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