, 20 August 1849. 224

met in their state convention in 1848 and 1850. Under the new convention rules that eliminated at-large delegates, heretofore under-represented counties like Cuyahoga wielded new influence.

In the 1850 convention, Judge Reuben Wood, a Cleveland resident, former state senator and a state Supreme Court justice for fifteen years won the gubernatorial nomination. Furthermore,

Gray represented the county on the committee on resolutions at the 1848 convention and was instrumental in explaining the party‟s stance on slavery. While the state‟s Free Soil Whigs endorsed the principles of the Wilmot Proviso that year, Ohio Democrats resolved that the several states had the right to manage their domestic institutions as they saw fit. However, they also resolved that slavery was an evil; they reiterated their right to say so; and they pledged to exercise their right to prevent its extension and eventually “eradicate” it by any constitutional means. Gray relished pointing out that this resolution, in pledging Ohio Democrats to work for the extinction of slavery, went further than the much-lauded Wilmot Proviso.76

Historians generally have blamed the ambiguity of the concept of popular sovereignty for intensifying, rather than dampening, the vitriolic debate over slavery, as numerous constituencies offered competing definitions and jockeyed to invest the concept with a unitary, “correct” meaning. However, the subtle hint of abolitionism, similarly wrapped in ambiguity, in the

Democrats‟ platform did not seem to harm the party significantly in the 1850 state elections.

Their focus on the reform of a banking system beset with liquidity problems (significantly, the first six resolutions adopted at the Democrats‟ state convention in 1850 all criticized and

76 Plain Dealer, 12, 15 and 17 January 1850. Free Soilers argued that Gray and his cronies ruthlessly suppressed radical Democrats‟ efforts to force the party to specify how and by what right Democrats could prevent slavery‟s expansion and eventually obliterate it. See Cleveland True Democrat, 14 January 1850. Indeed, Ohio Democrats sought to retain the principle of antislavery while maintaining an all-important and strategic ambiguity regarding how to fight the institution. 225

proposed the reformation of the state‟s banks) addressed an immediate problem affecting all

Ohioans.

After having lost three successive gubernatorial campaigns in excruciatingly close contests (the largest margin of victory in those races was 2,303 votes out of over 235,400 cast)

Democrats finally won the top office in the state in 1850 behind Wood‟s candidacy, as he defeated his Whig opponent by a comfortable plurality. While Free Soilers nearly doubled their seats in the legislature, increasing from six to 11 seats, Democrats ran even with their Whig rivals. Both major parties claimed 32 seats in the state House, while Free Soilers claimed eight.

Whigs outnumbered Democrats in the state Senate by only one seat, 17 to 16, with Free Soilers capturing the remaining three. Obviously, this gave the Free Soilers the coveted balance of power in the legislature between the two more established parties, but a sanguine Gray did not feel that this presaged the triumph of free soil over other pressing political issues, nor the demise of either of the two major, long-lived parties.

The Plain Dealer saw antislavery as only one aspect of a larger campaign against oppressive institutions. Gray identified three aristocracies in the United States that threatened to undermine equal rights and equal opportunity. The Bank aristocracy was „in favor of locking up in corporations powers and privileges denied to the masses. The Cotton Aristocracy (or northern textile mill owners) contended for “high tariffs and protective laws favoring their own monopolies and manufactures at the expense of small capital and the labor of the working classes.” Finally, the Slave Aristocracy robbed “a certain class of men of their rights.” “They all

226

seek self-aggrandizement and to monopolize the good things of this world at the expense of the toiling masses.”77 The Democracy had to be vigilant against all such combinations of power.

As long as Western Reserve Free Soilers remained under the leadership of Whigs with conservative economic principles, Ohioans would never succeed in liberalizing their laws of incorporation and unleashing their productive potential through increased commercial opportunity. Gray suggested that only by battling all of the aristocracies that restrained such mass competition in the marketplace, under the aegis of the trusted Democratic Party, would class and racial oppression both cease. Yet, while the editor pledged to his readers that he and the

Democracy were committed to fighting all power combinations that threatened to circumscribe equal rights and deny equal opportunity, he was utterly inconsistent in abiding by that pledge.

After all, his repeated criticism of specially chartered corporations rang hollow when he celebrated the chartering of those businesses that promised to aid development of Cleveland‟s transport networks.

Conclusion

The third party Free Soil movement represented a dramatic and unprecedented politicization of antislavery. The party polled far more votes than the previous efforts of the abolitionist Liberty Party. However, despite the seeming success of this insurgency on the national level, a variety of factors prevented it from transforming itself from a temporary protest into a long-lived and truly revolutionary political party. Most historians, even when acknowledging the Free Soil party‟s heavy preponderance in New York, have tended to survey the phenomenon from a broad, national perspective, characterizing it as an expression of a

77 Plain Dealer, 25 July 1849. 227

growing antislavery sentiment throughout the North. However, at the state and local level, the

Free Soil uprising looked markedly different than it did at the national level. In Maine, the movement had to compete with temperance to encourage new voters to participate in the canvass and to attract older voters dissatisfied with their own parties. New York Barnburners proved ambivalent Free Soilers at best, continuing to negotiate their “return” to power in a party they believed they never really had left, after all. On the Western Reserve, the close association of

Free Soil with old Whiggery meant it was never a viable option for Democrats of antislavery leanings there. Furthermore, those Democrats who did not join Free Soil did not simply stand pat. They tended to promote political reforms and improvements-based economic platforms that would appeal to those who embraced the go-ahead age. Boosterish editors proved instrumental in crafting this alternative to Free Soil, though it had to have caused some to wonder whether they felt greater loyalty to these economic programs or the party itself.

Those Democrats who resisted the charms of Free Soil also did not seem to exhibit a craven “doughface” willingness to accept proslavery domination of the party in return for meager crumbs of patronage. Nor did they demonstrate a blind and unthinking loyalty to the traditions of the party exhibit Instead, prosaic concerns of winning and maintaining office and securing positions of power within the party itself at the local and state level seemed to trump these issues in influencing Democrats‟ rejection of Free Soil. In most cases, that rejection typically did not represent a concomitant abnegation of the principles of equal rights and equal opportunity. Ultimately, though, the majority of Democrats in these regions could not disentangle themselves from their loyalty to party and their commitments to promoting the commercial advancement of their communities to serve the antislavery Free Soil cause.

228

However, we also would be wrong to view the rejection of Free Soil as a sign of strengthening unity among Democrats. Rather, especially in the case of New York, this typically was little more than electoral pragmatism. When the Rochester Republican and Rome Sentinel changed with the political weathervane, they amply demonstrated how party organs simply lacked consistent, bedrock, partisan principles. While these vacillating newspapers took inconsistent and divergent positions on major issues, they nevertheless displayed an ability to unite for the purposes of contesting elections against their Whig rivals. However, coming together on policy was a different matter altogether, and one wonders how united the Democrats would be without the external pressure supplied by Whigs. Indeed, the political inconsistencies of the Democratic press revealed that the one constant that defined their reporting was their devotion to the needs of their community, not obedience to the dictates of party leadership, either at the state or national level. Ironically, their independent and inconsistent course both encouraged factional revolts, such as free soilism, and ultimately frustrated those efforts, as well.

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Chapter 5: Compromise and Collapse

Entering 1850, Democratic editors in the North had reason to feel optimistic. Their party had withstood a concerted free soil uprising, and their defeat at the hands of the Whigs in 1848 had had the salutary effect of encouraging the squabbling factions within its ranks to pursue reconciliation. The idiosyncratic Democratic press welcomed the repairing of these divisions.

The uncompromising independence of these editors and their willingness to reinterpret party principles and exploit factionalism for their own ends had encouraged voters to demand that their party be flexible and responsive to their own needs. These voters prodded their party to take bold, new ground on a host of issues, such as antislavery, temperance, and nativism. However, fearful of the disruptive potential of these demands, most Democratic journals suddenly grew cautious and retreated to the conservative Democratic principles that had first defined their attachment to party.

The Compromise of 1850

In this milieu, Democratic editors in the North confronted one last step in the attempted settlement of the nettlesome political issues that arose out of the Mexican War. The massive land cession from Mexico had to be divided into discrete territories and established with territorial governments. With the failure of the Wilmot Proviso to become law, Congress also needed to legislate on the legality of slavery in these new territories. Lastly, the population of California had exploded as a result of the discovery of rich veins of gold and silver there, and its leaders had drafted a constitution in November 1849 in preparation to apply for statehood.

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The grand effort to settle these issues, once and for all, culminated in the series of legislation collectively known as the Compromise of 1850. In late January, the venerable Whig

Henry Clay, who had recently returned to Congress, introduced a single bill to dispose of all of the vexing controversies that had grown out of the Mexican War. It tackled practical concerns of governance, such as determining the border between Texas and the New Mexico Territory, providing for the federal government‟s assumption of Texas securities debt, admitting California to the union as a free state, and establishing territorial governments for New Mexico and Utah on the basis of popular sovereignty. To bring the divisive national debate over slavery to an end, the bill proposed to abolish the slave trade in Washington, D.C., a sop to political antislavery activists who long had insisted that slavery could not exist constitutionally in federal jurisdictions. The bill paired that measure with a more stringent fugitive slave measure, to reassure slave owners that the federal government would use its powers to sustain the institution in the slaveholding states. This provision prevented alleged fugitive slaves in the North from availing themselves of jury trials to contest their recapture, and instead installed federal commissioners to determine the status of individuals claimed as escaped slaves. It further required ordinary citizens to participate in efforts to apprehend fugitives at the request of federal marshals or else risk a $1,000 fine and potential prison time.1

1 The border dispute between Texas and New Mexico nearly led to a Texan invasion of the territory. The problem of Texas‟ debt had arisen when Texas joined the union, relinquishing its right to collect custom duties, which it had employed to pay its bond securities. Debate ensued over whether Washington should offer face value for the Texas bonds, since the vast majority of them had been sold and subsequently traded at well below par. For a detailed explanation of the machinations behind the assumption of the Texas debt, see Holman Hamilton‟s Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1964): 123- 133. For the specific provisions and powers contained in the compromise laws, see Robert Russel, “What Was the Compromise of 1850?” Journal of Southern History, vol. 22, no 3 (August 1956): 292-308. Russel noted that the acts incorporating territorial governments for New Mexico and Utah gave their territorial legislatures power over “all rightful subjects of legislation,” including slavery (296). However, territorial governors retained veto power over any legislation and Congress also retained the power to nullify any seemingly unrepublican laws. 231

Clay‟s complex bill lacked the support of President Zachary Taylor, who believed that all of its measures should be considered individually with all due deliberation. The combination of

Taylor‟s hostility and the fact that all congressmen objected to some parts of the bill led to its defeat in June, 1850. Scant days later, President Taylor died on July 9 of acute gastroenteritis, possibly as a result of cholera.2 Vice President Millard Fillmore, who had been solicitous of

Clay‟s compromise bill, now was elevated to the presidency. Sensing new opportunity,

Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas worked with his fellow Illinois ally in the House, William

Richardson to chop Clay‟s failed package into five bills and shepherd them through the Congress piecemeal. By pairing off votes, or voting in favor of the bills they supported while abstaining from votes on bills they opposed, the various feuding factions in Congress passed the legislation between 9 and 20 September, 1850, and Fillmore dutifully signed them into law.

