America's Fiscal Constitution (17 page)

Chase’s political isolation ended when the Barnburners asked for his help. Chase helped author a Free Soil party platform stating that “the obligations of honor and patriotism require the earliest practical payment of the national debt,” supporting import taxes only for the purpose of balancing the budget, and proposing “a retrenchment of the expenses and patronage of the federal government.” In addition to these traditional Jeffersonian goals, the Free Soil platform endorsed a new law entitling “actual settlers” to free grants of public land.
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The Free Soilers rallied around a slogan—“free soil, free men”—that within several years would be adopted as the banner of a new Republican Party.

Delegates to the Free Soil convention in 1848 nominated Martin Van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams, for vice president. In a first for a national political convention, they welcomed participation from African Americans.
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Free Soilers—principally antislavery Democrats—had a significant impact on the 1848 election. In a three-way contest, a plurality of voters elected the slave-owning Whig presidential candidate, General Zachary Taylor, who declined to comment on federal issues until after the
election. Voters in Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, and Ohio elected a significant number of Free Soilers to their state legislatures, which selected US senators until a constitutional amendment adopted in 1913 required their direct election. A coalition of Democrats and Free Soilers in the Ohio legislature elected Salmon Chase to the Senate by a one-vote margin in 1848. He was joined in the Senate by Charles Sumner, who was elected by a similar one-vote margin in Massachusetts. Chase and Sumner identified themselves as “Independent Democrats,” though the Senate Democratic caucus promptly expelled them because of their views on slavery.

The Free Soil Party lost momentum when many of the New York Barnburners moved back into the Democratic Party. By 1852 the Whig Party was also disintegrating as a result of the deaths of its two founders—Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. That year Democratic leaders finessed the issue of slavery in the territories by running distinct campaigns in the North and South. Their modest and obscure candidate Franklin Pierce assisted that strategy by saying little. The Whig’s proud candidate, General Winfield Scott, simply could not hold his tongue. Pierce won the votes of all but four states in the Electoral College.

The 1853 municipal election in Chase’s Cincinnati—the nation’s major immigrant gateway to the Ohio River—served as both a microcosm of and a fulcrum for Northern politics. The city’s Whig Party almost vanished, and its historic Democratic majority receded. They were replaced by local parties built around single issues, such as opposition to the influence of Catholic immigrants, aid to Catholic schools, and the public sale of alcohol. Anti-immigrant groups throughout the nation coalesced into a new political organization, the Native American Party, more commonly known as the “Know-Nothing Party” because of its secretive strategy.

As memories of Jefferson and Jackson began to fade into legend, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois tried to modernize the Democratic Party with a vision of a railroad that would link the East and West Coasts and open the interior for settlement. That type of progress would require some form of government that could administer property laws in the Western territories. Douglas introduced a bill creating the Kansas-Nebraska Territory on January 4, 1853. To enlist support for the bill from Southern Whigs in Congress, Douglas and President Pierce agreed to amend the bill to void the prohibition of slavery in territory north of a line enshrined in the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

Northern opposition to that amendment spread like wildfire. Salmon Chase fanned those flames with a nationally publicized “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States.”
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Chase and his colleague Charles Sumner called on all citizens opposed to the extension of slavery to fight together against the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Half of the Northern Democrats in Congress defied the views of their constituents by voting with Southern Democrats and Whigs for passage of that legislation. Northern Democrats felt betrayed by their representatives in Congress who supported the measure, while Northern Whigs distanced themselves from Southern Whigs who voted for the bill.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act made Chase’s repeated warnings about a conspiratorial Slave Power appear prophetic. A new generation of Northern civic leaders prepared to run against incumbents in 1854. These “Anti-Nebraska” men would form the nation’s second enduring political party and adopt the American Fiscal Tradition as the group’s unifying economic platform.

PART II

THE TRADITION SUSTAINS A GROWING NATION AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY: 1854–1900

5

R
EPUBLICANS
E
MBRACE THE
T
RADITION

1854–1860: Years when deficits exceeded debt service = 3 (1858–1860, recession after Panic of 1857)

T
RIBUTARIES
F
LOWING INTO A
R
EPUBLICAN
R
IVER

Tracing the origin of the early Republican Party is like charting the source of a river with many tributaries. Northerners in 1854 elected a new House majority consisting of congressmen who had campaigned against the extension of either slavery or open immigration and, frequently, both. These winning candidates had used a variety of party names: Whig, Democrat, Anti-Nebraska, People’s Party, Free Soil, Fusion, Independent Democrat, Native American or Know-Nothing, and Republican. Only after Ohio voters elected Salmon Chase as their governor in 1855 and House members selected a Speaker in 1856 did various groups that opposed the extension of slavery agree to share a common name: “Republican.”

Anti-Nebraska men such as House members John Sherman of Ohio and Justin Morrill of Vermont had little time to consider an economic or budgetary platform in 1855 and 1856. Yet within a few years they—along with Salmon Chase, William Fessenden of Maine, and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania—would craft the tax and spending policies that preserved the nation during the Civil War. Sherman and Morrill would manage federal budgets for decades afterwards. Their stories explain how the Republican Party came to embrace the American Fiscal Tradition.

