What Hath God Wrought (85 page)

In debate, Democrats and Whigs alike employed the rhetoric of American republicanism, invoking popular “virtue” against “corruption,” though Democrats used it to denounce the money power and Whigs to denounce executive usurpation.
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Democrats more often invoked Lockean natural rights; Whigs, Anglo-American traditions of resistance to monarchical misrule. Both parties traced their origins to Jeffersonian Republicanism: Democrats to the Old Republicanism of Macon and Crawford; Whigs to the new Republican nationalism of Madison and Gallatin. (In 1832, Madison and Gallatin both supported Clay for president against Jackson.) For all that they had in common as American republicans, however, the Whigs and Democrats differed markedly in their conception of America’s future. They disagreed not simply over means but also over ends. The goals of the two parties’ voters added up to rival visions of the national destiny.

Democrats basically approved of America the way it was. They wanted to keep it economically homogeneous in the sense that they believed agriculture should remain the predominant occupation, though their party had nothing against the expansion of commercial opportunities for planters and farmers. Democrats enjoyed their greatest party strength in the South, where agriculture predominated even more than in the North. They expressed disapproval of government favors for privileged elites, of which a national bank seemed to them the prime example. Democrats celebrated “popular sovereignty” and the equal rights of common white men. They hoped America would remain culturally (that is, morally) heterogeneous, so that a variety of religious options could be exercised and local communities of common white men could govern themselves freely. This meant deciding for themselves whether to practice slavery, whether to fund education and internal improvements, whether to tolerate Native neighbors, and, for that matter, how to deal with deviants like criminals and the insane. The Democrats’ vision of America did not require central planning, since most matters could be left either to the marketplace or to state and local decisions. Jacksonians did, however, want a government strong enough to extend their agrarian empire across the continent, expelling or conquering any who stood in their way and protecting slaveowners from interference.

Whigs had a different vision. They wanted to transform the United States into an economically developed nation, in which commerce and industry would take their places alongside agriculture. While the Democrats favored economic uniformity and cultural diversity, Whigs favored economic diversity and cultural uniformity. They wanted to impose cultural (moral) homogeneity because they strongly believed in a society that would nurture and respect conscientious individual autonomy, in contrast to the Democrats, who valued the autonomy of the small white community. Much more than Democrats, Whigs worried about lawlessness, violence, and demagogy. Duties seemed to them as important as rights, and both individuals and the nation had a responsibility to develop their potential to the fullest. Causes like temperance and public education fostered these values and also helped produce a population ready for the demands of a developed economy. Whigs had a
positive
conception of liberty; they treasured it as a means to the formation of individual character and a good society. Democrats, by contrast, held a
negative
conception of liberty; they saw it as freeing the common (white) man from the oppressive burdens of an aristocracy.

The Whigs had the more imaginative program, requiring the transformation of America by conscious effort and therefore needing economic planning and strong government. Twenty-first-century readers will inevitably note with surprise that the party of the business community should be the party most sympathetic to central planning and government intervention in the economy, the reverse of the usual pattern in our own day. But the businessmen of that period realized the difficulty of mobilizing capital and just how little chance existed that private enterprise alone could create the needed infrastructure of transportation and education—particularly in the absence of a central bank. Whig ambitions to transform America were more
qualitative
than
quantitative
; sheer geographical extension of the nation’s boundaries appealed to them little unless it promised economic development.

A comparison between the parties does not reveal a perfect symmetry. The Whigs possessed a more coherent program: a national bank, a protective tariff, government subsidies to transportation projects, the public lands treated as a source of revenue, and tax-supported public schools. The Democrats of course denounced the Whig plans, but beyond this, they often displayed a set of generalized attitudes rather than a specific program of their own. Jackson’s program of Indian Removal, ambitious and centrally directed, was an exception, to be sure, but often the Jacksonians led by establishing an “emotional bond” with their followers rather than by policy initiatives.
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Democratic politicians, following the example of Martin Van Buren, learned how to evoke partisan feelings in the electorate while retaining considerable flexibility with regard to policy. The variation in their tariff and banking policies—indeed, the division among them between hard and soft money—manifested this. Accordingly, the Democratic leaders relied on invoking loyalty to the party rather than to a coherent program. They largely succeeded in transferring to their party the personal loyalty Jackson had aroused and wrapped it in his mantle as defender of the people.
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By contrast, the Whigs never came around to Martin Van Buren’s view that political parties were good things in principle, even in the heat of their campaign of 1840. Rather, they took the view that partisanship had been forced on them by the other side. As the Illinois Whig Abraham Lincoln put it, “
They
set us the example of organization, and we, in self-defence, are driven to it.”
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Although Harrison condemned Jackson’s spoils system, his postmaster general soon busied himself replacing Democrats with Whigs throughout the country. Fundamentally, however, the Whigs saw their party not as an end in itself but as a means to set policy. When they deplored what they called “the spirit of party,” it was not because they themselves had no party but because they resented a partisanship that substituted for policy. No doubt they resented all the more the fact that the Democrats’ practice proved so successful at the polls.

