American Experiment (77 page)

In picking the aged Harrison for President, the Whigs had sacrificed political conviction and clear policy positions for a largely media-created war hero. They had gambled on the health of an old soldier who would be seventy-two by the end of his term. History was cruel. The new President, after giving a vacuous Inaugural Address that promised presidential impotence and left policy up to Congress—a two-hour speech that found bored politicians roaming around the platform stamping their feet to get the blood running—moved into the White House and into the ceaseless importunings of Whigs hungry for office. Fatigued and dispirited, he caught cold one morning while shopping in Washington’s meat and fish markets, and the cold turned into pneumonia. Bled, blistered, cupped, leeched, and massaged, he died just one month after taking office. Vice-President John Tyler, ignored by Harrison, had been staying in Williamsburg in benign isolation. Summoned now to Washington, he arrived two days later after covering the 230 miles by boat and horseback.

So John Tyler was President. In Tyler, a Virginian of the old school, history resisted the Whigs’ effort to outflank it. Raised amid the aristocratic republicanism of the tidewater, graduated from the College of William and Mary at the age of seventeen, Tyler had climbed the political ladder from the Virginia House of Delegates to the national House of Representatives,
and later to the governorship and the United States Senate. He had come to be known as a strict constructionist and a leading member of the southern states’ rights bloc in Congress; and as such he gave only tepid support to Jackson. Tyler shifted toward the Whigs when the Virginia legislature instructed him to vote for expunging the censure resolution of Jackson and Tyler resigned his seat rather than comply. Independent in doctrine and party, Tyler was as critical of Whiggish economic nationalism as he had been of Jacksonian executive power. He had remained close enough to Clay, however, and to his old states’ rights ideology, to be chosen by Whig leaders as a ticket balancer with Harrison—although only after those leaders had offered the vice-presidential nomination to several other, more noted politicians.

Tyler at fifty-one was still determined, on entering the White House, to stick to his conservative, old Republican principles. He immediately proved that he was indeed a strict constructionist. Soon labeled “His Accidency” by his Whig foes, he insisted on being considered the new, constitutional President, rather than a Vice-President acting as President, thus setting a precedent for all later Presidents elevated by chance. On the other hand, the new President decided to retain Harrison’s Cabinet intact—a Cabinet headed by Daniel Webster as Secretary of State and dominated by Webster, Clay, and other Whig senators and congressmen. Surrounded, as he said, by “Clay-men, Webster-men, anti-Masons, original Harrisonians, Old Whigs and New Whigs—each jealous of the others, and all struggling for the offices,” he resolved to move cautiously and to “work in good earnest” to reconcile “the angry state of the factions toward one another.”

It was not to be. The Whigs had plastered over their factional splits with thick gobs of campaign hokum. Now they split over hard policy choices. The battle erupted not merely between two wings of the party, but two wings ensconced in two institutions separated by the Constitution and by Pennsylvania Avenue.

Commander of the congressional wing clearly was Henry Clay. Now sixty-four years old, “Harry of the West” was still the engaging, impetuous, eloquent legislative leader who had electrified Congress three decades earlier in the days of the war hawks, though now more irascible and volatile. Clay was still cock of the walk in the Senate, chairman of the Finance Committee, policy spokesman for congressional Whigs, and leader of men occupying key positions in both houses. The Kentuckian had gone into a half-drunken rage when news of Harrison’s nomination had reached him at Brown’s Hotel in Washington. Pacing the room, shouting obscenities, he had denounced his friends as “not worth the powder and
shot it would take to kill them,” and called himself the unluckiest man in party history—“always run by my friends when sure to be defeated, and now betrayed for the nomination” when sure of election.

Clay’s relationship with President Harrison deteriorated so rapidly that the two were at the point of a break when the general died. For a time it seemed that the senator and his old friend John Tyler might be able to work together despite their doctrinal differences. But history was remorseless: the Whigs’ campaign preference for rhetoric rather than policy positions that might serve as rough guides to party policy makers; the Whigs’ desire to balance their ticket even if it meant choosing a states’ rights doctrinaire; the Whigs’ antipathy to executive leadership, and their doctrine of legislative supremacy—all these combined to rob Whiggism of the fruits of its 1840 victory.

