The Most Important Election of Their Lifetimes
Claiming that the coming presidential contest is “the most important election of our lifetime” is a quadrennial ritual in American politics. It’s almost never true.
But it was true in 1844. The race between Henry Clay and James K. Polk proved to be even more than that. It was one of the most significant elections in American history because its outcome set the country on an inexorable course toward civil war.
Mark Cheathem’s Who is James K. Polk: The Presidential Election of 1844 is the latest installment in the University Press of Kansas’ Presidential Election Series. It lives up to its predecessors, offering a highly detailed examination of the political context in which the race developed, blow-by-blow accounts of the party conventions, and an encyclopedic rundown of the presidential and vice-presidential contenders in each party.
We have come to expect all of this from the Kansas series. But Cheathem, a history professor at Cumberland University, project director of the Papers of Martin Van Buren, and author of multiple books on the Jacksonian Era, goes above and beyond in describing the “material culture” of the campaigns — lithographs, political cartoons, music, banners, bowls, and balls – a subject he covered in great detail in The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson.
Media hullabaloo of this sort is not the only thing that ties mid-19th century campaigns to the modern age. Whigs tossed about charges of vote fraud, particularly in Louisiana, where recent Irish immigrants were alleged to have moved from one polling place to the next to cast extra votes for the Democrats. A highly partisan press spread fake news, including baseless allegations that Polk had branded his slaves.
In the end, Polk won a razor-thin victory, earning less than 50 percent of the vote, a plurality that altered the destiny of the republic.
Polk’s victory over Clay confirmed the annexation of Texas begun under his predecessor, John Tyler, bringing on the war with Mexico that led to the acquisition of new territory that fueled the debate over the expansion of slavery.
The Democrats, in dumping their frontrunner, former President Martin Van Buren of New York, revealed and exacerbated the slavery-based sectional division in the Democratic Party.
As editor of the Van Buren papers, it would be understandable if Cheathem wanted to give Old Kinderhook the benefit of the doubt on occasion. He credits Van Buren with “taking a principled stance” on Texas. But mostly he sowed confusion and resentment.
Van Buren defended his opposition to annexation by dismissing concerns that Britain might try to win control of Texas. If she did, he was certain that “the great principle of self-defence” would inspire Americans to rise against the invader. In other words, defending an independent Texas was worth fighting a war with Britain, but adding Texas to the U.S. was not worth fighting a war with Mexico. Little wonder that Democrats were confused.
Democrats were the party of slavery and national expansion, and Van Buren had been instrumental in its creation. All he accomplished by sticking his finger in the eyes of the constituencies he had built into a national party was to alienate them.
Clay’s opposition was no clearer, though his grip on the Whig nomination was more secure. Throughout the campaign he wavered and wiggled, trying in true Clay style to appease both sides of the annexation argument and managing instead to confound both.
Southerners who wanted Texas (and to expand slavery) tossed Van Buren aside in favor of Polk, with the blessing of Andrew Jackson, Van Buren’s onetime patron. “Although retired and in poor health,” Cheathem writes, “Andrew Jackson loomed large as a campaign symbol.”
It was the thin end of the wedge. The North-South crack in the Democratic Party revealed and exacerbated in 1844 would in time grow into the chasm that would rend the party in 1860 and hand that election to Abraham Lincoln, leading to secession and war
Immersing the reader
The best volumes in the Kansas election series are among the best campaign books ever written. Cheathem upholds the standard.
One tradition in the series is that the authors tend to look for ways to debunk popular misconceptions. One glaring example is the book on the 1840 campaign, in which Richard Ellis derides the notion that the “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too” campaign was a substance-free exercise in celebrating log cabins and hard cider.
Cheathem largely resists the temptation. One exception might be that he doesn’t accept the oft-stated myth that Liberty Party candidate James Birney cost Clay the victory in New York that would have given him an Electoral College majority.
It’s a popular argument in some circles, especially because Birney’s anti-slavery purity appeals to modern sensibilities, thus he often gets more attention than his actual impact warrants.
As Cheathem writes, Liberty Party voters were just as opposed to Clay, a slaveholder, as they were to Polk. “The argument that they would have backed Clay by default in a close election if their party had not run a ticket simply does not hold up to scrutiny,” Cheathem concludes.
Instead, he correctly credits New York’s Democratic Senator Silas Wright, who had been persuaded to run for governor, with carrying Polk to victory on his coattails, outpolling Polk by 4,000 votes in the state.
The only weakness in the Kansas series is the books’ lack of non-political context. 1844 was a raucous year in American history, but little of that is apparent in this book, which is in keeping with the series’ laser focus on politics and policy to the exclusion of culture.
The book so immerses the reader in the campaign that one feels nearly like a participant. But most readers experience campaigns differently, not as insiders but as spectators. A nod to overland immigration, western exploration, to the religious excitement of the Second Great Awakening, to anti-Catholic violence (which is briefly mentioned) would have given the reader a more complete picture of the context in which the campaign took place.
I’ll also ding Cheathem for overuse of the word conspiracy, a term he applies to the slave power, the anti-bank “money power,” even to fears about British policy toward Texas. That none of these were “conspiracies” in the literal sense of the term does not mean they were not real issues. Exaggeration is coin of the political realm, and sometimes people simply use an inelegant or imprecise term to describe a vexing problem. Such imprecision should not be used to blithely dismiss genuine concerns.
These are relatively minor blips in an otherwise excellent book. Who Is James K. Polk is essential reading for every political junkie, for anyone interested in presidential campaigns, and for all who seek to understand antebellum America and the road to civil war.
John Bicknell is the author of America 1844: Religious Fervor, Westward Expansion and the Presidential Election That Transformed the Nation and Lincoln’s Pathfinder: John C. Fremont and the Presidential Election of 1856. He is writing a book on the wartime relationship between Lincoln and Fremont.
