Lauren N. Haumesser

“Not man enough”: Gender and Democratic Campaign Tactics in the Election of 1856

Throughout the 1850s, the Democratic Party was frequently, as one contemporary put it, “not on speaking terms with itself.”1 Democrats disagreed on issues as fundamental as the scope of federal and state power, political economy, and even slavery. Americans had debated the relative power of the federal and state governments since the founding of the republic. Now, however, Democratic leaders had to adjudicate the dispute within their own party. Moderate Democrats emphasized states rights within the federal system, while radicals argued for states’ total sovereignty. Nor did Democrats agree on a vision for

America’s economy. Southern planters celebrated agrarianism, while a group of Democrats who dubbed themselves the “Young Americans” believed the government should support economic development projects such as railroad development and harbor improvements.2

Party members did not even agree on the most important political issue of the day: slavery. The party and its members—like almost every American in the nineteenth century—were intensely racist. All Democrats agreed that blacks were biologically inferior.

But Free Soil Democrats and slaveholding Democrats divided over whether slavery should be extended into America’s new western territories. 3 Free Soil Democrats, who were concentrated in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Ohio, were suspicious of

Southern planters. Free Soilers believed planters had allied with New England textile

1 Quoted in Jean Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983), 145. 2 On the Young Americans’ support for publically-funded economic development measures, see Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828-1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 36-79. 3 Baker, Affairs of Party, 178. 2 barons to profit off the backs of poor whites and slave labor. They saw slaveholders as undemocratic, grasping aristocrats who were endangering America’s democratic experiment—the very type of centralized power Free Soil Democrats thought their party was committed to fighting.4 Southern slaveholders (and Southerners who aspired to own slaves) responded. They argued that slavery was a positive good: the bedrock of the South’s social structure and booming economy. Slaveholders had long expected to dominate the

Democratic Party and use it as a vehicle to protect Southern interests, but in the 1840s,

Northern free soilers had begun to challenge that dominance.

Republicans also divided over the slavery question, but their differences in opinion were not nearly as great as the Democrats’. Created in response to the Kansas-Nebraska

Act of 1854, the Republican Party stood for the eventual end of slavery. Republicans only disagreed on how and when slavery would end. Conservative and moderate Republicans believed that nonextension would promote voluntary, gradual manumission. This group’s main concern was securing land for free white men to work without competition from slave labor. But a vocal minority of progressive Republicans, by contrast, believed in immediate abolition and social equality—a radical position at the time. Republicans disagreed on how to end slavery, but they agreed that slavery should end.

The emergence of the Republican Party and the ongoing violence over slavery in

Kansas guaranteed that slavery would be the issue in the election of 1856. The Republican platform stated that it was the “primary object. . . of our Federal Government” to secure the

4 Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). David Wilmot’s 1846 proposal to ban slavery in any territory acquired as a result of the war with Mexico divided Congress on sectional lines instead of the usual party lines, a harbinger of late antebellum politics. See ibid., 5. 3

“right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. . . to all persons.”5 It was thus the federal government’s responsibility to take a stand against slavery. A distinct position on family and gender issues bolstered the Republicans’ anti-slavery position. Republicans advocated for reformed gender roles. They believed in companionate marriage: the idea that men and women should marry for love, not economic benefit. Slavery violated this ideal by denying enslaved men and women the right to marry legally. And when a white slaveholder raped an enslaved woman, he violated the sanctity of her marriage and of his own. Republicans also believed in a type of domestic feminism that argued that all women, regardless of status, had the right not to work and to exercise full control over their homes. Slavery violated domestic feminism by forcing enslaved women to work alongside men. Republican candidate John C. Frémont and his wife Jessie represented the whole platform perfectly.

John was ardently opposed to slavery, and Jessie was the model of a progressive wife: beautiful and domestic, but also an intelligent and trusted advisor.6

In response, Democrats retrenched on the slavery question. Devoting more than half of their platform to slavery, Democrats declared, “Congress has no power under the

Constitution, to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several states.”7

Democrats believed that leaving the decision to allow slavery up to the territories the only

“sound and safe solution” to the “slavery question.”8 Popular sovereignty was the broadest

5 "Republican Party Platform of 1856," http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29619. 6 In his monograph on gender and anti-slavery in the 1856 campaign, Michael D. Pierson argues that "one can argue that antislavery activity increased in large degree because slavery became more incongruous to northern family ideals as that region underwent the alterations" of separate spheres and development of "restrained manhood" (18). On Jessie Frémont, Pierson argues that conservative Republicans appreciated Jessie’s beauty and domestic talent; more liberal Republicans emphasized that she was intelligent and advised her husband on political matters. See Micheal D. Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 7 "Democratic Party Platform of 1856," http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29576. 8 Ibid. 4 possible position that all Democrats could support. The platform did not, however, speak to any of the nuances of the slavery issue that divided Democrats. The party’s nomination of

James Buchanan—a Pennsylvanian with Southern sympathies—covered up but did not resolve Democrats’ divisions.9 From the convention to election day, Democrats kept their message broad to accommodate the party’s many factions. In 1856, Democrats believed slavery should be decided by popular sovereignty. They decried Republicans’ support for the federal restriction of slavery as radical, “alarming,” and “dangerous.”10

Neither the Democrats’ platform nor their choice of candidate resolved the divisions within the party. With the election looming, Democratic leaders wondered how they would unite their party to defeat the smaller but united Republicans. They faced two fundamental challenges: to foster unity within their own party across tactical and policy divides, and to paint the new Republican Party as illegitimate, sectionalist, and disunionist. Democratic leaders had to convince their disparate constituencies that they were, in fact, natural allies.

Democrats accomplished this by depicting themselves as conservatives on issues of gender and arguing that Republicans—and by extension much of Northern society—were gender radicals.

1856 marked the first time a party systematically deployed gender as an election strategy. In 1852, Democrats had faced the dying Whig Party. Presiding over a divided party, Whig candidate Winfield Scott provided little competition for Democrats. Democrats, meanwhile, had attained an uneasy peace over the Compromise of 1850. Northern and

Southern Democrats united against slavery agitation and nominated Franklin Pierce, whom

9 For more on Buchanan’s biography and his appeal to Democrats as a presidential candidate, see Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 274. 10 "Democratic Party Platform of 1856". 5

Michael Holt describes as an “inoffensive dark horse.”11 Democrats did not label Whigs as gender radicals in the 1852 campaign because they did not need to in order to win the election. Democrats hoped to absorb moderate and conservative Whigs (those who supported the 1850 compromise) and isolate and discredit antislavery radicals, ultimately rendering the Whig party defunct. Democrats sometimes taunted Scott for worrying too much about “offending” his party’s abolitionist wing.12 But more often, Democrats claimed the problem lay in one small section of the Whig Party. In 1852, the Richmond Enquirer warned its Democratic readers against conflating a few Northern “fanatics and agitators” with the whole body of “constitutional, sound men in the North” who opposed abolitionism.13

What changed in 1856? How did Democrats wield gendered arguments in their

1856 campaign? And what does the campaign tell us about American political culture in the mid-1800s? This essay will answer these questions by focusing on four states that represent the party’s divers constituencies: New York, Ohio, Virginia, and Georgia.14