John Sherman learned the value of a dollar at an early age. He was six years old, one of eleven children, when his father died in 1819 on the Ohio frontier. A local lawyer, Tom Ewing, raised his brother William—nicknamed “Cump”—whom Mary Sherman considered to be her “smartest boy.” Mary sent John to live with the family of another frontier lawyer. Cump left for the US Military Academy at West Point, while his younger brother John, at age fourteen, went to work on the construction of a lock and dam on a canal between the Ohio River and Gallatin’s Cumberland Road. Ohio’s Democratic governor gave John’s job to a political supporter, leading Sherman to wryly reminisce that he “was a Whig of sixteen” who felt like “it was glorious to be a victim of persecution.”
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Sherman then studied law, a promising field in the nation’s fastest growing state.

The young lawyer was among the hundreds of Ohioans who responded to Chase’s 1854 Anti-Nebraska “Appeal” by attending a statewide meeting of citizens opposed to the extension of slavery. They adopted a resolution proclaiming that they were not “a mere old-time Abolition convention. . . . We are not here to construct a Free Soil, a Whig or a Democratic platform. Our duty is a higher and nobler one.”
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Calling themselves “Anti-Nebraska men” or “the People’s Party,” they backed a slate of candidates—including thirty-three-year-old John Sherman—for the House of Representatives. With rallies often held in churches, their slate swept the 1854 Ohio congressional elections.

Vermont voters that year also elected a political newcomer, Justin Morrill, to the House of Representatives. Like Chase and Sherman, his parents had many children, though most of Justin’s siblings died young. Morrill’s blacksmith father could not afford college tuition for his studious son Justin, who worked at a general store and learned the merchant’s skills of accounting and managing credit for customers who could not pay in full until after the harvest. Over time Morrill bought several Vermont general stores. His knack for math, encyclopedic memory, and reputation for fairness helped him thrive as a trader of promissory notes, the unofficial paper money that circulated before John Sherman and Salmon Chase helped create the first official paper currency in 1862.

Morrill, like the vast majority of people in Vermont, loathed slavery. Even Chase’s Liberty Party had flourished in the state, though its Vermont branch had passed resolutions containing antislavery language so aggressive that the national party refused to publish them out of fear of reprisals.

Vermont’s voters also strongly believed in the use of import taxes to nurture American businesses. Since the state’s economy depended so heavily on herds of sheep, its citizens enthusiastically backed high import fees on wool.

Morrill paid more attention to politics after he sold his business in 1848. He also spent more time in his treasured library, where his reading turned to history and economics. In 1854, at age forty-four, he ran for Congress as an Anti-Nebraska Whig, though he did not follow the example of Maine’s William Fessenden, who combined Whigs with Free Soil Democrats to create a “fusion” majority. Morrill won by a narrow margin in a contest against both Democratic and Free Soil candidates. The 1854 campaign was Morrill’s last close election for four decades and his last election as a Whig.

Seasoned politicians wondered whether the tide propelling the Anti-Nebraska and Know-Nothing movements had crested during the 1854 elections. They sought to discern the answer in the nation’s third-largest state, Ohio, which elected its governor and other state officials in October 1855.

Some veterans of Ohio politics expected the Anti-Nebraska men to either rejuvenate the state’s Whig Party or try to form a new Northern Democratic Party. Conservative Whig leader Tom Ewing, Tyler’s former treasury secretary and mentor as well as father-in-law to William “Cump” Sherman, urged Anti-Nebraska Whigs to keep away from controversial issues that might offend “wise and conservative southern men.”
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In contrast, Independent Democrat Salmon Chase thought there “must be . . . a Democratic Party & a Conservative Party under some name,” and he hoped to recruit the Anti-Nebraska men in his efforts to take over the Democratic Party.
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Anti-Nebraska Democrats, Whigs, Know-Nothings, and Free Soilers in Ohio convened in Columbus in July 1855 to decide their next steps. They chose young Congressman-elect John Sherman, to chair the meeting and another lawyer, William Boyd Allison, to serve as secretary. Along with Morrill, Sherman would chair the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee for most of the years between the Civil War and turn of the century. Allison would chair the Senate Appropriations Committee during much of that era. Their budgets helped define the fiscal principles of the new party taking root in 1855.

Budgets were far from Sherman’s mind as he presided over the Columbus convention. His job was to convince factions with disparate views on economics and immigration to work as a team. The convention ultimately endorsed a slate of candidates that included Independent Democrat
Salmon Chase for governor and Know-Nothing sympathizers for all of the other state offices. The convention charged a committee with the task of contacting like-minded groups in other states in hopes of organizing a national convention for a new Republican Party. Salmon Chase agreed to call himself a Republican and won a narrow victory that October to become the first Republican governor of a large state.

Congressman John Sherman joined other Anti-Nebraska men who, by a bare majority, elected an Anti-Nebraska Democrat with Know-Nothing sympathies as the new Speaker in early 1856. Sherman explained to his colleagues that he was willing to “act in concert with men of all parties and opinions who will steadily aid in preserving our Western territories for free labor.”
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Sherman later wrote that “the Whig Party had disappeared. . . . The Republican party then represented the progressive tendency of the age.”
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Delegates to the first Republican National Convention, held in Philadelphia in 1856, could agree only on a skeletal platform: they opposed slavery in the territories and supported the construction of a rail line to the Pacific. Their nominee for president, John Frémont of California, was a famed mapmaker whose cartography skills could be helpful in charting the route for a transcontinental railroad. His skills as a presidential candidate were weaker. The Ohio delegation to the national convention of Know-Nothings led many others from the North to bolt from their party and join the Republicans.