A prominent theme in the historical accounts of the political effects of the compromise has been the notion that it staved off disunion and possible war for a decade, allowing the free states a period of population growth and economic development that, many historians claimed, was crucial in the Union‟s victory in the subsequent Civil War. This perspective on the compromise puts the cart before the horse, practically implying that the purpose of the legislation was merely buy time for the North to prepare for a violent showdown over the role of slavery in the growing nation. David Potter expressed this teleology when he referred to the Compromise as “the armistice of 1850.” Similarly, John C. Waugh characterized the Compromise of 1850 as the second of the antebellum era‟s truces, after the Compromise of 1820. Yoking the two

2 On Taylor‟s death, see K. Jack Bauer, Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1985): 314-316. The sudden onset of illness and rapid descent into death convinced some contemporaries that the president had been poisoned. Several shared this theory with Taylor‟s vice president, Millard Fillmore, after the latter was elevated to the presidency. See Elbert B. Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1988): 195-196. 232

measures together, he suggested an inevitable pattern of political truces followed by renewed and

“fiercer conflict” ultimately culminating in a “death-dealing civil war.” Recently, Robert Remini has taken this view to an extreme length, concluding that the Compromise “delayed the catastrophe of civil war for ten years, and those ten years were absolutely essential for preserving the American nation under the Constitution.”3

However, the threat of disunion and war in 1850 seems to have been remote at best.

While Clay‟s measures were under consideration in the Congress, a convention of southern states met in Nashville from 3 to 11 June, to consider how the slave states should respond to perceived abolitionist assaults on their slaveholding rights. While the Nashville Convention openly debated the advisability of southern secession, it revealed a deeply divided South. Only nine slaveholding states sent delegates, and moderates prevailed over secessionists. The convention meekly passed resolutions disapproving of Clay‟s bill and affirming the right of secession if the slaveholding states felt that the basic (property) rights of their citizens were in jeopardy.4

Historians long have debated whether the threat of secession at this time was real. In his dense History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, published in 1896, James Ford

3 Potter, The Impending Crisis: 90; John C. Waugh, On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How It Changed the Course of American History (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 2003): 190; Robert Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise that Saved the Union (New York: Basic Books, 2010): 157. Remini echoed long outdated post-World War II scholarship that drew lessons from the result of that war to claim that the North triumphed in the Civil War due to its superior industrial might. However, Richard Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones and William Still, Jr. long ago showed that a disparity in industrial might had little to do with Union victory on the battlefield. See Beringer, et. al., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1986). Remini also claimed that the South “unquestionably would have made good its independence” if it had seceded in 1850, though he does not explain what advantages it would have possessed at that time to make this an unquestioned fact (quotation from page 157). 4 A detailed account of the convention, its participants, and the communities from which they hailed can be found in Thelma Jennings, The Nashville Convention: Southern Movement for Unity, 1848-1851 (Memphis, Tennessee: Memphis State University Press, 1980). Fifty-seven per cent of the delegates were from Tennessee alone, and the populous states of Louisiana, North Carolina, Kentucky and Maryland sent no official delegates (nor did the smaller slave states of Missouri and Delaware). Though the convention went out with a whimper, Jennings insisted unconvincingly that it had a profound and lasting effect on the national debate over slavery and southern sentiments toward secession. 233

Rhodes airily dismissed the threat. Instead, he argued that the real threat of national dissolution would have emerged only if Congress had deadlocked and proved unable to establish governments for the new territories. Nearly 70 years after the publication of Rhodes‟ acclaimed volume, Holman Hamilton similarly concluded that any threat of disunion was exaggerated. In his cynical view, the Compromise had less to do with adjusting sectional disputes than dispensing pork and political horse-trading among selfish, myopic congressmen. Both men believed that abolitionist demands to keep slavery out of the territories and southern threats of disunion were little more than bluster, and both concluded that the Compromise was a fair, moderate settlement for all sides.5

Subsequent historians have disagreed with these benign assessments. Pointing to a growing undercurrent of radicalism in the South, Potter believed that threats of disunion uttered at Nashville were credible. Sean Wilentz bluntly stated, “the crisis of 1850 was real. Southern secessionist fervor had overtaken even mainstream politicians like Robert Toombs,” a respected unionist who viewed the Compromise of 1850 as the South‟s final concession to antislavery northerners.6 With the sectional divisions occasioned by the territorial cession from Mexico and the threats of disunion defiantly uttered at both sessions of the Nashville Convention, it is natural to focus on the Compromise of 1850 as a measure designed to preserve the Union and restore sectional harmony. However, this ignores another driving force behind support for the measure, especially among Democrats in the North: to deal a death blow to the Free Soil movement,

5 James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, vol. I (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1896): 131-136; quotation from 189. Rhodes ignored the fact that numerous northern congressmen who had supported the measure were voted out of office in the subsequent election cycle, a sure sign of northern discontent with at least portions of the Compromise. However, he did acknowledge that the Whig Party tended to crumble in the North in the wake of the passage of these acts. Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: 163-165. Hamilton‟s is one of the signal works in the school of “the blundering generation,” which argue that a generation of ill-prepared, selfish, and often fanatical politicians doomed the nation to Civil War through their own inept handling of explosive political issues, namely slavery. 6 Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: 644. 234

reclaim the loyalties of antislavery voters and strengthen the party for further contests with their

Whig rivals. The intent of the Compromise was to allay raw sectional tensions, but its supporters in the North also tended to see it as a means to allay raw factional tensions within their own party. This crucial aspect of the Compromise gives the lie to the teleological view that the measures were designed solely as a patchwork truce between an increasingly estranged North and South.

Despite their efforts to restore order in their respective parties, it appeared that northern

Whigs and Democrats were to be disappointed. David Potter noted that Compromise supporters did not cease their labors with its passage. Rather, they strove to incorporate it into the creeds of the major parties as a “final” settlement of the conflicts arising out of expansion and slavery‟s place in the larger nation. Ironically, Michael Holt pointed out, “it was only after the territorial problem was apparently solved by the passage of the Compromise of 1850 and pressure was exerted to gain adherence to it that the slavery issue proved most dangerous to the Second

American Party System.” Likewise, William Gienapp further argued that the Compromise and subsequent finality measures actually inflamed, rather than dampened, factionalism in the

Democratic Party. Unable to unite all Democrats behind a forthright declaration of finality, the party merely pledged to abide by all the measures, which satisfied neither Compromise opponents nor its supporters in the organization.7

The most salient effect of the Compromise thus was not its temporary alleviation of sectional conflict, but its acceleration of party fragmentation and dissolution. However, the

North‟s Democratic editors seemed slow to apprehend that legacy. Even those, such as Joseph

7 Michael Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1978): 68 (quotation), 98. William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987): 14-16. 235

Gray, who anticipated a reorganization of parties over the issue of slavery‟s expansion, seemed to believe that the Compromise largely had settled that vexing problem within the party. Other northern editors simply believed, much like former President Taylor, that the Compromise had been a solution in search of a problem unnecessary and that it did not address the pressing political issues of their community.

This is a crucial distinction in northern editorial reaction to the Compromise Acts. Many newspapers, recognizing latent hostility to its more controversial features, said little about the legislation during its tortuous journey through Congress. They tended to say even less about the operation of these laws once they had gone into effect. David Potter has noted that as soon as the

Compromise measures had become law, elements in both major parties began to invoke it as a final settlement of the questions of slavery‟s expansion and self-government in the territories.

Some Democratic papers embraced “finality,” for it would force antislavery partisans within the party either to accept this settlement or continue their insurgency through a new organization.

Even those Democratic papers who had opposed the Compromise did not necessarily oppose this

“finality” campaign with vigor. Reflecting the deep ambivalence toward the Compromise in both parties, both major party conventions in 1852 merely resolved to continue to abide by them as they would abide all national laws.

Temperance Splits the Maine Democracy

Both Democrats and Whigs in Maine had withstood the free soil movement and retained most of their loyal voters, but the increasing politicization of the temperance movement presented them with another, fresh challenge to their authority. Moreover, the successful presidential campaign of Zachary Taylor, who had portrayed himself as a nominal Whig who 236

would govern independent of party, further portended the potential end of the existing partisan system.8 Despite their stubborn independence, Democratic editors like Holden responded to these threats by clinging more tightly to the existing party system that had supplied them with patronage and a loyal core of readers. Holden barely acknowledged the Compromise and dismissed rumors of disunion. He asserted that for the slaveholding South, “the Union is its salvation. Let it sever that bond and it commits suicide.”9 Thus, the Compromise measures were not the most serious political issue of the day.

To vindicate the existing political system, Democrats had to show that Whig rule, not slavery‟s expansion, posed the greater danger to the country. To that end, the commercially- minded Holden seized on allegations of gross malfeasance in Taylor‟s Treasury Department to argue that continued Whig rule would bankrupt the nation, while enriching corrupt Whig leaders.