11 Michael Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 72. 12 “The Game Exposed,” Richmond Enquirer, May 15, 1852, 2. 13 “The Southern Whig Press and Mr. Hallett, Chairman of the National Democratic Committee,” Richmond Enquirer, May 18, 1852, 2. 14 This argument builds on works on gender, nineteenth-century political culture, and male mastery, which for all their contributions have yet to explain how and why gender became such an important part of Democratic politics. Historians including Gail Bederman have come to understand gender as a “historical, ideological process.” This is the most recent development in the scholarship. Previously, gender was understood as being defined by one’s cultural context; before that, scholars believed that gender was an unchanging essence. Institutions, ideas, and daily practices afford men and women different ideas and opportunities to explain who they are and what they can do; this study will show how men and women constructed their gender through two particular political institutions: the Democratic Party and presidential elections. On gender as a process, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7. For an example of an argument for gender as a product of cultural context, see E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993). This study also benefits from work on gender and nineteenth-century politics. In the past twenty years, historians have studied the role of gender in the Republican Party. They have shown that Republicans 6

Democrats in New York included Free Soilers who opposed slavery’s extension but who had not defected to the Republicans. New York was also home to the Young America movement, whose members embraced the market revolution and supported internal improvements.15 Democrats in Ohio, though, were suspicious of any federal intervention; they opposed tariffs, federally sponsored internal improvements, and federal intervention advocated for reform on gender issues in general and women’s issues specifically, and that this position helped draw people to the Republican Party. See Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes. Pierson argues that Republicans advocated reformed gender roles (including companionate marriage and domestic feminism), which allowed women a greater place in politics and also created room for a sexual critique of slavery. For a similar argument on Republicans in the postbellum period, see Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Elizabeth Varon has shown that the Republicans’ Whig predecessors also made room for women in their party—they by arguing that women were inherently moral and thus their participation (and partisanship) was good for politics. See Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Nina Silber has demonstrated that ideas about gender—womanhood especially—created differences in the ways the North and South thought about, experienced, and remembered the Civil War. See Nina Silber, Gender and the Sectional Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Literature on male mastery and masculinity is also important for this work, since ideas about masculinity influenced politics just as much as ideas about femininity. Though in their hearts men sometimes felt inadequate for not being able to live up to a masculine ideal, in their homes and in their politics they justified their mastery by those same ideals. On how the attempt to live up to idealized typologies of masculinity made men feel inadequate, see Stephen W. Berry, All That Makes a Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Stephanie McCurry’s work on yeoman’s mastery in antebellum South Carolina is foundational. She argues that yeomen’s independence was defined against both the enslavement of African Americans and the subordination of women, and that evangelicalism helped frame these dependencies as part of the natural order. In the end, she argues, yeomen fought in the Civil War because they “found common cause with planters in maintaining and policing the class, gender, and racial boundaries of citizenship in the slave republic” (228). See Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Similarly, Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover’s edited collection of essays uncovers that “men internalized a sense of manliness through relationships to wives, children, and slaves by subverting challenges to white male authority leveled by these dependents and by heading autonomous, self-sufficient households”(ix). Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover, ed. Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). This gender construction then played out in political life, where Southern Democrats—especially wealthy ones—set to prove their manliness by dominating men outside the home, not just women and slaves within it. See Wallace Hettle, The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001). As Hettle puts it, "Men instilled with strict self-discipline that enabled them to compete effectively inn an economy based on the domination of slaves would learn to rule over less successful white men" (83). Southern, martial masculinity was not the only ideal available to men. Amy Greenberg argues that this typology competed with one that she calls “restrained masculinity,” which emphasized male restraint and women’s morality. This, she says, was more often taken up by men who lived in the North or urban areas. See Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 15 On Free Soil and the Democratic Party, see Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824- 1854. On the Young America movement, see Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828-1861. Eyal argues that Young America Democrats pushed Democratic thinking forward on economic policy, internal improvements, and political reform. 7 in slavery.16 Meanwhile, economic development in Virginia fostered divisions among

Democrats there. Slaveowning Virginians in the Tidewater responded to Western

Virginians’ perceived threat to their economic and political power by demanding even stronger protections for slavery.17 Democrats in Georgia likewise demanded slavery be protected. But arguments about internal improvements and taxation that had the potential to move votes in New York and Ohio had no effect on Georgia’s Democrats.18 Democrats in each of these states offered profoundly different economic visions for the country. Yet in one thing they were similar. Throughout the 1856 campaign season, Democratic newspapers, songs, biographies, and political cartoons everywhere collapsed the

Republican political spectrum into caricature and stereotype, using gendered images to paint all Republicans as radicals on issues ranging from women’s rights to slavery.

Democrats used gender in three distinct but related ways. One of these was to criticize John and Jessie Frémont’s marriage and personal habits. A second tactic associated the Republican Party with the women’s rights and free love movements. A third and final tactic argued that abolitionism was at once the source of all Republican gender radicalism and its most terrifying manifestation. Together, these three tactics helped Democrats define what they stood for: patriarchy, social order, racial hierarchy, and union. Gendered images also unified Democrats by defining what they stood against: woman’s rights, free love, abolitionism, and disunion. These tactics built among Democrats across the country a

16 On the similarities and differences among Democrats in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, Baker, Affairs of Party, 143-45. 17 On Virginia’s economic development and the growing schism among Virginians in the 1850s, see William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 18 Anthony Gene Carey argues that this divergence between national politics and local issues pushed Georgia toward secession. See Anthony Gene Carey, Parties, Slavery, and the Union in Antebellum Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997). 8 sense that they shared a fundamental conservatism that, despite all of their other disagreements, made them more alike than different. But this temporary unity came at a terrific price. When Democrats indicted all of northern society as deeply radical and disordered, they alienated Northerners in their own party and pushed the country to the brink of disunion.

Radical marriage, radical party: John and Jessie Frémont

The Republicans’ nomination of John C. Frémont to face the Democrats’ James

Buchanan in the election of 1856 brought gender to the forefront of the campaign. Frémont was handsome and youthful—forty-three, compared to Buchanan’s sixty-five—and married to the beautiful Jessie Benton Frémont. Jessie, as Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s daughter, was also intelligent and well versed in politics. Republican strategists recognized

Jessie’s potential for generating enthusiasm in the election. Republican campaign songs described Jessie as “sweet” and “bright.” They even hinted that her political acumen would help John in the White House, writing, “for the Chieftain’s White Mansion she’s better than

[one].”19 For their part, rank-and-file Republicans saw in Jessie what they wanted to see: conservative Republicans saw a beautiful wife, while progressives saw an accomplished woman who would help her husband in the White House.20

Democrats criticized John’s appearance. Newspapers from New York to Georgia made snide remarks about Frémont’s supposedly effeminate hairstyle, which was thick,

19 "O, Jessie Is a Sweet, Bright Lady," in The Campaign of 1856. Fremont Songs for the People., ed. Thomas Drew (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856); "Jessie Fremont," in The Campaign of 1856. Fremont Songs for the People., ed. Thomas Drew (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856). 20 For a discussion of the different ways in which Republicans understood Jessie Frémont, see Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes, 129-33. 9 wavy, and parted in the middle. According to Democrats, this was feminine and unfashionable. “Owing to the feminine arrangement of his locks,” New York’s Brooklyn

Daily Eagle claimed that Frémont was “the most distinct and sui generis in the Union.”21

Though one Republican campaign novel defended Frémont’s “heavy, waving, dark hair” as parting “naturally in the middle,” Democrats shot back that the center part was totally indefensible. The accusations against Frémont’s presentation went on—that the serious male farmers and laborers of New York would not vote for an effete man who parted his hair down the middle, that Frémont had the manners of a “polished courtesan.”22 By making fun of Frémont’s hairstyle, Democratic newspapers both slurred Republican men as feminine and portrayed the Democratic Party as the party for real men.23

Even more troubling for Democrats than John’s appearance was Jessie’s public involvement in the campaign. Democrats had allowed women to be involved in their public campaigns since the 1830s. Women attended Democratic mass meetings, listened to debates, baked cakes for party barbecues, and even marched in torchlight parades. And yet when Jessie appeared publicly in Frémont’s campaign, Democrats retrenched, decrying her involvement in politics as evidence of the Republicans’ gender radicalism. Democrats worried that Jessie did not depend totally on John as they believed a proper wife should.