The crisis came over banking, still the most divisive political issue facing the nation. In accordance with the President’s states’ rights views, Tyler’s Secretary of the Treasury, Thomas Ewing, presented to Congress a bill for a “Bank and Fiscal Agent” to be chartered by Congress in its capacity not as the national legislature but as the local government for the District of Columbia, to be authorized to establish branches elsewhere but only with the consent of the states concerned. Thus elaborately were Tyler’s constitutional scruples cosseted. Clay was unimpressed. Like Tyler, he would repeal Van Buren’s Independent Treasury Act, but in its place he wanted an effective and truly national bank. Tyler’s idea for an agency that would have to beg a state to allow a branch to be set up within it—“What a bank
would
that be!” Clay wrote to a friend.

The two men—the President of the United States, who stuck gamely to his states’ rights dogmatism but felt that Congress should make policy, and the “Great Pacificator,” who considered himself a kind of prime minister—met in the White House. Neither would yield. The President’s amiability broke under Clay’s pounding.

“Go you now, then, Mr. Clay, to your end of the avenue, where stands the Capitol, and there perform your duty to the country as you shall think proper. So help me God, I shall do mine at this end of it as I shall think proper.”

Clay did modify his bill to provide that, while no branch of the proposed bank could be established without the consent of the state, such consent would be presumed automatically granted unless the state legislature specifically opposed it at the next session. It was a reasonable compromise, but Tyler would have none of it. Increasingly captive to a “Corporal’s Guard” of extreme states’-righters such as the Virginians Thomas W. Gilmer, Henry A. Wise, and Abel P. Upshur, he called Clay’s compromise
a “contemptible subterfuge.” Tyler’s Cabinet—still Harrison’s Cabinet—wanted their chief to sign the bill.

Washington waited while Tyler teetered back and forth between assent and veto. His veto, on August 16, 1841, set off a tumultuous debate in the Senate. That evening Benton, Calhoun, and other Democratic senators of the old school, delighted by Tyler’s defiance of the congressional Whigs, came to the White House to celebrate with Tyler over cigars and brandy, but they were followed by a mob of Whig protestors who aroused the Tyler family with their clamor and disbanded only after burning the President in effigy.

The presidential and congressional Whigs mobilized against each other. Chastising Tyler on the Senate floor, Clay moved unsuccessfully to override the veto. In the deadlock that followed, presidential-congressional relations unraveled. Tyler allowed Webster and other cabinet members to involve themselves in a compromise bill that easily passed both House and Senate. “Give your approval to the Bill,” his Attorney General, John J. Crittenden wrote him, “and the success of your Administration is sealed.” Veto it, and “read the doom of the Whig party and behold it and the President it elected, sunk together, the victims of each other, in unnatural strife.” Again Tyler vetoed, and again a great hue and cry broke out, as Whig leaders throughout the country castigated the President, letter writers threatened assassination, and burning effigies swung from tree limbs.

Then, on a September afternoon, five of Tyler’s cabinet members strode into his office, one by one, and laid their resignations on his desk. The President knew well that the walkout was devised and coordinated by Clay in an effort to punish him—and even more, to force his resignation and bring into the White House the president of the Senate, a Clay lieutenant. Tyler became more determined to stay. One man who had not resigned that day was Daniel Webster. Busy with delicate foreign negotiations, reluctant to serve Clay’s interests, the “Godlike Daniel” saw his own opportunities in the Tyler-Clay hostilities.

“Where am I to go, Mr. President?” Webster asked his chief.

“You must decide that for yourself, Mr. Webster,” said the President, with his usual reserve.

“If you leave it to me, Mr. President,” the Secretary of State said, “I will stay where I am.”

“Give me your hand on that,” said Tyler, rising from his chair, “and now I will say to you that Henry Clay is a doomed man from this hour.”