In 1849, Secretary of the Treasury William Meredith ordered the department‟s revenue cutters

(ships which operated out of the port cities along the eastern seaboard) to remain in port during the winter of 1849-50 and proposed the elimination of federal warehouses in order to comply with a leaner budget. A disbelieving Holden argued that Meredith‟s plan proposed to solve short- term fiscal problems by sacrificing rising imports and duties in the long-term. Revenue cutters, though expensive, paid for the costs of their operation within a scant three to nine months, depending on the volume of trade in the individual ports. Moreover, abolishing the warehousing system would create a bottleneck for imports and threaten the livelihoods of all but the wealthiest

8 When Taylor initially passed over many leading Whigs for patronage positions during his first days in office, Holden nervously noted that his administration truly did appear to be more independent than Whig. Eastern Argus, 10 March 1849. 9 Portland Eastern Argus, 10 March 1849. Less than a year later, Holden explained that secession would only make it more difficult to recover fugitives and would derange the national commerce. See Eastern Argus, 6 February 1850. 237

merchants. In short, Meredith‟s plan threatened to reverse the expansion of commercial opportunities begun under the Polk Administration.10

However, this paled in comparison to what seemed to be outright fraud emanating from

Taylor‟s cabinet. In 1850, Taylor‟s Treasury Department paid a long-delayed claim for damages, the so-called Galphin Claim, which pre-dated the Revolutionary War. The claim had sought restitution for the colonial government‟s breach of George Galphin‟s exclusive contract to trade with Geogia‟s Creek Indians. Adding in the costs of inflation and 75 years of back interest,

Meredith paid over $230,000 to settle the claim. This in itself was not controversial. However,

Secretary of War George Crawford, who had served as the Galphin family‟s claim agent prior to joining Taylor‟s cabinet, received 50% of the award, over $100,000 for his services. In their respective papers, Holden and the Griffin brothers excoriated the Taylor Administration over this conflict of interest and the extravagance of paying $100,000 of the Treasury‟s funds to a sitting cabinet member during a period of supposed budgetary constraints for the department.11

Not surprisingly, “Galphinism” became a Democratic shibboleth heading into the 1850 elections. It most clearly connoted the plundering of the public treasury, but Democrats like

Holden also tried to expand its meaning to become an epithet for what he believed were Whigs‟ anachronistic and myopic financial vision. Michael Holt has argued that in the wake of the

Compromise of 1850 Democrats vainly tried to resurrect voters‟ interests in the same battles over the bank and tariff that had characterized their competition with the Whigs for over a decade.

10 Revenue cutters met merchant ships as they approached American ports and collected duties on their cargo before it was unloaded at port. Meredith needed to cut costs to comply with a budget that had been shrunk by the previous Congress. On Holden‟s opposition to Meredith‟s plan, see Eastern Argus, 16, 17, and 23 January 1850; Republican Journal, 25 January 1850. 11 Galphin‟s charter had been granted by the British crown. With the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War, his claim became the responsibility of the United States government. On the Galphin claim, see the Republican Journal, 12 April 1850; The National Era, 29 August 1850. Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the National Era, claimed that many of those Democrats who railed against the Galphin claim also pressured the government to pay the Texas securities claims (many of which were held by influential southern Democrats). 238

However, this was not entirely accurate. Rather, Democrats like Holden tried to reassure the reading and voting public that only Democrats offered the dynamic economic vision necessary to sustain the go-ahead age. A return to Whig policies, as the actions of Meredith‟s Treasury

Department suggested, would only lead to commercial retrenchment, deepening class divisions, and the impoverishment of the nation.

Absorbed by the Taylor Administration‟s alleged fiscal short-sightedness and blatant malfeasance, these Democratic editors wasted very little ink on the tortuous odyssey of Clay‟s bill in 1850. Their reactions to the eventual passage of all of the Compromise measures in

September were similarly muted. The Eastern Argus quietly applauded the triumph of Congress‟

“moderate counsels” in passing the numerous Compromise bills. The Republican Journal, an opponent of Clay‟s initial compromise measure and a formerly staunch foe of popular sovereignty and the extension of slavery, merely described the features of the Compromise Acts under a headline conclusively titled, “Settlement of the Slavery Questions.”12 Viewing the

Compromise as a political distraction, an issue of secondary importance, both papers were simply relieved that its passage finally ended a months-long congressional impasse.

Holden believed that the conclusion of the Compromise saga finally stabilized the current partisan system. In an article titled “Two Parties,” the editor argued that the Compromise had removed the need for continued free soil agitation, and he confidently predicted that that party‟s

“dissolution therefore may be regarded as certain.”13 Though the editors of the Republican

Journal shared Holden‟s yearning for a return to the predictable “two party” system, they did not share his optimism. Once a ferocious critic of Clay‟s bill and a seemingly implacable foe of

12 Eastern Argus, 12 September 1850; Republican Journal, 13 September 1850. 13 Eastern Argus, 7 October 1850. 239

slavery‟s expansion, they quickly abandoned those positions with the passage of the measures.

Rather than join their antislavery readers in protesting the Fugitive Slave Law‟s infringement on individual liberty, the paper concluded, “we do not believe one freeman has been sent into slavery under” that law. Stung by charges of hypocrisy from other radical, antislavery papers, the

Journal acknowledged, “suppositions have been raised” in the Democratic press “as to what is democracy and what is not, under certain conditions of things, and whether this or that paper is not breaking over the boundaries of the party.”14 For its part, the Republican Journal despaired of opposing the galling Fugitive Slave Law, for it feared it would only further fracture the

Democratic Party.

The Griffins brothers, editors of the Republican Journal, alluded to an interesting aspect of this factional conflict. It was not necessarily the leaders of Maine‟s Democratic Party who were accusing party members of being un-Democratic. Rather, it was various party newspapers, acting of their own volition and fighting over the boundaries of the party, or what it entailed to be a true Democrat. Democratic editors, pursuing their independent courses, simply were unwilling or unable to agree what the party‟s position on the extension of slavery should be.

Anti-slavery did not retain salience in Maine on its own merits, however, for the

Compromise at least had weakened the immediacy of antislavery as a political issue. Prescient free soilers therefore saw that their best opportunity to keep their cause alive was to ally with the growing political temperance movement in the state. Within the Democratic Party, Governor

John Hubbard was the leader of the temperance advocates. He demonstrated both his commitment to the cause and his conditional embodiment of the office of governor when he presided over a state-wide temperance meeting in the capital of Augusta during his third (and

14 Republican Journal, 23 May 1851. 240

subsequently final) term as governor. The expressed purpose of the convention was to rally against a faction of Democrats who proposed the repeal or amelioration of the state‟s eponymous total prohibition law, or Maine Law. Opponents of the Maine Law within the Democratic Party were outraged that a Democratic governor would participate in a convention largely organized by Whigs (and Free Soilers). Hubbard‟s prominent presence indicated that he was appealing to

Whig and Free Soil voters to sustain a law that sharply divided his own party.15

Though it was Democratic custom to re-nominate their sitting governors by legislative caucus, these angry Democrats vigorously lobbied for a state party convention to determine

Hubbard‟s fitness for re-nomination. The Democratic caucus ignored their pleas and again put forth Hubbard for the governor‟s chair. Holden accepted this as standard party practice, but he also was troubled by the governor‟s heterogeneous sources of support. Hubbard‟s antislavery bona fides lured some Democrats back to the fold from the Free Soil organization. Yet, he also openly sought the support of reformist Whigs and encouraged Maine‟s Protestant ministry to become more involved in politics in pursuit of moral reform. Indeed, the Augusta temperance meeting drew from a distinctly different base of power than did the leadership of the Democratic

Party itself. The party‟s most influential leaders largely hailed from the state‟s oldest communities in the South or the river port towns of Augusta and Bangor in central and eastern

Maine, respectively. All of the officers and most of the delegates at the temperance convention were from small towns along the state‟s mid-coast, western interior or eastern portion of the state, towns which felt under-represented among the leadership of the major parties. There were no officers from the south, including Portland.16

15 Eastern Argus, 27 January 1852. 16 Eastern Argus, 27 January 1852. 241

Moreover, the aforementioned Protestant clergy assumed a prominent role in the temperance convention, and they did not merely speak to the moral issues inherent in the temperance crusade. Rather, their participation was decidedly political, citing various demographic and financial statistics to show that the Maine Law had reduced pauperism and violence and reduced civic expenditures to combat those problems. Challenging the established leadership of the major parties, these ministers used their pulpit to promote specific causes and candidates. Holden condemned this “politico-religious” campaign, which he believed sullied the sacred through its intrusion on the secular.17 His real complaint, of course, was that the clergy represented a well-organized challenge to the political leadership that he, his editorial fraternity, and the officers of the state‟s political parties had formerly wielded exclusively.

In addition to the challenges from newly politicized temperance advocates, it was the disruption of commerce caused by the enforcement of the Maine Law that aroused Holden‟s dissatisfaction with it. Neal Dow, now the mayor of Portland, had zealously enforced the laws‟ provisions to the point of conducting raids on suspected tippling shops and liquor warehouses.

Moreover, he had begun intercepting shipments of liquor on the Atlantic and St. Lawrence

Railroad bound for New Hampshire, suspecting that the destination NH emblazoned on the casks was a mere ruse to ship liquor illegally from Portland‟s many distilleries to customers in the

Maine countryside along the rail route. These indiscriminate seizures not only captured illegally purchased liquors, but also spirits that had been legally purchased by out-of-state merchants for sale and use beyond Maine‟s boundaries.

17 Eastern Argus, 30 March 1852. Reverend Weaver from the raucous lumber town of Bangor claimed at the convention that the Maine Law had reduced pauperism by 50% and the expenses of the almshouse by 97% in that city. See Eastern Argus, 27 January 1852. 242

The Eastern Argus expressed concern that discomfited New England merchants might choose other roads and freight companies to ship their goods rather than tolerate delayed shipments or the confiscation of their property. Holden published letters from associations of businessmen in New Hampshire and Vermont, which uniformly argued that Dow‟s actions hurt the business of their communities. Consequently, they were beginning to seek alternative modes of transportation, incurring greater costs while also taking their business away from the editor‟s beloved Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad. The fact that these letters were almost identical in their language, strongly suggests that they were pre-circulated, probably by officers of the

Atlantic and St. Lawrence, among merchants in various communities served by the road.18

Holden could not brook this threat to the city‟s commerce, especially when the Atlantic and St.

Lawrence was just beginning to realize its vast potential.