Democratic newspapers were aghast at Jessie’s public appearances during the campaign. A crowd of Republicans gathered outside the Frémont’s lodgings in New York, cheering and

21 "Fremont's Religion--Two Fremonts in the Field," The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 11 1856, 2. An article in The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer implied that Democratic hero Andrew Jackson would never have bothered to part his hair down the middle. See “Fremont," The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, October 9 1856. 22 "Prospects in New York," The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, August 20 1856, 4; "A Remarkable Man," Southern Banner, August 7 1856, 3. 23 Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover argue that “manhood did not exist except in contrast to womanhood.” Thus, Frémont’s hair marked him out as unmanly because his appearance did not contrast sufficiently with a woman’s (or so Democrats implied). See Glover, Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South, xiii. 10 crying out for the Frémonts to make an appearance. John made a brief speech and then retired. After a short wait, Jessie came out on the balcony, and the roar of the Republican supporters below greeted her. The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer decried the interval before

Jessie appeared as a mere “pretense of holding back—a sham of coyness.” This was no retiring true woman. The Enquirer insinuated that Jessie relished her role as “the feminine partner in the business.”24 Jessie’s independence indicted John’s masculinity as much as it did Jessie’s femininity. It was clear to Democrats that John, who Democrats frequently emasculated as the “husband of Jessie,” neither desired nor was capable of controlling his wife.25

Democrats in New York worried about Jessie’s independence as much as Democrats in Cincinnati did. Holding forth at an outdoor meeting one August night in New York’s

Lower East Side, Democrat Isaiah Rynders claimed that Frémont’s election would render

Jessie president “de facto,” because she was the “best man of the two.”26 Rynders exaggerated Jessie’s control over her husband’s politics. But in so doing, he made an important point: Jessie’s autonomy was masculine, subversive, and threatening. The way

Democratic papers in Cincinnati and New York depicted Jessie as a radically independent woman united Democrats in those areas against the Republican Party.

Contrasting the Democratic ideal with the outrageous example of the Frémonts,

Democratic journals argued that husbands were responsible for maintaining control over their wives. To drive the point home, journals published stories about marriages that went

24 "New Election 'Wrinkle' -- 'Our Jessie'," The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, July 9 1856, 2. A similar article questions why Jessie appeared at a campaign rally on her own, as a stand-in for John, after John was forced to cancel. See "New Mode of Electioneering for the Presidency," The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, July 13 1856, 2. 25 See both "The Closing Scenes of the Monster Democratic Meeting at Indianapolis," The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, July 19 1856, 4; "Inasmuch as the Black Republicans," The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, July 4 1856, 2. 26 "The Fourteenth Ward Democracy in a Glow of Enthusiasm," The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 15 1856, 2. 11 sour when wives struggled for too much control. One typical story from New York was titled “Three Ways of Managing a Husband.” In this account, a wife finds that two of the three ways of relating to her husband end in disaster. The first method, in which the wife assumes that she “had a right to say and do a little as I pleased,” results in her husband being unable to “bear anything from me.” The second failure came when she tried to

“struggle fiercer than ever for the ascendency.” The couple fights, the husband withdraws, and the couple lives aloof from one another for a full year. Finally, she “gave up,” her “pride, self-will, [and] anger. . . conquered.” She “was a weak woman in the hands of a strong- minded man.” The “least” she could do was to “obey.” But in her new obedience, the wife finds peace. Tying up her own will “with a silken fetter” miraculously transforms her marriage into a happy one.27 For the Democrats who would have read the story, the moral was clear: an orderly and happy marriage—as well as an orderly and happy society— depended on husbands’ control over their wives.

Southern periodicals were in lockstep with Northern ones in emphasizing that men must control their wives. The Richmond Enquirer referred back to the Roman Empire to prove the point. When Roman husbands “relaxed their rule. . . . wives, children, and slaves had lost much more in protection, guardianship, affection, and even supervision and control, than they had gained by the larger liberty in which they were permitted to indulge.” This, the Enquirer told readers, critically weakened the Roman Republic, leaving it

“disgraced and lingering to her fall.”28 Frémont’s own relaxed rule over his own wife, then, would surely set a bad example for American families. If Americans adopted the Frémonts’ model of companionate marriage, it would destabilize society. And because Democrats

27 As retold in Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes, 106. 28 "The Family," The Richmond Enquirer, July 1 1856, 1. 12 objected to the Frémonts’ marriage, their elevation to the White House would also strain the bonds of union. It was up to the Democrats to stop Frémont.

Though Democrats believed in patriarchy, they also believed men should be benevolent, generous patriarchs. Short stories and poems on the duties of paternalism filled Democratic periodicals. One story tells of a husband who rules over his wife with

“selfish, arbitrary, and implacable” mastery. His wife, who had previously been like a

“confiding, dependent child”—the ideal Democratic wife—soon becomes a “self-possessed woman.” Physical illness follows quickly on the heels of moral decay, and she dies of consumption. Another story emphasizes the positive effects of one husband’s generosity.

He has the power to grant her every wish, and he usually does. He is pleased by his own benevolence, while she is “happy in the possession of a complying husband and pleasant anticipation of future gratifications.”29

On this score, too, Democrats from diverse parts of the country could see that

Frémont had failed. Democratic papers scandalized their readers by reporting that

Frémont had abandoned his own mother. According to the Richmond Enquirer, Frémont’s mother was widowed, impoverished, and living alone in Charleston, where she had become a washer woman for “several benevolent ladies in the neighborhood” who had given her work only to “lessen. . . the humiliation of her condition.”30 It is possible that this story is apocryphal, the mere fact that the newspaper printed it matters more than the story’s veracity. In New York, meanwhile, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle harped on Frémont’s neglect of another kind of dependent: those men who were under his command during an expedition

29 Free Hearts and Free Homes, 107-08. 30 "John C. Fremont's Mother," The Richmond Enquirer, October 24 1856, 4. "Grand Rally in the Fifth Ward," The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 19 1856, 2. 13 across the Rocky Mountains. During one expedition, ten men died in the snowy Rockies after Frémont had insisted that they forge onward. “No man”—no real man—“with an

American heart would desert his comrades while life lasted.”31 Democrats believed that

Frémont had failed to control his wife, and he had failed to provide for those who depended on him.