One policy that the Democratic Party embraced consistently was white supremacy. The centrality of white supremacy in Democratic policymaking helps explain that party’s hostility toward Clay’s American System. Democratic suspicion of government aid to internal improvements reflected
not
a horror of the market revolution but a fear that such a program might threaten the institution of slavery. The danger, from the slaveholders’ point of view, was twofold. In the first place, national plans for internal improvements might be designed to wean areas in the Border States or Upper South away from slave-based agriculture toward a diversified economy in which slavery would become vulnerable to gradual emancipation. In the second place, national plans for internal improvements set a precedent for federal activity that might encourage interference with slavery—for example, by exercising the interstate commerce power over the interstate slave trade. Jacksonians welcomed transporting farm products to market, so long as it could be done without the centralized planning that raised the specter of emancipation.

As he did so often, the perceptive former president Adams saw to the heart of the matter. Solicitude for slavery constituted the real obstacle to federal internal improvements, he told his constituents.

Significantly, the constitution of the Confederate States adopted in 1861 forbade the central government to sponsor internal improvements.

Of course, the Whig Party too had to compromise with slavery if it were to remain a nationwide party. Unlike its successor, the Republican Party of Lincoln, the Whig Party was committed to a presence in the South. The attitude of both Whigs and Democrats to race and slavery varied from one geographical area to another, but with one constant: In every region, even the Deep South, the Whig Party took the less stridently racist position. For example, in the Alabama “black belt,” although most of the large slaveowners voted Whig, it was the Democrats who beat the drums most insistently for protecting slavery from the dangers of abolitionism and strong central government.
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In the great debate over slavery in Virginia following Nat Turner’s Uprising, a majority of Jacksonians defended the institution, and a majority of future Whigs sympathized with gradual emancipation, although the division was primarily geographical. “While both parties practiced the politics of slavery in their partisan rhetoric, Whigs and Democrats stood in distinctly different places on the spectrum of attitudes and behaviors that constituted the slavery issue,” writes the historian of Virginia politics in this period.
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Throughout the South, the Whigs showed significantly less enthusiasm for the expansion of slavery than the Democrats. In the North, Whigs, who tended to accept social differentiation, could easily adopt a condescending paternalism toward nonwhites. Ironically, the Democrats’ great insistence on the natural equality of all white men prompted them to make a more glaring exception of non-whites. Taking seriously the motto “all men are created equal,” Democrats called into question the very humanity of nonwhites in order to keep them unequal.

Henry Clay as a young man had backed gradual emancipation for Kentucky at the state constitutional convention in 1799. Remarkably, he remained critical of slavery even as a national party leader. In 1827, as secretary of state, he told the American Colonization Society that he would be proud if he could help “in ridding this foul blot,” slavery, from both Kentucky and Virginia. Addressing the U.S. Senate in 1832, he expressed the hope that “some day” the country as a whole “would be rid of this, the darkest spot on its mantle,” though of course he added that it was entirely up to the states.
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But when making his bid for the Whig nomination in 1839, Clay determined to solidify his southern support. He decided this required a major policy address disavowing the abolitionists and distinguishing his own antislavery position from theirs.

Clay made his statement in the Senate on February 7, 1839. In it, he reasserted his lifelong conviction that slavery was evil and should not have been introduced into America. Abolitionists exercised their constitutional rights when they petitioned against it, he affirmed; Congress should receive their petitions but not grant them. The evil of slavery must be tolerated at the national level, he asserted, while waiting for it to be addressed at the state level. Slaves represented $1.2 billion in capital, Clay estimated conservatively, and the abolitionists made no provision to cushion the economic impact of sudden emancipation. Ultimately, Clay, like Jefferson, framed the issue in terms of the dangers of emancipation to the white race. In many places in the South, blacks were so numerous that emancipation risked either black domination or race war. Most whites in the South would cling to slavery despite its evils, as a guarantee of white supremacy, he declared. Should southerners have to choose, Clay predicted, they would value slavery above the Union.
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By rejecting gradualism, compensation, and colonization, those Clay called the “ultra-abolitionists” made the resolution of the slavery question more difficult. By endorsing equal rights for all, they made intermarriage (“amalgamation”) inevitable. By inveighing against the wickedness of slavery they arrayed section against section and threatened the Union. Without their heedless agitation, Clay supposed, the causes of gradual emancipation and colonization would still be alive and well in Kentucky. In a political climate favoring partisan extremism, in a society entertaining millennial hopes, Clay offered sober moderation, a sense of limitations, and watchful waiting.

The speech shows Clay loyal to the Jeffersonian moral position on slavery—probably more faithful to it, in fact, than Jefferson himself had been in old age. Like the Sage of Monticello, Clay looked to providence and posterity to find a solution. The outlook he expressed, for all its tragic limitations, would represent the starting point for Abraham Lincoln’s evolving views on slavery.
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The most remarkable thing about Clay’s speech is that it served its political purpose in the South. Southern Whigs accepted its logic. They did not insist, as Calhoun and other southern Democrats already did, that slavery must constitute a “positive good,” a benefit to both races. They expressed satisfaction with Clay’s position, and Harry of the West went off to the Whig convention with the solid backing of southern delegates.
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In the South, the difference between the parties on slavery remained the difference between endorsing the “peculiar institution” as right and advantageous, and accepting it as an unfortunate social system to which there seemed no feasible alternative.