Though temperance repelled some Democrats, it also promised to keep Democrats vital by luring new, reform-minded voters to the fold (and away from the Whigs) and limiting the defections of antislavery Democrats, many of whom also supported the Maine Law. Indeed, the

Republican Journal succinctly noted that if all these elements were cast out of the Democracy,

“then the party will be conveniently small.”19 However, for Holden, these advantages were outweighed by the Maine Law‟s imposition on the right to traffic in legal goods. Holden suggested that the impact of Dow‟s zealous enforcement of the law in Portland on the railroad might even threaten to obstruct the road‟s completion. In the spring of 1850, legislators from

Portland introduced a bill to allow the city a special dispensation to loan an additional $500,000 of city credit to the Atlantic and St. Lawrence project. Even if the bill passed, the state

18 Eastern Argus, 5 April 1852. 19 Republican Journal, 9 July 1852. 243

constitution mandated that it had to be ratified in a city referendum. If Portlanders began to entertain doubts as to the railroad‟s viability, due to Dow‟s meddling or other reasons, they might vote against the bill. While Holden lobbied continuously for the passage of the bill, the

Griffins were wary of it. They warned that over-leveraged entrepreneurs in communities throughout the state would use such bills to bail themselves out of failed improvements ventures.

The editors gravely intoned that the government was not “established to stand in the position of the endorser of the credit of men or corporations when such men or corporations find that a foolish speculation or a gross miscalculation has periled their property.”20

However, Portlanders did not seem to share the Griffins‟ concern. Though it took over a year for the legislature to pass the bill allowing Portland to invest further in the railroad, a meager turnout of Portland voters approved the measure by an astonishing 888 votes to 22. With the aid of this and a subsequent city loan, the Atlantic and St. Lawrence finally completed construction and opened to traffic along its whole extent from Portland to Montreal on 18 July

1853. To recoup their investments and pay outstanding debt, the corporate officers leased the road to Canada‟s Grand Trunk Railway in 1854 for a period of 99 years. Holden was overjoyed at the successful completion of the great project, though disappointed that ownership passed from the hands of Mainers to a foreign corporation. Still, his relief was so great that he recounted how this project single-handedly transformed the city:

Portland at that time was in a state of great depression – her stores and houses, many of them, unoccupied – her business and commerce at the lowest ebb – her resources of trade

20 Republican Journal, 11 October 1850. The city would loan its credit in two installments (in the form of interest-bearing city scrip or notes), the second installment being executed after the railroad spent $650,000 of its own capital on immediate construction. In return, the city received a lien on the road. The third such bill (each bill was passed in two year intervals in 1848, 1850 and 1852), required the railroad to deposit mortgage bonds with the city, to be canceled as it re-paid its loan. See Charter and By-Laws of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad Co. (Portland: Bearce, Starbird, Rich and Co., 1855). On Holden‟s support for the laws, see Eastern Argus, 21, 23, and 25 May 1850. 244

in a great degree cut off or dried up – real estate and wharf property a drag, and rents some 2 or 3 per cent only of the prime cost of the property rented. The suggestion of Mr. Poor therefore, held out the prospect of relief to a people who felt the need of relief.21

This dramatic and, no doubt, exaggerated recollection, revealed the editor‟s all-absorbing focus on the commercial growth of his community. Above all other concerns, his desire to render the city productive, to enable it to achieve the full value of its property, its industry and its natural, commercial advantages, dwarfed other interests. He pursued these interests to the exclusion of all other issues, notably antislavery and temperance, which were rapidly reorganizing the state‟s political parties while he sat at his editor‟s desk.

Holden‟s single-minded focus on internal improvements and commerce thus prevented him from recognizing and effectively responding to broader issues that affected his party in the

1850s. When the controversial Hubbard was re-nominated for governor in 1852, so-called anti- temperance, anti-abolitionist Wildcat Democrats bolted the ticket and nominated a rival candidate. The Eastern Argus pledged support to Hubbard, but did not wage battle against the

Wildcats, as most “loyal” Democratic papers did. Though Hubbard polled more votes than in his previous election campaign in winning a handsome plurality, he failed of a majority. The state legislature had to determine the winner, and the Whig-controlled senate elected their nominee,

William Crosby, who had finished a distant second to Hubbard. The following year, Wildcat

Democrats gained control of the state convention and nominated an anti-Maine Law candidate for governor, Albert Pillsbury. Predictably, the party‟s vengeful, pro-temperance and antislavery

“woolhead” faction fielded a separate ticket, headed by future state Republican Party leader

Anson Morrill. Again, the regular Democratic nominee won a plurality, only to see the legislature choose the soundly beaten William Crosby as governor. The fact that Maine‟s

21 Eastern Argus, 26 February 1852. 245

Democrats could nominate staunchly pro-temperance and anti-temperance gubernatorial candidates only two years apart and still win pluralities in the state canvass underscored the inconsistent message and the unsettled character of the party.22

By 1854, Holden sounded like an amused bystander when he recounted yet another vicious fight between the party‟s “Morrill Maine Law wing and its “[Shepard] Cary wildcat wing,” as the party prepared for its annual summer convention. The editor looked forward to a good scrap, but he refused to ally himself firmly with either faction. Instead, he appeared to stand aside, pledging to support the party‟s regular nominees, but otherwise declining to engage in the factional fight that threatened to divide the party. Indeed, his writing reinforced a sense of distance between him and the party, describing it and its various factions as though they were distant, discrete entities, not an organization to which he himself belonged.23 In this instance it did not seem that the editor had abandoned the party, but rather the reverse.

However, their failure to engage the efforts to re-shape the party‟s message and its constituency ultimately left Holden, the Griffins, and their sympathetic editorial colleagues in a position of weakness. They had side-stepped the convulsive slavery and temperance issues, hoping that the Compromise of 1850 and the Maine Law of 1851 would settle those issues and allow the party to return to its economic focus and the predictability of combat with their inveterate Whig foes. Instead, by 1855, Morrill Democrats, Whigs, Free Soilers, and nativist

Know Nothings coalesced in a fusion party, the forerunner to the state‟s Republican Party. This

22 Hubbard recorded nearly 1,000 votes more than he had in 1850 (41,616 to 40,750) while Crosby‟s total dropped nearly 3,000 votes from his 1850 effort (29,129 to 32,079). These figures do not include results from distant townships whose total vote in 1850 had been less than 800. See Eastern Argus, 25 September 1852. On the fierce factional disputes, see Richard W. Judd, Edwin Churchill, and Joel Eastman eds. Maine: 210-212. Judd estimated that approximately half of Hubbard‟s support came from Democrats, while the remaining half came from a combination of Free Soilers and Whigs. 23 Eastern Argus, 26 May 1854. 246

coalition would outnumber Maine‟s stodgy Democrats and, beginning in 1856, dominate state politics for two decades.24 In the previous decade, the Maine Democratic Party had been discomfited by Holden‟s independent course in single-handedly promoting a new economic creed for the party. However, a decade later, the party was hamstrung by his and other editors‟ refusal to try to provide guidance on the weighty issues that had cleaved the party into several warring factions. They price for this failure to act was a generation of relative political impotence for Maine‟s Democrats.

Croswell’s Decline Heals the New York Democracy

Of all the state parties in the North, New York‟s Democrats arguably had suffered the most debilitating and violent division over the intractable issues of internal improvements funding and political antislavery. The state‟s radical Barnburners appeared especially chastened by the experience. In their concerted effort to deny Hunkers power in the party, they had contributed to Whigs‟ ascendance to power in state government. Moreover, those Whigs passed exactly the kind of internal improvements funding that radicals had feared from Hunkers.

Democratic rapprochement in 1849 had nearly erased Whig advantages in the legislature, and

Democrats hoped that it presaged their eventual return to power.

Edwin Croswell, having been buffeted and bruised in his role at the center of the fratricidal conflict, also seemed less willing to carry on the fight. As was described in the first chapter of this dissertation, the editor had lost tens of thousands of dollars and suffered a tremendous blow to his reputation when he was implicated in the malfeasance that brought down

Albany‟s Canal Bank in July of that year. A legislative investigation (headed by Barnburners)

24 See Judd, Maine: 211-212. 247

into the Canal Bank‟s sudden collapse placed the blame squarely on Croswell and the bank‟s cashier, Theodore Olcott. The damning report concluded, “the prominent if not the main cause of the failure of the bank was the secret and clandestine appropriation of its funds by the cashier to his own uses and purposes and assenting to large and irregular loans to directors, and that too, without adequate security.”25 Croswell and Olcott had brazenly flouted state law and ethical rules of corporate banking, treating the Canal Bank as an endless supply of credit and capital for their personal investment schemes. Moreover, as a repository of state funds intended for the payment of the contractors and laborers engaged in canal repairs and construction, the bank‟s insolvency meant that contractors and dozens of laborers on the eastern portion of the canal went without pay for several weeks. These were the same laborers that Croswell‟s own party consistently had pledged to protect from unscrupulous speculators and monopolists. However, the state deposits designated to compensate them for their honest labor were only so much capital to Croswell, to be used in his own pursuit of personal wealth. Croswell‟s entire political course had been charted to encourage development and unleash speculation. The resulting collapse of his fortunes defrauded the state, degraded its laborers, and utterly devastated Croswell‟s political authority.

In her study of banking and lending in Jacksonian Era New England, Nicole Lamoreaux characterized banks as investment clubs. She concluded that directors of banks in this era, “often funneled the bulk of the funds under their control to themselves, their relatives, or others with personal ties to the board.” Similarly, Olcott, Croswell and several of the individuals to whom they loaned bank funds used those funds to invest in businesses in which they were joint

25 Report of the Select Committee of the Senate Showing the Fraud and Peculations of Edwin Croswell, Theodore Olcott, John L. Crew, and Others: 5. The committee report spared most of the directors and bank president John Keyes Paige from criticism, laying the blame at the feet of the restive Croswell and Olcott (see pages 9-10).