James Buchanan, a bachelor, did not have an immediate family of his own to rule and protect. Democrats thus searched for other ways to cast Buchanan as the responsible patriarch in opposition to Frémont. The Richmond Enquirer did this by reporting that

Buchanan had given 4000 dollars to create a trust for the “relief of poor and indigent females in the city of Lancaster,” Buchanan’s hometown in Pennsylvania. This evidence of

Buchanan’s generosity toward impoverished, dependent women, the paper assured readers, was “only one of the many evidences of Mr. Buchanan’s judicious and warmhearted generosity.”32 Buchanan had no wife or children, but he nonetheless modeled the type of responsible, benevolent patriarchy all Democrats could agree on. Published by partisan newspaper editors and read by men and women alike, stories like these about

Frémont and Buchanan reflect the values of editors and readers alike.33

In Democrats’ eyes, the Frémonts’ marriage embodied the irrational, destructive nature of the Republican Party as a whole. Jessie Frémont seemed mannish in her

31 "Grand Rally in the Fifth Ward." 32 "Mr. Buchanan's Charities," The Richmond Enquirer, September 26 1856, 2. A similar article published in the same paper one month later praised Buchanan’s charitable activities. See "Buchanan at Home," The Richmond Enquirer, October 24 1856, 1. 33 The types of advertisements in the papers indicate that Democratic publishers knew women to be among their readership. Innumerable notices for mass meetings, barbecues, and parades invited “the ladies” to join in the celebrations. Newspapers also included advertisements for items in which only a woman would be interested. One antebellum Democratic magazine, for instance, included a detailed review of a self-improvement book for women, which offered advice on such topics as “female responsibilities,” “self-education,” “reasoning and originality,” and “love of domestic concerns.” See “The Young Woman's Guide, by Wm. A. Alcott," The New-Yorker, December 14, 1839, 205. 14 independence, and John Frémont was feminine in his looks and inability to control or provide for his family. These traits were problematic on their own: Democrats could not imagine that a man who exercised so little control over his wife should be strong enough to lead the country. But the Frémonts’ personal transgressions also conjured images of creeping social disorder that Democrats believed led to political instability. This was an especially powerful appeal in 1856 because, with the ongoing violence in Kansas,

Americans were deeply concerned about the possibility of disunion. Democrats implied that any party led by John Frémont could not maintain the stable social order necessary to preserve the union. However much other issues divided Democrats, all were happy to define themselves in opposition to John Frémont as the party of patriarchy and of social and political order.

Guilty by association: women’s rights and Free Love

In 1856, Democrats also indicted the whole Republican Party as guilty by association with the women’s rights and Free Love movements. Few northerners supported women’s rights and Free Love. But Democrats nonetheless believed that the movements’ messages of women’s equality and individual autonomy threatened the patriarchal social order and indeed the union itself. The Democrats portrayed themselves as the party of conservative gender roles. Many Northerners and Southerners alike supported conservative gender roles, so the Democrats’ position allowed the party to equate its gender conservatism with preserving the union.

Women’s rights activists supported the Republican Party. This fact provided

Democrats with another opportunity to indict Republicans as gender radicals. Women’s 15 rights activists hoped to liberalize divorce laws and expand opportunities for women beyond the home. Democrats found the way these ideas questioned men’s dominance in the private and public spheres deeply troubling, and party papers across the country fanned the flames of their insecurities. In the South, the Richmond Enquirer wrote that

“women deem the throwing off the restraints of modesty and marriage, a ‘sine qua non.’”

Among liberal northern circles, the Enquirer warned its readers, “women wear masculine attire, preach infidel sermons, abuse the constitution and the marriage tie, and yet do not lose caste in society.” This was a nightmarish vision of society for Democratic men. Changes in divorce laws would undermine men’s power at home, while women’s speechifying challenged men’s power over the public sphere. The Enquirer finished by making sure readers understood these northern liberals were intimately related to the Republican

Party, warning that “Frémont is run. . . . as the anti-marriage and anti-female virtue candidate.”34 The north was already “a vast magazine of explosive vices and corruptions,” another Enquirer article reported. If Frémont won the election and woman’s rights were imposed on the South, the ensuing divorces would threaten the very “fabric of [the]

Union.”35

Not all Republicans supported the woman’s rights movement: the movement remained on the fringes of Northern politics. Nonetheless, Democrats argued repeatedly

34 "Free Love and Fremont," The Richmond Enquirer, September 16 1856, 1. 35 "No. 2: Will the Union Be Preserved? If Dissolved Can the South Maintain Herself?," The Richmond Enquirer, September 9 1856, 2. As Steven Hahn has written, “In the patriarchal household economy, relations of legal and customary dependency, not equality, linked all to the male head.” Democrats would have considered women’s rights activists’ calls for equality subversive because women and children were supposed to depend on men, not relate to them as equals. Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 31. Rebecca Edwards’ study of gender in post-Civil War partisanship affirms that Democrats believed Republicans would undermine men’s control over their wives. She writes, “The logical end of Republicanism, its opponents warned, was that husbands would lose authority over wives. If any man needed further proof, he could look to the northern legislatures that were meddling with their marriage laws.” See Edwards, Angels in the Machinery, 20. 16 that since women’s rights activists supported the Republican Party, all Republicans must support the women’s rights movement. Below a reprinting of the demands that a women’s rights convention made on the Republican Party, a Democratic newspaper in Ohio mockingly asked “how [Republicans] can resist the demands of these ‘strong-minded women.’” These women demanded that the Republican Party support their movement. The

Democratic paper leapt to the conclusion that Republicans had incorporated the activists’

“ridiculous . . . nonsense and fanaticism” into their “creed.”36 Never mind that the paper did not prove that Republicans reciprocated women’s rights activists’ support. The mere association was powerful enough to damn the whole Republican Party in the eyes of

Democrats. Another article shows New York Democrats deploying the same tactic of associating women’s rights activists with the Republican Party. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that attendees at a Frémont meeting in New Hampshire had hung John and Jessie banners, including one that said “Jessie for the White House.” “It is evident,” the Eagle intoned, “that our opponent fully sympathises [sic] with the women’s rights movement.”37

This is a patent exaggeration of the banners’ meaning: these Republican supporters seem to have been simply parroting back a version of the the “give ‘em Jessie” refrain that had circulated since the start of the campaign. Nonetheless, the idea that Republicans would force the women’s rights movement on conservative men was a threatening one.

Democratic strategists capitalized on the fear of the women’s rights movement; they urged voters to overlook their differences and unite to defend male dominance.

36 "The Black-Republican Party and the Strong-Minded Woman," The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, November 29 1856, 4. 37 "Women's Rights," The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 2 1856, 2. Another Brooklyn Daily Eagle article punned that a women’s rights convention had been called off after the women had become “palpabl[y] split” over Frémont’s center part, condemning the women as silly and Frémont as feminine in one turn of phrase. See ""Take Your Time, Miss Lucy"," The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 14 1856, 1. 17

While damning all Republicans as women’s rights supporters, the Democratic Party presented itself as the protector of an idealized, domestic femininity. The Democrats’ ideal woman was the unthreatening opposite of the “pantalooned Amazon[s]” who were subverting men’s authority.38 Northern and southern Democratic newspapers alike glorified this vision of womanhood during the 1856 campaign. One fictional story published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the fall of 1856 traced the vicissitudes of a couple’s married life, from the first night home after their honeymoon, to the loss of their first-born son, to the marriage of their children. Though the marriage was marked by “agony” as much as “intense joy,” the wife felt truly fulfilled by the “duties of married life.”39

Democratic newspapers in the South also praised women who were domestic and unassuming. An obituary eulogized a Richmond-area woman as a loving wife and excellent homemaker. “She was. . .the cherished wife, the devoted mother,” the obituary read. “Her rural home was remarkable for the most unbounded, generous, and refined hospitality to the many visitors who thronged it.” In her loving relationship with her husband and her precise care for her home, the woman had developed “all the graces which beautify the female character.”40 Similarly, a book review in the same paper praised a female author as a

“beautiful specimen of that modest, shrinking, feminine nature.”41 Why were Democratic women superior to Republican women? The Richmond Enquirer pointed to their husbands.