Total war had erupted between the two wings of the Whig party. Rid of the Harrison and Clay men in the Cabinet, Tyler created a new one composed of conservative Democrats and states’ rights Whigs. The
congressional Whigs struck back by officially expelling Tyler from the party. There followed a presidential-congressional battle in which constitutional checks served as the live ammunition. In place of Clay’s kind of national bank, Tyler proposed a nonpartisan “Board of Control” designed to limit White House authority over the “public Treasury” and to protect the rights of the states against its branches, a plan quickly tabled in Congress and later defeated. The Clay party brought out two tariff bills in the summer of 1842; Tyler vetoed both. Some extremist Whigs—not Clay—threatened the President with impeachment; Tyler toyed with the idea of a third-party movement. By the fall of 1842 the President and Congress were almost deadlocked, amid the most savage polemics and mutual buck passing. Clay had the votes, it was said, and Tyler had the vetoes; but, in fact, each side had a veto over the other,

Some bills did overcome the obstacle course. The Independent Treasury Act was repealed; a bankruptcy law was passed for the relief of hundreds of thousands of debtors spawned by the depression; and distribution and pre-emption acts gave settlers the right to “squat” on 160 acres of land and ultimately to buy it at low prices, with the proceeds from the sale of public lands to be distributed to the states. These enactments were due to “masterly logrolling,” in Glyndon Van Deusen’s words, among sectional blocs—logrolling that ultimately brought a new tariff compromise bill, the price of which was to decimate the distribution act.

Whig unity was fading so quickly now that Tyler welcomed a Democratic party sweep of the 1842 congressional election as “the greatest political victory ever won within my recollection.” Clay, still master of the Senate Whigs, had already quit the upper house to prepare to seek the presidency in 1844. Webster left the Cabinet hardly a year and a half after Tyler had retained him. By this time Tyler’s administration had been reduced to a caretaker government.

The Whigs never regained their verve and momentum after their failures in government. Clay won the party nomination in 1844 but once again he enjoyed a brief but empty victory when Democrat James K. Polk defeated him handily in the electoral college, though narrowly in the popular vote. Four years later, Clay lost the Whig nomination to General Zachary Taylor, who won the White House for the Whigs but died of cholera within two years. Having won the presidency twice by nominating military heroes who proceeded to die in office, the Whigs tried the same tactic again in 1852 with General Winfield Scott, who was beaten by Democrat Franklin
Pierce. This time the general survived, it was said, but the Whig party did not.

How could a political party develop so strongly, win two presidential elections and almost a third, and then decline so quickly? The Whigs had brilliant leadership in Clay and Webster and in broad cadres of secondary and grass-roots leaders. At a time when the Democrats were enfeebled by their states’ rights and localistic leanings, the Whigs had a potentially powerful nationalistic doctrine of direct utility to the rising industrial and mercantile elites of the nation. Their rapid monopolization of the opposition to the Democrats, and equally rapid capture of the presidency and Congress, attested to an electoral appeal that seemed likely to give the Whigs political dominance for a generation or two.

But the heart of the Whig party often seemed to beat feebly behind the lively facade of senatorial gladiators and log-cabin appeals. Springing into existence after Jackson’s veto of the bank bill, the party attained true unity only in opposition to “presidential dictatorship”; no other doctrine could unite men so diverse in view and competitive in ambition as Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. Conceiving of party itself as more an occasion for oratory and camp meetings than a vehicle for policy leadership, most Whigs had little vision of the possibilities of partisan organization. Opposed to strong Presidents, the party allowed patronage and other political resources to slip into the hands of congressional leaders, and hence, in contrast to the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Jacksonian Democrats, a national party was never firmly built around the chief executive.

The party placed its future largely in the hands of Clay and his lieutenants, skillful in the give-and-take of group and sectional logrolling but far less adept in mobilizing the grand nationwide coalitions necessary for effective presidential politics. Ironically, the party that opposed executive power unwittingly demonstrated that strong Presidents are necessary to the existence of strong parties, just as strong parties comprise the political foundation for strong Presidents.

Certainly the Whigs had bad luck, both in the demise of their generalissimo-Presidents and in their felt need to appeal at the same time to plantation elites in the South and business elites in the North. But transcending leaders can turn misfortune to their own uses and avoid, or at least cope with, sectional entrapment—they can, in short, turn the shank of history. The Whig failure of leadership lay far deeper than in the presidential-congressional imbalance; it lay in the inability of the Whigs to break away from a bourgeois, genteel, respectable, establishment politics appropriate in an earlier day of social elitism and popular deference. The genius of that
system lay in the character—the honor, dignity, responsibility, honesty, courage—of wellborn leaders. The genius of Jacksonian leadership lay in its appeal to numbers through the techniques of organization, propaganda, conflict, party discipline, and voter mobilization. The Whigs commanded neither the quality of the earlier leadership nor the quantity of the Jacksonian followership. The day of the independent public gentleman was over.