248

stockholders or partners. Thus, the activities of the Canal Bank were unique not in their character but perhaps only in their magnitude. Regardless, Croswell emerged from the affair embarrassed and heavily indebted. In 1844 he had bought an interest in the True Sun newspaper in New York

City (with a loan from Albany mayor Erastus Corning and Horatio Seymour) to promote Hunker principles and policies. In 1848, he removed to the city to oversee his new paper, in search of greater profits than the Argus could supply. After the failure of the Canal Bank, his sundry business interests in New York City absorbed most of his attention, as he attempted to scale his mountain of debt. He retained a controlling interest in the Argus until 1854 but left much of its editorial duties to associates.26

By 1850, Croswell was beset both by creditors and Barnburners, and he was in search of ways to mollify both. Despite the reunification of the state Democracy the previous year, John

Van Buren continued to correspond with Free Soilers and speak at Free Soil gatherings in New

York and other states, encouraging them to maintain their independent organization. Through the pages of the Argus, the editor criticized the younger Van Buren in early 1850 after the latter had congratulated Connecticut Free Soilers for bolting the Democratic ticket and running their own candidates in their recent state election. Croswell plaintively beseeched his fellow party members, “we desire the unity of the Democratic Party and its maintenance upon the broad national ground on which it has stood from the origin of parties in this country – avoiding

26 Nicole Lamoreaux, Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections and Economic Development in Industrial New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 4. Lamoreaux described insider lending practices as an innovative response to a dearth of investment capital. Despite its potential for abuse, insider lending generally proved to be safe and reliable. On the investment activities of Canal Bank officers, see Report of the Select Committee of the Senate: 14-18. On Croswell‟s declining role at the Argus and in the Democratic Party, see Manning, Croswell of the Argus: 288-311. Croswell‟s efforts to erase his debts ultimately were fruitless. After the Civil War his home entered foreclosure, and the former editor lived with his daughter until dying penniless in 1872. 249

sectional issues – and eschewing especially the Wilmot Proviso as a party element.”27 To him,

Clay‟s Compromise bill, though it was a Whig measure, promised to provide the grounds for that unity by finally disposing of the Proviso and establishing the legal mechanisms by which slavery could be admitted to or prohibited from the territories.

Croswell‟s subsequent editorial on “the crisis” facing the country in the spring of 1850 was therefore conditioned not only by sectional conflict outside of New York but intra-party conflict within it. President Taylor‟s hostility to the Compromise and his “recommendation of non-action…may be the fruit of profound sagacity; but it seems to be the result of imbecility.”28

To the diminutive editor, it was not merely that Taylor‟s inaction threatened to exacerbate sectional disputes, but that it also threatened to undermine both of the major parties by giving continuing succor to Free Soilers and potential antislavery defectors.

While Croswell hoped that the Compromise would snuff out the remaining embers of the

Free Soil uprising, he also worked toward rapprochement with his Barnburner foes on economic policy. When Democrats in the state legislature voted against a resolution to urge the state‟s congressional representatives to oppose President Taylor‟s plan for rivers and harbors improvements, the Argus approved of their vote, despite having previously supported the resolution. The paper explained that it had desired a resolution recognizing the propriety of federal funding for internal improvements generally, not a narrow resolution specifically in support of Taylor‟s plan. Though the paper had reluctantly supported the Whig-crafted resolution, it also acknowledged the wisdom of Democratic opposition to the measure. This was a calculated equivocation, intended to seek common ground with Barnburners on financial issues

27 Albany Argus, 21 February 1850. 28 Albany Argus, 27 May 1850. 250

involving government spending. Still, the Argus insisted that it continued to support

“appropriations for the improvement of rivers and harbors, so far as they are admissible under a liberal interpretation of the Constitution.”29 This editorial explicitly rejected the radical

Democratic principle of strict construction, as opposed to “liberal interpretation,” of the

Constitution.

Only a few years earlier, this pronouncement would have aroused the ire of radical

Democrats and engendered a bitter debate. However, the economic condition of the state had changed significantly by 1850. Laboring under the successive Whig administrations of John

Young and Hamilton Fish, Barnburners were unable to prevent the beginning of construction on the Erie Canal enlargement and extensions to the lateral lines, and as a consequence the construction of those improvements began to lose salience as a political issue. This was underscored when the State Comptroller suggested a cessation of the public works until the state had raised sufficient funds to pay the “special appropriations” on the canal recently made by the legislature. Despite the immediate lack of monies to meet the “special appropriations,” the legislature‟s Ways and Means Committee rejected the comptroller‟s suggestion. The three man committee, consisting of two Whigs and a Democrat, looked “upon these debts as gross violations of the [state] constitution and great public wrongs.” However, “the committee would not add to this unpardonable and inexpiable wrong the untold embarrassment which would necessarily grow out of an attempt to arrest the public works and withhold from the contracts already entered into, and in progress, future surpluses of revenue.”30

29 Albany Argus, 26 January 1850. Whigs and small number of Hunkers combined to pass the resolution with a bare majority. 30 Albany Argus, 15 April 1850. 251

In previous years, the “inexpiable wrong” of making appropriations without sufficient funds would have become a campaign rally for Barnburners and perhaps the impetus to invoke the Stop and Tax law of 1842. Instead, they raised little fuss over the temporary shortfall.

Democrats got around this seeming inconsistency by invoking the inviolability of contracts as alluded to in the committee report. The state could not halt construction on the Erie enlargement and the extension of the lateral lines, for it had entered into contracts for those works in good faith and had to honor them. This convenient formulation allowed Democrats the luxury of not having to assume a position on the funding of the improvements. They could condemn profligate spending without putting an end to it, simply by defending the interests of workers and independent contractors in completing the public works.

The Compromise itself allowed Democratic editors to pursue this strategy. After the passage of the Compromise laws, a relieved Croswell concluded that, “not even a pretext for the renewal of this dangerous and exciting quarrel between North and South” remained. More important, these laws also clarified the situation of the parties in the North. The Fugitive Slave

Law, the Argus maintained, would be “the stalking-horse of the free soil and abolition politicians

– opponents, past and present beyond all doubt, of the National Democratic Party.”31 Rather than fight free soilers within the party, tried and true Democrats now could fight them in the open.

Those opponents of slavery had attempted to make the Wilmot Proviso a test of party orthodoxy and read Hunkers out of the organization. Now, the Hunker Argus hoped that the Compromise would have the same effect, forcing the permanent defection of intractable antislavery radicals from the organization.

31 Albany Argus, 19 September 1850; 9 June 1851. 252

To that end, Hunkers hoped to keep Barnburners in the party by compromising on economic issues. Michael Holt has noted that once slavery ceased to be a pivotal partisan issue,

Whigs and Democrats retreated to the old issues that had divided them, namely taxation and improvements. Yonatan Eyal further claimed that this effort failed because the two parties resembled each other too closely on these issues during the 1850s. In hindsight it is easy to see that the parties did miscalculate the continuing resonance of these economic issues. However,

Democrats particularly believed that they had crafted a new and compelling stance on economic issues. Both the Barnburner Atlas and the Hunker Argus positioned the Democratic Party as the fiscally responsible alternative to Whig governance. Both parties promised to extend the system of internal improvements in the state, but Democrats would do so without incurring the

(allegedly) $16,000,000 in cost overruns with which the Whigs had saddled the state treasury.

Croswell‟s inveterate, radical foes at the Albany Atlas acknowledged that Democrats now saw “public improvements as great public blessings, designed through the agency of a liberal but honest use of the public money to benefit the whole people; and not as the packhorse of greedy politicians and public plunderers to mount and ride at freedom until state bankruptcy arrests their course.”32 This colorful coda acknowledged that state government was now irrevocably and inextricably implicated in directing the state‟s economy through planning and funding improvements designed to open new markets and preserve existing ones. In this go-ahead age, it would be foolish for Democrats to oppose or deny this role. Instead, it was incumbent upon them to oppose pork, malfeasance, and other wastes of the public trust. They would be the party of

32 Albany Atlas, 10 August 1852. The figure of $16,000,000 comes from the Argus, 6 October 1851. On the supposed convergence of Democratic and Whig economic thought, see Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s: 101-103; Eyal, The Transformation of the Democratic Party: 40, 145. 253

responsible management of the state‟s funds, arrayed against the reckless and shortsighted fiscal policies of the Whigs.

Perhaps voters were not ready for this nuanced reformulation of Democratic economic principles, but the party‟s leading organs in New York promoted this as the means to ensure continued party unity and end Whig misrule in the state. However, the Democratic editors who had carried on a vicious and bruising newspaper war over party financial policy finally seemed ready to embrace this change and cease their conflict. Indeed, Atlas editor Henry Van Dyck appeared to accept the new economic order that Croswell and more entrepreneurially-minded

Democrats had heralded with the advent of free trade. For instance, the lower tariff might have opened American iron foundries to foreign competition, but a higher tariff would have obstructed the construction of thousands of miles of new railroad lines. Now, Van Dyck extolled, “the railroads of the Union keep a standing army of well-paid consumers as conductors, guards, engineers, stokers, mechanicians, and repairers.” His editorial implied that it was the duty of the

Democratic Party not only to provide the conditions for such economic development, but to help supply that “standing army” of worker/consumers.33

The Atlas also subtly changed its stance on improvements funding. When radicals passed the Stop and Tax law of 1842, the paper had decried the unnecessary construction of lateral lines and other canal extensions begun by the Whigs. Now the paper supported that construction and instead decried the “stoppages on the public works” that resulted from “the extravagances and rapacious plundering” of Whig canal commissioners who awarded exorbitant construction contracts to friends and cronies. The Atlas promised that Democrats would ensure continued improvements to the canal system that would be a “means of public prosperity and wealth, and a

33 Albany Atlas, 21 July 1852. 254

public blessing.”34 Ironically, now that the Argus was practically prostrated by Croswell‟s financial embarrassments, the Atlas practically had turned Hunker.

The reunion of Hunkers and Barnburners and the new detente between the Argus and the

Atlas were further cemented by the nomination of Franklin Pierce for president by the 1852

Democratic national convention. Both papers heartily endorsed the nominee and applauded the platform. This time, the Atlas faced a “charge of inconsistency and of dereliction from principle” from dismayed free soil papers outside of New York for accepting a party platform that vindicated popular sovereignty and pledged fidelity to the requirements of the Fugitive Slave

Law. Van Dyck refuted the charge, pointing to the constitutions of California and Oregon as instruments that enshrined the Wilmot Proviso in law and meagerly claiming that the Fugitive

Slave Law hardly was worse than the statute it replaced. However, in reality the Atlas clique simply no longer needed to wield the antislavery issue against Croswell, and so they largely abandoned it. United behind their new nominee in pursuit of continued improvements and expanded commerce, the Argus and Atlas finally seemed to bury the issue of slavery and their old divisions with it.