Democratic men controlled and protected the wives, keeping them happily domestic and dependent. “No wonder the women are rebelling,” the Enquirer sneered of women’s rights

38 "Lady's Logic, or Miss Murray on Liberty," The Richmond Enquirer, July 4 1856, 1. 39 "A Home Picture," The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 2 1856, 1. 40 "Obituary," The Richmond Enquirer, October 3 1856, 2. 41 "Lady's Logic, or Miss Murray on Liberty," 1. 18 activists. “It is shameful and disgraceful to leave wives and children unprotected.”42

Northern and Southern Democrats here united to assert that women should be domestic and submissive. Democratic journals argued that the Republicans stood for divorce and public disorder, while a Democratic victory would protect women’s pure, domestic nature—and men’s total control.

Free Love activists provided another reason for Democrats to unite against the

Republican Party. Free Love supporters argued that women and men should be free to remain in sexual relationships for as long—and only as long—as they loved their partner.

The idea that people could enter and leave sexual relationships when they chose would have struck Democrats a radical assertion of individuals’ self-ownership—especially for women, whom conservatives believed owed their husbands access to their bodies.43 Free

Love activists also rejected parental authority over a couple’s children, instead allowing the

Free Love community to raise collectively all of the community’s children. Combined with the rejection of marriage, collective child rearing threatened the family as the fundamental unit of society. By threatening American families, Free Love threatened American society and government as a whole.44 Finally, all of Free Love’s practices, from extramarital sex to the rejection of marriage to the equality of men and women, seemed to defy God, a bad precedent for Democrats who believed that male mastery and distinct gender roles were divinely ordained.

42 "Woman's Rights," The Richmond Enquirer, April 15 1856, 2. 43 Indeed, Michael Pierson believes that the Free Love movement, not women’s rights activists, represented “the era’s most explicit threat to marriage as an institution.” It was thus easy to unite around marriage as the “only bastion of legitimate sexual activity.” See Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes, 105. 44 As Rebecca Edwards puts it, in mid-century politics, “good government depended on proper household order; tyranny or anarchy, as threats to the republic, appeared in the guise of sexual sin.” See Edwards, Angels in the Machinery, 17. 19

Democratic papers from in the North, South, and West capitalized on this radicalism.

Newspapers scared their readers by detailing Free Love activists’ demands and exaggerating how many Republicans had already embraced the doctrine. Cincinnati’s Daily

Enquirer painted for its readers a picture of those who attended “‘free-love’ meetings” in

New York. The men were “nasty, blear-eyed, sallow-faced, long-haired things” who “h[u]ng round the skirts of” “loose,” “strong-minded women.” All involved were “lewd and dissolute.”45 As with the women’s rights activists, here again a Democratic paper has deployed the trope of the masculine woman and the feminine, even infantilized man to demonize social liberals. Editors knew that the idea of Free Love would horrify Cincinnati’s

Democrats—or indeed, Democrats anywhere—because it represented a radical, highly sectional form of social disorder.

Papers in New York and Richmond united with Cincinnati’s Daily Enquirer to condemn Free Lovers. One Democrat wrote to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle incensed by

Republican plans to undermine civil society by giving Americans too much of all kinds of freedoms, including “free love and a large number of other freedoms of appetite and action too numerous and unsuitable to mention.”46 This New York Democrat did not separate Free

Love from any of the other freedoms Republicans called for: all were radical Republican policies that sought to undermine social order. The Democratic paper in Richmond likewise accused Free Lovers of pursuing individual freedom at the expense of social stability. The new “saloon of Free Love” in New York was a sure sign that Northern liberals had “grown restive under the restraints of marriage, continence, and chastity.”47 Paranoia about Free

45 "A Chance for the Police," The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, August 23 1856, 2. 46 "To the Editor of the Eagle," The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 9 1856, 2. 47 "Free Love and Fremont," 1. 20

Love reached a fever pitch in a Richmond Enquirer article that accused Free Lovers of wanting to

cut clear asunder every social, domestic, and religious tie that binds man to man, and keeps society together; to banish religion, law, order, female virtue, parental authority, and separate property, and to inaugurate no-government, the unrestricted ‘sovereignty of the individual’ and the unbridled gratification of every passion.48

Richmond and New York Democrats’ profound fear of a social movement that claimed very few adherents shows how effective the Democrats were in linking radical social movements to the terrifying specter of disunion. Free Love became for Democrats both a practically divisive social movement—Free Love communities existed in the North but not the South—and a symbol of Republicans’ northern identity. Moreover, that New York

Democrats were just as concerned as Southerners reminds us that many Northerners, even in Republican states like New York, remained profoundly socially conservative despite the liberal movements that swirled around them. This allowed Democrats to reiterate their argument that they were the only national, unionist party.

Democratic newspapers also dramatically overstated Free Love’s prevalence and influence in the Republican Party. Just as they had with the women’s rights movement,

Democratic papers equated Free Lovers’ support for Republicans with Republican support of Free Love. In New York, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle indicted the Republican Party by pointing to the support it received from Free Love activists. “Mrs. Nichols, a prominent advocate of free love and a member of the free love clubs of New York, has taken the stump for Frémont,” one article read.49 An anti-Frémont political cartoon depicted a Free Love

48 "The Black Republicans on Polygamy," The Richmond Enquirer, June 27 1856, 2. 49 "Out for Fremont," The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 23 1856, 3. 21 activist among a group that included a temperance advocate, a socialist, a women’s rights activist, and a Catholic priest, all radicals whom Democrats accused of supporting Frémont.

The Free Love activist is an old woman, with a long hooked nose, pointy chin, spectacles, and poorly made, narrow hoops holding up her skirt—not the nineteenth century’s image of feminine beauty. She asks Frémont outright to join the “next meeting of our Free Love association, where the shackles of marriage are not tolerated and perfect freedom exists in love matters.” “You will be sure to Enjoy yourself,” she continues, “for we are all

Freemounters.”50 The bawdy pun made a serious point: Republicans were the party of gender radicalism. To Democratic editors and readers alike, it apparently did not matter that there was no evidence that Frémont or any Republican on the ticket supported the

Free Love movement. The mere association of the two was enough to damn the Republican

Party in the eyes of any Democrat who wished to preserve social and political order.

Democrats in the South overstated the relationship between the Free Love movement and the Republican Party, as well. The Richmond Enquirer scoffed that

Frémont’s “bad morals” made him “the appropriate leader of a party that. . . .from Oneida. . . to the free-love saloons of New York and Boston, makes open war on female virtue and filial obedience.”51 A similar article in the same paper accused the Republican Party of

“making open war” on “morality and religion” and “attempting to inaugurate in their stead anarchy, agrarianism, infidelity, and licentiousness.”52 The paper even warned that the

South would secede to protect its moral purity from Republican influence if Frémont were elected—not an uncommon threat among Democrats during the election of 1856. While the

50 Louis Maurer, The Great Republican Reform Party, Calling on Their Candidate, 1856. Nathaniel Currier. 51 "James Buchanan. The North, the South, and the Union.," The Richmond Enquirer, October 10 1856, 2. 52 "The Effects of Disunion on the South," The Richmond Enquirer, August 29 1856, 2. 22 ensuing war would be terrible, the editorial read, “licentiousness, and agrarianism, and infidelity, and anarchy, are far worse.”53 Here we see that in the South as in the North,

Democratic newspapers told readers that the Republican Party supported Free Love and wanted to dissolve marriages, undermine patriarchal control, and defy God’s very plan for men and women, and supported these claims not with evidence but by repetition.54

Democrats presented themselves as the party that would protect women’s religious faith and morality—and by connection, social order—from Republican Free Loveism. Prose published in Democratic newspapers represented women as bastions of religious virtue.

One poem, dedicated to Annie of Charleston, South Carolina, extolled the girl’s “soul” which

“seeks. . . pants. . . springs [and] searches for higher, better things” and “longs for angel’s food—The luxury of doing good.” The poet reminded her that she needed to develop this natural religious inclination by following the “One who lived for thee.”55 This poem and indeed most of the prose in Democratic newspapers appears on the surface to have nothing to do with Democratic politics. The decision to publish this poem and countless others like it, though, tells us that Democratic editors knew this vision of women’s religiosity appealed to the rank and file’s personal beliefs. It also reinforced the Democrats’ self-image as the party that represented the majority’s religious impulse, and thus offered the best chance at keeping the union together.

Men’s praise rewarded those women who had developed their morality and religious faith in childhood. Another poem in the Richmond Enquirer shows a man fixating

53 "The Evils and Dangers of the Times," The Richmond Enquirer, August 26 1856, 2. 54 Sometimes, the repetition was simple, such as in this article, which jibed that Republicans should add “Free-Love” to their motto of “Free-Kansas, Free-Soil, Free-Speech, Free-Press, and Fre-mont.” See "Fremont and Free-Love," The Richmond Enquirer, June 27 1856, 1. 55 "To Annie B*******, of Charleston, S.C.," The Richmond Enquirer, September 9 1856, 4. 23 on his beloved’s moral purity as he cries over her deathbed. “Her body was the Temple bright, In which her soul dwelt full of light,” he remembered. But because she had been so virtuous, he was sure that even as he cried over her cold body, she “looks down on me from

Heaven above.”56 Democratic men valued women who were demure, religious, and moral.

Even Franklin Pierce paid what the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called a “pretty compliment” to the women gathered at a political event. “We all know,” he declared, “no man who listened to his wife ever went astray, and no young brother ever gave a listening ear to his sister. . .

.without being the better for it.” Indeed, “there is no good man who does not feel his heart made stronger through [women’s] influence.”57

Whereas Free Love activists were pushing Republican men to undermine social order, Democratic women—or at least, the ideal Democratic woman—were a positive moral influence. Their morality was important, men believed, because a Christian woman was a socially conservative one—a source of stability and support for conservative gender roles. Her profound religious faith made this idealized woman accept her husband’s mastery on the basis that it was grounded in Christian doctrine. The Democratic Party offered itself instead as the party of pure, religious women who supported the male- dominated social order. This was a powerful way of uniting exclusively male voters around their party.58 Even if they disagreed on any number of other issues, Democratic men could

56 "The Lily of Heaven," The Richmond Enquirer, September 30 1856, 4. This intense idolizing of women also appears in Southern men’s diaries, with men sometimes allowing women’s faith to become their own. Stephen Berry writes that men’s “love of woman. . . did not replace organized religion but bled into it until the two were indistinguishable. Their wives became their conduits to God, and that was often as close to Him as they really wanted to be.” See Berry, All That Makes a Man, 92. 57 "President Pierce," The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 14 1856, 2. 58 Though it may seem unlikely that men’s interest in mastery and social order could impel them to vote against their other beliefs in an election, Stephanie McCurry has shown that the shared experience of mastery was even powerful enough to unite yeomen whose economic interests did not necessarily lie in the slave system to support the Confederacy four years later. She argues that evangelicalism supported the experience 24 see that Republicans would corrupt their women and subvert their control, while

Democrats would support women’s religiosity and thus also male control. Republican women were no less Christian than Democratic women, Democrats argued that Democratic women’s Christianity was more socially stabilizing and less radical than was Republican women’s.

Republicans, abolitionism, and gender radicalism

The Democrats’ third and final tactic in the election of 1856 was to link arguments about gender roles and morality to the central issue of the campaign: slavery. They decried abolitionism as both the cause and a horrifying example of Republican gender radicalism.

This accusation required the Democrats to conflate Republicans with abolitionists—even though abolitionists were few in number compared to the Republicans, and the relationship between the two groups was highly ambivalent.59 Assuming Republicans were abolitionists allowed Democrats to argue that Republicans’ gender radicalism could not be separated from their determination to abolish slavery at any cost.60

One Democratic tactic was to decry abolitionists as the very cause of gender disorder. Brooklyn’s Daily Eagle called abolitionists sacrilegious “nigger worshippers,”

of mastery by framing inequalities and dependencies as part of the natural order. See McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds. 59 For more on this relationship, see Varon, Disunion!, 277. 60 Democrats were not the only ones to link slavery, abolition, and gender issues. Kristin Hoganson argued that Garrisonian abolitionists needed to prove their political legitimacy over objections that supporting women’s rights made them womanish radicals. To do this, Hoganson writes that Garrisonians “drew on conventional middle-class gender beliefs to combat their own marginality as desexed freaks; prove black people's full humanity; and make their religious, economic, social, and moral arguments more compelling." By arguing that slavery desexed both slaves and owners, Garrisonians “shifted the tables so that the slave- holding South became the seat of gender radicalism.” Kristin Hoganson, "Garrisonian Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Gender, 1850-1860," American Quarterly 45(1993): 559, 60. 25 lambasting them as “men who ought to be women, and women who ought to be men.”61

The Southern Banner, Athens, Georgia’s Democratic newspaper, raised the specters of biracialism and independent women in its report on an antislavery meeting in Chicago.

Blacks attended the meeting alongside socially prominent whites, and white men attended with their “wives and daughters.” For readers, this mixed-race, mixed-sex abolition meeting was the archetypical image of Republican radicalism. What would have shocked readers even more is that the “fair white maidens” at the event cheered the blurring of “the distinction between the white and black races.”62 Here, the Southern Banner amplified race- based fears of abolitionism by associating it with gender radicalism. Abolitionists wanted not just freedom for blacks, the Banner told readers, but also the freedom for women to participate in politics and even marry black men.

Compare this image of Republican womanhood with how the Democrats portrayed their own female supporters. The Richmond Enquirer proudly reported that fifty-four women, dressed in pure white, attended a Democratic rally in Concord, Ohio. The women carried small white flags emblazoned with “BUCHANAN and BREKINRIDGE,” and the wagon they arrived in was hung with a pink canvass on which was printed the motto “WHITE HUSBANDS OR

NONE.” “That is the way to say it,” the reporter editorialized. The rebuke against “the present disgusting attempts to elevate the negro to. . . equality” was “well-timed” and likely to put the “wild fanatics” in their place.”63 This overt discussion of women’s ideal role in the

61 "Nigger Worship and Nigger Worshippers," The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 9 1856, 2. 62 "Almagamation Meeting on Sunday," Southern Banner, December 25 1856, 2. 63 "The Right Way to Talk," The Richmond Enquirer, September 30 1856, 1. A story published in the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer played on the horror of both racial amalgamation and Republicanism. An innkeeper does not believe a black man when he calls at the inn, claiming that a female lodger is his wife. The woman assures the innkeeper that the man is indeed her husband, and the innkeeper is incredulous. But the tension is diffused when the woman says that marrying a black man is far better than marrying a Republican—something she 26 slavery system is uncommon in the Democratic press. The vast majority of Democratic rhetoric on gender and abolitionism rather took the form of a critique of Republican radicalism. Nonetheless, this example is revealing. For one, it hints at how Democrats understood women’s role in a slave society: women were more powerful than slaves, and they were even entrusted with part of the responsibility for maintaining racial purity, but they still depended totally on husbands for social status and financial support. Secondly, the Richmond Enquirer praises these women who are overtly involved in politics, even though they derided women who participated in abolitionist or Republican events, including the mixed-race event in Illinois. Perhaps the Democrats tolerated women in public life only as long as they were supporting a conservative message.