John C. Mather‟s scandalous tenure as canal commissioner from 1851 to 1853 seemed to reify Croswell‟s political impotence. Mather had been elected canal commissioner in 1850 with the aid of Hunker and Anti-Rent votes. By 1852, he had become the focus of a Canal Board investigation after the annual State Auditor‟s report revealed a sudden, sharp increase in canal expenditures the previous year. The Atlas called for an investigation and, subsequently, Mather‟s dismissal. Croswell defended the beleaguered commissioner and claimed that the auditor had falsified his report. He further argued that the Auditor charged Mather with letting exorbitant

34 Albany Atlas, 12 August 1852. 255

contracts which actually had been executed by the previous, Whig, commissioner but only completed under Mather‟s tenure. The venerable editor suspected that the Canal Board investigation deliberately was timed to embarrass the Hunkers and dissuade them from seeking prominent nominations at the state convention. The Atlas sneered that a paper sustained by

“Canal Bank plunder” could not be trusted to vouch for the feasibility of Mather‟s excessive contracts.35

Like Croswell‟s campaign against Azariah Flagg‟s re-nomination in 1847, this conflict over Mather had the potential to divide the party. Croswell likely was correct that the timing of the auditor‟s report and its subsequent publication by the Atlas was deliberately orchestrated to discomfit the Hunkers at the state party convention. Equally important though was the Atlas‟ desire to prove to voters that Democrats, unlike their rivals, were serious about rooting out malfeasance in state government. Regardless, the dispute quickly died down, in part because

Mather, whose tenure as canal commissioner was scheduled to run through 1853, could only be removed from his position through a lengthy impeachment process.36

Clearly, Croswell lacked the political capital to make the treatment of Mather an issue on which to challenge Barnburners‟ repatriation to the party. Likewise, the Atlas‟ expose′ of Mather failed to arouse outrage against Hunkers. Like the few remaining pockets of committed free soilers in the state, the venerable editors seemed to have been shoved to the political margins.

Unity prevailed at the state convention, and prominent former Hunkers and Barnburners split

35 Albany Atlas, 1 September 1852. For the brief debate over Mather‟s performance as commissioner, see the Atlas and Argus, 27 August to 3 September 1852. 36 Albany Atlas, 4 September 1852. The State Assembly impeached Mather for corruption in 1853, but the Court of Trial of Impeachments acquitted him. See Journal of the Assembly of the State of New York at Their Seventy-sixth Session, vol. II (Albany: Charles Van Benthuysen, 1853): 1368; and the New York Times, 25 May 1853. 256

nominations between them, with Rufus Peckham, one of the victims of the New Scotland outrage, earning an unexpected nomination for congressman.

Unity subsequently was vindicated by a smashing triumph at the polls. Democrats routed the Whigs, claiming 88 legislative seats to their opponents‟ 40 and electing their entire ticket for governor, lieutenant governor, canal commissioner, and inspector of state prisons. A rival Free

Democratic ticket, consisting of Whigs and un-reconciled Free Soilers tallied less than one-tenth of the votes that Hunker Horatio Seymour received in his successful bid for governor.

A small group of Hunkers, led by Daniel Dickinson, maintained that the Barnburners should not be welcomed back to the party fold with impunity, but the party was strongly reunited in the main.37 The persistence of high receipts from the canals and the continuation of canal repairs and extensions without endangering the state‟s credit had ameliorated conflict between

Hunkers and Barnburners. The Compromise of 1850 further enabled both factions to jettison the slavery issue, which Barnburners initially had co-opted simply to challenge the leadership pretensions of their Hunker rivals. Though it helped to heal the party, it also prevented the reunited organization from capitalizing on one of the most significant political issues that would shape partisan competition in the 1850s. As a consequence, they failed to enroll an entire new generation of voters who saw restrictions on slavery‟s growth and the political rights of immigrants (particularly Catholics) as the leading political issues of the day.38 Many of those

37 Those Hunkers who believed returning Barnburners should be punished for their apostasy were quickly dubbed Hard Shells or Hards. Those who welcomed Barnburners back unconditionally were dubbed Soft Shells or Softs. Hards believed that former Barnburners should be prevented from holding significant leadership posts within the party. 38 Before the Republican Party established itself as the main opponent of the Democrats, the Know Nothing Party, which grew out of a network of nativist fraternal organizations, enjoyed a meteoric rise and fall in politics. The party capitalized on anti-Catholic prejudice, fears of increasing immigration, and anti-party sentiment among many Americans. The best accounts of the Know Nothings are Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Mark Voss-Hubbard, Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics before the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 257

new voters would find a home in the Republican Party by 1856 and carry that party to ascendance in northern politics by 1860.

Racism Consumes Western Reserve Democrats

On the Western Reserve, the Compromise measures of 1850 were uniformly unpopular.

Joseph Gray considered the measures largely unnecessary, and he dismissed threats of southern disunion as mere “bluster and braggadocio.” The Ashtabula Sentinel, a Whig-Free Soil journal, argued that Clay‟s bill sought to barter away free territory without securing any concessions in return from the slave states. Because the territory gained from Mexico in the late war already was free due to the legacy of Mexican law, these papers concluded that there was nothing for which the North needed to bargain. Rather than demanding that the region be opened to slavery, southern politicians should have acted as supplicants, asking for concessions from their northern colleagues. Thus, both papers saw the Compromise debates as a test of northern manhood.

Would northern politicians firmly resist these seemingly insolent southern demands? In unmistakable language, Gray labeled the Compromise supporters the “grannies at Washington” and concluded, “they have not the gender” to represent northern interests. After a combination of southern and northern votes narrowly defeated a bill that would have admitted California to the

Union as a free state, the Sentinel wondered, “is there no manhood in the North? Are we indeed a race of slaves?”39 The Sentinel‟s coda underscored partisan editors‟ gendered view of the supposed crisis embodied by the Compromise. Manhood connoted independence of thought and action. The opposite of this concept of manhood was servility or slavishness. In the view of these

University Press, 2002). Anbinder noted that the Know Nothings appealed to young skilled laborers of limited means, while Voss-Hubbard saw that the party cleverly appealed to a large anti-party sentiment among many young men of voting age. 39 Ashtabula Sentinel, 3 August 1850; Cleveland Plain Dealer, 3 August 1850. 258

rival editors, the Compromise did not promise to restore partisan equilibrium. Rather, it was an expression of the ineffectiveness of northern politicians in representing northern interests. As such, the Compromise was an indictment of the current partisan dynamic, not a vindication of it.

Both papers applauded the defeat of Clay‟s omnibus, only to lament the later passage of each of its provisions under Stephen Douglas and William Richardson‟s skillful handling in the

Senate and House respectively. A. S. Hendry, Representative Joshua Giddings‟ spokesman at the

Sentinel, immediately promoted popular meetings in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law and the new Fillmore Administration. These were ostensibly non-partisan meetings, appealing to all opponents of slavery, but they clearly were designed to test the viability of a new antislavery political organization. Gray tried to convince antislavery Democrats that they could achieve

“effectual antislavery measures without leaving the Democratic creed or stepping out of the

Democratic Party.” However, a growing Free Democracy movement in the state challenged this assertion. In 1849, a large contingent of Democrats in Medina County abandoned the party to join with Whigs and Liberty men in calling anew for the passage of the Wilmot Proviso.

Reflecting the mingling of Free Soilers, former Whigs, and antislavery Democrats in this movement, in 1851 the Ashtabula Sentinel had re-christened itself the organ of the “Free Soil

Democracy” on the Reserve.40

Gray implicitly distrusted this movement, dominated as it was by former Whigs and Free

Soilers. The popular free soil movement, he argued, “gathers recruits only to transfer them on election day to their ancient enemy, the Whigs… whose policy is at war with the interests of the laboring classes, and who, through unequal laws, such as high tariffs, chartered monopolies, etc.

40 Sentinel, 12 January 1850; Plain Dealer, 12 October 1850. On the estrangement of the Medina County Democrats, see Plain Dealer, 17 January 1850. 259

seek to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”41 He reiterated the familiar theme that free soilers were ill-disguised Whigs whose opposition to slavery paled in contrast to true Democrats‟ opposition to all pretensions to aristocracy, whether that of southern slaveholders or northern capitalists. Yet, this warning seemed to fall on deaf ears, and Gray and his fellow Democrats on the Reserve remained bereft of a coherent antislavery message of their own to counter the amalgamated Free Democracy.

Gray had served on the committee on resolutions at the state Democratic convention in

1848 and helped to craft the party‟s unwieldy and obfuscating statement on slavery in response to the Wilmot Proviso controversy that year. The resolution affirmed that Ohioans regarded slavery as “an evil” that was “unfavorable to the full development of the spirit and practical benefits of free institutions.” It further acknowledged the unqualified right of all people to exercise their right of free speech to denounce the institution and seek its restriction and eventual eradication. However, it also ultimately recognized that the individual states enjoyed the right to manage their domestic institutions as they saw fit. This attempt to please all sides in the divisive debates over slavery offered little inspiration. It was hardly the stuff the party might emblazon on campaign banners as it charged into political combat. Despite its obvious shortcomings, the

Democratic Party again adopted that essentially unchanged resolution at their state convention in

1850.42

The peremptory re-adoption of the 1848 resolve on slavery revealed that the state

Democracy, and Gray himself, wished that the disruptive slavery controversy would simply fade away. Instead, the editor chose to focus on his preferred goals of internal improvements and the

41 Plain Dealer, 12 October 1850. 42 Plain Dealer, 15 January 1850. 260

reformation of the state banking system. He fervently hoped that these related issues would divert interest from sectional disputes over slavery to more pressing local issues of economic growth and the proliferation of commercial opportunities for small producers as well as wealthy capitalists. To that end, the editor made note of a supposed increase in labor organizing. He considered it a “natural movement when the fact is known that nine tenths of all manual labor does not receive sufficient remuneration for its own maintenance.” Recent commercial growth and economic expansion in the North meant that “labor is in more ready demand, and therefore it seems a fit opportunity to ask what it should receive.”43 Rather than pursue fickle antislavery voters, Gray argued that the Democracy should redouble its efforts to attract laborers and small producers. This class-based appeal, he insisted would hold much greater relevance for Ohio voters as they negotiated dynamic changes in the northern economy.