Democrats also condemned abolitionists as another manifestation of Republicans’ gender radicalism, including the twin threats of women’s rights and Free Love. One article in Richmond charged Republicans with “crush[ing] one species of property”—slaves—“and in the very abuse of freedom cry[ing] out for everything to be free—love, marriage, lands, houses, possessions in every form.”64 Republicans’ radical abolitionism was in this portrayal another symptom of a disease that had spread throughout the party: the desire for individual freedom at the expense of society’s conservative, stabilizing institutions.

Republicans were set on assailing everything “valuable, moral, or sacred” in the South’s

“domestic institutions” with their “multitudinous isms,” cried another article. A vote for

Frémont was a vote for “an infidel and licentious world. . . a Free Love World.”65 Here,

“domestic” takes on a dual meaning. Explicitly, the writer was referring to the South as a

and the innkeeper both could agree on. "Truly a Hard Case," The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, September 5 1856, 3. 64 "The True State of the Case," The Richmond Enquirer, September 23 1856, 2. 65 "An Undivided and Conservative South," The Richmond Enquirer, June 24 1856, 1. 27 distinct geographical area with distinct institutions—slavery and patriarchy—with which the Republicans should not be allowed to interfere. But we can also understand the word domestic to refer to the individual homes in which southern men reigned over women and slaves with impunity. Democratic men thus worried that a Republican victory would undermine the South’s self-determination and white southern men’s sovereignty over their own homes.66

A letter to the editor of Athens’ Southern Banner provides another example of a

Democrat damning abolitionism as an outgrowth of gender radicalism. The writer accused

American Party candidate Millard Fillmore, whom southern Democrats usually criticized as retrograde, of being affiliated with northern radicals. The vituperative, poorly reasoned attack associated Fillmore’s Know-Nothing backers with a vague northern “they” who supported “every new-fangled doctrine.” This liberal menace backed all radical movements because these movements became “at once, or eventually, the ally of Abolition.” “It is for this,” the writer declared, “that they encourage ‘free love.’”67 That abolitionists who worked with William Lloyd Garrison also supported women’s rights grounded the association between abolition and gender radicalism in reality. Not all abolitionists agreed with

Garrison on this matter; indeed, the issue caused a rift among abolitionists. But these were shades of grey that the Democrats deftly ignored.68 They convinced their voters that all

66 In her study of gender in politics in the post-war years, Rebecca Edwards argues that the Civil War only intensified Democrats’ belief that federal power too frequently intruded on private life and men’s control. Abolitionism offended these Democrats because whether from the north or south, they “defined slavery as a household or family institution, [and] they viewed Emancipation and black male suffrage as threats to patriarchal as well as racial order.” Edwards, Angels in the Machinery, 6. 67 "Letter from A. C. Walker, Esq.," Southern Banner, August 21 1856, 1. 68 For a more in depth explanation on the rift among abolitionists over women’s rights, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 649. Many historians have argued that women’s rights activism and abolitionism were mutually reinforcing. Gerda Lerner has discussed how Sarah Grimké’s feminist discontent merged with her 28

Republicans were radical, gender-bending abolitionists. Nothing could point directly to disunion than a party that appealed to only one section’s beliefs about gender and slavery.

Democrats presented slavery as a necessary conservative counterpoint to all of the interrelated forms of Republican radicalism. A conservative stance on slavery could safeguard the country against any number of radical doctrines. The Richmond Enquirer,

Democrats argued that free society’s radicalisms, including “infidelity. . . anti-marriage doctrines, [and] free-love doctrines,” were “express assertions, that free society is neither natural, rightful, or even tolerable.” “The absence of these evils in slave society,” the article continued, “shows that it is the better system.”69 Another article in the same paper argued that a “united and conservative South”—that is, one that kept its slaves—would be “looked to as an. . . anchor of hope and security” by both “m[e]n of property” and every “Christian of the North.”70 Only the conservative, patriarchal institution of slavery could counterbalance

Republican radicalism and save the country from moral ruin. This logic provided

Democrats who might have otherwise been ambivalent about the slavery issue a reason to unite behind the pro-slavery plank of the Democratic platform.

Associating abolitionism with gender radicalism, whether by describing abolitionists as gender inverts or by relating radical gender movements to abolitionism, was a cagey tactic for uniting the Democrats against Frémont and Fillmore. In the South,

dissatisfaction with slavery, Ellen Carol DuBois argued that women’s involvement with abolition helped them develop their own political movement, and Rebecca Edwards noted that a number of prominent women’s rights activists spoke publicly in favor of abolitionism. But Kristin Hoganson argues that, ironically, the very Garrisonian abolitionists who supported women’s rights undermined that movement by claiming that slavery hurt women by preventing them from attaining the domestic ideal—implying that the home was the only place where women could be fulfilled. See Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Indepdnent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978); Edwards, Angels in the Machinery, 28-29; Hoganson, "Garrisonian Abolitionists." 69 "The Strangest Thing in the World," The Richmond Enquirer, September 19 1856, 2. 70 "An Undivided and Conservative South," 1. 29 lumping together the “multitudinous isms” allowed Democrats to make a cohesive agenda out of mastery. Republican gender radicalism and Republican race radicalism had to be stopped in order to preserve southern men’s mastery over their women and their slaves. In the overwhelmingly white North, abolitionism did not threaten white men’s status in the same way it did in the South. Women’s rights and Free Love did threaten northern men’s power, though, and so depicting abolitionism as part and parcel of those two “isms” helped northern men understand abolition as a threat even if they lived in a free state. In short, radicalism was radicalism, no matter what conservative institution it threatened; and the desexing of women threatened the identities of northern and southern men alike. Only a united, conservative Democratic Party could thwart Republicans’ attempts to divide the country with their radical beliefs on gender and slavery.

Conclusion: Democratic landslide or Democrats’ downfall?

James Buchanan defeated John C. Frémont handily on November 4, 1856, winning nineteen states to Frémont’s eleven. The victory initially reassured Democrats. The threats of John and Jessie Frémont occupying the White House, the onward march of women’s rights, free love, and abolitionism, and most of all, the threat of disunion—all seemed to be halted by Buchanan’s election. A New York Democrat composed a song affirming that

Buchanan would “never betray/ Yankee hearts or their rights/ then for Jemmie hurrah!”71

The Democratic national organ affirmed the sentiment, predicting that “every scheme of

71 Katy Luby, "Welcome Buchanan!," (New York: Horace Waters, 1857). 30 disunion will soon perish from amongst us, and the old sentiment of fraternal amity be reestablished.”72

This unity was fleeting. Though Democrats banded together against John and Jessie

Frémont, women’s rights, and Free Love, their use of gendered arguments to achieve unity on the slavery issue planted the seeds for the party’s schism in 1860. Democrats from the

North, South, and West alike had painted gender radicalism and abolitionism as Republican heresies, against which Democratic unity was the only bulwark. But while New England’s

Democrats indicted only Republicans with abolitionism and disunion, southern Democrats went one step further: they condemned all of Northern society as fundamentally disordered and different from southern society.

Democrats in Boston inveighed against Republican abolitionism as passionately as did their counterparts in the South and West. Unlike Democrats elsewhere, however,

Boston’s Democrats accused Republicans of political—not social—radicalism. Democrats in accused Republicans of senselessly agitating against slavery. One article in Boston’s

Democratic paper, The Boston Post, told readers that “the fact of American slavery” did not cause the “troubles” the country faced. The problem was rather abolitionists, represented by “swarms of hungry and seditious politicians.” Were it not for abolitionists and their political lackeys, citizens would remember that they were “obligated to sustain existing laws” or change them only by “constitutional means.”73 Abolitionism, not slavery, fomented civil disobedience and disrespect for the Constitution.

For Boston’s Democrats, it was a short leap from accusing Republicans of inciting civil disobedience to accusing them of encouraging disunion. The Post editorialized that by

72 The Democratic Review, quoted in Varon, Disunion!, 287. 73 “The Times,” Boston Post, July 10, 1856, 1. 31

“lash[ing] themselves into [a] fury” to “resist the ‘aggressions of slavery,’” Republicans risked “tear[ing] down” the “best government in the world.”74 Disunion was the ultimate political radicalism, and Republicans, set on abolishing slavery at any cost, were pushing the country to the brink. And what did they hope to accomplish? Paraphrasing the

Republicans’ campaign issues, the Post asked its readers: Would disunion make “‘free soil’ of a foot of slave territory? Would it “hasten the period of emancipation?” Would it “secure

‘freedom for bleeding Kansas,’ or avenge the battery upon Senator Sumner?”75 Boston’s

Democrats responded to all of these questions with a resounding no. Republicans risked a bloody civil war for no ostensible benefit. Boston’s Democrats indicted Republicans as political radicals, bent on emancipating slaves even at the cost of disunion. In none of these articles, however, did Boston’s Democrats accuse Republicans in particular or Northerners in general of social radicalism.

Southern Democrats trod that path alone. Especially in the Deep South, Southern

Democrats conflated Republicans with Northerners. Democrats outside of New England had charged Republicans with social as well as political radicalism, but now Southern

Democrats leveled these charges against northern society as a whole. The Charleston

Mercury reprinted an article from the Richmond Enquirer that described the North as “an anarchical, agrarian, free-love, infidel world, under the mad misrule of abolition and socialism.”76 The rise of the Republican Party, then, merely represented more profound problems in northern society—problems that then could not be fixed by the mere fact of

74 “The Fremont Ratification Meeting,” Boston Post, July 2, 1856, 1. For another accusation of Republican disunionism, see “Patriotic Citizens of the North Look at the Progress of Fanaticism,” Boston Post, September 23, 1856, 1; this article informs readers that Republicans hope for an "alliance of the free states" which will allow the North to secede. 75 “To the People of the Non-Slaveholding States,” Boston Post, September 26, 1856, 1. 76 “The Compact--Conservatism--A United South,” The Charleston Mercury, September 16, 1856, col. C. 32

James Buchanan’s victory. Another article similarly asserted that “The great movement at the North. . .taught everywhere now in free society is, that ‘Passional Attraction,’ ‘Free

Love,’ ‘Attractive Labor,’ and ‘The Voluntary Principle,’ are to be substituted for Law,

Religion, and Government.” Significantly, the writer called these beliefs not merely “isms,” as other Democrats did throughout the election, but “Northernisms.”77 So doing planted the blame for social radicalism not on individual movements but on northern society as a whole. Southerners who read stories like these would increasingly struggle to distinguish between their northern Democratic friends and their abolitionist and Republican enemies.

Once Southern Democrats had indicted northerners as social radicals, they found it easier to believe that they were a people apart from the North. Unlike northern society, southern society was “moral, religious, and conservative.”78 An article reprinted from a

New Orleans paper proclaimed that as the South developed, it should be “Southern and not semi-Northern and mongrel.” “Puritanism proper,” the article declared, must be “utter[ly] extripat[ed].”79 Articles called on southerners to stop sending their young men to universities in the North and to prevent Northerners from investing in the South, all to avoid the contamination of northern society. Understanding the North as fundamentally radical helped Southerners—not just Democrats—identify against a northern other.

Southerners, whether Know-Nothing or Democratic, believed that their fundamental conservatism marked them off as different from all Northerners.

Critically, southern Democratic newspapers began to argue that the differences between northern and southern society threatened the South. Northerners, they argued,

77 “Southern Schools,” The Daily South Carolinian, January 9, 1856, col. D. 78 Ibid. 79 “The Young South,” The Daily South Carolinian, January 12, 1856, col. D. 33 would force their radical movements on southern society if they were given the chance.

The Charleston Mercury accused the “would be aristocracy of Boston and New Haven” and an ill-defined but menacing “New England philanthropy” of designing to remake the South in the North’s free labor image. In the South white working men enjoyed, according the writer, “the most perfect social equality between rich and poor.” Northern abolitionism would “debase white working men to the level of negros [sic]” and in so doing “accustom them to the coarsest social distinctions founded on mere wealth”—not, as the writer assumed southerners would see it, on the legitimate grounds of race.80 If Frémont were elected, the paper implied, Northerners would have the power to abolish slavery in the

South, taking white supremacy along with it. White southern yeomen should vote

Democratic.

Stirring up fear of northern political and social radicalism seemed like a smart campaign tactic to southern Democrats—especially slaveholders. Throughout the earlier debates over slavery, these Democrats cast Whigs and Free Soilers as disunionst abolitionists. But by 1856, some of the most extremist, slaveholding Democrats had begun to doubt that the Democratic Party’s anti-abolitionist coalition would hold. They worried that Democrats would lose power and the ascendant Republicans would abolish slavery in the South.81 Slaveholding Democrats, then, had a duel agenda for protecting slavery. Their

80 “The Compact,” col. C. 81 William Freehling explains that Southern Democrats feared a Republican president would nominate fellow Republicans to federal offices in the South and push for antislavery legislation in Congress. To both appoint Republicans and pass antislavery legislation, though, he would require Republican majorities in both houses of Congress—something most southern Democrats realized was unlikely. Most southern Democrats were thus not yet secessionists because they did not believe Congress or even a Republican president could take “overt acts” against slavery. Despite these practicalities, some southern fire-eaters, including Virginia’s U.S. Senator James Mason, believed that the election of a Republican president alone justified secession. William W. Freehling, Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 103–104. 34 best hope was to win the election of 1856. But they also needed to build the case that disunion might be necessary if the federal government would not protect slavery. As a result, charging Republicans with political disunionism was less useful for southern than for northern Democrats because southerners saw disunion as a viable option under the right circumstances. Blanket condemnations of the radical North solved these problems.

Slaveholding Democrats calculated that fear of northern radicalism would sway enough voters to put Buchanan in the White House. On the off chance Frémont won, slaveholders would have already begun building an argument for secession. In the South, accusing the whole North of political and social radicalism united the Democratic Party in the election of

1856.

But this message would also, ultimately, help tear asunder the Democratic Party and the very union Democrats hoped to save. Most Democrats seemed to agree that painting their opponents as gender radicals and disunionists would help unite the party and win the election. Southern Democrats, however, interpreted this tactic differently than their northern counterparts. Whereas northern Democrats accused Republicans specifically of political and social radicalism, southern Democrats decried all Northerners as radicals who could not be reasoned with. The broad tactics that united the Democrats proved also to be the party’s undoing. Southern Democrats, especially slaveholders, came to vilify all

Northerners. And against this northern enemy—which included many of their fellow

Democrats—secession would by 1860 seem the only defense. 35

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