As part of his commercial appeal to the producers of the Western Reserve, the editor urged local governments to fund internal improvements directly. Though the state Democratic leadership zealously opposed incurring public debt, Gray welcomed it. When the Whig government for Cuyahoga County steered the county out of debt, the Plain Dealer was surprisingly dissatisfied. Instead of using tax monies to pay down old debt, the county government should have used the money to improve roads, and to build new bridges and replace old, rickety ones, he argued. Free roads and bridges built by the county would be far preferable to the existing network of toll roads and bridges that had been erected by chartered corporations.

These corporations liberally used their power to “erect toll gates and monopolize every leading thoroughfare to or from” Cleveland, Gray complained.44 These roads theoretically connected

43 Plain Dealer, 22 August 1850. 44 Plain Dealer, 4 October 1850. 261

producers and markets, but their tolls eroded the profits that impecunious farmers and husbandmen might derive from marketing their goods in the city.

It was Gray‟s goal to shift the costs of internal improvements and the marketing of produce from the laboring classes to corporations and the capitalists who directed them. The

Plain Dealer waded into the fall elections in 1850 under the banner, “Free Trade, Free Territory,

No Bank Monopolies, No Privileged Orders, Equal Taxation.” The last issue was one of the most prominent in the campaign. In a lengthy campaign article, the Plain Dealer noted that banks in

Cuyahoga County held approximately $1.75 million in assets. Because state law taxed only bank capital, these banks were taxed on only $400,000, amounting to $5,000 in tax revenue. If they were taxed on their total assets, like ordinary citizens, they would pay nearly $26,000 in taxes to the county authorities, monies that could fund the internal improvements for which Gray and his

Democratic cronies were clamoring.45 Curiously, the Plain Dealer did not seek to equalize taxation by lowering taxes on the citizenry, but rather by increasing taxation on banking corporations. According to Gray‟s developmentalist ethos, Ohio did not suffer from too much taxation, but too little. If state, county, and local taxes on individuals were lowered to the same rate as that of corporations, these communities would not have sufficient revenue to ensure their growth. Only by increasing taxation and encouraging governments to use the proceeds for internal improvements, could they spread the benefits of the burgeoning economy and ensure its continued growth.

However, the Free Soilers who held the balance of power in the state legislature posed a potential obstacle to reforming the state‟s financial system. Gray‟s reaction to this fact was ambivalent. He had largely ignored the Compromise of 1850 after its passage, but shortly before

45 Plain Dealer, 5 October 1850. 262

the state election in 1850, he began writing a series of articles excoriating the Fugitive Slave

Law. It is tempting to argue that he did so in a last-minute appeal to antislavery voters. However, the bulk of the articles appeared after the election. Instead, it seems more likely that these editorials were a reaction to the durability of the slavery issue and an attempt to curry some favor with Ohio‟s Free Soilers. Gray avowed that slavery was “a most outrageous contradiction to our pretensions as a Model Republic.” However, he failed to follow this bold declaration with real leadership on the issue of slavery. He neither counseled support for the Fugitive Slave Law, nor disobedience. Instead, he meekly assured his readers that the “progress to general freedom cannot be arrested by any such law and certainly not in such a country as this.”46

The editor grew increasingly frustrated with his inability to reconcile his economic goals with the antislavery demands of the state‟s still powerful Free Soil organization. For nearly a year, May 1850 to July 1851, a constitutional convention in Columbus was drafting a new charter for the state. Free Soil delegates were bitterly disappointed when they failed to secure an article extending the elective franchise to Ohio‟s black male citizens. On the other hand, Gray was dismayed when some of those same Free Soilers and a small group of Democrats joined

Whigs to defeat an article that would have granted the legislature the power to repeal individual bank charters. The proposed article failed by only two votes, 44-42. Invoking Chief Justice

Taney‟s reasoning in the Charles River Bridge Case, the editor complained that the article merely confirmed that the legislature did not have the power to “grant away sovereign powers” in perpetuity. Subsequent legislatures, as the representatives of the sovereign people, necessarily had the power to alter these charters. In a grandiose condemnation of the article‟s defeat, he complained that chartered corporations “enter into competition with the people individually,

46 Plain Dealer, 28 October 1850. 263

under most unjust and unequal advantages. They are possessed of all the power of association, fortified by the favor of the law. They are grants warring upon the people individually, and absorbing the profits of their toil.”47

Gray‟s overheated rhetoric would suggest at first blush that he was working toward class revolution. Of course, he was no revolutionary, but he found it difficult to accept that his efforts on behalf of the producing classes were eclipsed by the campaigns against slavery and the state‟s

Black Laws. Though he had supported the repeal of the Black Laws in 1847, ten years later the editor‟s appeals on behalf of the Democratic had been reduced to little more than embittered racism. With a Fusion-Republican coalition ascendant in Ohio by 1857, Gray apprehended an entire political and social revolution in the state. Like other Democrats, he contended that

Republicans did not merely seek the political equality of black citizens, but the perfect social equality, too. In ugly language, he sought to scare his readers with the specter that Republicans would “amalgamate the races and make this a government of minks and Monkeys.”48 The editor who had claimed that Democratic principles demanded equal political rights regardless of race, now turned into a vicious race-baiter when a rival party threatened to secure those same rights for black male citizens.

Gray‟s racist lament revealed his own frustration at his inability to keep antislavery

Democrats within the party. It was no coincidence that he published increasingly racist diatribes against the Republicans immediately prior to the state Democratic convention, hoping to whip white Ohioans into a frenzy of outrage and lure them to the Democratic standard. The party‟s convention itself, he claimed was the most harmonious in 20 years. Alluding to Samuel

47 Plain Dealer, 3 January 1851. 48 Plain Dealer, 20 July 1857. 264

Medary‟s formerly iron-fisted control of the Ohio Democracy, he reminded his readers, “the trouble has heretofore existed with the Democratic Party in Ohio that a claim has been set up by certain cabals of men that „candidates must come from their political coteries or they could not run.‟” With the power of that cabal broken, strong, new candidates from across the state had come to the fore, offering voters a much “fresher” ticket.49 However, this was more wishful thinking than reality. Gray was painfully aware that, by 1857, nativists and Republicans had mobilized more new voters into their ranks than had the stolid Democracy. With his inability to offer consistent leadership on slavery and the Black Laws and his inability to see the increasing salience of those issues in Ohio politics, Gray failed to capitalize on these new voters on the

Reserve and in the state at large. The so-called Fusion-Republicans had been invigorated by new voters. Now Gray and a weakened Democracy searched in vain for their own fresh reinforcements.

Conclusion

By the 1850s, each of the editors in this study had seen dramatic changes in their personal fortunes and those of their party. Edwin Coswell, of course, confronted the most dramatic changes. Having once wielded considerable power and influence within the party, his financial embarrassments saw him quickly eclipsed in stature by his rival Henry Van Dyck. He eventually salvaged some vestiges of his reputation when he helped negotiate the merger of the Atlas and

Argus, with his nephew, Sherman installed as co-editor. However, his sudden loss of political capital had neutered his leadership role in the party. His plaintive pleas for the passage of the

Compromise measures were tantamount to calls for a truce in the savage factional disputes that

49 Plain Dealer, 8 August 1857. 265

had ranged within the New York Democracy. His self-aggrandizing political behavior and reckless speculations had inflamed factionalism in the party, but it also ultimately left him unable to provide meaningful leadership when that factionalism threatened to undermine the current partisan system itself. His earnest desire for rapprochement came across as self-serving. That the leading journal of the radical Barnburners so eagerly accepted the offer of rapprochement, after years of beleaguered conflict, only disenchanted its own stolid antislavery supporters. The rift in the state Democracy had been healed, but at the cost of thousands of voters who now sought an organization that would better represent their opposition to the growing influence of the Slave

South.

The Belfast Republican Journal experienced a similar backlash, when it acquiesced in the

Compromise measures and distanced itself from the twinned antislavery and temperance issues that continued to divide the party in Maine. Charles Holden at the Eastern Argus seemed absolutely routed by the changes wrought in Maine politics. Unable to interest voters in the

Galphin scandal, he appeared to distance himself from the Democracy as pro-temperance, antislavery forces scratched and clawed with opponents of temperance and free soilism for control of the party. He was ill-prepared to confront the new partisan dynamic that emerged out of the tumultuous period since Polk‟s presidency. The massive political mobilization of moral reform organizations and the entrance of new groups into politics, particularly the clergy, challenged the authority of party leaders and threatened to reorganize the parties themselves.

What he witnessed was a harbinger of partisan reorganization at the national level.

Joseph Gray found himself in a unique position in comparison to these other editors and their journals. He had fought to strip the Medary clique of autocratic powers within the Ohio

Democracy and to liberalize its economic platform. He presumed that this would enable him to 266

present to the voters of the Western Reserve a dynamic, free-market alternative to the conservative Whig system of chartered economic development. Gray even embraced free soil in hopes that it would further popularize his economic vision. However, when free soil continually eclipsed his free market mantra in terms of political importance among Reserve voters, he felt increasingly marginalized and isolated. Embittered by his inability to revolutionize economic development on the Reserve, he found solace in a bitterly racist antipathy to political antislavery.

267

Conclusion: Partisan Newspapers as a Mode of Unity and Division

The remarkable geographic expansion and growth of commerce (both domestic and international) during the Polk Administration offered new opportunities to the Democratic editors of the North. Polk‟s campaign and administration had served as dramatic examples of the transformative power of new men and new issues in northern politics. The president‟s successful implementation of free trade particularly appealed to editors‟ ingrained boosterish spirit.

Emboldened by his example, these Democratic editors independently sought to transform their party‟s message to better serve the needs and wants of their communities and constituencies.

Often, these were idealistic, ad hoc efforts to modernize the party‟s message to appeal to new voters and take advantage of new issues. Other times, they were sincere attempts to reform anachronistic party practices. For instance, the Belfast Republican Journal and the Cleveland

Plain Dealer both sought to co-opt the property reforms of the radical National Reform

Association in the 1840s and write it into the Democratic creed. They hoped that the advocacy of restrictions on property ownership and land speculation would win support from modest freeholders and small producers. When the NRA‟s political viability proved fleeting, both papers eventually dropped the issue of land reform.

Other attempts to reform the party‟s message seemed to mix altruistic intentions with self-interest. The Eastern Argus sought to dismantle the party‟s long-held, radical prejudice against the use of exclusive charters to spur economic development. Arguing that this prejudice was tantamount to an anachronistic superstition, the paper defended the necessary use of such charters in capital-poor regions like the Pine Tree State in order to fund basic infrastructure development. In the case of the Atlantic & St. Lawrence Railroad, Charles Holden clearly was 268

correct that its construction would enrich the city of Portland directly and the state of Maine indirectly. Of course, its exclusive charter, which protected the railroad from competition, also promised to fill his pockets and those of the state‟s Democratic leaders, who joined Holden as stockholders and early officer in the corporation.

This individuality of the press in constantly re-shaping the Democratic creed to fit the

(largely commercial) needs of its constituents often enhanced the appeal of the party, but also could be employed to the party‟s detriment. Edwin Croswell willingly sacrificed his party to gratify his desire to keep construction going on the lucrative Erie Canal system. Believing that improvements and extensions to the canal were vital to his considerable speculations in canal- related industries, Croswell broke with his own party and fomented an uprising against its leadership. His campaign against the re-nomination of Azariah Flagg culminated with his

Hunker faction in control (briefly) of the party, but it also inspired radical Democrats to adopt the Wilmot Proviso and free soilism as means of securing the moral high ground and beating back Croswell‟s insurgency.

Democratic editors like Holden, Croswell, and Gray had hoped that liberalizing the party‟s economic platform and re-shaping its message to fit the needs of a dynamic commercial trade and a growing national market would modernize the party and ensure its vitality. However, their very willingness to alter that message only encouraged further experimentation and changes by other Democratic newspapers and voters. Once they had demonstrated the malleability of the

Democratic creed, they could not control voters‟ demands that the party take on new issues, namely moral reform issues like antislavery and temperance. When these issues threatened to eclipse the economic reforms these editors and their allies had fought for, they grew more cautious and retreated to the more conservative principles of the party. Unable or unwilling to 269

countenance antislavery or other such reforms, their suddenly reactionary stance encouraged new voters, the very voters whose loyalty they had hoped to claim, to seek new political organizations to represent them. They found those organizations in the Know Nothing and Republican Parties, as the fortune of northern Democrats began to decline by the mid-1850s.

Newspapers in the antebellum era arguably were the most important piece of the party apparatus. They formed the vibrant and continuous link between party and voter. However, these newspapers remained proudly independent in their operations. They determined how best to present the party creed to voters and expounded on what positions the party should take on important issues affecting their state and community. As we have seen, this independence lent the party an important flexibility, but it also allowed individual editors to undermine the party‟s message, if not its very principles (as Holden had done). The inconsistencies in these party organs had the potential to weaken voters‟ ideological attachment to the organization.

What explains the sometimes selfish and irresponsible course of partisan editors in this regard? Perhaps the irascible Joseph Gray offered the clearest contemporary insight into the self- identified duties of partisan editors and their proclivity for acting as gadflies. In 1851, the editor penned a short critique of a new travelogue by a European writer by the name of Marnier. The author had traveled throughout much of the United States and recorded his reactions to American society and its mores. Gray was particularly exercised by Marnier‟s comparison of the press of

Britain and the U.S., especially because the author predictably found the latter lacking. Marnier noted that the British press was more intellectual, more refined, and more literary. English papers were designed to educate, improve, and uplift, not merely to inform. In contrast, as Gray paraphrased Marnier, American newspapers,

270

Are too small, do not have a sufficient number of editors, do not run far enough around the ring of universal knowledge. They speak too flippantly of governmental affairs; impudently meddle with their representatives at Washington, tear off the awful veil from the sanctum sanctorum of President and Cabinet, and sit in judgment on their deeds.1

What was intended as a harsh indictment of the American press only comforted Gray, who embraced the image of the flippant, politically meddlesome newspaper.

Indeed, the editor acknowledged the vast differences between the English and American press, but found that they redounded to the credit of the latter, not the former. The English press, sustained by monopoly charters and staffed by scholars shut out of other professions was indeed more refined and literary. However, Gray countered, “our papers are intended merely as vehicles of news, and it is labor enough to take care of this in a country of so great extent, so many interests, and tenanted with so busy and enterprising a population.” Readers demanded that their papers inform them of “all the hurly burly throes of a new country and a new people.” In this description of the American press, Gray situated the newspaper not squarely within the party, but squarely within the commercial reading market. Newspapers were not demure literary publications, but rather no more than simple “vehicles of news,” responding to popular interests.2

The editor further emphasized popular “ownership” of the American press when he contrasted its political reporting with that of British newspapers. He accused the British press of too much servility to the crown and failing its readers by refusing to offer forthright, manly critiques of government policy. In a chest-thumping conclusion, Gray expressed his preference for “a Press that speaks its opinions frankly and openly and fearlessly, that looks into and criticizes the action of the „powers that be‟ and devotes itself – with a few exceptions – to the

1 Cleveland Plain Dealer, 18 July 1851. 2 Plain Dealer, 18 August 1851. 271

good of the mass – the mass by whom it is sustained.”3 Interestingly, he did not describe the newspaper as being beholden to party or ideology. Rather, it was beholden only to the masses, the reading public. Gray pointedly did not single out the government as sole focus of newspapers‟ investigations and criticisms. Instead, he used the broader term, the powers that be, suggesting that it was a newspaper‟s duty to “speak is opinions frankly and openly and fearlessly” not only to government, but to all those who exercised power in the country, the state, the community, and perhaps even the party.

This was Gray‟s illuminating portrait of the partisan newspaper. Like any commercial venture it was covetous of the support of the masses and solicitous of its variegated and vulgar interests. Beholden to no one other than the readers who sustained it, it acted independently and expressed its opinions loudly and freely. This independence of thought and liberty of speech gave it its essential character. Though these features of the partisan press bedeviled partisan leaders, he insisted that, more importantly, it won the editor “an abiding affection in the hearts of millions.”4 Whether successful in his political aims or not, the partisan editor ultimately consoled himself with the belief that he had served his community and his readers, if not his party, loyally.

3 Plain Dealer, 18 August 1851. 4 Plain Dealer, 18 August 1851. 272

Bibliography

MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS

Atlantic & St. Lawrence Railroad Company Records, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College Salmon P. Chase Papers William P. Fessenden Papers Millard Fillmore Papers Portland Anti-Slavery Society Records, Maine Historical Society James Shepherd Pike Papers, University of Maine Special Collections William Henry Seward Papers Gerrit Smith Papers Benjamin Tappan Papers Martin Van Buren Papers Israel Washburn Papers, University of Maine Elisha Whittlesey Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS

Akron Beacon Albany Argus Albany Atlas Albany Evening Journal Ashtabula Sentinel Augusta Age Bangor Daily Whig & Courier Belfast Republican Journal Buffalo Courier Buffalo Express The Campaign Dealer and Great Political Northwester (OH) Cayuga Patriot Cincinnati Enquirer Cleveland Herald Cleveland Plain Dealer Cleveland Times Cleveland True Democrat Conneaut Reporter Daily National Intelligencer (DC) Eastern Times (ME) Geauga Whig Goshen Democrat and Whig Goshen Independent Republican 273

Gospel Banner (ME) Hallowell Liberty Standard Hallowell Free Soil Republican (formerly, the Liberty Standard) Kennebec Journal (ME) The National Era New York Herald New York Times Ohio Statesman Portland Advertiser Portland Eastern Argus Portland Inquirer Ravenna Star Rome Sentinel Rochester Democrat Rochester Republican & Daily Advertiser Sandusky Clarion Toledo Blade Universalist Quarterly and General Review Upper Sandusky Democratic Pioneer Utica Daily Gazette Washington Union

CONTEMPORARY PUBLICATIONS AND PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS

Barton, James L. A Brief Sketch of the Commerce of the Great Northern and Western Lakes. Buffalo: Jewett, Thomas & Co., 1847.

Bishop, William G. & Attree, William H. Report of the Debate and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of New York, 1846. Albany: Evening Atlas, 1846. Google Books.

Brockway, Beman. Fifty Years in Journalism, Embracing Recollections and Personal Experiences. Watertown, New York: Daily Times Printing and Publishing, 1891. Google Books.

Charter and By-Laws of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad Co. Portland: Bearce, Starbird,

Rich and Co., 1855.

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Matthew R. Isham

Education The Pennsylvania State University, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 The University of Maine, Master of Arts, United States History, 1999 Colby College, Waterville, Maine, Bachelor of Arts, Magna Cum Laude with Honors and Distinction in the major, English Literature, 1993

Professional Experience Research assistant, The George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, The Pennsylvania State University, 2010 – Pennsylvania Civil War Sesquicentennial Digital Archives Project Lecturer, Department of History and Religious Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, 2004- 2005, 2007-2009 Editorial assistant, Civil War History, 2005-2007 Research assistant to William Blair, “Why Didn‟t the North Hang Some Rebels? The Postwar Debate over Punishment of Treason,” the Frank L. Klement Lecture Series, Marquette University, 2004

Publications “Slavery and Freedom in Pennsylvania,” Civil War Pennsylvania 150 website (www.pacivilwar150.com: 2009) “Babes in Arms: Children of the Civil War – a Historical Overview,” Civil War Pennsylvania 150 website (www.pacivilwar150.com: 2009) “The Democratic Party and Antislavery,” “The Mexican War and Antislavery,” “Radical Republicans,” in The Encyclopedia of Abolitionism, Peter Hinks and John McKivigan eds. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007): 213-215, 471-472, 561-562.

Awards and Professional Honors George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center Pre-doctoral Fellow, 2005-2007 Warren W. Hassler Fellowship, The Pennsylvania State University, 2005 and 2006 James Landing Fellowship, The Pennsylvania State University, 2005 and 2006 Norlands Fellow, Norlands Living History Center, Livermore, Maine, 1999 Phi Alpha Theta, University of Maine, 1997-1999; Penn State University, 2003

Presentations “„To Bind Them Both in Pacific Obligations‟: Maine, British Canada, and the Expansion of International Trade in the Antebellum Era,” Third Annual Graduate Student History Conference, George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, The Pennsylvania State University, February 2009 “Maine‟s Manifest Destiny: Maine, Canada and the Expansion of International Trade, 1845-1848,” 12th Annual New Frontiers in Graduate History Conference, York University: Toronto, Canada, February 2008

Isham, Matthew